Does fast food really make us fat?
Matsa and Anderson next looked at data on individual eating habits from
a survey conducted between 1994 and 1996. When eating out, people
reported consuming about 35 percent more calories on average than when
they ate at home. But importantly, respondents reduced their caloric
intake at home on days they ate out (that’s not to say that people were
watching their weight, since respondents who reported consuming more at
home also tended to eat more when going out). Overall, eating out
increased daily caloric intake by only 24 calories.
The researchers also find that greater access to fast food restaurants, as created by new highway construction, doesn’t much matter for weight. Here is more, including a link to the original paper.
Hegel, or Department of Yikes
Eric, a loyal MR reader, asks:
Could you comment on
Hegel? What do you make of his argument regarding the desire for
recognition as a fundamental driving force of history. I have not read
much of Hegel, but this idea was attributed to him in Francis
Fukuyama’s "The End of History."
My competence here is low but who I am to turn down a loyal reader? I have looked at every page of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit — usually considered his most profound work — but I can hardly claim to have read it. Maybe the Master-Slave dialectic was profound at the time but, frankly, I considered the book a waste of time and I couldn’t keep on paying attention. Philosophy of Right and Philosophy of History are more coherent (the writings on aesthetics also) and every now and then Hegel is striking prescient or otherwise brilliant, such as when he is writing about the forthcoming nature of bourgeois commercial society. But "every now and then" is the operative phrase here. Mostly you read him because he has been an influential thinker. A few points:
1. He is more of a classical liberal than most people think. The correct translation does not in fact have him writing: "The State is the march of God in the world." And he had a very well-developed theory of property rights.
2. "Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis" is a very bad representation of what Hegel believed.
3. The whole Hegelian structure becomes more plausible once you see it as motivated by the belief that philosophy had become truly, absolutely stuck after Hume and Kant. Hegel thought that his "moves" were required to get out of the mess that preceded him. I prefer the pragmatic turn myself.
4. I very much like Charles Taylor’s book on Hegel. I do not think it is what "Hegel really meant" but perhaps it is what "Hegel would have had to have really meant, had some smart people like Robin Hanson pinned his back against the wall, lectured him about futarchy, and made him write shorter sentences to boot."
5. I believe that the secondary literature on Hegel is fraught with danger and is highly unreliable.
On the desire for recognition, yes it is a fundamental driving force (ask any blogger) although it was a well-known eighteenth century idea.
Overall I don’t think much people should spend much time with Hegel, although if someone tells me he found it a revelation, I don’t think him crazy.
Michael Stack, a loyal MR reader, asks
When I was in 5th grade I participated in a charity event called "Jump Rope For Heart". People donated a certain amount of money per rope jump. I found myself wondering why it was structured that way – after all, people didn’t really care whether I jumped or not.
Many charitable events are structured this way, though typically they involve public walking.
Why do they work this way? Why not ask for lump-sum donations rather than having a bunch of people dig fence post holes? Is it make-work bias? Is it the labor theory of value? Maybe instead my willingness to jump/walk or otherwise participate indicates my commitment to the cause and in some sense certifies the event? A band-wagon effect? Maybe the dollar amount per unit of effort (jump, miles walked, etc) is so low that it induces people to donate more money than they would otherwise?
Rather than paying somebody to do busy-work, why not instead pay people to do something productive, such as soliciting even more donations?
Consider publicity as the main scarcity a charity faces. If you elicit volunteers to walk, run or skip rope for you, those persons will talk up the activity — and the charity — to their friends, both ex ante and ex post. They’ll even wear your T-Shirt "Cystic Fibrosis Marathon."
Since most of the people are exercisers anyway, the charitable activity doesn’t cost them much on net. In fact the exercise is one way of expressing a greater commitment to the charity and may encourage subsequent donations. Commitment, of course, is not infinitely elastic in supply. So some of the person’s commitment may be transferred to the charity and away from the ideal of personal exercise. Counterintuitively, in the long run the person may end up less fit but more committed to the charity. In other words you’re paying with some of your health and discipline rather than with your money.
Assorted links
1. On Hayek’s Road to serfdom, via Megan McArdle.
2. Boston Review symposium on Africa, very good.
3. Will Wilkinson continues his excellence.
4. The world’s most impressive subways and yes Tokyo is #1.
5. Extended version of BSG interview with Ron Moore, interesting throughout.
What your funeral music says about you
Here’s an interesting article about the Brits, many of whom prefer "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life," the Monty Python song, for their funerals. My probably unrealistic (and not morally binding) vision of my funeral is to forbid any tributes or even spoken words but make everyone sit through Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem (Kempe or Klemperer versions, about 79 minutes long) and then simply close the event and send everybody home.
Whether this is an aesthetic preference, or whether I don’t want to let them talk themselves out of weeping over my death, I am not sure.
Helicopter drop
Well…airplane drop. Consider it another instance of zero overhead giving.
eBook sales are way up
Penguin has reported that e-book sales from the first four months of
2008 have surpassed the house’s total e-book sales for all of last
year. According to the publisher, the spike is "more than five times
the overall growth in sales, year-on-year, through April 2008." Penguin
Group CEO David Shanks said he attributed the jump, in large part, to
the growing popularity of e-book readers.
Here is the link and right here you can buy Discover Your Inner Economist in Kindle form (it’s also available as a Sony eBook) and paperback as well, here is the Amazon link.
Addendum: Here is more on the economics of Kindle.
The Economics of Sawdust
I was in Vermont over the weekend and talking to a dairy farmer about the rising price of milk. I was surprised when she said that higher sawdust prices was one of the causes. Sawdust? Sawdust, it turns out, is used for bedding the cows and the price of dust has doubled in the past year. I surmise that the downturn in housing construction has meant a reduced demand for lumber and thus less sawdust.
The connection between the housing market and the milk market is an interesting example of the dense connectedness of markets, "general equilibrium" in the language of economics.
The economics of sawdust also reminds us that the capitalist production system minimizes waste – entrepreneurs search out ways to extract the most value from every input and from every output. Thus even sawdust, as trivial a waste product as one could imagine, is turned into an input into milk production as well as into particle board, fuel nuggets, mulch and other useful products.
Addendum: The WSJ has more on sawdust.
Advice for visiting a developing country
William, a loyal MR reader, asks:
What advice do you have for an aspiring development economist visiting a developing country for the first time?
He is a rising sophomore from a very good university and has strong interests in economics. The locale is Cape Town, although the question is about general advice. My tips are the following:
1. Learn as quickly as you can what is safe and what is not. In Brazil taxicabs are pretty safe, in Mexico City they are not. This will take some doing and in the meantime be very careful. Have a prearranged safety net if you lose everything to a thief.
2. Do not get drunk take drugs or patronize prostitutes. Really, It is a path to trouble and if you want to do it save it for a more familiar environment.
3. Try out the various transportation networks in the region, the more inconvenient the better.
4. Attend a religious ceremony or fiesta or both.
5. Make sure you visit some small farms.
6. Immerse yourself in the music of the place — I don’t mean the most commercial musics — before you go and then of course after you arrive. This is more valuable and more "real" than reading the literature, which is often intended for outsiders. Of course read some non-fiction on the place as well.
7. See if you can teach or attend a class in a local school.
8. Eat the street food.
9. Do not rule out the idea of romance, keeping #2 in mind and noting that cross-cultural romantic signals are often misunderstood. This is a tricky one but it is the #1 teacher if it works out not to mention the romantic benefits.
10. Count the number of Indians and Chinese and Lebanese (and sometimes Koreans) around and draw inferences from that data.
11. If you can, arrive with a well-defined hypothesis in mind. But don’t think you can collect all the data on one trip, you probably can’t.
12. Realize that you probably won’t understand all the times that people are telling you "no."
Learning the language goes without saying. I suspect Chris Blattman can add to this list, can you?
Addendum: Here are Chris’s tips.
The culture that is Japanese
A homeless woman who sneaked into a man’s house and lived undetected in
his closet for a year was arrested in Japan after he became suspicious
when food mysteriously began disappearing.Police found the
58-year-old woman Thursday hiding in the top compartment of the man’s
closet and arrested her for trespassing, police spokesman Hiroki
Itakura from southern Kasuya town said Friday.
Even better is how he caught her:
The resident of the home installed security cameras that transmitted
images to his mobile phone after becoming puzzled by food disappearing
from his kitchen over the past several months.
Hat tip goes to Instapundit.
My favorite things Japan, classical music edition
1. Piano: Mitsuko Uchida is a clear first choice. Her box of the Mozart sonatas remains the best. Oddly I don’t like her much in the rest of the classical repertoire, though her Debussy and Webern and Schoenberg are interesting (though not my preferred versions for the latter two, which are the steelier Pollini and Gould). I also like Aki Takahashi, most of all for Cage and Feldman.
2. Conductor: Seiji Ozawa has remarkable talent and he can conduct almost anything without a score (not easy). Still, he never really developed his own sound and he has to count as a missed opportunity. First prize goes to Maasaki Suzuki, who has recorded a remarkable all-Japanese St. Matthew’s Passion and is doing a cycle of the Bach cantatas.
3. String Quartet: Tokyo is first-rate, get their complete box of Beethoven’s String Quartets.
4. Composer: Toru Takemitsu is the obvious choice, though I don’t much come back to his work.
5. Classical guitarist: Kazuhito Yamashita. His transcriptions are mind-blowing, most of all the Stravinsky. The fascination of the Japanese with transcriptions could command an entire book.
Outside of classical music I’ll recommend Kodo (and indeed all Taiko music, but only live, not on disc), The Brilliant Green’s "The Angel Song," and yes Yoko Ono. Most of Japanese popular music is a blur to me, though not an unpleasant one.
The best beef in the world?
There is a new winner and yes it is Kobe Beef in Kobe, Japan. It lives up to the hype, if you are in Kobe just try any of the better beef establishments in town. My personal list now reads as follows (in order, of course):
1. Kobe Beef, Kobe, Japan.
2. Dry-aged beef in Hermosillo, Mexico.
3. Southern Brazil, near Curitiba.
4. Lockhart, Texas, most of all the brisket at Schmitty’s.
Maybe Argentina is next in line and it might place higher if I had consumed countryside barbecue there.
And yes, Michael Pollan and Mark Bittman are right: you should eat less beef. But Kobe is not the place to abstain. The reality is that eating beef in Kobe will make it very hard for you to eat beef almost anywhere else again.
Why did they build expensive medieval churches?
Bryan Caplan asks (the rest of the post is interesting on other matters):
Seeing a bunch of French cathedrals makes me even more skeptical of the claim (made by Larry Iannaccone
and others) that people weren’t more religious in earlier centuries. If
people weren’t far more religious in the Middle Ages, why did they pour
such a high fraction of their surplus wealth into century-long
religious architectural projects? You could say "It was primarily
rulers, not donors, who allocated the funds," but that just pushes the
question back a step. Were rulers vastly more religious than the
masses? That’s hard to believe. Were rulers trying to impress the
masses by building churches? Well, why would churches impress the
masses unless they were highly religious?
His answer:
Religious architecture and art were to medieval feudalism what advertising and commercialism are to modern capitalism:
A rather effective way to build support for the status quo using
aesthetics instead of argument. My claim, in short, is that Notre Dame
played the same role during the Middle Ages that fashion magazines play
today. Notre Dame was not an argument for feudalism, and Elle is not an argument for capitalism. But both are powerful ways to make regular people buy into the system.
I would add that churches were a form of fiscal policy and the associated spending was a way to hand out goodies to political allies. (This is especially important if the finished project takes decades or centuries to materialize.) In a time of political decentralization it wasn’t easy to construct or maintain a long distance road. So you had to put a lot of expense in one easy-to-guard place and in a politically correct way. Churches were the obvious choice. Churches may have been an efficient means to store wealth for other reasons as well. If someone is going to plunder you on the run, they can wreck a church but they can’t dissemble and carry away its value very easily.
Robin Hanson might argue that beautiful churches also signaled the status of the elites who built them.
Markets in everything, Yugoslavia edition
Already from the first days and weeks of the
conflict in 1992, individuals sought to obtain money by providing
information about the locations of prisoners and detainees. Some people
offered to arrange prisoner exchanges or releases in exchange for
payment. The practice continued into the postwar era, when individuals
from all three ethnic groups offered information about mass graves and
other burial sites for profit. About 12,000 victims of the conflict
remain unaccounted for.
Here is the article, the pointer is from Stephen Smith.