What will French search engines look like?

by  Tyler Cowen in

[Chirac] asked his culture minister, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, and Jean-Noël Jeanneney, head of France’s Bibliothèque Nationale, to…create a home-grown search-engine to browse [French texts]. Why not let Google do the job? Its French version is used for 74% of internet searches in France. The answer is the vulgar criteria it uses to rank results. “I do not believe”, wrote Mr Donnedieu de Vabres in Le Monde, “that the only key to access our culture should be the automatic ranking by popularity, which has been behind Google’s success.”

Here is the story. 

In-vitro meat and the animal welfare movement

by  Alex Tabarrok in

I predict that the animal welfare movement will expand dramatically in the next several decades as in-vitro meat becomes widely available.  In-vitro meat is "made in the laboratory" meat – it’s real meat but grown in "vats" rather than on animals.  In-vitro meat has already been grown in thin slices, thick steaks are harder because fresh meat must be fed nutrients by a blood supply and that requires an incredibly complicated network of capillaries and veins.   But really, who is going to notice the difference in a McDonald’s patty?  I bet thin meat tastes a lot better than tofu.

I think that many people have an idea in the back of their minds that something is not quite right about the treatment of animals (see Tyler’s post) but so long as they taste good and there are few substitutes why bring the idea to the forefront when it will just make you feel bad?   In-vitro meat will change this equation.  With a ready substitute suppression will no longer be necessary and the question of animal welfare will explode into the public consciousness.

Forget PETA, animal welfarists should be sending their money to researchers working on in-vitro meat.

Aside from animal welfare, in-vitro meat could be economic.  In an article in 1932 Winston Churchill argued:

Fifty years hence we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.

This quote is often put forward as an example of foolish prediction but my bet is that Churchill was off by no more than a factor of ~2.

Addendum: No, this isn’t an April Fool’s joke!

How do we know if the music industry is doing well?

by  Tyler Cowen in

To re-iterate my extremist line against even [Mark] Cuban, however, aggregate sales aren’t really all that relevant. If the music is getting made, and the music is getting listened to, well then, that’s a healthy IP environment. The creation and consumption of new works is the end, sales are merely a means to that end.

Matt Yglesias continues:

I don’t believe I’ve even heard anybody try to argue that fewer new songs are being written or recorded or that people are listening to less music than they used to. It’s the availability of new music for consumption that we’re supposed to be protecting here. P2P, through both authorized and unauthorized uses, obviously leads to an uptick in the number of people who listen to any given song. You would need a pretty huge decrease in the quantity of new music being recorded (and, as I say, no sign there is such a decrease at all) in order to make the case that the progress of musical arts was being seriously impeded here. P2P probably is a problem for the major record companies, both because infringement will reduce their sales potential, and also because it will make it easier for public domain and independent works to be distributed and publicized. This, however, simply isn’t something IP law is supposed to prevent. The health of music-production as an endeavor is not at all the same thing as the financial status of the RIAA’s membership. As I say, if there’s evidence that thanks to copyright infringement kids aren’t forming bands anymore, artists are quitting the business in droves to go to law school, or clubs are finding that nobody wants to go on tour anymore then that would be interesting and relevant, but I’m not familiar with any such evidence.

He truly ought to be an economist, albeit with more Milton Friedman driven into his blood (although here is his George Stigler impersonation). 

I’ll add two points of my own.  First, file-sharing is in the long run a greater danger for capital-intensive movies; I worry less about music.  Second, most new CD releases fail to either earn money or attract real attention, with or without file-sharing.  Furthermore most consumers listen to only a subset of what they buy.  A first best probably involves lower music sales, not higher sales.  Let’s say you sample a CD on iTunes (or illegally for that matter), don’t like it, and then don’t buy it.  The music company stops funding that kind of music.  Why is that market failure?  Admittedly we may be cutting into a cross-subsidy of some winners; the fools and their mistaken purchases help cover the fixed costs of the music company.  Still it is probably better to move closer to a better informed optimum, which again means less music not more.

Addendum: In addition to the excellent Mark Cuban link at the very top, Matt offers more data.

Who pays for pharmaceutical innovation?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Since 1999 America has accounted for 71% of the sales of new chemical entities, up from 62%. Japan and Germany, the next two largest pharmaceutical markets, account for just 4% each.

That is from Doug Bandow at Cato, here is the link.  Of course this figure stems from both high volume and high price in the U.S.; it is a massive form of implicit foreign aid.  By the way, for those of you interested in Cato University seminars on economics — "for citizens" — read more here.

Sweden fact of the day

by  Tyler Cowen in

Sweden’s largest trade union admitted that the official 5.5 per cent unemployment rate is hiding a "real unemployment" of 20 to 25 per cent, which includes those claiming long-term sick pay or having taken early state retirement.

Here is the link, and thanks to Tim Worstall for the pointer.  Here is Alex’s earlier post on disability.  Here is my earlier post on disability in the Netherlands.

Proposals to improve animal welfare can backfire

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is yet another (and final) excerpt from my paper on animal welfare, now available on-line:

A boycott of meat products alone, however, may simply induce animals to be shifted into the [less salutary] sector. Ideally the boycotters would like to boycott meat and the product of the sectors that are even worse for animals, but such a broader boycott may not be possible. The boycotters may not be able to “reach” the animals used in the worst sectors. Not all such animals, for instance, are used to produce consumer goods sold in stores. Some laboratory animals are used to produce goods sold only to corporations, or are used for university research. The danger is that a boycott of meat will simply shift animals into very bad and harder-to-reach sectors. Instead, a subsidy to the better sector will have more predictable effects, by pulling animals out of the other, less favorable sectors, and thus should be preferred.  [Addendum: You don’t need to switch individual animals, just reinvest resources in animal breeding and care.]

…This point bears on the debate between vegans and vegetarians (a vegan eats neither meat nor dairy products, while a vegetarian eschews meat alone.) Let us call the worst sector for animals the dairy sector, and let us call the less worse sector the meat sector. On factory farms, dairy cows typically have inferior lives to cows raised just for meat. The dairy cow is locked up for its early years and then killed at a young age, often before reaching the age of four. Usually meat cows are allowed to graze freely for more years, before being killed. If there is a boycott of meat, but not dairy, the farmer may simply shift animals into the dairy sector, to the detriment of their welfare. A vegan may do the world the most good of all, but a meat eater may benefit animals more than does a non-vegan vegetarian. Meat eaters help keep the dairy sector from absorbing more cows. In essence, meat eaters bid up the price of cows, which will keep them out of other uses, some of which might be quite painful for the cows.

There is also a case for selective vegetarianism.  Although factory farms are prevalent in the United States, family farms (which typically treat animals better), are more common in Western Europe.  An optimal group norm might then involve eating meat when in Europe but not in the United States.  Similarly, we might eat meat only in very fine restaurants, where the animals typically are raised under free-range or otherwise superior conditions.

And now comes "defending the undefendable," namely European agricultural subsidies (no hate mail please!):

Agricultural subsidies, especially as implemented in Europe, may benefit animals and animal lovers. Many of these subsidies prevent small family farms from being absorbed by large agribusiness and factory farming. Given that family farms tend to treat animals better than do factory farms, such policies will improve animal welfare. Economists usually consider European agricultural policy to favor special interests at the expense of the general welfare. Nonetheless these subsidies have at least one potential rationale, once we take animals into account.

Is the number of autistics rising?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I read the following in USA Today:

A decade ago, one in every 2,500 U.S. children had autism; now it’s one in 166, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says.

But is it true?  Autism Diva (a new blog) raises some serious doubts.  Autism may still be rising, but this number may be the latest "urban legend."  Using Google alone, I could not track down the ultimate source (beyond the CDC press release) of the "1 in 166" claim.  I can, however, tell you this.  A search for "autism 166" yields (repetitive) riches on google.com, but nothing real on scholar.google.com.

Addendum: Here is one serious piece; it supports my skepticism.  Thanks to Daniel Starr for the pointer.

Why did so many Germans support Hitler?

by  Tyler Cowen in

A well-respected German historian has a radical new theory to explain a nagging question: Why did average Germans so heartily support the Nazis and Third Reich? Hitler, says Goetz Aly, was a "feel good dictator," a leader who not only made Germans feel important, but also made sure they were well cared-for by the state.

To do so, he gave them huge tax breaks and introduced social benefits that even today anchor the society. He also ensured that even in the last days of the war not a single German went hungry. Despite near-constant warfare, never once during his 12 years in power did Hitler raise taxes for working class people. He also — in great contrast to World War I — particularly pampered soldiers and their families, offering them more than double the salaries and benefits that American and British families received. As such, most Germans saw Nazism as a "warm-hearted" protector, says Aly, author of the new book "Hitler’s People’s State: Robbery, Racial War and National Socialism" [TC: I cannot find it on U.S. Amazon, try this German link] and currently a guest lecturer at the University of Frankfurt. They were only too happy to overlook the Third Reich’s unsavory, murderous side.

Financing such home front "happiness" was not simple and Hitler essentially achieved it by robbing and murdering others, Aly claims. Jews. Slave laborers. Conquered lands. All offered tremendous opportunities for plunder, and the Nazis exploited it fully, he says.

Read more here.  I am a believer in studying the extremes.  Hitler’s Germany (extreme oppression and persecution), modern Haiti (a complete mess), and Yugoslavia in the 1990s (relapse from tolerance into murder) have a special hold on my attention in this regard. 

And might you think that the German soldiers always followed orders?  How about this:

In Auschwitz…there is not one case in the records of an SS man being prosecuted for refusing to take part in the killings, while there is plenty of material showing that the real discipline problem in the camp — from the point of view of the SS leadership — was theft [from arriving Jews and others].  The ordinary members of the SS thus appear to have agreed with the Nazi leadership that it was right to kill the Jews, but disagreed with Himmler’s policy of not letting them individually profit from the crime.  And the penalties for an SS man caught stealing could be draconian — almost certainly worse than for simply refusing to take an active part in the killing.

That is from the new and noteworthy Auschwitz: A New History, by Laurence Rees.

Markets in everything

by  Tyler Cowen in

This one was only a matter of time:

Twelve tons of 15-year-old horse manure will be going under the hammer at a charity auction in west Wales.  Contractor Eynon Price, of Llandeilo, who donated the vintage dung, said it was worth more than £140.  Said to do wonders for roses and trees, the manure is one of 70 lots being sold in aid of Aberglasney Gardens.

It’s broken down really well and it has not got much acid in it so it is very good for planting roses or anything like that."

"This is quite a big load [sic] so you would be looking at anything up from about £140," he added.

Here is the story, and thanks to John Palmer, who writes The Eclectic Econoclast economics blog.

Stop-Loss Regrets

by  Alex Tabarrok in

The Army and National Guard are having trouble meeting their recruitment goals.  The basic reasons are obvious but I suspect that an overlooked reason is the use in recent years of stop-gap and stop-loss policies – pulling people back into military service (from the Individual Ready Reserve) possibly years after their active duty has been completed and preventing people from leaving the field after their contractual obligations have ended, respectively.

It’s one thing to volunteer for a known tour of duty – it’s something more to subject your life-plans to an unknown schedule dictated by someone else.  The stop-loss measures may have stopped losses temporarily but part of the price is understandably reluctant recruits.