Independence Day
A sign on the highway on the road to Toronto speaks volumes.
Remember, driving is a privilege not a right.
Despite the fact that I am Canadian, everytime I see this sign my stomach churns with anger and I must suppress a desire to turn back to the U.S. The sign is a reprimand from the rulers to the ruled reminding them of their place. I want to tear it from the ground but my fellow Canadians think my reaction odd. More Americans, I think, would understand and that I suppose is why I call America home.
Happy Independence Day.
Earthquake in Germany?
This week the German government is expected to pass a landmark immigration reform. The measure would allow migrants to work in Germany if they have skills if specified fields, such as engineering, information technology, or the sciences.
To be sure, the qualifications are many. It must be shown that no German can do the job. National security factors can be invoked to limit and restrict migrants. An earlier version of the bill would have let in lower and medium-skill migrants. Still, this is a long way from Helmut Kohl’s famous remark: “Germany is not a country of immigration.” Furthermore there would be no quotas under the proposed legislation.
For one summary of what is afoot, see the WSJ, 2 July, p.A9. Here is another summary of the proposed reforms. Here is some background context on the policy change. Note that the reforms attempt to manage immigration before EU constraints take over; in this regard also they fall short of a true liberalization.
So will this prove an earthquake in German politics? It depends how rigidly the entry standards are enforced. In any case the West European countries are badly in need of a basic model for greater immigration. Germany currently has many migrants but most are ethnic Germans and their flow has dried up. After all, there are only so many Volga Germans. This reform, however imperfect, should prove at least one step in the right direction.
Markets in everything, once again
Try the latest, simulated dating. They set you up for a “date,” but in reality you meet with a dating coach. You pretend to be interested, then you are given tips for how to do it right in the real world. That will be $275 please, in case you are too chicken to ask your friends for help. Plus you pick up the tab.
Here is a related book about how to judge the first impressions you make on other people. And “Football Hunk” offers ten tips for guys.
Here’s another quirky match-making service:
In New York, there’s Dinner in the Dark, which arranges meals in a pitch-black bar and restaurant. Waiters equipped with night goggles are the only ones who can see – leaving clients to fumble with their utensil-free dinner while getting to know their prospective matches, from the inside out. Candles are lit during dessert, when clients see who is sitting next to them.
Adverse selection anyone?
Nigerian politics is not efficient
An outbreak of polio has hit children in the Nigerian state of Kano. Kano is one of the muslim states that had boycotted the use of the polio vaccine. Many muslim states in Nigeria banned the polio vaccine because those in charge said the Americans were using the vaccines to make their population infertile. Many of them said the vaccine would also be used to spread AIDS in the region. Despite appeals from neighbouring countries to vaccinate its population, the conspiracy theorists in Nigeria got their way.
Now, as expected, polio is beginning to spread among children in the region. Now the local authorities are appealing for urgent assistance.
The World Health Organisation has sent a team to the area. The team has confirmed that the outbreak is polio.
It turns out that the Nigerians are willing to accept vaccines from Indonesia, a Muslim country. But this has led to lengthy delays and shortages.
Here is the full and sad story.
Haitian fact of the day
In the early nineteenth century Polish soldiers went to Haiti to fight for Haitian independence against the French. Many of these soldiers stayed in the country, settling in the town of Cazale. The town has since become known for its “banana arts,” based around carving the fruit into paper-like forms.
A small Smithsonian exhibit on this history has recently been sponsored by The Republic of Taiwan
Market in Everything
I think most of these are “art” but this market in everything makes for entertaining reading. Here are some of my favorites. For legal reasons, if you want the product, you will have to go to the website for the seller’s email.
Guilty? Innocent? It’s all the same to me. For a fee of 500 pounds a time I will lie to the police about your whereabouts, and for 2000, I will perjure myself in court, and swear a testimony to a fictitious scenario of your choice. Easiest to contact me in advance of crime, and establish the deal. Emergency alibis also available.
For a price, I will think of you and only you every time I commit acts of self-love during a time period. I will picture you in my mind, and pretend that all pleasurable touches come from your hands…I will breathe your name heavily. I will lust after you. I will dream of you. I will long for you. …During each time period, I vow to commit acts of self-love to orgasm, at the very least, once per day, no matter what.
Worried that the day to mark your passing is going to be an Eleanor Rigby type affair? Fear not, for 20% of your estate (or £1000, whichever the greater) plus travel and overnight accomodation expenses, I will pretend to have known you, deliver a stirring eulogy, and then get drunk at your wake.
I will sell you immortality for only £12 plus £2 booking fee. There is a full refund for dissatisfied customers.
Thanks the MetaFilter for the link.
Taxes for everything?
The cost of a nose job could soon be nothing to sneeze at in New Jersey.
People who have unnecessary cosmetic surgery in the state will soon have to start paying a 6 percent tax for their procedure if Gov. James McGreevey signs a budget that was passed last week by the state Legislature.
It will be the first time a tax has ever been placed on a surgical procedure in America.
Here is the full story. CAT scans and MRI procedures will be taxed as well.
If you think that “beauty competition” is a zero or negative sum game, such taxation might seem like a good idea. More likely, absolute increases in beauty make everyone better off. To paraphrase my friend Bryan Caplan, would it simply be a “wash” if every woman in the world suddenly looked thirty years older?
I am also disturbed by the privacy aspect of this legislation. Imagine the government looking through your medical records to see if your surgical procedures were for medical or aesthetic reasons.
How to use Internet radio
It can work for you, read here, courtesy of Wired magazine. Here’s just one bit:
Radio@Netscape offers more than 175 free stations with fixed genres. In addition to the standard pop, rock and jazz categories, there’s a great mix of less-common genres including Hawaiian, klezmer, Bollywood, doo-wop, Motown and baroque. The single-minded fan can catch channels devoted to Ray Charles, Prince or the Doors. The WB channel features music from its various television shows.
Here is more on the service. I am especially fond of the Dancehall channel.
Internet radio, of course, is a substitute for downloading music. In the limiting case (if population were much, much larger), you could have a radio station for every song. Mandatory licensing would then apply, which is how the law ought to have treated music downloads in the first place (though here is a Cato critique of the idea). You can offer the song, you simply have to pay royalties, at some legally fixed rate, after the fact. We would have a more competitive market for downloads and a much greater selection of music. On the downside, we probably wouldn’t have those neat iPod device designs, as profit margins for Apple would be lower.
The law, of course, is keen to maintain the distinction between Internet radio and downloads. But how about a station that played the “requested song” with a probability of 0.4? Here is an article about “customizable” Internet raio, and why it might prove more useful than downloads. Here is readable information about the legal status of Internet radio. On a different but related front, now the RIAA is worred about digital radio too.
Monkey see, monkey do: Neuroeconomics in action
…[monkeys] have a rudimentary concept of economic choice, and researchers have discovered a medium of exchange — Berry Berry fruit drink — that can usefully stand in for money in a monkey’s mental life. To illustrate how monkeys make economic decisions, Glimcher’s former colleague Michael Platt, now at Duke, has investigated how they value status within their troop. Male monkeys have a distinct dominance hierarchy, and Platt has found they will give up a considerable quantity of fruit juice for the chance just to look at a picture of a higher-ranking individual. This is consistent with field observations, Platt says, which have found that social primates spend a lot of time just keeping track of the highest-ranking troop member.
Here is the full story, which is in fact a fascinating study of the new discipline of (human) neuroeconomics. Read the whole thing for an update on where economics is headed. Here is the ever-interesting Randall Parker on recent advances in the technology of neuroeconomics. Here is Kevin McCabe’s occasional neuroeconomics blog.
And here is a neuroeconomics link on how love can turn off parts of your brain.
The most international city in the world?
Arguably it is London:
…nearly one-third of the FT100 top companies has a non-national as chairman or chief executive. No other country has anything like that proportion.
Britain now publishes more book titles than any other country. Further example: there are more Chinese students in the UK than in any other country, again more than the US.
I can remember when the problem was keeping the Brits in, not keeping the foreigners out. But the UK had the good sense to embrace globalization rather than fighting it. Is there a lesson in this for you-know-who?
New movie record
Is light slowing down?
Read the latest update. Yes I will defer to the experts, but in my gut I have never bought into the idea that the speed of light should be constant for all space and time. Maybe I am simply too used to economic models, where all the measured magnitudes fluctuate over time. That being said, a faster speed of light in previous times might, among other things, explain why the universe appears to be so uniform. Here is a collection of relevant stories and links.
Get this:
The speed of light, one of the most sacrosanct of the universal physical constants, may have been lower as recently as two billion years ago – and not in some far corner of the universe, but right here on Earth.
Do we economists sound that funny to outsiders?
Good news from Japan?
It is well known that Japanese government debt stands at very high levels; according to one estimate debt was 161% of GDP as of March 2003. For purposes of comparison, here are some figures.
The little-known good news, if you can call it that, is that most of these debts are inter-governmental in nature. For instance the central bank holds a large quantity of Japanese governmental debt. After making the appropriate adjustments, the Japanese public sector owes net consolidated debts of 62% of GDP. This is lower than the OECD average.
An additional estimate suggests that Japan must increase its tax rates by three to nine percentage points, to make good on its obligations. Note that Japanese taxes are currently second lowest in the OECD, after South Korea. The worst case scenario is that Japan must increase its tax rates to Western European levels.
Here is the researcher’s home page. The page promises that the relevant paper will be available shortly. The 26 June to 2 July issue of The Economist offers a good summary of the paper; the author also argues that Japanese demographic problems are not as serious as is often believed.
My take: OK, it seems fair enough to cancel out inter-governmental debt: “they owe it to themselves.” But why stop there? Remember the old Keynesian line?: “We owe it to ourselves”. Why not cancel out debt altogether? The most important statistic is not the final debt level, rather the estimate of how big a tax increase will be needed to restore fiscal order. Note that Western Europe “gets away” with its current levels of taxation only because the rest of the world does not follow suit. So the worst case scenario is nothing to be complacent about.
But overall the cited result cheers my heart. I’ve been bullish on Japan for a long time. As catatastrophic economic problems go, a bad banking system is something you can fix, albeit slowly.
I’ve had enough
Here is our latest foreign policy initiative:
New US curbs on travel to communist-ruled Cuba went into effect on Wednesday, with opponents decrying them as an attack on family and the Bush administration arguing they will hasten the fall of Cuban President Fidel Castro.
Cuban Americans may now visit relatives on the island once every three years instead of annually and they may go only to see close family members rather than more distant relatives, among other restrictions aimed at toughening the four-decade-old US economic embargo on Cuba.
“It’s unimaginable, abusive,” said Raquel Chaviano, one of hundreds waiting at Havana airport on Tuesday for one of the last flights back to Miami before the rules went into force.
“The family is the main thing in life, and it has nothing to do with politics,” said Chaviano, who left the Caribbean island in 1980, leaving behind her daughter and siblings.
Here is the full, sad story. Here are more details about the human costs of the policy. Here is some material on America’s failed use of sanctions against Cuba.
What do you have to do to join The Ranks of the Shrill? Does someone have to send you an E-Invite?
Musical chairs
I’ve been listening lately to Jeff Tweedy’s group Wilco, a group with a very high “critical praise to sales ratio”. Here is the Coase theorem in operation:
[Jeff] Tweedy’s canonization doesn’t actually happen until 2001, when he records “Yankee Foxtrot Hotel,” an ambitious, often gorgeous album that is famously rejected as too obscure by Warner/Reprise. Tweedy buys back the album for $50,000, sells it to the far smaller Nonesuch Records and becomes a folk hero, especially to major-label haters, when critics decide that “YFH” is pretty much a masterpiece. (Never mind that Nonesuch is actually another subsidiary of Warner. )
Here is the full story.