School Choice: The Findings
This new Cato book is a good introduction to the empirical literature on vouchers and charter schools. For my taste it places too much weight on standardized tests, but admittedly that is the main way to compare educational results over time or across countries. I believe the lax nature of government schooling in the U.S. often leaves the upper tail of the distribution free to dream and create, but I would not wish to push that as an argument against vouchers. If you’re interested in bad arguments against vouchers, and their rebuttals, Megan McArdle offers a long post.
Can super-agents raise player salaries?
Robert, a loyal MR reader, asks:
I was recently
reading about ARod’s decision to leave the Yankees. The article
mentioned "superagent Scott Boras." It’s widely believed in the sports
community that Boras has the ability to increase the salaries beyond
what they would get with a regular agent. Considering that there are
only 30-odd teams that might want a player, I find it hard to believe
that an agent could make such a big difference.
I know more about Mark Alarie than ARod, but super-agents may matter through the following mechanisms:
1. The super-agent manages an otherwise incompetent or unruly player. The agent is about improving the quality of the player as much as extracting surplus from the team.
2. A super-agent, especially if he has repeat business with teams, may credibly certify the unobservable qualities of players, even star players.
3. Boras may be very good at marketing his players to management and getting owners to open up their pocketbooks.
4. If Boras represents multiple stars, clubs will be reluctant to cross him. The equilibrium here is tricky. But if the agent has discretionary power to steer a player to one equal offer or the other, and the club reaps surplus from each player, a club may overbid for one player to stay on the agent’s good side and receive favorable discretionary treatment later on. Repeat dealings with the agent also mean that the club is more likely to follow through on its implicit commitments to both the player and the agent.
5. Robert suggests that some (non-super) agents may in fact be in league with the owners, not the players.
Can you think of other possible mechanisms?
Addendum: Here is J.C. Bradbury on Boras. And here is a New Yorker story on Boras, courtesy of John de Palma.
How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read
What a wonderful title. This new sensation, by French intellectual superstar Pierre Bayard, tells how to liberate our reading habits from the oppression of our most formidable peers (we carry around books to look cool) and more importantly from our own ever-more-demanding selves, which pursue the perfect reading experience but for largely misconceived and self-destructive Freudian reasons; rather than improving our reading, we should instead perfect a new kind of "anti-reading," and as part of a broader program of reconciling antinomies, de-objectifying the book, revising Barthes to fit a new and partially unhidden world where structures can be liberating, and uncovering the not yet fully recognized Proustian roots of the modern sensibility.
Highly recommended, it comes out tomorrow.
What does a post under the fold signal?
Lee, a loyal MR reader (by RSS, it seems), writes:
I am also protesting these partial posts! They are mildly inconvenient!
Sadly, when part of an MR post is below the fold, only the top part is fed into RSS. The vast majority of our posts are full posts, I use partial posts for two reasons.
First, sometimes I wish to keep a more important or more typical post close to the top of the page. This signals to new readers what we are about; I don’t want Eric Maskin visiting MR for the first time and thinking it is a blog mostly about romantic piano music. Keeping an older post toward the top of the page also keeps the comments flowing.
Second, putting a post under the fold signals that the post will not interest most of you. In equilibrium, only those of you who really care about the post title should incur the cost of either clicking on the bottom part or leaving RSS and visiting the site, and then clicking, to read it. You are supposed to be put off from reading it (except for the few dedicated Nyiregyhazi fans who read MR, are there any?; it does not suffice to share his addictions). But perhaps I am naive here, and telling people "this is quirky stuff that won’t interest most of you" in fact generates interest.
But not today: Ideally, I would have put most of this post…er…under the fold.
Does gerrymandering cause polarization?
I used to think so, but not any more:
We assess whether there is a strong causal relationship
between congressional districting and polarization. We find very little
evidence for such a link. First, we show that congressional
polarization is primarily a function of the differences in how
Democrats and Republicans represent the same districts rather than a
function of which districts each party represents or the distribution
of constituency preferences. Second, we conduct simulations to gauge
the level of polarization under various “neutral” districting
procedures. We find that the actual levels of polarization are not much
higher than those produced by the simulations. We do find that
gerrymandering has increased the Republican seat share in the House;
however, this increase is not an important source of polarization.
That’s from the very accomplished Howard Rosenthal. The paper is here, hat tip to BookForum.
So what does cause voter polarization? Here is a counterintuitive hypothesis: political extremists are most active when they fear that the extremists from the other side might win. Each candidate requires those extremists for support and resources, and when a candidate wins he or she then must polarize to some extent. If you think of the extremists as motivated by fear of the other side, in a lopsided district they are more likely to stay at home and keep their mouths shut, thereby allowing the candidate to straddle the center. It’s a close race that brings out the partisans and gives them some measure of ex post control.
Might this be true?
We examine DW-Nominate scores for members of the House of Representatives who served from 1993 through 2000. The most politically extreme members tended to represent politically competitive districts, a result at odds with traditional Downsian expectations.
File this one under "I’m still fundamentally confused."
Using Incentives to Solve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
The very interesting Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has a good analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a clever suggestion for moving forward:
“In my view, it is a mistake to look for strategies that build
mutual trust because it ain’t going to happen. Neither side has any
reason to trust the other, for good reason,” he says. “Land for peace
is an inherently flawed concept because it has a fundamental commitment
problem. If I give you land on your promise of peace in the future,
after you have the land, as the Israelis well know, it is very costly
to take it back if you renege. You have an incentive to say, ‘You made
a good step, it’s a gesture in the right direction, but I thought you
were giving me more than this. I can’t give you peace just for this,
it’s not enough.’ Conversely, if we have peace for land–you disarm, put
down your weapons, and get rid of the threats to me and I will then
give you the land–the reverse is true: I have no commitment to follow
through. Once you’ve laid down your weapons, you have no threat.”Bueno de Mesquita’s answer to this dilemma, which he discussed with
the former Israeli prime minister and recently elected Labor leader
Ehud Barak, is a formula that guarantees mutual incentives to
cooperate. “In a peaceful world, what do the Palestinians anticipate
will be their main source of economic viability? Tourism. This is what
their own documents say. And, of course, the Israelis make a lot of
money from tourism, and that revenue is very easy to track. As a
starting point requiring no trust, no mutual cooperation, I would
suggest that all tourist revenue be [divided by] a fixed formula based
on the current population of the region, which is roughly 40 percent
Palestinian, 60 percent Israeli. The money would go automatically to
each side. Now, when there is violence, tourists don’t come. So the
tourist revenue is automatically responsive to the level of violence on
either side for both sides. You have an accounting firm that both sides
agree to, you let the U.N. do it, whatever. It’s completely
self-enforcing, it requires no cooperation except the initial agreement
by the Israelis that they are going to turn this part of the revenue
over, on a fixed formula based on population, to some international
agency, and that’s that.”
The article cited has a lot more on Bueno de Mesquita and the remarkable series of accurate predictions that he has made using rational choice modeling. See also this piece from Science News, The Mathematical Fortune Teller.
Should we use mercenaries at all?
Over at Mark Thoma’s, Bernard Yomtov asks a very good question:
Why should there be mercenaries at all, given the existence of a large
and well-trained Army? The mercenaries are former soldiers. Their
functions are military and could be carried out by regular soldiers.
The only reason I can see for using them is precisely to have people
doing military jobs who are outside the normal chain of command, and
not subject to normal laws, rules, and regulations governing the
conduct of soldiers. In other words, it is to have people who do not work for government in the way that they should.
Most private contractors today do not serve in the function of soldiers but rather they deliver, ensure, and guard supplies. This should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, but often the private sector does a better job and without major legal problems.
Security guards, however, are often "mercenaries." A general or top Iraqi official for instance might be guarded by Blackwater employees. The critics have not shown that Blackwater employees misbehave at a higher rate than do U.S. soldiers, so the comparative case against Blackwater — as opposed to the more general case against the war — is mostly shrill rhetoric. It is possible to pay Blackwater employees bonuses for good performance rather than just give medals, plus they are on a higher pay scale in the first place. Nonetheless my judgment call is that issues of perception and accountability are important enough in contemporary Iraq that we should be using contractors less in these capacities (as the column indicated), but the temptation to use them is based on more than just sheer political abuse.
Contractors lower the cost of good operations, contractors lower the operational (but not social) cost of bad operations, contractors magnify the costs of mistaken Executive preferences, and contractors can raise new problems of monitoring. If you don’t think the first item on this list is at work, there is good reason to cut back on contractors in Iraq.
But if you view the scope and use of contractors as a more general decision, rather than something which can be fine-tuned for each war, it is no longer such a simple choice.
Erwin Nyiregyhazi
In the 1920s he toured to rave reviews, though he recorded only a few piano rolls. He played in a dramatic and virtually improvisatory nineteenth century style. Yet he was shy, introverted, and "constitutionally precise." Strikingly handsome, he lost his way with women, marrying eight times, frequently visiting prostitutes and also going with men. "I’m addicted to Liszt, oral **x, and alcohol — not necessarily in that order," he remarked. After the War he resurfaced in Los Angeles. His debilitations prevented him from concertizing, so he sight-read orchestral scores for Hollywood directors, for pay, so they could judge potential soundtracks. He allied himself with Bela Lugosi (a huge admirer) and, inspired by The Fountainhead, courted Ayn Rand. He was rediscovered in the late 1970s: "never before had I heard a living pianist who played entirely with that 19th century sense of rhetoric which the old writers had described: the true "Romantic Style," wrote Gregor Benko (TC: a man who knows piano). "Next to him, Horowitz sounds like he is playing a toy piano," explained another reviewer.
He toured Japan and a few recordings were made, though his technique was unreliable. We are left with scraps, and there is nothing worthy on CD. On LP his recording of Liszt’s "St. Francis Legend" remains a marvel. The late Roy Childs — a Nyiregyhazi worshipper — used to play me N. on reel-to-reel, taped from private concerts. His "Funerailles" was unforgettable. Will these recordings ever be released?
We now have Kevin Bazzana’s Lost Genius: The Curious and Tragic Story of an Extraordinary Musical Prodigy; here is a not sufficiently positive NYT review.
Here is a summary website for the man. Here is a YouTube video, it is amazing for a few moments toward the end but mostly sloppy. Here are two more YouTubes, the old clip has a young N. playing Liszt’s Liebestraum in the background, the other is another pianist playing one of N’s compositions.
The bottom line: Talent is not enough.
To Know Contractors, Know Government
What a splendid title they chose for my NYT column on the economics of Blackwater. To start:
…whatever the possible sins of the Blackwater firm, the overall problem
is not private contracting in itself; contractors do not set the tone
but rather reflect the sins and virtues of their customers, namely
their sponsoring governments.
…War is, among other things, an economic undertaking, so the profit motive in military affairs isn’t always bad or ignoble.
And then:
Today, America no longer has a draft, its military bureaucracy can be
inflexible and the public wishes to be insulated from the direct impact
of war. Contractors are a symptom of government weakness, but are not
the problem itself. The first Persian Gulf War, which enjoyed greater
international support, was not reliant on contractors to nearly the
same degree.
Contractors can offer many efficiencies, but:
When things are going well and the “good guys” are in control, the
flexibility and experience of military contractors can make things go
even better. But when the environment is hostile and events are
spiraling out of control, the incentives of private contractors may
lead to many mistakes.Note that a serious issue for Blackwater –
the allegations about needless deaths of innocent civilians – has also
been an issue for United States government forces from the beginning of
the conflict.Most of all, contractors are appealing when a
victory is possible in relatively quick order. The potential
accountability problems won’t linger for long; conversely, few
contractors will look good when a conflict runs on for years.
As they say, read the whole thing; I discuss Alex’s research as well.
Every meal counts
ETHNIC DINING TALK: Tuesday, October 30, Tyler Cowen, author of "Discover Your Inner
Economist," discusses "Every Meal Counts: How to Get the Best Food
Possible in Washington, D.C." and signs his book. Books will be for
sale. Free entry. 6:30 p.m. Cleveland Park Branch Library, 3310 Connecticut Ave. NW. 202-282-3072.
Of course you are encouraged to come…
Does trade spread AIDS?
Emily Oster tackles this question:
I generate new data on HIV incidence and prevalence in Africa based on inference from mortality rates. I use these data to relate economic activity (specifically, exports) to new HIV infections in Africa and argue there is a significant and large positive relationship between the two: a doubling of exports leads to as much as a quadrupling in new HIV infections. This relationship is consistent with a model of the epidemic in which truckers and other migrants have higher rates of risky behavior, and their numbers increase in periods with greater exports. I present evidence suggesting that the relationship between exports and HIV is causal and works, at least in part, through increased transit. The result has important policy implications, suggesting (for example) that there is significant value in prevention focused on these transit-oriented groups. I apply this result to study the case of Uganda, and argue that a decline in exports in the early 1990s in that country appears to explain between 30% and 60% of the decline in HIV infections. This suggests that the success of the Ugandan education campaign against HIV…has been overstated.
Since I used to believe Samuel Brittan when he argued that trade spreads sex, this result accords with my intuitions.
I thank Scott for the pointer. There should be an algorithm informing me every time there is a new Emily Oster paper. If Scott is indeed such an algorithm, I am pleased. And of course I am that algorithm for you.
What I’ve been reading
1. David Linden, The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams, and God. My standards for popular science books have tightened in the last ten years but this still exceeds them. A good rule of thumb is to read anything that comes from Belknap Press at Harvard, unless of course it is Michael Sandel’s question-begging critique of transhumanism and genetic engineering.
2. God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World, by Walter Russell Mead. Yes there is a uniquely Anglo-American way of looking at the world, here’s how it came about, and also why the rest of the world resents it. And why Tony Blair fought the Iraq War. Consistently interesting and readable, recommended. In passing it is also one of the best books for understanding the rise of the West.
3. Can’t Buy Me Love: The Beatles, Britain, and America, by Jonathan Gould. I loved this book, and yes I was already sick of books about the Beatles. Not only is the musical analysis first-rate (it pinpoints what is wrong with the arrangement of "Got to Get You Into My Life"), but it is close to an economic history of the Beatles. Of course they started Apple, their record label, to shift labor income into capital gains, yet they were not up to running a music company. Who needs the Laffer Curve? You can (in part) blame high marginal tax rates for the breakup of the Beatles.
4. Michael Dirda, Classics for Pleasure. As with popular science books, I am long since jaded with the genre of "let’s read my short essays about the classics so you don’t have to go bother reading those long, nasty books yourself." But this one delivers a true odyssey of discovery; I dog-eared a dozen or so pages to follow up on the recommendations. Will tracking down John Aubrey’s Brief Lives pay off? Who knows, but don’t we live on hope as it is?
Rich people fact of the day
Pew Research Center reports
that find "Democrats pulling even with Republicans among registered
voters with annual family incomes in excess of roughly $135,000 per
annum."
In case you were wondering. Here is more. In any case Americans don’t vote their economic self-interest nearly as much as you might think; Bryan Caplan’s book has the most recent debunking of this myth.
Ed Glaeser
The weather wisdom of crowds?
Jason Kottke reports:
Ben Tesch is about to launch a collaborative weather site called cumul.us.
It’ll aggregate weather information and harness the wisdom of crowds to
see if they can make better weather predictions than the experts.Will this all work? Who knows, but it only took me two months to make, and I wanted to find out.
Unlike so many other types of information, the web has had little
impact on how weather reporting is done (the Weather Channel stuff is
still rudimentary), so it’ll be interesting to see if this works.
I predict this will fail — how many government agencies already work at predicting the weather?, or in other words the crowd is already in place. The alternative hypothesis is that weather forecasting awaits its Orley Ashenfelter, and that a mechanism like this will bring the best nerdy, quantitative "amateur" forecast into public prominence.