Guns, Germs, and Steel on TV tonight

by  Tyler Cowen in

An adaptation of Jared Diamond’s renowned Guns, Germs, and Steel will be shown on PBS tonight, I believe at 10 p.m. but check it may depend upon your area.  Thanks to Ed Lopez for the pointer.  I must now run to give a talk (yes, it is intimidating to have both Jane Galt and Daniel Drezner in the audience), but I’ve opened comments for those of you who know more about this, and perhaps know about future showings as well.

Markets in everything

by  Tyler Cowen in

Sherry Shumaker has grooved to "Dancing Queen," "Wild Thing" and "Doo Wah Diddy" with her dancing partner Heidi — a Doberman pinscher.

At a Woodbridge studio, Heidi has taken lessons in standing on her hind legs, walking backwards and spinning, all in time to music and in sync to Shumaker’s dance steps.

Here is the rest, and no I didn’t know that dogs could take swimming lessons (silly me), or that you could arrange for them to watch back episodes of Lassie on satellite TV.

Is there “vanity sizing” in clothing markets?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Imagine the temptation to sell nominally-marked small sizes (but the clothes are still large) to those who do not "deserve" them.  Does this appeal to self-deception — also known as vanity sizing — occur on a wide scale?   Do we observe ongoing private sector inflation when it comes to clothes sizes? Kathleen Fasanella, a successful apparel pattern maker, says no, it only looks that way sometimes:

Sizes are not created equally; not all mediums from company to company are identical and nor should they be! Manufacturers necessarily target a given consumer profile -even push manufacturers have target demography- and it is more common for consumers of a given profile to share anthropometric characteristics than it is that they not. A medium simply indicates the middle size of a given manufacturer’s size run; that’s it.

…let’s say that everybody had to use the same sizes, can you imagine the number of sizes the western wear company would be forced to carry as compared to the tutu maker? …consumer expectation that they should be able to walk into any store, anywhere and pick out a medium and expect it to fit them but that’s just not reasonable.

Read Kathleen’s whole post, and here are some rough data.  Here is a typical charge, which also names some (supposed) culprits, such as The Gap, Ralph Lauren, and Banana Republic.  I do not have the expertise to evaluate this debate, but I am more generally intrigued by claims that non-uniform, heterogeneous standards are more efficient than pure uniformity.  Note that the fashion industry has never tried "hard enough" to create uniform standards.  I’ve opened up the comments for those who are more sartorially minded than I am.  A related but not identical question is whether movie critics suffer from "praise inflation" over time.

Books for Africans

by  Lee Coppock in

Last year before leaving for Liberia, I solicited book recommendations from a few friends (including Alex).  I wanted to come up with a fairly short list of books that Liberian leaders should read if they were interested in building an economic system that would be conducive to economic growth.

Here is the list of books that I took and donated to a college library:

  1. The Birth of Plenty, by William Bernstein
  2. The Noblest Triumph, by Tom Bethell
  3. The Mystery of Capital, by Hernando De Soto
  4. The Elusive Quest for Growth, by William Easterly
  5. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, by David Landes
  6. How the West Grew Rich, by Nathan Rosenberg and L.E. Birdzell

My lectures last year were essentially built around the material in Easterly’s book.  This year, I’ll be lecturing from Common Sense Economics: What Everyone Should Know About Wealth and Prosperity, by James Gwartney, et al.  In fact, Jim Gwartney personally donated twenty-five copies of this book for me to take along for the Liberians!

So what books would you take if you were headed off to sub-Saharan Africa, with the chance to lecture to academicians and policy makers?  I have opened up the comments section for you to post your suggestions.

Reason Papers are now on-line

by  Tyler Cowen in

Remember Reason Papers?  Starting in 1974, they provided serious discussions of "nutty" libertarian issues before the mainstream took notice.  Here is the link.  Here are the archives.  Here is Jeff Hummel’s excellent Problems with Austrian Business Cycle Theory, circa 1979.  Here is Loren Lomasky’s review of Nozick’s Philosophical Explanations, plus his review of Derek Parfit.  Or try this familiar guy on the economics of epistemology.

Neither run nor duck?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Reading this made me sad:

Early detection [of a bomb] can backfire because of the grisly fact that human beings act as human shields.  "There is a trade-off between crowd size and crowd blocking," says Prof. Kaplan.  A large, dense crowd puts more people in harm’s way, but "the probability of being exposed to a bomb fragment declines exponentially with the size of the crowd."  As a crowd flees, there are fewer people near the bomber to absorb the fragments (as when a soldier falls on a grenade) and more people, unshielded, farther away.  Simple geometry shows that you can hit more people at a radius 20 feet from a bomber than you can five feet from him…The same effect occurs if people throw themselves to the ground  That minimizes each person’s exposed area, but also at the expense of decreasing human shielding.  For bombs with 500 or more fragments (in Israel, 1,000 is typical), "hit the deck" can raise rather than cut casualties.

That is from The Wall Street Journal, 8 July 2005, by Sharon Begley.

Who would gain from agricultural free trade?

by  Tyler Cowen in

…the reality is that liberalizing agricultural trade would largely benefit the consumers and taxpayers of the wealthy nations.  Why? Because agricultural subsidies serve first and foremost to transfer resources from consumers and taxpayers to farmers within the same country…Other countries are affected only insofar as world prices rise.  But the big, clear gainers from such price increases would be countries that are large net exporters of agricultural products — rich countries, such as the United States, and middle-income countries, such as Argentina, Brazil, and Thailand.

What about the poorer countries?  For one thing, many poor countries are actually net importers of agricultural products, and so they benefit from low world prices.  An increase in prices may help the rural poor, who sell the agricultural goods, but it would make the urban poor — the consumers — worse off.  Net poverty could still be reduced, but to what extent depends in complicated fashion on the working condition of roads and the markets for fertilizer and other inputs…

Regardless of whether agricultural liberalization increases or decreases poverty, the impact would not be significant.  Most studies predict that the effect of such liberalization on world prices would be small…

Furthermore a general reduction of trade barriers in rich countries could leave some of the world’s poorest countries worse off.  A substantial part of least-developed countries’ exports enjoy favorable conditions of access to the markets of rich countries under various preferential trade arrangements…

That is Nancy Birdsall, Dani Rodrik, and Arvind Subramaniam, in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs.

My take: A few caveats are needed.  First, the dynamic gains are higher than the above words would indicate.  Free trade may encourage many nations to raise their agricultural productivity.  Second, agricultural free trade will lead to lower prices for many commodities, especially in the longer run.  That all being said, don’t be surprised if China, the U.S. and Mercosur come out as the big winners, not Africa.

Addendum: Here is a useful link, thanks to Asif for the pointer.

Does the Pope Read Marginal Revolution?

by  Alex Tabarrok in

In a new op-ed, an important Catholic theologian apparently accepts the logic of my argument (and here) on theism and evolution.  Coincidental timing?  Perhaps.  But the probability that the Pope reads MR now increases! 🙂   From the NYTimes.

An influential cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church, which has long
been regarded as an ally of the theory of evolution, is now suggesting
that belief in evolution as accepted by science today may be
incompatible with Catholic faith.

The cardinal, Christoph
Schönborn, archbishop of Vienna, a theologian who is close to Pope
Benedict XVI, staked out his position in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times on Thursday,
writing, "Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but
evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense – an unguided, unplanned process
of random variation and natural selection – is not."

Thanks to Roger Sweeny for the pointer.

Meat without Feet

by  Alex Tabarrok in

Earlier I wrote that the animal-welfare movement will explode as in-vitro meat becomes commercially viable.  A new paper discusses some novel techniques for growing in-vitro meat.  New Harvest, a non-profit firm, has been created to experiment with and promote the technology.   We will soon need a new word for people who eat meat but not animals.  Email me if you have suggestions and I will publish the best.

How do cellphones change your life?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yes you are always connected and people yak in restaurants.  Michael at 2blowhards.com makes another good point:

I don’t use the land line often, but when I do it’s often for very enjoyable 30 minute stream-of-consciousness yakfests. It’s hard to imagine enjoying such a conversation on the cellphone, and I finally decided that I don’t want to give up the possibilty of having analog conversations.

Is it down to the quality of the sound? There seems to be an ever-so-slight delay in the conversational back-and-forth on a cellphone. This takes a little getting used to, and it certainly interrupts the free flow of intuition and thought.

My main dislike: When you have a cellphone, it is easier for others to be late.  It is also harder to get people to precommit to exact plans in advance.  Too much discretion, not enough rules.

Can placebo effects cure your allergies?

by  Tyler Cowen in

People itching for a solution to seasonal allergies could get help from self-hypnosis, a team of Swiss researchers suggests. The study finds that simply focusing one’s thoughts on allergen-free environments can reduce symptoms of hay fever by one-third.

Beware my posts on the sciences; I like to report results which confirm my priors.  Here is the full story.

The Poorest of the Poor

by  Lee Coppock

As Alex mentioned, I’ll be blogging next week from Monrovia, Liberia.  I will try to post three to four times, but the reliability of "internet cafes" in Liberia is suspect at best.  Part of the problem is the lack of public electricity.  If I am able to blog, it will likely be courtesy of a gasoline generator.

Despite its naturally beautiful beaches on the Atlantic Ocean, Liberia is not exactly a popular vacation destination.  My time in Liberia will be spent lecturing on economic growth and visiting orphanages with my oldest daughter and a small group from my church.

Liberia may be the poorest nation in the world.  Recent estimates from the world bank indicate that per capita gross national income in Liberia is about half that of Rwanda. 

Some more facts about Liberia:

  1. Liberia was founded by freed U.S. slaves.
  2. Since 1980, the only "elected" leaders of Liberia (Samuel Doe and Charles Taylor) assumed power through bloody coups.
  3. Carolyn Cole of the L.A. Times won a Pulitzer Prize in 2004 for these photos of the Liberian civil war, which raged off and on from 1989 until 2003.
  4. Since the fall of 2003, U.N. troops have been stationed in Liberia to disarm the various factions, keep the peace, and oversee presidential elections (slated for this coming October).

By the way, Tyler’s sage advice to me before my first trip to Liberia was "beware of men wielding machetes."