Katrina update
Billions of federal dollars are about to start flowing into this city
after President Bush on Thursday signed the emergency relief bill the
region has long awaited. But, with the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina
approaching, local officials have yet to come up with a redevelopment
plan showing what kind of city will emerge from the storm’s ruins.No neighborhoods have been ruled out for rebuilding, no matter how
damaged or dangerous. No decisions have been made on what kind of
housing, if any, will replace the mold-ridden empty hulks that stretch
endlessly in many areas. No one really knows exactly how the $10.4
billion in federal housing aid will be spent, and guidance for
residents in vulnerable areas has been minimal.
How about this?
Mr. Voelker, who is in charge of the state authority’s efforts to
coordinate with neighborhood planning, sounded uncertain even about the
nature of the master plan."I don’t know what this master plan is going to say, because I’m not a master planner," Mr. Voelker said.
Here is the full story. Mr. Voelker’s honesty is to be applauded, even when it appears he is trying to rewrite Aristotle’s Law of Identity.
For background on Katrina I recommend the forthcoming Breach of Faith: Hurricane Katrina and the Near Death of a Great American City, by Jed Horne.
If you want other tragic news, here is Man Charged After Wife’s Head Flies From Truck, and that happened while he was committing two other murders.
I agree with Paul Krugman (about fiscal policy)
Think of a standard IS-LM picture. Does that match current reality?
Obviously not: the Fed doesn’t target the money supply, so holding M
constant is not a useful thought experiment, and actually confuses
students. In fact, since the Fed actually targets the Fed funds rate
rather than the money supply, you might think that the LM curve should
be replaced with a horizontal FF curve. This would seem to suggest no
crowding out at all.But except in the very short run the
Fed doesn’t set the interest rate passively; instead, it tries to
stabilize output around potential. A reasonable way to represent a
Taylor rule or something like that in a simple diagram is to draw a vertical line, the BB curve (for Ben Bernanke). This gives us 100% crowding out.And
I think that’s right. Except in liquidity-trap conditions or in the
very short run, before the Fed has a chance to catch up, fiscal policy
doesn’t change aggregate demand, only the mix.
The source is Brad DeLong.
Tim Harford interviews Gary Becker
Here is the link, Becker joked only once, and Tim reports:
Becker wants a clear head for tennis that afternoon. He is 75 and looks
it, with fine white hair and translucent, heavily lined skin, but he
moves like a younger man. When I arrived at his home to take him up on
his offer of a lift to the restaurant, I could see his silhouette
coming down the stairs at a fair clip. He drives confidently. In the
summer, he moves his work to Cape Cod and often swims in the ocean.
Becker has always loved sport, but that, and his family, seem to be his
only distraction from work. "I don’t like small talk too much, so I
don’t try to get involved in that." It is clear from even a few minutes
conversation that what really motivates Becker is the world of ideas.
Cads and Dads
Tyler, Alex, Alex’s wife Monique, Bryan (Caplan), Ilia (Rainer) and I had a fun conversation on Thursday.
A standard story says that women like cads for short term relationships, to get good sex (i.e., genes), and dads for long term relationships, to get security and comfort (i.e., resources to raise kids). Of course some men are good in both roles, but most men are thought to be better at one role than the other.
Woman always want both sex and security, but they seem to prefer "bad boy" cads more when they are young, and dads more when they are older. Why? We were looking less for proximate psychological causes and more for functional explanations. We came up with these four theories:
1. Young women must practice having relationships, in part to discover the distribution of guys out there and their own ability to attract guys. This requires short term relationships. But it is not clear why these should be more with cads rather than dad candidates. And this would predict young women avoid sex when practicing, to avoid having kids. This theory applies to better to young teens than to young women.
2. Instead of having all her kids with a dad, many women may have enough negotiating power to get a dad to support her even if she has one kid with a cad. Dads object less to supporting a cad kid created before they met, as a cad kid created during their relationship suggests that it won’t be the last. A cad kid early in life can be written off to the "foolishness of youth," and she can credibly claim that she didn’t intend for this to be a cad kid; she had hoped the cad would be a dad.
3. Girls more than women expect parents to help with their mistakes. A young woman expects a cad kid to be cared for not by a dad but by her parents and extended family. Since parents die eventually, older women are less likely to have such support available. This theory predicts that women without living parents would be less attracted to cads, all else equal.
4. Young people have stronger incentives to signal than older people, since they are still forming long term attachments, and want to attract the best partners. Young women compete to attract cads in order to signal their attractiveness and social power, and having sex with cads helps to attract cads. Women compete more for cads than for dads because cad quality is easier to see in young men – it can take many years to reveal who are the best resource providers. This theory predicts young women have less interest in private unobserved relationships with cads.
The truth is probably a mixture of these theories. But some are probably more important that others.
TC: Here are related posts on the topic.
The problem with emergency rooms
Inadequate emergency rooms are one of the most neglected policy issues in the United States. Read this depressing article. Excerpt:
Emergency medical care in the United States is on the verge of
collapse, with the nation’s declining number of emergency rooms
dangerously overcrowded and often unable to provide the expertise
needed to treat seriously ill people in a safe and efficient manner.Long waits for treatment are epidemic, the reports said, with
ambulances sometimes idling for hours to unload patients. Once in the
ER, patients sometimes wait up to two days to be admitted to a hospital
bed.As a system, U.S. emergency care lacks stability and the
capacity to respond to large disasters or epidemics, according to the
25 experts who conducted the study. It provides care of variable and
often unknown quality and depends on the willingness of doctors and
hospitals to lose large amounts of money.That’s
the grim conclusion of three reports released yesterday by the
Institute of Medicine, the product of an extensive two-year look at
emergency care.
This is one reason why we are less well suited to defend against a pandemic or a major terrorist attack than many people think. Note that emergency rooms are unpriced resources for many users, so this outcome should not surprise the economist. Did you know that the number of emergency rooms has decreased since 2001?
Are any of you willing to return to pre-1986 policy, when emergency rooms were not obliged to treat all comers? Is there evidence on how big a difference this law made? If we expanded emergency room capacity, but kept current law, would we in effect have national health insurance, paid for by an (implicit) tax on other forms of medical care?
Here is an article on how emergency rooms work. Here is a claim that most people don’t need to go. A cross-country comparison of the economics of emergency rooms would make for a fine dissertation, and then some.
Markets in everything
Drivers in three US cities will soon be able to earn a buck or two just
for vacating a parking space. SpotScout is a website that matches
people about to leave a parking spot with those looking for one. Using
a cellphone, drivers tell SpotScout when they will leave their parking
spot, where it is, and how much they will sell this information for.
The site, to be launched next month in New York, Boston and San
Francisco, matches this information with people looking for a space.
Here is the link; the pointer is from Daniel Akst. If you don’t already know it, here is Dan’s article on how to best help other people.
What it’s like being shy
"Up until now, people thought that [shyness] was mostly related to
avoidance of social situations," says co-author and child psychiatrist
Monique Ernst. "Here we showed that shy children have increased
activity in the reward system of the brain as well."Why this
would be the case is still not clear. "One interpretation is that
extremely shy children have an increased sensitivity to many types of
stimuli–both frightening and rewarding," says Guyer. There are other
possibilities as well, says Mauricio Delgado, a psychologist at Rutgers
University in Newark, New Jersey. For example, increased activity in
the striatum may help shy children cope with the anxiety of stressful
situations, although not enough so to help them overcome their shyness.…Because shy children
appear to be more sensitive to winning and losing, they may experience
emotions more strongly than others, putting them at risk for emotional
disorders such as anxiety and depression. On the flip side, shy
children may experience positive emotions such as success very
strongly, helping them succeed…
OK, that is from scans of only 32 people, 13 of them shy. But that is actually more than usual for such a study. Here is the link. Here is Jonathan Rauch’s famous piece on being an introvert, well worth reading.
Chris Masse sends me further neuro links, here and here. Here is a recent neuro study on how women react to erotic images.
Selling Alastair Cooke
In December 2005, Cooke’s family learned that his body had been surgically plundered and the pieces sold to different bidders. A body brokerage company had harvested his bones, falsified his medical records–claiming he had died at 85 of a heart attack–to make them more marketable, and then sold them to at least two tissue banks.
Cooke’s was one of more than 1,000 bodies allegedly stolen by the company, New Jersey–based Biomedical Tissue Services. Prosecutors say the company and the funeral home, Daniel George & Son, made millions of dollars harvesting pieces of the cadavers, instead stuffing bodies for burial with broomsticks and piping. An investigation is ongoing.
Here is the full story, and thanks to Bookman for the pointer.
Economics and the arts — roundup
1. I hate inspiring films. This AFI list of the most inspiring films is yuck. How about Audition, or Ichi the Killer?
2. Over at Slate, Meghan O’Rourke and James Surowiecki make the case for Buenos Aires in a wonderful multi-part series. Here is their piece on "Argentina’s Woody Allen," whom I recommend.
3. Google does Shakespeare, the site is here.
4. Are European art museums falling behind?
5. Britney Spears admits to being "an emotional wreck."
The real Swedish jobless rate is 15 percent
You might think this post is "libertarian cackling with glee," but in fact I was surprised to see this. The problem is also expected to get worse, read the whole thing.
John List and the economics of charity
Here is my New York Times column today. The focus is on how we often make bad charitable decisions. Excerpt:
…before we can improve our charity, we must first understand it. John A. List, an economist at the University of Chicago,
is studying fund-raising campaigns toward this end. Professor List,
combining his career as a researcher with a role as part-time
consultant, introduces variations into real world fund-raising
campaigns and studies the results. This reflects his core method of the
"field experiment," which he has applied to topics as diverse as
competition between the genders, how contestants cooperate on
television game shows and how markets work in baseball card trading.
Steven D. Levitt, co-author of "Freakonomics" and a colleague at the
University of Chicago, refers to Professor List as the young economist
most likely to win a Nobel Prize.
Here is another bit:
For purposes of contrast, Professor List and his team then increased
the attractiveness of the woman who asked for the money. The more
attractive women (a "one standard deviation increase in
attractiveness," in statistical terms) had as big a positive impact on
giving – in the range of 50 to 100 percent – as moving from the least
successful fund-raising method to the most successful.
A tale of two pueblos
San Agustin Oapan and Ameyaltepec both lie in the Mexican state of Guerrero. They share a language (Nahuatl), a common agricultural heritage, and essentially the same gene pool. Ameyaltepec split off from Oapan in the late eighteenth century; since then interbreeding has continued. The villages are close together; "forty minutes by foot, or an hour by car," a villager once told me. Oapan is roughly twice as large: 3000 inhabitants to about 1500 in Ameyaltepec. Both feel remote.
San Agustin is filthy. The streets are full of pig **** and drunks. Ameyaltepec is not quite Geneva, but it is clean. The pigs are kept off the street. Drunks are nowhere to be found. Homes are much better maintained. Families are at least twice as rich as in Oapan. Residents of Ameyaltepec work together to construct trade networks (for artisan works) spanning the entire range of Mexico. They were "colonizing" Cancun while Oapan residents were still cultivating the nearby Cuernavaca. Ameyaltepec is much more interested in charismatic religion. Oapan residents criticize them for "saving all their money." Town politics are much more fractious in Oapan.
I don’t know why the two pueblos are so different. I do know that many people see some of the worst features of Oapan in Mexican migration to America. Much of this is rooted in fact; problems with gangs for instance are very real.
When I look at Ameyaltepec I see contingency, culture, and incentives at work. I don’t see why most parts of the United States cannot manage a comparable success with regard to Mexican-Americans. Obviously we have greater institutional capabilities.
In Mexico there are many Ameyaltepecs, albeit with differing details. There are also large parts of Mexico with virtually zero crime.
Latino immigration has gone better in Virginia than almost any other part of the United States. I again see variation and contingency, of course without guarantees of success.
The tale of two pueblos is one reason – but not the only one — why I think large numbers of Mexican-Americans in the United States will work out well.
Comments are open but please make your points without attacking the other commentators.
Risk Analysis using Roulette Wheels
A PSA test can reveal the presence of prostate cancer. But not all such cancers are fatal and treatment involves the risk of impotence. Do you really want the test? It’s difficult for patients to evaluate these kinds of risks. Mahalanobis points us to an article advocating visual tools such as roulette wheels to help patients understand relative risks and chance. Even better than the diagrams is this impressive video; the video may be of independent interest to the older men in the audience.
Markets in everything, alas no more
The Chinese government has banned restaurants from serving food on the bodies of naked women. The practice was condemned as a violation of common decency by the commerce department. …The practice of eating sushi off naked or nearly-naked women has long been popular with a certain clientele in Japan.
Here is the full story, and thanks to Yan Li for the pointer. And if you wish to read about a truly unusual Chinese market, try this one.
What are the top economics journals?
Here is one recent ranking, courtesy of Newmark’s Door. My view is simple. The American Economic Review and Journal of Political Economy are the two most important journals. The former will have more pieces with careful testing and design, but the latter has more conceptually important articles. I find the JPE more enjoyable. The Quarterly Journal of Economics has brilliant pieces which can tend toward the unsound or have imperfect execution. Econometrica, while it remains a clear third or fourth in rank, is less important than it used to be, perhaps because pure theory has declined in influence. For this same reason, the Rand Journal and Review of Economic Studies, while both still very good journals, have lost their previous luster. Journal of Economic Theory mattered in the 1970s, but it has fallen off a cliff. After that you have the top field journals, which of course vary by field. Journal of Economic Perspectives and Journal of Economic Literature serve important functions, and are both fun and instructive to read, but they are rarely venues for presenting new ideas. They report how new ideas have been interpreted and digested.
Science journals, especially Nature, are starting to become more important for economics. My favorite field journal is the Journal of Law and Economics. Journal of Finance is of very high quality, though finance is a world unto itself. The relative returns to the top few journals have risen greatly in the last fifteen years; many more schools require publications in those journals for tenure than before.