Why?

by  Tyler Cowen in

****ing libertarians. I swear to God, you guys act the same every
single time. EVERY time I post something about a societal trade off,
you instantly, passionately and irrevocably identify yourself with one
and only one side. Why? WHY? WHY do you do that? I thought this one
might be harder for you. I mean, two picturesque resource extractors. I
thought the salmon fishers might get some love from you. Two years
they lost their entire livelihood and way of life! But no. Instead you
write with a fanatic dedication to the potential costs to the farmers!
Why?! What did you choose on? Seriously, it was "rippling back muscles
of the fisher as he winches his nets out of the sea, man on his boat
against the elements" versus "his thigh muscles flexing, the grower
squats to take a handful of soil, surveying the new growth on his
alfalfa before whistling for his dog". How the hell did you choose?

That is from Megan Very-Non-McArdle, and there are some related posts at the blog; commentary is here.  The asterisks are from me.

These days, if a TV show is going to draw me in as a viewer, it has to be really, really good.

The Raw Shark Texts

by  Tyler Cowen in

…is great fun.  I still can’t decide if it is a "good bad book," like Shantaram, or a "good good book," but it’s a good book of some kind or another. 

Imagine a cross between Memento and The Time Traveler’s Wife and you get halfway there.  There’s also plenty on when cheap talk equilibria matter (I hope you’ve seen Saw) and some visual influences from graphic novels and alternative typographies.  In any case it should become a big hit.

Most underrated mystery novel

by  Tyler Cowen in

Many of you have asked for posts on the most underrated books.  Today will start a short flirtation with this topic ("underrated week," which of course starts on Friday) and we’ll break books down by category.

For mystery, I’ll nominate the works of Henning Mankel, although arguably he is not underrated any more by critics.  Verissimo’s Borges and the Eternal Orangutans is my other pick.  Or how about Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx?

Readers, comments are open…

Museum:

by  Tyler Cowen in

The subtitle is Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the content is a series of varied, first person, quasi-biographical reports of how the Met works:

1. "We received our art education at home, where we were fortunate enough to be surrounded by Impressionist paintings…"

2. "The building is in pretty good condition considering the amount of use it gets.  There have to be at least thirty bathrooms in this place, and in each of those bathrooms you have six or seven toilets, four or five urinals, four or five sinks, plus you have the locker room for the employees, with showers and things like that."

3. "I think it’s very important to have art in the world.  I am somebody who is not terribly impressed with people.  The only thing which is really exceptional about humans is art; apart from that, we are animals."

Who would you most like to be? 

Recommended.

China estimates of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

Pollution is more globalized too:

Bruce Hope, a senior environmental toxicologist at the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, estimates that global sources contribute 18 percent–more than four times the local share–to Oregon’s air pollution.  Increasingly, the ozone on the west coast will be determined by China.  In California, for example, some researchers believe at least one-third of California’s fine particulate pollution–known as aerosol–originates from Asia.  These pollutants could potentially nullify California’s progress on meeting stricter Clean Air Act requirements.  In May 2006, University of California-Davis researchers claimed that almost all the particulate matter over Lake Tahoe was from China.  The great irony is that these pollutants are mainly due to the burgeoning demand of U.S. and EU consumers for cheap Chinese goods–which is driving the Chinese economic development.  Some estimates cite that 7 percent of China’s CO2emissions are due to production of U.S. imports.

Here is the source, the pointer is from Robin Hanson.  Concerning the last sentence, if you haven’t already seen it by now, here is Hal Varian’s piece on where the iPod is made.

“One line to rule them all”?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Jane Galt writes:

Everyone knows the unified queue is the best way to move checkout traffic. So how come every time customers in a crowded drugstore try to form a single queue, the cashiers force us to line up at the registers? Do they get some kind of psychic job from knowing in advance which customer they’ll check out?

You might try to argue that the indirect utility function is convex (risk-loving) in prices, and that people, when they realize that their personal line-choice algorithms result in shorter (longer) waits, make more (fewer) trips to the store.  Samuelson once proved a theorem about that in the QJE.  The intuition is that consumers can take advantage of price variability, in this case "time price" variability, and come out ahead.  Admittedly the notion of "going to the store more often when your innate line-choosing algorithm turns out to be good" requires a mental stretch.

People also might like knowing that the end to waiting is in sight.  On the phone they put you on hold and tell you the expected wait time, or they should.  At least five times in my life I’ve bolted a supermarket and abandoned the groceries, simply because the lines appeared too long.  It is harder to estimate how long a single line will take, and it is harder to compare single lines across supermarkets.

And might there be "line price discrimination"?  Hurried people like me can scout out the best lines (don’t you have visual algorithms for speedy cashiers?…young girls are best), whereas the conversation-starved, check-writing old ladies might even prefer a slower line.

There are thousands of papers on queuing theory, but I’ve never seen a good study of when single lines are to be preferred.  How sad indeed is my profession…

Meet Bryan Caplan in Person!

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Bryan Caplan will be talking about free trade and The Myth of the Rational Voter at the Heritage Institute on Monday July 2 at 11 am, RSVP here. 

He will also be speaking at a Cato luncheon for his book on Tuesday July 17 at noon.  More information here.

Bryan would be happy to sign your copy of the The Myth of the Rational Voter.  I know he would be even more delighted to sign your copy of Amore Infernale.

Eating Strategies

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Do you eat the best thing first or save the best for last?  Most people fall into one of these two categories and according to Brian Wansink’s Mindless Eating there is a simple economic explanation.  The people who eat the best thing first tend to have grown up as younger children from large families.  The people who save the best for last are more often first borns.  Need I say more?

Mindless Eating, by the way, masquerades as a diet book but it’s really about research design!  Highly recommended.

Overrated novels

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is one nomination for the most overrated novel of the 20th century.

I wonder about Gide and Sartre as well.  J.D. Salinger is too easy a target, as is John Barth.  How about Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird?  I keep on thinking there is an obvious and juicy British nomination (just look up how the Penguin Guide to Classical Music treats Elgar recordings), but I can’t settle on a single glaring name which stands above all others.

For the most overrated major author, I’ll pick Carlos Fuentes.  I love Mexico (and I’ve tried reading his works in Spanish), but I find he deadens the place rather than bringing it to life.  Had he not been around for the fashionably left-wing, anti-imperialist 1960s, he’d just be another guy with a pen.

The most overrated good book is Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady, which although very good is far from his best work.

What are your picks?

The most absurd sentence I read today

by  Tyler Cowen in

I am proposing that the Son and the Father Singularities guided the worlds of the multiverse to concentrate the energy of the particles constituting Jesus in our universe into the Jesus of our universe.

That is from Frank Tipler’s The Physics of Christianity.

But wait, there is competition for the honor:

If Jesus indeed rose from the dead using the mechanism described in Chapter 8, namely electroweak tunneling to convert matter into energy, and if indeed this was done with the intention of showing us how to use the same process, then we ourselves should be able to learn how to turn matter into either electromagnetic energy or neutrinos within a few decades.

You choose…

Gas Shortages in Iran

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Iran, one of the largest producers of oil in the world, has shortages of gasoline and has just introduced a rationing scheme causing riots in the streets.

Need I explain why the shortage exists?

Under the rationing plan, owners of private cars can buy 26 gallons of
fuel per month at the subsidized price of 38 cents per gallon.

and this tidbit is interesting.

Conservatives in Iran’s parliament, especially those aligned with
the country’s national oil company, have long pushed for higher
gasoline prices to curtail demand and free up government funds for
investment in more oil and gas production.

Ahmadinejad had resisted allowing increases because of his campaign promises to share Iran’s oil wealth with the nation’s poor.

What it is like to be a baby

by  Tyler Cowen in

I found these claims intriguing, but memory did not provide a test:

Gopnik argues that babies are not only conscious, they are more conscious
than adults.  Her argument for this view begins with the idea that
people in general — adults, that is — have more conscious experience
of what they attend to than of what they disregard…

Baby brains, Gopnik says, exhibit a much broader plasticity than adults’ and have a general neurochemistry
similar to the neurochemistry involved in adult attention.  Babies learn
more quickly than we do, and about more things, and pick up more
incidental knowledge outside a narrow band of attention.  Gopnik
suggests that we think of attention, in adults, as something like a
mechanism that turns part of our mature and slow-changing
brains, for a brief period, flexible, quick learning, and plastic —
baby-like — while suppressing change in the rest of the brain.

So
what is it like to be a baby?  According to Gopnik, it’s something like
attending to everything at once:  There’s much less of the reflexive and
ignored, the non-conscious, the automatic and expert.  She suggests that
the closest approximation adults typically get to baby-like experience
is when they are in completely novel environments, such as very
different cultures, where everything is new.

In my view, some people have a better sense (a much better sense) of what it is like to be a baby than others…