The Economics of Chocolate
"You
say that 400 florins a year as an assured salary are not to be despised,
and it would be true if in addition I could work myself into a good position
and could treat these 400 florins simply as extra money. But unfortunately,
that is not the case. I would have to consider the 400 florins as my chief
income and everything else I could earn as windfall, the amount of which
would be very uncertain and consequently in all probability very meager.
You can easily understand that one cannot act as independently towards
a pupil who is a princess as towards other ladies. If a princess does not
feel inclined to take a lesson, why, you have the honor of waiting until
she does. She is living out with the Salesians, so that if you do not care
to walk, you have the honor of paying at least 20 kreuzer to drive there
and back. Thus of my pay only 304 florins would remain–that is, if I only
gave three lessons a week. And if I were obliged to wait, I would in the
meantime be neglecting my other pupils or other work (by which I could
easily make more than 400 florins). If I wanted to come into Vienna I would
have to pay double, since I would be obliged to drive out again. If I stayed
out there and were giving my lesson in the morning, as I no doubt would
be doing, I would have to go at lunchtime to some inn, take a wretched
meal and pay extravagantly for it. Moreover, by neglecting my other pupils
I might lose them altogether–for everyone considers his money as good
as that of a princess. At the same time, I would lose the time and inclination
to earn more money by composition. To serve a great lord (in whatever office)
a man should be paid a sufficient income to enable him to to serve his
patron alone, without being obliged to seek additional earnings to
avoid penury. A man must provide against want."
Marginal Revolution Goes Avant-Garde
David Morris, New York City theater artist and long-time reader of MR, is one of the creators of Routine Hearing: Exercises for the Body Politic.
Exercises for the Body Politic
moves to the beat of an original score featuring the luminaries of
political oratory. From the golden oldies of Goldwater and
McGovern to the modern sounds of Limbaugh and Moore, your headphones
will set the stage for this auditory grand ballet. Enjoy a glass
of wine, a game of cards and the company of your fellow citizens as one
of HERE’s favorite design teams–David Evans Morris & Juliet
Chia–hit shuffle on the political soundtrack of 21st century.
The lastest installment of Exercises will feature selections from Tyler’s paper Self-Deception as the Root of Political Failure. Alas, no selections from your truly but if Nixon going to China can become an opera I have high hopes for the musical, Believe in Pascal’s Wager? Have
I got a deal for you!
You can get tickets to Routine Hearing which plays Jan. 2-3 at the above link.
Addendum: Here are Tyler and I on An
Economic Theory of Avant-Garde and
Popular Art, or High and Low Culture (JSTOR link).
How to appreciate Shakespeare
…right now, at this very moment, one can see more great Shakespeare, one can find more transformative Shakespearean experiences, from what is already on film even in the form of tape or DVD on a television screen than the average person, even the average critic, will see on stage in a life time.
That is from Ron Rosenbaum’s generally quite good The Shakespeare Wars. His list:
1. Orson Welles, Chimes at Midnight [TC: also Welles’s best movie]
2. Peter Brook, King Lear
3. Richard III, with Laurence Olivier
4. Hamlet, with Richard Burton
To this list I would add Welles’s Othello and — more controversially — Baz Luhrmann’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Haitian voodoo scenes and all; Rosembaum is more positive than negative about that one, but it doesn’t make his list.
Universal 401k accounts
Today’s New York Times column is here. Excerpts:
Just as the earned-income tax credit pays poor people to work, the universal 401(k) would pay poor people to save…By directing the benefits toward the neediest, the universal 401(k)
savings plan tries to increase economic security in a cost-effective
manner.There is an obvious way to pay for a universal 401(k)
plan. For every dollar spent on the universal 401(k), the federal
government could spend one dollar less on Medicare and Social Security
benefits…It may seem that what the poor need is more money to spend, but the
universal 401(k) plan is taking a gamble by encouraging them to lock up
more savings. Perhaps support for a culture of savings and discipline
is more important than subsidizing additional spending.…A fiscally responsible universal 401(k) plan would not make everyone
happy. Libertarians and conservatives would be suspicious of
government-created accounts. Liberals might not like freezing or
reducing future expenditures on Medicare and Social Security. But if we
are looking for policy initiatives that address real-world problems and
offer something to each side, encouraging low-income savings is a good
place to start.
My favorite things Brazil, music edition
1. Classical music: Villa-Lobos for sure, his guitar music most of all. Hector Miolin and Joseph Bacon made excellent recordings.
2. Acoustic guitar: We all know the jazz and bossa nova player Baden Powell, but John Fahey was rightly obsessed with Bola Sete, an acoustic blues player with licks from another planet. Even many well-informed "guitar specialists" don’t know his work.
3. MPB: There are so many wonderful figures, buy Brazil Classics 1, 2, and 3 for the best overviews; all the cuts are selected by David Byrne. Brazil Classics 1 would be one of my ten desert island discs and sometimes I feel it is my favorite CD period. Beleza Tropical 2 is a good follow-up disc. Contrary to popular opinion, I don’t think many of the MPB albums stand on their own, but the best cuts are unforgettable.
4. Copied by Beck: Os Mutantes ["We are Mutants"] is one of the best groups of the 1960s. When it comes to putting together a song in the studio, they rate just behind the Beatles and Brian Wilson. The "Best of" CD is a good place to start; Beck will never ever sound the same again.
5. Brazilian electronica: Start with Suba’s Sao Paulo Confessions, one of the subtlest techno albums. For a good collection of the music he inspired, try The Now Sound of Brazil, which includes cuts by Cibelle, Bebel Gilberto, Zuco 103, and others. This is a growing and vital genre.
6. Drum music: First prize goes to Olodum, they are best live, preferably late at night in the town square in Salvador, Bahia, which I have yet to experience. They play on Paul Simon’s "The Obvious Child," which can be downloaded on iTunes. Honorable mention to Timbalada and Ile Aiye.
7. Forro: To call it "jaunty and infectious accordion music" does not do it justice; Music for Maids and Taxi Drivers is one good introduction, plus anything by Luis Gonzaga.
8. Classical pianist: Nelson Freire remains underrated, here is a Chopin recital, better than Rubinstein.
There is more, and more, and more. Most of it I don’t even know. Here are some different recommendations.
The bottom line: Very few countries have better music than Brazil. If you take away the United States, Brazil might have the world lead. If you don’t know this stuff, you have much to live for. Please do put your further recommendations in the comments.
Sao Paulo is banning outdoor advertising
Imagine a modern metropolis with no outdoor advertising: no billboards,
no flashing neon signs, no electronic panels with messages crawling
along the bottom. Come the new year, this city of 11 million,
overwhelmed by what the authorities call visual pollution, plans to
press the “delete all” button and offer its residents an unimpeded view
of their surroundings…The outsized billboards and screens that dominate the skyline,
promoting everything from autos, jeans and cellphones to banks and sex
shops, will have to come down, as will all other forms of publicity in
public space, like distribution of fliers.The law also
regulates the dimensions of store signs and outlaws any advertising on
the sides of the city’s thousands of buses and taxis.
Here is the full story. As far as I can tell (my last visit was eight years ago, however), most of it is not down yet. In any case I suspect the city is more attractive with the commercial angle. The underlying buildings are mostly ugly, so a fanciful clutter will do better than an attempt at sleek postmodernism.
By the way, it was already the case that most of Sao Paulo’s 13,000 or so outdoor billboards were installed illegally. The goal is to clear the space entirely, so that any single offender sticks out very obviously and can be prosecuted. But of course the tipping point matters. Whatever change ends up in place, I expect a slow creep back towards the status quo ex ante.
Brazil fact of the day
The price level in Brazil is approximately 5 trillion times higher today than it was in 1972.
Here is the source.
Markets in everything, shoe laces and masochism edition
One of the biggest annoyances in long-distance running is lace
management. After banging out 50 miles, it can be hard to squat or even
bend over long enough to tie your shoes. The North Face recently
responded to Karnazes’ complaints and came out with the $130 M Endurus
XCR Boa. Its laceless upper is enmeshed in thin steel cables that
connect to a tension dial at the back. A simple turn cinches the shoe
onto the foot. No more slowing down to fiddle with laces.
Here is the full story of an obsessed runner. Get this bit:
Finding four hours for a 30-mile run during the day was next to impossible. The solution: sleep less…He now gets about four hours of shut-eye a night.
By the way…
…in 1995 Karnazes entered a 199-mile relay race – by himself. He competed against eight teams of 12 and finished eighth.
The Power of Philanthropy
The British Museum is one of the world’s premier arts institutions. But last year it spent less than a million pounds on new acquisitions. Compare this to the more than 55 million pounds spent by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, or the more than 20 million pounds spent by MOMA. The Met figure is inflated above normal levels because of the purchase of an expensive Duccio painting but the comparison remains. The Louvre spent 16.8 million pounds in the same year, coming in third internationally. The Getty was fourth and the Rijksmuseum fifth.
That is from The Art Newspaper, December 2006, p.25. Here is a good article on a Frenchman who has realized the power of decentralized philanthropy. Here is a good article on NYU’s obsession with philanthropy.
Should we keep prostitutes on the streets?
Getting the pros off the streets, it seems, turns them into careerists:
In the mid-1990s, changes to law enforcement strategies in New York City pushed many women working in the sex trade off of the streets and into the indoors. Increasing numbers of women began advertising sexual services in bars, over the Internet, and in print media, and conducting their work in their homes, hotels, and brothels. This study uses in-depth interviews and participant observation to examine the impact of this change on the life and work of women working in New York’s indoor sex trade. A critical finding is that as women move their work indoors, they begin to conceive of sex work as a profession and a career, rather than just a short-term means of employment. This “professional and careerist orientation” may have significant implications for the length of women’s tenure in sex work and ultimately, for their ability to exit the trade completely.
Here is the full paper, by Alexandra K. Murphy and Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh.
Markets in everything – Paretian liberal edition
Male workers who vow to stay away from prostitutes after year-end celebrations in South Korea are to be rewarded.
The Ministry for Gender Equality is offering cash to
companies whose male employees pledge not to pay for sex after office
parties.Men are being urged to register on the ministry’s website. The companies with most pledges will receive a reward.
Note that the vow is awarded, not the abstinence. The pointer is from Claudio Shikida, Brazilian economist and blogger.
Posner Lectures Chipmunk
Here’s a tidbit from a Washington Post article today on property rights in online worlds.
Earlier this month, U.S. Circuit Judge Richard A. Posner visited
Second Life, appearing as a balding, bespectacled cartoon rendering of
himself, and addressed a crowd of other animated characters on a range
of legal issues, including property rights in virtual reality. Posner
stressed that it was in Linden Lab’s interest to ensure due process and
other rights."They want people to invest in Second Life, and we
know people won’t invest if their rights are not reasonably secure," he
told the audience, which included a giant chipmunk and several
supermodels. He went on to predict the eventual emergence of an
"international law of virtual worlds" similar to international maritime
law.
Gifts the starter motor of civilization?
Seth Roberts argues that gifts furthered civilization by deepening the division of labor and increasing skills even when such skills were not at a first practical, i.e. today’s gift is tomorrow’s technology.
The new bird flu study
Who is at greatest risk from a pandemic? We now have more systematic data:
The authors used international mortality data from 27 countries and
regions where there was a minimum of 80% death registration in the
years 1915 to 1923, trying to correlate the wide variation in mortality
with community attributes. By restricting their data set to these
"registration areas," they are able to make more comparable comparisons
between areas that differed in mortality. They selected two features of
the communities that might indicate important differences, per capita
income and latitude….There was an extremely wide variation in excess mortality from country
to country and region to region. Even within the same registration
areas, for example, the Census of India, there is a 2.1% excess
mortality attributed to the pandemic in Burma compared to a 7.8% in the
Indian province of Berar.…the single variable of per capita income in a country explains half of the variation in excess mortality [emphasis added].
It is possible that 95 percent of the losses of human life would come in the developing world. Here is much more.
It is, by the way, a mistake to think that the risk of this happening has gone down. The recent bird flu deaths in Egypt
point to the ongoing danger. Nor should you think we have
any real idea what is going on with bird flu in Nigeria.
Ordem e Progresso
One data point aside, the most obvious difference in Rio, from ten years ago, is how much safer it
seems. Many parts of town that were previously filled with stalkers and
snatchers and kiddie gangs are now quite walkable and indeed pleasant.
Small crimes have gone down in frequency, but crime occurs on a larger
scale. The city has been parceled out, and if the police control a part
of town they are able to keep snatchings and the like to a minimum, unlike ten
years ago. That said, the clashes at the fringes, between the police and
the favela kings, are, according to my Brazilian friends, more frequent and
more violent. There is greater cartelization of territory, with
tighter control within each market, but more at stake on the borders.
As Americans (and Russians) we are not used to visiting large, insular
countries like our own, but Brazil is just that. The diversity is remarkable, for one example Sao Paulo has about three
million ethnic Japanese. But as in the United States, much of the
diversity is an illusion. You can be from anywhere, and do anything you
want, but somehow you still only have the option of being Brazilian.
Hardly anyone here speaks English, or indeed anything other than
Portuguese. Many people claim to speak Spanish; that only means if you
speak to them in Spanish they are willing to answer you back in Portuguese,
with one or two Spanish words thrown in. There are few concessions to
tourists, and even the most famous sites are visited mainly by Brazilians,
not foreigners. It is one of the best experiences of intense cultural
immersion you can get.
Yes there are string bikinis but they are overrepresented on
postcards. The ocean walk in Rio is full
of people who should not be wearing bikinis. Brazilian women are among
the world’s most beautiful but in part because they do not insist of being
superthin. They will overwhelm you with their sensual earthiness, and
their true appeal doesn’t rest much on their looks one way or the other.
I had to wait four hours for a connecting flight from Sao Paulo to Rio. I saw hundreds of Brazilians waiting for different flights (have I mentioned that infrastructure is terrible?), but not once did I see anyone reading a book.
The food is better than I remember it, top sirloin being the best cut at a
churrascaria. The cheeses, while not complex, are superb. The cold antipasti are often the best part of the
meal. Only Italy has better pasta, and even that is debatable.
I find it hard to finish Our Mutual Friend, perhaps because the plot
still doesn’t make sense to me, not even on second reading. Still, I hold
an obvious fascination with serial stories which pretend to be about one thing
and are in fact deeply about something quite different; those who read MR most
closely already know this, even if they can’t always figure out the plot.