Results for “daniel klein” 117 found
Sentences to ponder
The findings reveal that 20.7% of the studied articles in behavioral economics propose paternalist policy action and that 95.5% of these do not contain any analysis of the cognitive ability of policymakers.
No, that is not Arnold Kling, it is from Niclas Berggren. Hat tip goes to Daniel Klein.
*The Locavore’s Dilemma*
The authors are Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu, and the subtitle is In Praise of the 10,000 Mile Diet:
The publisher’s page summarizes it thus:
Today’s food activists think that “sustainable farming” and “eating local” are the way to solve a host of perceived problems with our modern food supply system. But after a thorough review of the evidence, Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu have concluded that these claims are mistaken.
In The Locavore’s Dilemma they explain the history, science, and economics of food supply to reveal what locavores miss or misunderstand: the real environmental impacts of agricultural production; the drudgery of subsistence farming; and the essential role large-scale, industrial producers play in making food more available, varied, affordable, and nutritionally rich than ever before in history.
They show how eliminating agriculture subsidies and opening up international trade, not reducing food miles, is the real route to sustainability; and why eating globally, not only locally, is the way to save the planet.
I very much enjoyed reading the book, you can order a copy here. For the pointer I thank Daniel Klein.
NPR interview with Ronald Coase
It is here, at age 101. Excerpt:
China’s rapid emergence as a global economic power — one of the most important developments of the past generation — took him completely by surprise.
“I thought it would take 100 years, if not more,” Coase said.
It seemed striking that an economic legend could be so wrong about such an important subject. I asked Coase what he made of this.
“I’ve been wrong so often I don’t find it extraordinary at all,” he said.
For the pointer I thank Daniel Klein.
The Lord Monboddo screensaver
The 8-year-old twins love their iPad. They draw, play games and expand their vocabulary. Their family’s teenagers also like the hand-held computer tablets, too, but the clan’s elders show no interest.
The orangutans at Miami’s Jungle Island apparently are just like people when it comes to technology. The park is one of several zoos experimenting with computers and apes, letting its six orangutans use an iPad to communicate and as part of a mental stimulus program. Linda Jacobs, who oversees the program, hopes the devices will eventually help bridge the gap between humans and the endangered apes.
How about this?:
“Our young ones pick up on it. They understand it. It’s like, ‘Oh I get this,’” Jacobs said. “Our two older ones, they just are not interested. I think they just figure, ‘I’ve gotten along just fine in this world without this communication-skill here and the iPad, and I don’t need a computer.’”
Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Daniel Klein.
Do most economists welcome ideological openness?
Daniel Klein has a new paper, with Davis, Figgins, and Hedengren:
A sample of 299 U.S. economics professors responded to our 2010 survey, which asked: “Suppose you are reading or listening to an economist, and he discloses his own ideological proclivities. Which best represents your attitude toward his doing so:” The results surprised us. Sixty-three percent of respondents chose “I welcome it,” twenty percent chose “I am indifferent,” and only ten percent chose “I dislike it.” Most economists, it appears, welcome ideological openness, and only a small minority dislikes it. Follow-up questions asked reasons why the respondent liked (or disliked) it. These results suggest that economists – or, at least those inclined to complete a survey – are quite inclined toward natural discourse.
I suppose this is good news for the future of the economics blogosphere. Or do economists just say that they welcome this openness, without really meaning it?
Assorted links
1. China markets in everything, fake iPhone signature.
2. Remastering music for the iPod age.
3. It appears the Slovaks will name a bridge after Chuck Norris.
4. Incorporating physiological observations into economics.
5. Via The Browser, predictions about Syria.
Tony Judt’s new book *Thinking the Twentieth Century*
It is a wide-ranging dialogue with Timothy Snyder, you can buy it here. I will gladly recommend this book, but I have mixed feelings about it. It is Judt’s “deathbed conversations” with Snyder, when he was paralyzed.
Is it fascinating? Yes. Did I read it straight through without pausing? Yes. Did I learn a lot? Yes.
Yet it doesn’t show Judt in such an overwhelmingly favorable light. He is cranky, unfair to his intellectual opponents, and he repeatedly misrepresents thinkers such as Hayek on some fairly simple points. He conducts unsubstantiated attacks on various New York Times columnists, as if they had once beaten him in a debate and this was his revenge. It shows his lifelong and mostly unhealthy obsession with what Daniel Klein has called “The People’s Romance.” Unlike in some of his previous writings, his proposals for a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine problem come off as an irresponsible and somewhat flip symbolic gesture, easy enough to make because he doesn’t have to live with the outcome. As a reader and reviewer it is hard to not wonder whether/how Judt was medicated during these conversations, and how well he had thought through his lack of editing options before publication. Or is this the real Judt? Are we all really like this? Pondering that question is as interesting as the dialogue itself.
The Austrians will be happy when Judt writes: “The three quarters of century that followed Austria’s collapse in the 1930s can be seen as a duel between Keynes and Hayek.” Yet he has the odd view that free market ideas were “imported to the U.S. in the suitcases of a handful of disabused Viennese intellectuals.” Others may underrate the importance of central/eastern Europe but in these dialogues he overrates it.
One does not have to agree with Hayek’s Road to Serfdom to find this an unfair characterization:
Hayek is quite explicit on this count: if you begin with welfare policies of any sort — directing individuals, taxing for social ends, engineering the outcomes of market relationships — you will end up with Hitler.
My favorite part of the book comes at Kindle location 1294, here is part of that discussion:
But even when Blunt was outed as a Soviet spy, in 1979, his standing in high society, and in the distinctive codes of that society in England, still protected him…Thus Blunt — a spy, a communist, a dissembler, a liar and a man who may have actively contributed to the exposure and death of British agents — was nonetheless deemed by some of the his colleagues to be guilty of no crime serious enough to justify depriving him of the fellowship of the British Academy.
If you are seeking to “normalize” this review, I consider Judt’s Past Imperfect to be one of the best books of the last few decades, his Postwar to be one of my favorite books ever, and his late essays to be some of the best writing, in any genre, in a long time. (Though I didn’t like Ill Fares the Land.) I can recommend this too, as something worth consuming and pondering and spending money on, but I still have a slightly queasy feeling in my stomach.
*Knowledge and Coordination: A Liberal Interpretation*
The author is Daniel Klein and you can buy it here. My blurb reads:
The best book on Smithian economics, or for that matter Austrian economics, in many years.
Here is a thirty-minute presentation of some themes from the book. Here is an associated podcast with Dan and Russ Roberts. Here is the syllabus for Dan’s class on economics and philosophy (pdf); here is the syllabus for his class on Adam Smith (pdf).
Who gets what wrong?
My colleague Daniel Klein reports from the front:
…under the right circumstances, conservatives and libertarians were as likely as anyone on the left to give wrong answers to economic questions. The proper inference from our work is not that one group is more enlightened, or less. It’s that “myside bias”—the tendency to judge a statement according to how conveniently it fits with one’s settled position—is pervasive among all of America’s political groups. The bias is seen in the data, and in my actions.
And what do the “right-wing” thinkers get wrong?
More than 30 percent of my libertarian compatriots (and more than 40 percent of conservatives), for instance, disagreed with the statement “A dollar means more to a poor person than it does to a rich person”—c’mon, people!—versus just 4 percent among progressives. Seventy-eight percent of libertarians believed gun-control laws fail to reduce people’s access to guns. Overall, on the nine new items, the respondents on the left did much better than the conservatives and libertarians. Some of the new questions challenge (or falsely reassure) conservative and not libertarian positions, and vice versa. Consistently, the more a statement challenged a group’s position, the worse the group did.
A college education, by the way, doesn’t help much. Here is another statement of the conclusion:
A full tabulation of all 17 questions showed that no group clearly out-stupids the others. They appear about equally stupid when faced with proper challenges to their position.
That’s a lesson David Hume would have appreciated.
Words of wisdom
Basically when you ask questions where the left-wing answer is also the one supported by economics, suddenly left-wing people have a better understanding of economics. But when you ask the other set of questions, it comes out the other way. Basically, there’s a lot of confirmation bias out there. This is why I think people who teach economics ought to think harder about their choice of examples when teaching.
That is Matt Yglesias (check out the interesting graph), referring to this paper by Daniel Klein and Zeljka Buturovic.
Who are the favorite economic thinkers, journals, and blogs?
The piece, by Daniel Klein, et.al., has this abstract:
A sample of 299 U.S. economics professors, presumably random, responded to our survey which asked favorites in the following areas: Economic thinkers (pre-twentieth century, twentieth century now deceased, living age 60 or older, living under age 60), economics journals, and economics blogs. First-place positions as favorite economist in their respective categories are Adam Smith (by far), John Maynard Keynes followed closely by Milton Friedman, Gary Becker, and Paul Krugman. For journals, the leaders are American Economic Review and Journal of Economic Perspectives. For blogs, the leaders are Greg Mankiw followed closely by Marginal Revolution (Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok). The survey also asked party-voting and 17 policy-view questions, and we relate the political variables of respondents to their choice of favorites.
The favorite twentieth century economists are Keynes, Friedman, Samuelson, and Hayek, in that order. Kenneth Arrow doesn’t do as well as he should, though he comes in second, after Gary Becker, in the category, favorite living economists, sixty years or older.
As for favorite living economists, under age sixty, Paul Krugman wins by a long mile, followed by Greg Mankiw, then Acemoglu, Levitt, and David Card. I do not deserve my position at #16, but thanks if you voted for me! Scroll to p.13 for that list.
On p.14 there is a fascinating chart about the political orientations of the voters for various favorite economists. Krugman for instance is more popular among left-wing economists.
The votes for favorite journal are on p.16, no surprises there. p.17 has the favorite blogs chart. Krugman and DeLong are third and fourth, after Mankiw and MR.
It is a fascinating paper which says much about our profession.
That is all from the latest issue of Econ Journal Watch, the link to the whole issue is here. Here is a good piece about the embarrassment of Richard T. Ely.
How do most people split the rent?
I receive this question from readers fairly often, but I don't usually have much of an answer, or for that matter much experience (when I roomed with Daniel Klein, he and I split the rent evenly). Now there is an interesting study. There are 42 datapoints and definitely some selection bias, but it's better than anything else I've seen. It examines for instance whether people first pick rooms and then set the prices, or first set the prices and then pick the rooms, or draw from a hat. It measures which factors most affect the rent splitting, with "No door" and "Private shower" coming in first and second respectively. The factor of importance for an apartment with the biggest standard deviation is size of the common area. In the survey, personal space is what people are willing to pay the most extra for. Opinions about the importance of windows have a high variance.
Here is their rent calculator, based on the above study.
Public choice: what to read
Jonathan G asks:
What concepts in public choice economics do you think liberals are under-exposed to? Can you recommend some books or articles?
I am not sure what he means by "liberals" so I will answer the question straight up about public choice. I recommend:
1. Dennis Mueller, Public Choice III. The best survey of the field, though this is an academic rather than a popular book. On voting theory — an overrated area in my view – try Peter Ordeshook.
2. Mancur Olson, The Rise and Decline of Nations. The best applied explanation of the logic of concentrated benefits, diffuse costs.
3. Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter. On the democratic side of the equation. Anthony Downs is still worth reading as well, though it needs a cheaper edition than $75. Also read Daniel Klein on The People's Romance.
4. For "pro-government public choice," see Amihai Glazer and Lawrence Rothenberg, Why Government Succeeds and Why it Fails. Also see my piece, with Glazer (an underrated public choice economist), "Rent-Seeking Promotes the Provision of Public Goods" (gated).
5. Buchanan and Tullock are among the most important public choice economists, but they don't come in canonical, easy to digest form. Any recommendations here? Liberty Fund has done the complete works.
6. Read Robin Hanson's blog posts on "politics isn't about policy."
7. An underrated topic is the application of behavioral economics to politicians and also voters and even special interest groups.
8. For understanding the U.S. system, I very much like David Stockman's The Triumph of Politics; oddly the paperback is priced at four times the hardcover.
9. Overall I recommend comparative approaches with other countries (start with Arend Ljiphart, plus Matt Yglesias has had good blog posts on this topic) and acquiring an anthropological and sociological understanding of political legitimacy and perception of interest. The rational choice literature often neglects those topics.
10. Here is my short review on the public choice of finance and big government.
11. For frontier research, see the papers of Andrei Shleifer and Daron Acemoglu. There is plenty of good applied research in political science, although this is less of a foundational place to start.
From the classics, there is Plato's Republic (a critique of tyranny in my view), Robert Michels Political Parties, Tocqueville's Democracy in America (politics as culture), and various Vilfredo Pareto essays, I am no longer sure which volume they are collected in (edited by Finer?). The Federalist Papers are impressive, but are they impressive to read?
What am I neglecting?
The economics of free parking
Here is my latest NYT column, for the ideas I am indebted to pointers from Daniel Klein, Matt Yglesias, and of course Donald Shoup.
Here is the bottom line:
If developers were allowed to face directly the high land costs of providing so much parking, the number of spaces would be a result of a careful economic calculation rather than a matter of satisfying a legal requirement. Parking would be scarcer, and more likely to have a price – or a higher one than it does now – and people would be more careful about when and where they drove.
The subsidies are largely invisible to drivers who park their cars – and thus free or cheap parking spaces feel like natural outcomes of the market, or perhaps even an entitlement. Yet the law is allocating this land rather than letting market prices adjudicate whether we need more parking, and whether that parking should be free. We end up overusing land for cars – and overusing cars too. You don’t have to hate sprawl, or automobiles, to want to stop subsidizing that way of life.
Here are a few quotations from the article:
“Minimum parking requirements act like a fertility drug for cars.”
And:
As Professor Shoup puts it: “Who pays for free parking? Everyone but the motorist.”
And:
If we don’t give away cars, why give away parking spaces?
What are the biggest problems with the idea? First, the danger of spillover parking means that a lot of parking has to be properly priced all at once. If the local K-Mart has a smaller lot, you don't want the customers flooding a neighborhood street and simply shifting the problem. The proper correction requires a coordinated pricing and enforcement effort, not only to succeed, but also to be sufficiently popular with homeowners. Fortunately, most of the coordination can be done at the level of the individual town or city.
Second, we don't yet know how many more spaces would be priced in the absence of legal minimum parking requirements, and how many fewer car trips there would be, especially if we are holding the quantity and quality of mass transit constant. The employer still may wish to subsidize appearance at the workplace. Alternatively, "parking fees as lump sum tax" is fine by me and it bears an odd but pleasant connection to Georgist ideas. Another possibility is that a lot of parking is shifted to satellite lots, combined with small buses or shuttles; Tysons Corner Mall already does this at Christmas or consider any number of airports. That still would improve land use (and welfare), but it remains an open question how much congestion and emissions would get better.
Mark Thoma discusses some distributional issues. I would note that less land for parking should lower other real estate and retail prices, even if more poor people end up taking the bus. And the very poorest Americans often don't have cars at all.
Wikipedia on A.J. Ayer and Mike Tyson
He taught or lectured several times in the United States, including serving as a visiting professor at Bard College in the fall of 1987. At a party that same year held by fashion designer Fernando Sanchez, Ayer, then 77, confronted Mike Tyson harassing the (then little-known) model Naomi Campbell. When Ayer demanded that Tyson stop, the boxer said: "Do you know who the fuck I am? I'm the heavyweight champion of the world," to which Ayer replied: "And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men." Ayer and Tyson then began to talk, while Naomi Campbell slipped out.
The link is here and the pointer is from Daniel Klein.