Strange proposed regulations
An Oklahoma senator hopes to revive cockfighting in the state by putting tiny boxing gloves on the roosters instead of razors.
The Oklahoma legislature outlawed the blood sport in 2002 because of
its cruelty to the roosters, which are slashed and pecked to death
while human spectators bet on the outcome.But State Sen. Frank
Shurden, a Democrat from Henryetta and a long-time defender of
cockfighting, said the ban had wiped out a $100-million business.To
try to revive it, he has proposed that roosters wear little boxing
gloves attached to their spurs, as well as lightweight, chicken-sized
vests configured with electronic sensors to record hits and help keep
score.
Here is the full story.
Why does America have inferior raw ingredients?
Mostafa Sabet, a reader, writes:
I agree with your point [TC: my link] about raw ingredients and wonder why the richest nation in the world has such crappy raw ingredients? We can afford it and obviously people can tell the difference. Sure it won’t affect the McDonalds’ and freezer section food, but why does it go all the way downstream unless you pay exorbitant amounts of money for it? When I was in Egypt, not exactly first world, the raw ingredients were far superior to the ones here. Any ideas?
A tough question, I see a few major hypotheses:
1. Things are changing rapidly, just visit Wegmans. OK, but why has it taken so long? And of course the revolution remains far from complete.
2. It is an exogenous demand-side question. Americans have bad taste in food, just as the Chinese have bad taste in lounge music. Why, for that matter, do the Japanese like karaoke so much? Why do the Scots serve deep-fried Mars candy bars? Note that more detailed versions of this hypothesis blame the British connection, Protestantism, and possibly the rule of law as well.
3. Food transportation in the U.S. exhibits economies of scale to an unprecedented degree. The relative price of canned and frozen and mass-branded goods is thus especially low here. This discriminates against both quality and freshness.
4. U.S. agricultural is so efficient that large farms replace small farms. At the margin this raises the marginal cost of "artisanal production" of gourmet items. The more heavily subsidized European agriculture has preserved many more small farms, which favors quality artisanal production.
5. It can take hours to make a really good mole sauce. America has high wages, nighttime shopping, plus the best TV shows in the world. The opportunity cost of good cooking and fine, slow dining is very high here.
Shiller on Housing Prices
Robert Shiller has a new edition of Irrational Exuberance coming out, this one will feature a chapter on real estate. Shiller, of course, predicted the stock market collapse and now believes that we are near the peak of housing prices. He is also involved in establishing a futures market that would allow people to hedge against movements in housing prices (see also my post on The New Financial Order). Here is a short interview with him on these subjects.
I too think that housing prices are inflated. It is certain that prices cannot continue to rise as they have in recent years and when interest rates increase, as they surely will as budget deficits continue to balloon and Asian central banks grow weary of taking losses on their portfolios, prices will fall both because of the rise in interest rates per se and because the increase will prick the bubble. Yes, Tyler has outed me as well as Brad De Long and Brad Setser.
Do MacArthur Awards stimulate genius?
As part of a program widely known as genius grants, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation most years gives one or more authors $500,000, hoping financial freedom will help the writers produce their best work.
An examination of the program, however, reveals that most of the 31 writers chosen since 1981 as MacArthur Fellows had already hit their artistic peak. That conclusion is supported by the 14 major awards – either a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award or PEN/Faulkner prize – and 37 minor awards the authors received before getting their MacArthur money.
Surveying book reviews, author profiles and the opinions of literary scholars, Crain’s determined that 88% of the MacArthur recipients wrote their greatest works before being recognized by the Chicago-based foundation. The sheer number of books produced by the writers declined, too, after their MacArthur awards.
It would reinforce romantic notions that great art requires personal sacrifice to suggest that, half-a-million dollars in hand, writers get lazy. But something else appears to account for the failure of the MacArthur program to fulfill its promise: Writers are mostly chosen too late in their careers, average age 48, and well after the literary establishment has recognized them for excellence.
Daniel Drezner offers further commentary. I see two options. Either the prizes stimulate genius by paying rewards ex post, or we would be better served by scattering smaller grants to a greater number of unknown writers. Ex ante subsidies do better than ex post prizes when the relevant creators are liquidity constrained. That is, without the upfront grant, a great but still obscure writer might have to drop out of the game for lack of money. Since that is a plausible description of the market for fiction, most prizes and grants in this area should take more chances. Tenured academics, in contrast, are not usually liquidity constrained (unless they have expensive lab bills); ex post prizes will work better for them.
That being said, it is easy to see why foundations — which involve accountability to a board of trustees — might prefer a more conservative approach. Yes a foundation may care about the world, but it must also support its own reputation, generate favorable publicity, and build a "ruling coalition" which reaps reputational awards from making quality grants. All of these factors will militate in favor of awards to established producers. When accountability is in place, who will opt for a very risky investment which fails in at least ninety percent of all cases?
The Cultural Exception
For years, France has fought what is sees as an American cultural invasion, powered by Hollywood movies, U.S. pop music and giant brands like Coca-Cola. Now, it is going to great lengths to save an American cultural icon in its backyard: Disneyland
The French government has just finished helping Walt Disney Co. bail out Euro Disney SCA, the operator of two Disney theme parks outside Paris. A state-owned bank is contributing around $500 million in investments and local concessions to save Euro Disney from bankruptcy. This comes after 17 years during which French leaders have spent hundreds of millions of dollars and countless hours to ensure that the land of Money could keep Mickey Mouse. Still saddled with debt, Euro Disney is gambling that expensive new attractions and an improved tourism climate will deliver a turnaround.
That is from the front page of The Wall Street Journal, 26 January. And here is a previous installment of The Cultural Exception.
Vioxx and Tort
We have two systems of drug regulation in the United States, the FDA and tort law. Unfortunately, neither system works well. FDA incentives push for excess delay and excess cost and the tort system appears random if not perverse in its operation with good claims receiving nothing and bad claims receiving billions.
Writing in the New Yorker, James Surowiecki discusses some relevant research from Kip Viscusi:
Merck would seem to have one big thing in its favor: the company
voluntarily withdrew Vioxx from the market. But while Merck executives
may have hoped to persuade people that they were acting responsibly,
plaintiffs’ attorneys have taken the withdrawal as an admission of
guilt…internal
company documents show that Merck employees were debating the safety of
the drug for years before the recall.From a scientific perspective, this is hardly damning. The internal
debates about the drug’s safety were just that–debates, with different
scientists arguing for and against the drug….While that kind of weighing of risk and benefit may be medically
rational, in the legal arena it’s poison. Nothing infuriates juries
like finding out that companies knew about dangers and then “balanced”
them away. In fact, any kind of risk-benefit analysis, honest or not,
is likely to get you in trouble with juries….Viscusi has shown that
people are inclined to award heftier punitive damages against a company
that had performed a risk analysis before selling a product than a
company that didn’t bother to. Even if the company puts a very high
value on each life, the fact that it has weighed costs against benefits
is, in itself, reprehensible. “We’re just numbers, I feel, to them” is
how a juror in the G.M. case put it. “Statistics. That’s something that
is wrong.”…Before a jury, then, a firm is better off being
ignorant than informed.
Philip Johnson dies
Here is the story. Here is his masterpiece, the Crystal Cathedral, located in Orange County, California. Here is the AT&T building in New York City. Here is the Transco Tower in Houston. Here is a directory of images and links. I admire this image also.
China fact of the day
China’s international patent applications, though growing, are still less than 1 per cent of the total filed in the US and Europe.
Read more here.
Why are labor unions declining?
Why hasn’t labour successfully colonised the non-manufacturing world, outside of the public sector?
Read the comments to her post, but I see a few major hypotheses:
1. It is now easier to fire people who try to organize unions. Remember Reagan and the air traffic controllers?
2. Marginal products are easier to measure and markets are more competitive than in times past. This lowers the scope for unions as a means of increasing the bargaining power of labor.
3. Physical capital — especially in service sectors — is less fixed than in previous times. If workers organize, the capital will move to another sector or nation. In contrast an auto plant is hard to move out of Michigan.
4. Government regulations, and superior market institutions for risk-sharing, render unions less necessary.
5. In the service sector the distinction between "management" and "labor" is more blurred than in traditional manufacturing firms. Yes you have lawyers and secretaries, but the class of manual laborers who spend their lives with a single firm is smaller than in times past.
It remains a puzzle to me why unions are so strong in Hollywood, suggestions are welcome, I have turned on the comments if you have any ideas on this.
Our colleague Gordon Tullock
The new Liberty Fund edition of Gordon Tullock’s The Organization of Inquiry is out:
In this book, Tullock focuses attention on the organization of science, raising important questions about scientific inquiry and specifically about the problems of science as a social system. Tullock poses such questions as: how do scientists engage in apparently cooperative contributions in the absence of hierarchic organization and why are scientific contributions worthy, for the most part, of the public’s trust?
If you are fed up with publication lags, Gordon had the answer for that one too, circa 1980:
"Professor Gordon Tullock referees submissions to Public Choice himself and usually has a response in the mail within 48 hours."
See also Brad DeLong’s appreciation of Gordon. And here is a list of forthcoming volumes in the series.
Will we find life on Titan?
All that methane has to be coming from somewhere, here is the story. If any of you know the betting odds on this, please write me.
Elsewhere on the science front, humans may be an excessively in-bred species, rendering us unusually vulnerable to genetic diseases. And our solar system may have formed in a violent nebula.
The Internet is not as bad as you think
Over the past decade, with the surge in Internet use, there has been no spike in the overall number of cases of sexual abuse against children.
That is from The New York Times, read the commentary by Matt Yglesias.
A Swiss Miss Doesn’t Miss Much
Switzerland continues to have more guns and less crime. Here is a charming portrait by Stephen Halbrook of a Swiss shooting competition for boys and girls.
The greatest shooting festival in the world
for youngsters takes place every year in Zurich, Switzerland. Imagine
thousands of boys and girls shooting military service rifle over three
days amid an enormous fair with ferris wheels and wild rides of all
kinds. You’re at the Knabenschiessen (boys’ shooting contest).
This girl, one of 1,585 who competed, being coached in sharpshooting with the Assault Rifle 90, the Swiss service rifle.Held since the year 1657, the competition traditionally has been both a
sport and a way of encouraging marksmanship in a country where every
male serves in the militia army. Today, girls compete along side the
boys. In fact, girls are now winning the competition.It’s
September 13, 2004. In the U.S. on this date, the Clinton fake “assault
weapon” ban sunsets. In Zurich, some 5,631 teens – 4,046 boys and 1,585
girls, aged 13-17 – have finished firing the Swiss service rifle, and
it’s time for the shootoff.That
rifle is the SIG Strumgeweher (assault rifle) model 1990 (Stgw 90), a
selective fire, 5.6 mm rifle with folding skeleton stock, bayonet lug,
bipod, and grenade launcher. The Stgw 90 is a real assault rifle in
that it is fully automatic, although that feature is disabled during
the competition. Every Swiss man, on reaching age 20, is issued one to
keep at home. Imagine all those teenagers firing this real assault
rifle while their moms and dads look on with approval, anxiously
awaiting the scores.
My Ethnic Dining Guide, revised
Here is the seventeenth edition. Even if you don’t live near Washington D.C., here are a few general tips for eating out:
1. Avoid dishes that are "ingredients-intensive." Raw
ingredients in America – vegetables, butter, bread, meats, etc. – are below
world standards. Even most underdeveloped countries have better raw
ingredients than we do, at least if you have a U.S. income to spend there, and
often even if one doesn’t. Ordering the plain steak in Latin America may
be a great idea, but it is usually a mistake in Northern Virginia. Opt
for dishes with sauces and complex mixes of ingredients. Go for dishes
that are "composition-intensive."
2. Appetizers often are better than main courses. Meals composed of
appetizers and side dishes alone can be very satisfying. Thai and
Lebanese restaurants provide the classic examples of this principle.
3. Avoid desserts. Most ethnic restaurants in America, no matter how
good, usually fall flat with the desserts. Especially if the restaurant
is Asian.
4. Order more than you plan to eat.
Altruism makes you high
At least if you have the right gene. I’m actually not very impressed with these correlation studies, experiments with mice and fruit flies where genes can be turned on and off are more convincing, but I don’t doubt that most behaviors are influenced by genes.