Rwandan killers speak

by  Tyler Cowen in

During that killing season we rose earlier than usual to eat lots of meat, and we went up to the soccer field at around nine or ten o’clock.  The leaders would grumble about latecomers, and we would go off on the attack.  Rule number one was to kill.  There was no rule number two.  It was an organization without complications.

That is from Jean Hatzfeld’s Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak.  I will post more about this remarkable book soon.  Here is one good review of the book.

Interview with Tyler Cowen

by  Tyler Cowen in

From the Richmond Fed, here it is, on the path of my career, how macro has changed, avian flu, blogging, the arts, and of course cuisine, among other topics.  Excerpt:

My prediction is that, in general, welfare states will increase in size in most places around the world.  We can expect most areas of the world to become wealthier because of globalization as well as other reasons.  And if you look at countries that are wealthy, they tend to have very generous welfare states.  Also, I believe that the human desire for security is extremely strong, even when it is not efficient or rational.  So as long as we experience economic growth, I think we can expect welfare states to grow.

The best sentence I read today

by  Tyler Cowen in

And – expected utility theory notwithstanding – people adapt more
easily to 100% certain bad events than to 95% certain bad events.

Here is more.

Further thoughts: I can see how the possibility of fertility treatments might make a couple worse off, if those treatments don’t work.  But is it better to feel "I will never have sex again," or would you rather hold on to the five percent chance?  What exactly makes these two cases different?

Baltimore pit beef barbecue

by  Tyler Cowen in

Baltimore, of all places, has its own barbecue tradition, called "pit beef."  Imagine slow cooking directed toward the end of a perfect thinly-sliced roast beef sandwich.  It is an artisanal version of Roy Rogers, with excellent french fries to boot.  It is best served rare with [sic] horseradish. ("Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.")  Chaps is one place to try; Big Al’s is another.  Both are first-rate for people-watching.  Did I mention that the entire tradition appears to have started on a dilapidated industrial highway, set among whorehouses and sex shops?  The style can be traced by to 1987, and it has spread to Camden Yards as well. 

Markets in Everything: Politicians

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Prosecutors call it a corruption case with no parallel in the long
history of the U.S. Congress. And it keeps getting worse. Convicted
Rep. Randall "Duke" Cunningham actually priced the illegal services he
provided.

Prices came in the form of a "bribe menu" that detailed how much it
would cost contractors to essentially order multimillion-dollar
government contracts…the California Republican’s "bribery menu"… shows an escalating scale for bribes,
starting at $140,000 and a luxury yacht for a $16 million Defense
Department contract. Each additional $1 million in contract value
required a $50,000 bribe.

The rate dropped to $25,000 per additional million once the contract went above $20 million.

What’s most disturbing about this is how low the prices were, $50,000 for $1 million in contract value.  Now let’s remember Econ 101, what makes prices low?  That’s right, competition.  So who was Cunningham competing with?

GMU Law

by  Alex Tabarrok in

My colleagues in GMUs school of law can be justly proud of how quickly their program has risen in the rankings.  TaxProfBlog excerpts from a National Review article:

Mason vaulted from 71st place in 1995 to 41st in 2005 — an
impressive achievement given that these rankings tend to remain static
from year to year…

To use a baseball metaphor, Manne was a scout who specialized in the
minor leagues. Whereas his competitors were obsessed with signing
big-name free agents in hot fields such as feminist legal theory, Manne
quietly assembled a team of undervalued unknowns. "If the market
discriminates against conservatives, then there should be good
opportunities for hiring conservatives," says Polsby. This is exactly
the sort of observation one would expect a market-savvy
law-and-economics scholar to make… "Have you read Moneyball?" asks Todd
Zywicki, another one of Mason’s bright young profs, in reference to the
best-selling book by Michael Lewis on how the Oakland Athletics
franchise assembled playoff-caliber teams on a limited budget. "We’re
the Oakland A’s of the law-school world."

Especially interesting is that GMU is probably undervalued relative to its academic achievement.

[GMU] probably would do even better but for the particular ways U.S.
News calculates worth: Forty percent of a school’s ranking is based on
reputation, as determined by judges and lawyers (15 percent) and law
professors (25 percent). "If we had Dartmouth or Princeton’s name,"
says Polsby, picking two well-regarded schools that don’t have law
programs, "we’d be a top-20 school overnight." …

Brian Leiter, a professor at the University of Texas, has created
several ranking systems that rely entirely on objective criteria. It
might be said, for instance, that a school is only as good as its
students. The 75th-percentile LSAT score of Mason’s entering class in
the fall of 2005 was 166 — enough to tie it for 22nd best (with seven
other schools). It might also be said that a school is only as good as
its professors. To measure this, Leiter has created a "scholarly
impact" rating based on faculty per capita citations in scholarly
journals and books. On this scale, Mason ties for 23rd (with four other
schools). Then there’s the Social Science Research Network, which
counts the number of times faculty papers are downloaded from the
Internet; over the last twelve months, Mason professors rank
eleventh….

Poll of the greatest 20th century economists

by  Tyler Cowen in

Given the source, expect a left-wing, anti-neoclassical perspective.  Here are the tallies, with a much longer list at the link:

1. John Maynard Keynes 3,253 

2. Joseph Alois Schumpeter 1,080 

3. John Kenneth Galbraith 904 

4. Amartya Sen 708

5. Joan Robinson 607

6. Thorstein Veblen 591

7. Michal Kalecki 481

8. Friedrich Hayek 469

9. Karl Polanyi 456

10. Piero Sraffa 383

11. Joseph Stiglitz 333

12. Kenneth Arrow 320 

13. Milton Friedman 319

13. Paul Samuelson 319

15. Paul Sweezy 268

16. Herman Daly 267 

17. Herbert Simon 250 

18. Ronald Coase 246

19. Gunnar Myrdal 216 

20. Alfred Marshall 211

At least Milton Friedman beat out Herman Daly.  Poor John Hicks.  And further down the list, does Pierangelo Garegnani, an obscure neo-Ricardian obsessed with commodity own-rates of return, deserve to place ahead of Franco Modigliani?

Thanks to www.politicaltheory.info for the pointer.

The Dubai port deal

by  Tyler Cowen in

I know little about how a port is run (try Matt Yglesias and Dan Drezner for contrasting perspectives), but my take is simple.  If Arabs have a role in running our ports, we will, rightly or wrongly, be more worried about port security.  Might we institute tougher inspection requirements for containers?  If the deal is approved, I predict port safety will go up, and this would be in lieu of a rather stagnant status quo.  Perhaps we should go further and send some equity shares in the Port of Baltimore to Osama bin Laden, no?  The funny thing is, if you haven’t been reading MarginalRevolution for a while, you probably think I am joking.

China skepticism

by  Tyler Cowen in

How long will it take before China cracks up?

To most Western observers, China’s economic success obscures the predatory characteristics of its neo-Leninist state. But Beijing’s brand of authoritarian politics is spawning a dangerous mix of crony capitalism, rampant corruption, and widening inequality. Dreams that the country’s economic liberalization will someday lead to political reform remain distant. Indeed, if current trends continue, China’s political system is more likely to experience decay than democracy. It’s true that China’s recent economic achievements have given the party a new vibrancy. Yet the very policies that the party adopted to generate high economic growth are compounding the political and social ills that threaten its long-term survival…

The Chinese state remains deeply entrenched in the economy. According to official data for 2003, the state directly accounted for 38 percent of the country’s GDP and employed 85 million people (about one third of the urban workforce). For its part, the formal private sector in urban areas employed only 67 million people. A research report by the financial firm UBS argues that the private sector in China accounts for no more than 30 percent of the economy. These figures are startling even for Asia, where there is a tradition of heavy state involvement in the economy. State-owned enterprises in most Asian countries contribute about 5 percent of GDP. In India, traditionally considered a socialist economy, state-owned firms generate less than 7 percent of GDP.

Here is much more, and I will go on record in agreement.  More specifically, how about a bone-crunching, bubble-bursting, no soft landing, Chinese auto crash-style depression within the next seven years?  This is also my biggest worry for the U.S. economy, I might add.

If you are not convinced, raise your right hand and repeat after me: "China in the 20th century had two major revolutions, a civil war, a World War, The Great Leap Forward [sic], mass starvation, the Cultural Revolution, arguably the most tyrannical dictator ever and he didn’t even brush his teeth, and now they will go from rags to riches without even a business cycle burp."  I don’t think you can do it with a straight face.

Had I mentioned that Yana and I are going to Shanghai in April?  I’ll ask you all for tips when the time comes.  I hear MarginalRevolution is banned there…

Are stationary bandits better?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I once wrote:

Some time ago, [Mancur] Olson started work on the fruitful distinction between a stationary and a roving bandit. A stationary bandit has some incentive to invest in improvements, because he will reap some return from those improvements. A roving bandit will confiscate wealth with little regard for the future. Olson then used this distinction to help explain the evolution of dictatorship in the twentieth century, and going back some bit in time, the rise of Western capitalism.

I have never found this approach fully convincing. Is the stationary bandit really so much better than the roving bandit? Much of Olson’s argument assumes that the stationary bandit is akin to a profit-maximizer. In reality, stationary bandits, such as Stalin and Mao, may have been maximizing personal power or perhaps something even more idiosyncratic. Second, the stationary bandit might be keener to keep control over the population, given how much is at stake. He may oppose liberalization more vehemently, for fear that a wealthier and freer society will overthrow him.

Here is more.  I had forgotten I had written that review, so I must thank Arnold Kling for the pointer.

Malcolm Gladwell has a blog

by  Tyler Cowen in

If you look, in fact, at emergency room statistics, you’ll see that more people are admitted every year for non-dog bites than dog-bites–which is to say that when you see a Pit Bull, you should worry as much about being bitten by the person holding the leash than the dog on the other end.

Does that follow?  Here is the blog, and thanks to Lynne Kiesling for the pointer.