“I spent eleven years not finishing my Ph.d.”

by  Tyler Cowen in

Vikram Seth, author of the renowned A Suitable Boy, passed much of his life in the economics Ph.d. program at Stanford.  His latest book, Two Lives, recounts:

I discovered soon after I had begun my compulsory courses in macroeconomics and microeconomics that I could not get by without wasting a whole lot of time studying. 

He adds:

The subject was dry, mathematically unrealistic and intellectually unchallenging [TC: it took him eleven years to figure that out???  I know someone who needed less time].

That is from a preface of sorts.  Most of the book concerns Shanti, an Indian relation of Seth’s who moves to Berlin in 1931 to study dentistry; Shanti falls in love with a Jewish girl and later marries her.  The narrative is sentimental and the authorial intrusions are often mawkish, yet the main storyline delivers. 

Keep Seth in mind the next time you feel frustrated at your ne’er do well graduate students.

Addendum: If you, like I, are also a sucker for the Stalinist romance, try Tete-a-Tete: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, compulsively readable and well above average for its genre.

Second addendum: Read this interview with Seth, thanks to Pablo Halkyard for the pointer.

The Illusion of Control

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is a brief excerpt from the piece I am writing on avian flu:

…these policy recommendations go against the U.S. national character. They will not strike an intuitive chord of approval from all quarters. America typically responds to challenges by refusing to admit it can fail. We have a “can-do” mentality. We built the first atomic bomb, we put a man on the moon, we revitalized the American economy in the 1980s and 1990s, and so on. This trait is admirable and it has been responsible for much of our national greatness. Nonetheless it may hinder our progress in fighting avian flu. We tend to seek out options which offer some option, however unlikely, of apparent invulnerability. Our approach should be different. We should be admitting that at this point we cannot stop a terrible event but we can only make it somewhat less bad.

For an example of our national tendency, consider the response to Hurricane Katrina. It was immediately decided that we should rebuild New Orleans as much as possible. I am not questioning whether this is a wise decision; maybe yes, maybe no. The point is we made this decision for reasons of emotion and temperament, rather than wisdom. We refused to admit that a major American city would be wiped out by a mere act of nature. So we engaged in a large macro response, designed to overturn or reverse the initial calamity altogether. This way we do not have to admit defeat, at least not yet. We seek to control problems when we cannot. All human beings have this tendency, but it is perhaps strongest in the United States, due to our long record of exceptional achievement.

Such a tendency could influence avian flu policy in damaging ways. For instance systematic stockpiles, centrally directed, and military-directed quarantines both give the impression that we can control the course of the pandemic. We would be making a highly symbolic and visual stand of “We won’t just let this happen.” Nonetheless these are not the most effective measures. Preparing emergency rooms or instructing people to wash their hands is, in effect, admitting that the disease would spread and kill people. It is a partial admission of “defeat.” Yet we might need some national modesty to address the problem in a relatively effective manner.

Strange Tabarrok Trivia

by  Alex Tabarrok in

My brother, Nicholas Tabarrok, is the producer of the apocalyptic, biblically inspired, Left Behind movies. Left Behind – The World at War just opened in 3,200 screens across America.  Haven’t seen it at your local multiplex?  That’s because the executive producers opened the movie in churches, harking back to a model of movie distribution that used to be common in the 1950s.  The movie has also been released near-simultaneously on DVD.  Here’s a review of the DVD.

Left Behind — The World at War (Sony, $25): The third installment in the popular Christian-themed apocalyptic dramas based on the Left Behind
series of novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. Forgoing a theatrical
release, this latest edition was screened over the weekend at about
3,200 churches around the country.

This time, the Antichrist
(Gordon Currie), now the head of the world government, taints freshly
published Bibles with biological weapons. Lou Gossett Jr. plays the
U.S. president. Extra features include a "making of" documentary, a
surprisingly funny gag reel and enjoyable commentary with Currie and
producers Nicholas Tabarrok and Andrew van Heerden (who also co-wrote
the film).

Golfonomics

by  Tyler Cowen in

This book presents Stephen Shmanske’s innovative research combining two of his passions, golf and economics. He develops two themes – the use of economics to explore institutional aspects of the business side of golf and the use of golf statistics to shed light on several vexing issues in economics. These two themes are addressed in two settings – the economics of golf course management and the economics of professional golf. Examples from golf course management are covered in separate chapters on golf cart usage, golf course maintenance, and the problem of slow play. Examples from professional golf include the causal relationships from practice to skill to earnings, the tournament compensation model, and the measurement of gender discrimination.

Buy it here.  If the $48 price tag intimidates you, try these two chapters on-line.  Here is a review.

Should we welcome digital cinema?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Movies projected digitally are bright, and blemish-free. Yet they feel … odd.

Digital projection supplies a different experience than
photochemistry-based projection. The image is clear — eeriely so. But
it’s also less dense, less nuanced, and far less sensual than a
good-quality traditional film image. Digital projection seems to suit
thwacky-slammy pictures just fine. Action-adventure pix,
computer-animated films, blockbusters, and dumbo comedies should do
fine projected digitally. But quieter films, and especially films that
deal in mood, poetry, and tactility — movies like "Swimming Pool"
and "Last Tango in Paris" — would lose a lot. As far as I’ve been able
to tell, movies projected digitally don’t feel like what they’re sold
as: movies perfected. They feel like ultrabigscreen TV.

Here is the full discussion, which includes an analysis of the economics of digital conversion in the theater.  Comments are open.

My macro mid-term

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is question number two, if you are bold try to sketch an answer in the comments.

Let us say you had a real business cycle model where production took a very long period(s) of time, rather than just a single (shorter) period.  Might this help such a model explain the aggregate macroeconomic data?  What might become easier and what might become harder?

Hint: One good approach is to break your answer down in the three categories of "comovement, persistence, and labor supply."

Why do you buy books?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Driven partly by pressure from incessant literary prize shortlists, more than one in three consumers in London and the south-east admit having bought a book "solely to look intelligent", the YouGov survey says.

It finds one in every eight young people confessing to choosing a book "simply to be seen with the latest shortlisted title". This herd instinct dwindles to affect only one in 20 over-50 year-olds…

…the results indicate that "reading" is a relative term. When asked about specific titles, only one in 25 people turn out to have read the novel chosen as the best in the Booker prize’s 25-year history, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children – and half these had failed to finish it.

Only one in 100 had read Andrew Levy’s Small Island, picked earlier this month as the best of all Orange prize winners. Not a single reader had yet opened this month’s Booker winner, John Banville’s The Sea.

Other strongly publicised titles endorsed by literary panels fare only slightly better. One in 20 members of the public has read Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and only one in 25 Yann Martel’s Life of Pi or Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist.

Some consumers hedge their bets by keeping two titles on the go – one an impressive book to show other people, the other an escapist work to enjoy.

The biggest group, more than two in every five people, follows the traditional method of choosing their reading; relying on recommendations from close family and friends.

The sample’s own top 10 titles, a mixture of classic and popular, is: the Bible, Lord of the Rings, one or other of the Harry Potter stories, Catch-22, Animal Farm, The Hobbit, Pride and Prejudice, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Da Vinci Code, Wuthering Heights.

Here is the story.  By the way, why do you read blogs? 

Addendum: http://kottke.org refers us to some selected one-star Amazon reviews of the classic works.

How much is your blog worth?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Type in your blog name here.  MR comes out as worth over $850,000, based on proportional allocation and the price of the AOL-Weblogs deal.  Alternatively, we could ask how much Alex and I would pay for MR, (well, Alex? Monique?) and treat the rest as the option value at the corporate level for creating additional blogs.  Or perhaps you should just sell AOL short (again).

Thanks to Shawn DuBravac for the pointer.

Freakonomics of the sea

by  Tyler Cowen in

"Before the 1880s, it was unusual to see lobster on menus," said Jones. "It was considered trash fish that people didn’t want"

Glenn said his interest in menus as historical resources evolved from a project in which he assigned students in a coastal resources class to study seafood price data based on prices in a 1950s restaurant menu he came across.

Besides documenting the rise and fall in popularity and prices of fish and mollusk species in restaurants, menus also provide scientists with serious documentation of the economics of commercial fishing over the decades, he said.

"Sea scallops don’t show up on the menus until the 1940s," Jones said. "Before that, it was all bay scallops on menus. Now, bay scallops are pretty rare and the ones you get are real small"

Other U.S. seafood resources are depleted as well, Jones said. Industry records show oyster harvests from Chesapeake Bay are down 96 percent from annual hauls in the early 1900s, he said.

In recent decades, American consumers in particular have chewed their way through two trendy delicacies, Jones said.

"In the 1970s and 1980s, orange roughie starts showing up on menus," Jones said. "But it’s a very slow-growing species and they were harvesting it much faster than the species could replace itself so it’s becoming commercially extinct"

Fishing boats simply shifted from chasing roughie in waters around New Zealand and Australia to pursuing Chilean sea bass in the southern Pacific and southern Indian oceans.

"They just moved on to another species," Jones said, citing catch statistics. "Now, the same thing is happening with the Chilean sea bass"

The same type of progression took place among Atlantic ocean species from the 1850s into the 1900s, Jones said.

Analysis so far has included menus mostly from coastal cities like New York, Boston, San Francisco and Providence, R.I., Jones said.

Here is the full story, and thanks to Dylan Alexander for the pointer.  Here is another summary, try this one too.  In Colonial America, servants wrote contracts specifying they would not be asked to eat lobseter (how fresh? and did they give you a bib and that little fork?) more than twice a week.  Here is a Canadian summary of the work.

Did I mention that we are running out of many species of fish, and that we will be consuming lower and lower items on the marine seafood chain?  I favor private ownership of fish stocks, to alleviate the commons problem, but a) this is not always technically feasible, and b) where possible, it would cause current prices to skyrocket, making those fish a luxury good.  Quotas can be a second best solution but they are hard to enforce.  I hope you like seaweed.