Results for “amazon” 5126 found
Beautiful People are Mean
Several year ago, I read about the experiment showing that average faces are judged more beautiful than non-average faces. In Judith Rich Harris’s No Two Alike there is an arresting figure which demonstrates. With a little search on the web I was able to duplicate the figure, which is based on the original research. The top two pictures are the averages of two faces, the next two are averages of 4, 8, and 16 faces and the final picture is an average of 32 faces.
Wow, now I will no longer be upset when people say I have average looks.
Paul Simon’s Surprise
Yes that is the name of the album, released today. The first surprise is that Borders didn’t have it out on display. The second surprise is that Brian Eno produces and imposes his sound on it. The third surprise is no world music. The fourth surprise is its high quality, at least after the dull You’re the One, six years ago. Here is a good New York Times article on Simon and the album. Here are (mostly positive) blog reviews.
Tax Roughening
I said yesterday that the Bush tax cuts are actually tax shifts. But that was
being kind, once we take into account tax roughening, Bush’s tax
cuts are tax increases.
Deficits caused by tax cuts can reduce the total tax burden if they are used to smooth taxes. Too see why remember that holding tax revenues constant it’s better to spread taxes across as many goods as possible. The first penny of apple taxation causes you to stop consuming the marginal apple – the one that was barely worth its price anyway. Raise apple taxes a bit more and you stop consuming apples whose value far exceeds their price. Better to lose one marginal apple and one marginal orange than two apples the second one of which was really valuable.
The same thing is true of labor. The first dollar of wage tax causes you to cut back on the last hour of work, but your wage on that last hour was barely worth the lost leisure time anyway so the first dollar of tax doesn’t create too much waste. Raise taxes more, however, and you cut into valuable infra-marginal hours. It’s better, therefore, to spread taxes over time periods – as Arrow taught us, the future is just a different set of goods.
Unfortunately, today’s deficits are tax roughening rather than tax smoothing. Even with big cuts in Medicare and Social Security, taxes will rise. Smoothing taxes now requires higher taxes and lower spending. Unfortunately we have had tax cuts and spending increases and thus the tax stream has become rougher and the total tax burden has increased.
Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations
[Bill] Gates…took Mike Spence’s famously difficult advanced microeconomics course — at the very dawn of the excitement about "bandwagon effects," monopolistic competition, and network economics. Enrolled in the course as well was Steve Ballmer, a fellow cardplayer with whom Gate had grown friendly. The two finished first and second in the course, but Gates didn’t wait for his grade.
That is from David Warsh’s Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations. Maybe this is the book of the year so far (I can no longer remember how much I liked Stumbling on Happiness).
While it pretends to focus on a single article — Paul Romer’s 1990 piece on endogenous growth — the book is a tour de force through growth theory, the economics profession, the world of public intellectuals, and how science works. Paul Krugman, Greg Mankiw, Bob Solow, and Bob Lucas play prominent roles, in addition of course to Romer. If you want to read one book on how the economics profession works, this is it.
I’ve never seen anyone write as well as Warsh about the social world of economic research, a world of brilliant, often eccentric people who bear no resemblance to the dreary suits you see discussing the economy of CNBC. It’s a world of informal manners yet intense status competition…
The book will please both specialists and neophytes. Warsh’s coverage is so thorough that even yours truly makes a few cameo appearances. I thank David for the coverage, and I recommend his book highly.
Stumbling on Happiness, II: Are Asians less happy?
Asian culture does not emphasize the importance of personal happiness as much as European culture does, and thus Asian Americans believe that they are generally less happy than their European American counterparts. In one study, volunteers carried handheld computers everywhere they went for a week and recorded how they were feeling when the computer beeped at random intervals throughout the day. These reports showed that the Asian American volunteers were slightly happier than the European American volunteers. But when the volunteers were asked to remember how they had felt that week, the Asian American volunteers reported that they had felt less happy and not more.
The above passage is from Daniel Gilbert’s excellent Stumbling on Happiness. Here is my earlier post on the book. Hispanics, by the way, remembered feeling happier than they had been in the moment. One implication is that you cannot completely trust happiness studies based on self-reported data.
By the way: Have you figured out what is the secret but unpalatable way of making better life decisions?
Stumbling on Happiness
Finally, in Part VI, "Corrigibility," I will tell you why illusions of foresight are not easily remedied by personal experience or by the wisdom we inherit from our grandmothers. I will conclude by telling you about a simple remedy for these illusions that you will almost certainly not accept.
That is from Daniel Gilbert’s Stumbling on Happiness, so far the best book this year.
He takes Proust and turns it into social science. Your brain distorts both your anticipations and your memories; we do not know how happy we were or how happy we will be. Here is a short article on Gilbert. Here is a long article on Gilbert. Here is a short piece on why dreading pain can be as bad as pain itself. Or is it…? Was it…?
What I’ve been reading
1. The People’s Act of Love, by James Meek. You wouldn’t think a Brit could imitate a 19th century Russian novel, but he pulls it off. Excellent mid-brow fiction, give it a few chapters to grab you.
2. The Singing Neanderthals, by Stephen Mithen. The author starts with sexual selection theories of the arts, and then asks why we sing in large groups rather than exclusively one-to-one. The Neanderthals are portrayed as a static culture, dependent on music for their communication, and thus unable to come up with new ideas. Recommended for those who like just-so stories and yes that includes me.
3. Capital and Collusion: The Political Logic of Global Economic Development, by Hilton Root. Here is the book’s web page. Hilton will be moving full time to George Mason, School of Public Policy.
4. Polio: An American Story, by David Oskhinski. There are few Pulitzer Prize-winning works you can gulp down and enjoy in a single brief sitting, but this is one of them.
5. You Must Set Forth at Dawn: A Memoir, by Wole Soyinka. Wonderfully written, sadly he doesn’t seem to see why capitalist enterprise is important for Africa.
6. The Book of Lost Books: An Incomplete History of All the Great Books You Never Will Read, by Stuart Kelly. Aeschylus, Dante, Kafka, and many others wrote works that were lost, destroyed, or never finished. (Hey, what about the missing second volume of Hayek’s Pure Theory of Capital? You know, the one where he integrates the theory of money and capital?) Here is the history of those works, in bit-sized, ready-to-consume form. Here is one good review. If you are tired of popular literary treatments which simply recycle material you already know, this book is for you. A gem.
Pramoedya Ananta Toer passes at 81
Here is one notice. I regard his The Buru Quartet as, after Orwell, the great political novel of the twentieth century. At a deeper level it concerns different notions of what a life consists of. As you read each volume, your understanding of what has come before shifts radically. Most of it he wrote while in prison. Of the living writers he was my "no brainer" pick for a Nobel Prize. Here are other notices of his death.
Did Gary Becker prove that advertising is informative?
So claims a NYT obituary for John Kenneth Galbraith. CrookedTimber and Brad DeLong question whether such models should be called "proofs." Fair enough, but neither does the obituary correctly represent Becker’s theory of advertising. As I understand Becker’s work (with Kevin Murphy) on the topic, individuals consume "social images" or "self-images." Having Nike shoes gives you the "benefits of being cool" if a) you actually have Nikes, and b) the ad links Nikes to a cool image for your relevant peer group. The standard economic theory of complements then applies for analyzing ads. Under some conditions, advertising can be a "bad" for consumers, not a "good," and advertisers will pay consumers to watch ads. Furthermore ads will present images and cultural linkages, rather than substantive information in the traditional sense. This generates some Galbraithian results, but without requiring that consumers are "tricked" or even "persuaded" into a particular point of view. This is not a proof; I think of it as an existence theorem that advertising can make corporate sense, and sometimes be socially welfare-improving, yet without being very informative.
Keep in mind that Becker titled his 1998 book Accounting for Tastes, a concession to the Galbraithian way of thinking.
Don’t trust economic impact studies
These studies usually give economics a bad name:
We should be skeptical of “economic impact” studies that show the importance of the arts to a community. A study of this kind might show that an arts festival or new arts arena brings millions of dollars in economic value. But these studies typically treat arts expenditures as creating value out of nothing. Implicitly it is assumed that if the money had not been spent on the arts, no other economic or social values would have been produced. Again, the relevant comparison is whether an arts arena leads to more value than some alternative. When we look at economic impact studies for one industry at a time, they all appear to show high benefits. But this means that the net benefits of any single project are low, zero, or perhaps even negative on average. By investing in one good idea we are always forsaking another good idea. In essence those studies list gross benefits rather than net benefits. Furthermore, once an economic impact study is being done, the resources are likely no longer undervalued.
That is from my Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding.
Jane Jacobs passes away
Here is a NYT obituary. Her The Death and Life of Great American Cities is one of the best books I have read. From the NYT:
In her book "Death and Life of Great American Cities," written in 1961,
Ms. Jacobs’s enormous achievement was to transcend her own withering
critique of 20th-century urban planning and propose radically new
principles for rebuilding cities. At a time when both common and
inspired wisdom called for bulldozing slums and opening up city space,
Ms. Jacobs’s prescription was ever more diversity, density and dynamism
– in effect, to crowd people and activities together in a jumping,
joyous urban jumble.
My favorite things New York City
1. My favorite demographic charts: Track population changes by borough.
2. My favorite NYC dining guide blog: Click on the categories on the top row of the blog to see the whole thing.
3. Favorite neighborhood: To live in? Manhattan is getting so uncool. I will pick the corner of Hudson and Barrow, which is near W. Houston and the West Side Highway, just north of the Saatchi building. There it still looks and feels like the New York City I grew up with (from New Jersey, that is). But when will I have the money and the courage to try? The Upper East Side bores me and the best food is in Queens; neither is suitable for real life.
4. Favorite book about: Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan, by Philip Lopate. I am surprised how few people know this one. Compulsively readable, and it makes me want to write a comparable work. But "A Drive Around Fairfax"? No way.
5. Favorite dim sum: Oriental Garden, in Chinatown, Elizabeth St., make sure to arrive early. Don’t forget Flushing, especially if you have time to kill at LaGuardia. The juicy pork buns at Joe’s Shanghai? Jackson Diner is still great Indian food though it is not the revelation it once was; the competition has caught up with it.
6. Best lunch bargain: Nougatine, the bistro attached to Jean-Georges. Get the venison with green chiles for its amazing mix of textures and heat.
7. Favorite Seinfeld episode: How about Master of His Domain? Soup Nazi is overrated and in fact I don’t even like it. The one where Jerry and Elaine try to be together again is another favorite, plus Show Within a Show.
8. Favorite free activity that even most New Yorkers don’t do: Browse the auction displays at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, especially before the major auctions in May and November.
Movies, music, literature? Not today. You might as well try "My Favorite Things Not in New York" for an easier task.
War & Peace & War
The core theses of this book are straightforward:
1. Some societies face multiethnic frontiers, and they respond by developing higher levels of cooperation. You have to bind together to clear out and kill those Indians.
2. Eventually the result is empire.
3. Empires decay. They wallow in luxury and the preconditions behind their previously high levels of cooperation go away.
4. The ability to cooperate is the key variable in human history.
So argues Peter Turchin — a professor of ecology — in his recent War & Peace & War: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations. Imagine Jared Diamond’s method extended into the formation of empires and the origins of war, with a dose of Hari Seldon, and you have this book.
In addition to the broader theses, Turchin takes on why Europe stayed disunited after the collapse of the Carolingian Empire (disunity was the default setting), why the eastern and western parts of the Roman Empire took such different courses (the Eastern Empire was largely a new creation), why the fall of the Roman Empire has earlier roots than you think (the frontier changed in nature), and why the Russians have been so obedient to tyrannical rulers (egalitarian structures, combined with a frontier). The author does not shy away from bold claims, nor does he give much attention to possible counterexamples; try his other books for further support but don’t expect your doubts to be resolved.
Some of the sentences scare me: "Cliodynamics predicts complex dynamical behavior for historical empires, with shorter cycles embedded within longer cycles, and so on [sic]."
If you judge a book by its vulnerability to criticism, this one makes for easy pickings. But Tolstoy wasn’t crazy, Ibn Khaldun is more important than you think, and Turchin will tell you why. Recommended, especially for those who like fearless and speculative minds.
Missing words
Often after I’ve heard of something for the first time – a food, a place, a person — I start hearing about it everywhere. Shouldn’t there be a word for this?
"Newbiquitous" is suggested.
Is there a word for the common experience of saying something to your child and then realizing — often with a shock — that you sound like one of your own parents?
"Mamamorphosis" is one idea.
My husband and I are in search of a word for the fear of throwing a party and having no one show up.
"Guestlessness"?
How about people who hit the "send" button for email without first attaching the file?
"Deficit sending" is recommended. Or "sends of omission."
Jonathan Zuber wants "…a verb meaning ‘to go do something and return having absentmindedly done one or more other things instead.’""
Any ideas?
You can put other requests, or suggestions, in the comments…
Arctic Monkeys
On my first listen I didn’t believe the ‘ype. By the twentieth listen I was believing, Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I Am Not is a great CD. Reminscent of The Who but popped up a notch with reggae and ska beats, Arctic Monkeys are a garage band from Sheffield, England. Original guitar licks and the lead singer’s Yorkshire accent give the album real flavor. I also like that it’s thematically whole, revolving around bars, bouncers, and the desperation and self-loathing that comes from trying to pick up women. I like this:
Last night these two bouncers
one of em’s alright
The other one’s a scary
His way or no way
totalitarian
And this:
Everybody’s trying to crack the jokes and that to make you smile
Those that claim that they’re not showing off are drowning in denial
But they’re not half as bad as me, say anything and I’ll agree
Cause when it comes to acting up, I’m sure I could write the book
Yeah, I’ve been there.