Assorted links
1. New Freakonomics study guide, explained and downloadable here. Elsewhere on the Steve Levitt front, he argues with Roland Fryer that black and white kids have roughly the same mental abilities when measured at age one.
2. Google map of Mars, hat tip to Yana.
3. Here is a new cost-benefit study of the war in Iraq, from a hawk-friendly point of view. The authors are Steve Davis, Kevin Murphy, and Bob Topel; I’ll let you know more once I’ve read it.
Do you want to be inspired?
Adam Phillips remains one of our most underrated thinkers:
However much we want inspiration, if it disturbs our normal sense of ourselves then we are going to resist it. Most people are not seeking self-knowledge; they believe – they live as if – they already know who they are. So self-knowledge in this sense is the enemy of inspiration, our best defence against this alien invasion. As in sex, we may long to lose our composure and self-control but there is one thing we desire even more, and that is not to. Self-knowledge protects us from inspiration; inspiration, like sexual desire, undoes us. For non-believers, inspiration is more like sexual desire than anything else; a fascination, a fear, and something we think of as having a secret solitary pleasure attached to it.
Read the whole thing. If you want to try one of his books, On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored is the best place to start.
China fact of the day
84 percent of new car sales in China are to first-time buyers. In the U.S., just 1 percent are.
That is from 20 March Business Week.
The bottom line on the new Judith Harris book
If you think my theory is unnecessarily complex, just wait till you see what the theories will be like fifty years from now.
An excellent line but also a sign of trouble. The final sentence is:
Making a virtue of necessity, I will leave it to other people to test my theory [TC: in fairness to Harris, she may be referring to her medical problems].
Nonetheless I like virtually everything she says. The key point is that when it comes to environmental influences on our behavior, we are highly malleable avatars. Tests which don’t recognize this will be misleading. For instance if you are testing "birth rank" theories, submission within the family does not imply submissive behavior toward the outside world. Of course the theory immediately gains an additional degree of freedom, both its blessing and curse.
The book is full of fascinating facts and interludes:
…people who are married to one of a pair of twins feel, on average, only so-so about the other twin; only 13 percent of the men and 7 percent of the women feel they could have fallen for their spouse’s twin.
Dead Ringers anyone? Here is my previous post on the book.
The bottom line: All those young, anti-theocratic, and sometimes pro-democratic Iranian hotheads, for all their rebellious behavior against their parents, when push comes to shove will embrace nuclear weapons and a maximal sphere of regional influence.
Road to Serfdom ala Ken Burns
Jared Rhoads has taken the Road to Serfdom cartoons and made them into a really elegant movie with music, ala Ken Burns. Check it out!
Addendum: Jared also writes regularly the Lucidicus Project.
M1 and Me
Michael Kinsley helps Alan Greenspan with his memoirs.
Although developments in human biology are always–and, in the view
of many experts, perhaps not un-including myself, quite
properly–subject to a variety of interpretations, the evidence does
tend to suggest, with only a limited amount of ambiguity, that I was
born…
New Thomas Schelling book
Strategies of Commitment, by Thomas Schelling, essays and speeches. Here is my previous post on Thomas Schelling, 2005 Nobel Laureate. Here is the home page for the book.
Cultural recovery bleg
I am looking for cases when a culturally flourishing city met a great tragedy, saw some population dispersion, and then recovered its creative energies. Vienna is an example where this is not true. Paris has wonderful museums and concerts but it is no longer a global cultural leader as it was before World War II. I am not aware that Atlanta was culturally important after the wreckage of the Civil War. Rome faded after (before?) the barbarian invasions. So are there any good examples? Comments are open…
DVDs and Movie Theaters
A lot of people have argued that DVDs, home theater, and the shrinking time from big screen to DVD sales are spelling doom for the movie theater business. Michael Campbell, CEO of Regal, the nation’s largest chain of theaters, has some smart things to say in response. I particularly like his first response which shows a keen appreciation of market inter-dependencies, "general equilibrium" in econ-speak.
I think DVD’s have been the savior of not only the studio model but
have been beneficial to theater owners, too, because it funnels more
money back into the studios, which in turn fuels higher production
budgets, greater numbers of films, and so on.We have seen the
window shrink from an average of about six months between theatrical to
video 10 years ago to about four and a half months today. Some
compression of that window over time is justified, or has been
justified at least in the past, because we generate our piece of the
pie at the box office much quicker today than we did a decade ago.People
who run the studios are smart people, and I think they realize the
tremendous value of having that theatrical launch pad. And I don’t
think that’s going to change. They make films to be released on the big
screen.
Does Mexican immigration reduce crime?
Robert Sampson writes in today’s NYT Op-Ed page:
…evidence points to increased immigration as a major factor associated with the lower crime rate of the 1990’s (and its recent leveling off).
Hispanic Americans do better on a range of various social indicators — including propensity to violence — than one would expect given their socioeconomic disadvantages. My colleagues and I have completed a study in which we examined 8,000 Chicago residents who were asked about the characteristics of their neighborhoods.
Surprisingly, we found a significantly lower rate of violence among Mexican-Americans than among blacks and whites…Indeed, the first-generation immigrants (those born outside the United States) in our study were 45 percent less likely to commit violence than were third-generation Americans, adjusting for family and neighborhood background. [TC: But don’t absolute probabilities play the key role here? And should we compare Mexicans to "blacks and whites" or to each group in isolation?] Second-generation immigrants were 22 percent less likely to commit violence than the third generation.
Our study further showed that living in a neighborhood of concentrated immigrants is directly associated with lower violence (again, after taking into account a host of factors…)
Alas, there is no permalink these days. Here is the relevant project which generated the data. No one of Sampson’s pieces on his web page seems to cover this result, though many are relevant more broadly. Also see this summary of his criticism of "broken window" and "tipping point" theories of crime.
Here is another piece which seems to support the basic result that Mexican immigration lowers crime. Here is a survey article on the topic. This piece (see p.113) suggests that crime is lower in border cities than comparable non-border cities, and that Mexican immigration cannot be identified as a cause of a higher U.S. crime rate.
Yes comments are open, but purely anecdotal accounts of how you were once mugged by a Mexican, or how your neighborhood just isn’t "the same anymore" are discouraged. I’m posting a version of this over at Volokh Conspiracy as well, look for the differing comments.
Addendum: Read Alex on this topic.
News you already knew
In this week’s Media Guy column for Advertising Age magazine, [Simon] Dumenco
contends that knowledge of the hippest, hottest blogs can increase
hook-up opportunities and boost sexual attractiveness….
Thanks to Eric Crampton for the pointer.
Pedicab crackdown
There are fewer taxicabs in New York City today than in 1937. Entry restrictions have meant too few taxis, too many private cars, and gridlock so bad that in downtown midtown Manhattan, pedicabs, basically tricycle-rickshaws, are faster than cars. Is it any wonder, therefore, that the city is considering a crackdown?
Thanks to Roger Congleton for the pointer.
Facts about the Mexican middle class
1. The ranks of the middle class — defined as $7,200 to $50,000 a year — have risen to about ten million families.
2. That is almost 40 percent of all Mexican households.
3. The country is in the middle of a housing boom. 560,000 new homes were built last year — a record — and 750,000 are expected for 2006.
4. Annual inflation is down to about three percent and over the last two years interest rates on 20-year mortgages have fallen from 18 to 8 percent.
5. Sales of home appliances have tripled in the last ten years.
Those facts are from Business Week, 13 March edition. Each time I visit Mexico, the more I am convinced that country has turned the corner. Here is an earlier post on undervalued nations. See here also.
The Road to Serfdom, in cartoon form
Seriously. Originally published in Look magazine. Thanks to Alina Stefanescu for the pointer.
Lunch with Tyrone
I have had lunch with Tyrone many times. He is never invited. Tyrone is devious, untrustworthy and worst of all, brilliant. It often take days to sort out the fallacies, sophistries, and half-truths that invade my mind after lunch with Tyrone. Sometimes it takes much longer. He makes my head hurt. Even when Tyrone is not at lunch, I worry. Tyrone does not always announce himself. Maybe he really was at lunch…I told you he was devious.
Please do not encourage Tyrone. He is a bad, bad, man.