The new Robert Putnam book
Robert Putnam has a new book out, with Lewis Feldstein, Better Together: Restoring the American Community. I started writing a short review of it, which ended up morphing into a look at Putnam’s oeuvre more generally, most of all his renowned Bowling Alone. The bottom line: I admire the quality of Putnam’s work, but am not convinced by his arguments that “bowling alone” is a growing problem. Click here to read my piece.
Herd behavior and dominant strategies for mice
Mice, taken collectively, are not very good at escaping from a crowded room. They act pretty much as humans do, namely they all crowd toward the door and few get out very quickly. Each individual mouse appears to make a rational calculation of a sort. The mice do best, and adopt some form of queuing behavior, when the door is large enough to let only one mouse through at a time. Researchers suggest that humans may exit a crowded more quickly, the smaller the door, which limits the crush toward the exit. For more information read this article from New Scientist.
Presidential Voices and Electoral Victory
A nice article in the Sept. 2002 Social Psychology Quarterly documents an interesting fact: the presidential candidate who has the right tone of voice tends to win the election.
According to “communication accommodation theory,” low status people change their voices to accommodate high status people. The presidential candidate who more frequently changes the “F_0” range of his voice (which is a very low hum) during a debate signals that he is in the low-status position. The authors believe that voters respond strongly to this non-verbal, but strongly emotional, cue. The authors note that George W. Bush may have “won” the 2000 debate with Gore because he signaled his dominance in this fashion, although Gore was perceived by journalists to have won through superior rhetoric. The results of voice analysis correlate well with electoral outcomes and polls.
Is love predictable?
The advent of Internet dating has led rapidly to a search for better matching results, as detailed by a recent story. After all, reductionists may wonder just how many dimensions the problem can have. Consider the following:
[Researchers] decided to employ computer technology to find a few “simple, logical rules” that make up, well, the recipe for love. For help on the technical side, they turned to Michael Georgeff, director of the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute. During his work on a NASA project at Stanford Research Institute, Georgeff had developed a methodology to teach Space Shuttle Discovery computers how to anticipate unexpected problems. Working with Thompson and Hutchinson, he applied the same principles to the design of dating software, employing many of the statistical methods common to social science research. “Say you score a 3 on the introvert scale, and a 6 on touchy-feely. Will you tend to like somebody who’s practical?” Using Georgeff’s software, Thompson and Hutchinson then developed an online quiz. Match.com, the highly popular online dating site, began using weAttract.com’s software this year to give users a rough sense of what proportion of the dating population might be attracted to their particular array of personality traits.
The new algorithms are designed to measure not only initial attraction, but also how well the would-be couple can live in harmony. Ten thousand people a day are signing up for eharmony.com, which also tries to do some simple lie-detecting. According to some accounts 30 percent of on-line daters are in fact married, and often lying about that fact.
Meredith Hanrahan, at Matchmaker.com, invokes a market metaphor:
If you want to buy a car, you get a lot of information before you even test-drive,” she says. “There hasn’t been a way to do that with relationships.”
Perhaps one web-dating entrepreneur put it best:
“Everyone is high maintenance. The trick is finding the precise sort of maintenance you need.”
Why executives should be paid more than they deserve
If workers are paid their marginal product its difficult to understand why some CEOs are paid such high wages. But think of the CEO’s wage as a prize. Valuable prizes make everyone else work hard in order to become the CEO. With this model, the tournament model (JSTOR) of Lazear and Rosen, it may even make sense that CEO wages go up as profits go down. After all, shouldn’t prizes be set highest when motivation is most required? No doubt, some will see this argument as more proof that economists are just shills for the capitalist class.
Is Larry Summers reshaping Harvard?
Yes, say many observers. His pro-science, back to the basics stance may make him one of Harvard’s most influential Presidents. And he is not backing down when faced with faculty opposition. Read this article from The Boston Globe, thanks to Instapundit for the link. Read here and here for my two previous blog posts on Larry at Harvard, with links to other commentary.
Addendum: Here is a recent (and brief) address by Summers on economics and morality, he stresses the ability of markets to conserve on altruism. Thanks to Doug Irwin for the pointer.
The economics job market
In case you know someone looking for an academic job, here is an excellent link, full of good advice, courtesy of Claudia Goldin, thanks to Brad DeLong for the pointer.
Sleep and Personality
Sleep research is great fun. Sleep is tied to so much in our lives, yet we know so little and there are always surprises. Consider the latest finding: the position you sleep in is highly correlated to your social personality. Being a log-sleeper (on the side, hugging the pillow) correlates with being outgoing and social, while fetal position sleepers are shy. Sleeping position is not the only correlate of personality. Your handwriting, your job satisfaction and a whole bunch of other things tend to be linked to personality.
Things I had not known about taxonomy
The Swede Carl Linnaeus, a father of modern taxonomy, “spent much of his leisure time penning long and flattering portraits of himself, declaring that there had never “been a greater botanist or zoologist…””
Today the world has about 10,000 active taxonomists. It takes eight to ten years to train a good taxonomist. It is commonly believed that the world has a severe shortage of taxonomists, although economists might challenge the use of the word “shortage” in this context.
Logging a new species costs about $2000 per species.
Each year about fifteen thousand new species are recorded. Insects alone offer possibly as many as 100 million undiscovered species.
As of 2002, there were no full-time taxonomists in Africa.
Kevin Kelly’s (Wired magazine) All Species Foundation has not made much of a dent in these problems. And taxonomy is not nearly as web-based as you might think.
I don’t think it follows, as scientist Koen Maes suggests, that “It’s not a biodiversity crisis, it’s a taxonomist crisis!” Still, we know less about species and their numbers than I had thought.
All this is taken from Bill Bryson’s recent and entertaining A Short History of Nearly Everything, chapter 23. Thanks to Yesim Yilmaz for the pointer.
What have we learned about income distribution?
I’ve been reading the new book The New Geography of Global Income Inequality, by sociologist Glenn Firebaugh. The data work is intensive, here are a few things I have learned:
1. Knowing what country an individual lives in explains about 70 percent of the observed variation in income across individuals (p.11).
2. If we could magically eliminate all income inequality within nations, the world’s total income inequality would shrink by at most one-third. Most of the relevant inequality is across different nations (p.11).
3. Global income inequality is falling, contrary to what many critics charge (pp.17-18). So the world’s poor are catching up to the world’s rich (p.18), on average.
4. Most poor countries are not catching up, most of all Africa. The world’s poor are catching up, on average, once we weight countries by population. The growth of China, and to a lesser extent, India, has driven the improved prospects of the poor and the decline in cross-nation inequality (passim).
5. If we compare the United States to Western Europe, there is considerably less inequality within the United States.
As you might surmise, I found this book to be excellent and highly instructive. It reads more like an extended article than a book, but nonetheless it delivers on the substance.
Addendum: Daniel Drezner offers some interesting remarks, with links, on Paul Krugman’s recent writings on inequality.
Subsequent addendum/clarification: Firebaugh (p.193) writes: “average income is much more unequal across nations in Western Europe than across states in the United States.” He does not (and could not) argue that “within a single nation equality” is less in Europe. Here are Gini coefficients for the various European nations and the United States.
The Eric Rasmusen controversy
Eric Rasmusen of Indiana University has long been well-known as an excellent microeconomist. I taught from his Games and Information for many years, I still have his article “Stock Banks and Mutual Banks” on my Industrial Organization reading list.
Lately Rasmusen has been the center of much controversy. Usually I like to summarize the links I use, however briefly. But in this case I am not sure how to explain events without offending anybody, I know Rasmusen a bit plus I have numerous gay friends. So just read here on the episode. Here is Rasmusen’s frequently interesting blog. Here are Rasmusen’s views on religion. Thanks to Eugene Volokh for the Chicago Tribune link.
Reagan Letters Published
Time magazine has an article on Ronald Reagan’s recently published letters, in which the former president expresses a taste for Ayn Rand. What is striking about the letters is their sheer volume (about 5,000) and directness. Avoiding convoluted phrasing, Reagan’s authorial persona is almost classical. Arguments and thoughts are presented in a plain language that puts the reader and the writer on an equal level, a powerful element of Reagan’s style of communication.
Never miss a day of the revolution!
You can now see all the posts from a specific day by clicking on that day in the calendar. Also, did you know that an easy way to see all the posts in a category is to click on the category link at the bottom of each post? The opening page of Marginal Revolution contains the last 7 days of posts. Google search and links to monthly and weekly archives are available in the left hand column.
The best way to get a cell phone for use abroad
Very useful tips from Cronaca.com. It is cheaper than you think.
Tragedy of the tragedy of the commons
Garrett Hardin and his wife recently passed away, it is rumored to have been a double suicide. Hardin was a well-known environmentalist, most prominently he coined the phrase “tragedy of the commons”. He spent the latter part of his career opposing immigration and favoring population control, he was even embraced by some eugenecists.
Addendum: The Hardins were survived by their four children, thanks to Nicky Tynan for the pointer.