Results for “series” 1043 found
The culture that is French, a continuing series
“I fear the government has passed the point of no return,” said Ron Chernow,
a leading American financial historian. “We have the irony of a
free-market administration doing things that the most liberal
Democratic administration would never have been doing in its wildest
dreams.”While they acknowledge the shock of the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the bailout package for A.I.G. on top of earlier government support for Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mac has stunned even European policy makers accustomed to government intervention in the economy.
“For opponents of free markets in Europe and elsewhere, this is a wonderful opportunity to invoke the American example,” said Mario Monti, the former antitrust chief at the European Commission.
“They will say that even the standard-bearer of the market economy, the
United States negates its fundamental principles in its behavior.”In France, where the government has long supported the creation of
national champions and worked actively to protect select companies from
the threat of foreign takeover, politicians were quick to point out the
paradox of what is essentially the nationalization of the largest
American insurance company.“Today the actions of American
policy makers illustrate the need for economic patriotism,” said
Bernard Carayon, a lawmaker of President Nicolas Sarkozy‘s center-right governing party, UMP. “I congratulate them.”
Here is the story. Since I am not a policy maker, I cannot claim that I am being congratulated personally. Still, I believe I am receiving a kind of indirect congratulations.
The economic fallout from these events is dominating the headlines. The intellectual and ideological fallout we are just beginning to contemplate.
The countercyclical asset, a continuing series
A sale of pickled sharks, butterfly paintings and other pieces by the
provocative British artist [Damien Hirst] has raised more than US$125 million – a
record for an auction of works by a single artist. And there is more to
come Tuesday.
Here is the story and I thank Chris F. Masse for the pointer. Here are previous installments in the series, including dirt for dinner in Haiti.
China wailing market of the day, a continuing series
I entered the mourning profession at the age of twelve. My teacher forced me to practice the basic suona tunes, as well as to learn how to wail and chant. Having a solid foundation in the basics enables a performer to improvise with ease, and to produce an earth-shattering effect. Our wailing sounds more authentic than that of the children or relatives of the deceased.
Most people who have lost their family members burst into tears and begin wailing upon seeing the body of the deceased. But their wailing doesn’t last. Soon they are overcome with grief. When grief reaches into their hearts, they either suffer from shock or pass out. But for us, once we get into the mood, we control our emotions and improvise with great ease. We can wail as long as is requested. If it’s a grand funeral and the money is good, we do lots of improvisation to please the host.
"How long can you wail? What was your record?"
Two days and two nights…Voices are our capital and we know how to protect them…
…Frankly speaking, the hired mourners are the ones who can stick to the very end.
That is from Liao Yiwu’s excellent The Corpse Walker: Real-Life Stories, China from the Bottom Up. Here is a previous installment in the series. Here is an out of date book, by comedian Eddie Cantor. Here is a photo:
Markets in self-constraint, a continuing series
Peter Risager, a loyal MR reader, relays the following to me:
A Danish chain of gyms is now offering membership free of charge, with the only caveat that you have to show up, in order for the membership to be free. If you fail to show up once per week you will be billed the normal monthly membership fee for that month. This should solve the problem with incentives that gym-membership normally carries – there is suddenly a very large (membership is around 85$ per month) incentive to show up each week.
He offers also a link in Danish.
Who should be bounced from The Great Books series?
Before leaving for Japan, I’d been pawing through these volumes lately — you know, the U. Chicago fat tomes with two columns on each page? The obvious question is which books belong and which do not; overall I’m surprised at how well the 1952 picks have held up and yes that is tribute to the University of Chicago or at least its influence.
I’m sad that Hume doesn’t get his own volume, including many of his shorter essays. Plus I’d like to add Dickens’s Bleak House and at least the first two books of Proust. And who to bounce? I nominate Plotinus as the obvious choice, noting that he has only about 24,000 cites on scholar.google.com, not even as many as Joseph Stiglitz.
In 1990 they dropped four books: Apollonius’ On Conic Sections, Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, and Joseph Fourier’s Analytical Theory of Heat. The loss of Sterne is regretted but the others we can do without. You’ll find a list of the added books in 1990 at the first link, about halfway down and yes they did include Swann’s Way. Little Dorrit is not the best or even the second best Dickens selection. Most are good picks though I would have left the Bergson, the Dewey (unreadable), and tossed out some of the shorter works in favor of Ulysses. More William James is never a bad idea; how about The Varieties of Religious Experience? None of the science books will age well. And how about a wee bit of Mises and Hayek to reflect the failures of socialism? Absalom, Absalom would help cover race and maybe Mill on The Subjection of Women should be there too.
Questions that are rarely asked, a continuing series
Why do affluent, middle-class, and poor voters all seem so exquisitely sensitive to election-year income growth for the wealthiest families?
Oddly, the voting of lower-income voters is relatively insensitive to their own election-year incomes. One option is that media reporting is biased toward coverage of the rich and famous. Another option is that we, as voters, are biased toward considering our pleasure or displeasure with the strength of the high-ranking members of our tribe.
That question is from Larry Bartels’s Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.
Here is a previous installment in the series.
Markets in *everything*, a continuing series
*Tenure*, the movie, starring Luke Wilson. Seriously. They are about to start shooting.
The culture that is German, a continuing series
Economic protectionism, linguistic protectionism, status protectionism, or all three?:
Americans with PhDs beware: Telling people in Germany that you’re a doctor could land you in jail. At least seven U.S. citizens working as researchers in Germany have faced criminal probes in recent months for using the title "Dr." on their business cards, Web sites and resumes. They all hold doctoral degrees from elite universities back home…Violators can face a year behind bars.
Here is the full story. And get this: "A male faculty member with two PhDs can fully expect to be called "Herr Professor Dr. Dr. Schmidt," for example."
Update: They just changed the law. I guess I should have titled this post "The earthquake that is Germany," etc. Sadly there is no medium for telling The Washington Post that their front page story this morning is wrong but of course we have a very keen reader willing to leave comments.
Department of Unintended Consequences, a continuing series
A rigorous statistical examination has found that smoking bans increase
drunken-driving fatalities. One might expect that a ban on smoking in
bars would deter some people from showing up, thereby reducing the
number of people driving home drunk. But jurisdictions with smoking
bans often border jurisdictions without bans, and some bars may skirt
the ban, so that smokers can bypass the ban with extra driving. There
is also a large overlap between the smoker and alcoholic populations,
which would exacerbate the danger from extra driving. The authors
estimate that smoking bans increase fatal drunken-driving accidents by
about 13 percent, or about 2.5 such accidents per year for a typical
county.
That’s coming out in the Journal of Public Economics, so it might even be true. Here is the short source article, which surveys other interesting results as well; worth a read.
Prophets of the Marginal Revolution, a continuing series
Guest blogger Fabio Rojas on Barack Obama, circa 2004. I remember reading that post and thinking: "Fabio is a great guest blogger, but who cares about that guy?"
The culture that is French, a continuing series
Are these consistent or contradictory points of view?
What those foreigners are missing is that French culture is surprisingly lively. Its movies are getting more imaginative and accessible. Just look at the Taxi films of Luc Besson and Gérard Krawczyk, a rollicking series of Hong Kong-style action comedies; or at such intelligent yet crowd-pleasing works as Cédric Klapisch’s L’Auberge Espagnole and Jacques Audiard’s The Beat That My Heart Skipped, both hits on the foreign art-house circuit. French novelists are focusing increasingly on the here and now: one of the big books of this year’s literary rentrée, Yasmina Reza’s L’Aube le Soir ou la Nuit (Dawn Dusk or Night) is about Sarkozy’s recent electoral campaign. Another standout, Olivier Adam’s A l’Abri de Rien (In the Shelter of Nothing), concerns immigrants at the notorious Sangatte refugee camp. France’s Japan-influenced bandes dessinées (comic-strip) artists have made their country a leader in one of literature’s hottest genres: the graphic novel. Singers like Camille, Benjamin Biolay and Vincent Delerm have revived the chanson. Hip-hop artists like Senegal-born MC Solaar, Cyprus-born Diam’s and Abd al Malik, a son of Congolese immigrants, have taken the verlan of the streets and turned it into a sharper, more poetic version of American rap.
Those would not have been my exact picks but there you go. (I was offended by L’Auberge Espagnole; could not one of them have had an internet start-up? I also found myself longing for organized religion.) Alternatively:
In a September poll of 1,310 Americans for Le Figaro magazine, only 20% considered culture to be a domain in which France excels, far behind cuisine.
Or:
Only a handful of the season’s new novels will find a publisher outside France. Fewer than a dozen make it to the U.S. in a typical year, while about 30% of all fiction sold in France is translated from English.
Most of all, the French specialize in having good taste in culture, which is a form of interior mental production. A world music buy on a French label is virtually a sure thing. The question is how good your culture can get, these days, without exporting much. Here is the full and interesting story.
Thanks to David Zetland for the pointer.
Will any future book series approach the success of Harry Potter?
I’d long wanted to offer my thoughts on this topic, so when Today’s Machining World approached me, I thought they were an ideal outlet. I wrote:
Absolutely. Most of all, the Harry Potter series is a social phenomenon. It’s not mainly about the books. It’s about kids – and often adults – sharing a common reading experience. We crave this kind of social connection – that’s what Oprah’s Book Club is about too. We like to look forward to the same books, read them at the same time, and talk about them afterwards. If you took these same kids, put them on a desert island, and just gave them copies of Harry Potter, with no further information or explanation, most of them wouldn’t be so impressed.
With the current Potter series now over, we are looking for something else to latch on to. We may not find it right away, but when we do, the world will be wealthier and have more readers. Some other book series will trump the popularity of Harry Potter – it is simply a question of when.
For a differing point of view, scroll to p.50 to read Megan McArdle, and on p.51 is Kevin Hassett.
Underappreciated economists, a continuing series
Vivian Hoffman, currently a Ph.d. candidate at Cornell. When I read this description of her research I think that modern economics is very much on the right track:
I study the economics of anti-poverty and health interventions using household survey and experimental economics methods. Most of my work to date has been in East Africa. For my dissertation research on demand for and intra-household allocation of insecticide-treated mosquito nets, I conducted fieldwork in southwestern Uganda. Ongoing projects include a study on the impact of food aid receipt on labor supply and agricultural production in Malawi, estimateing the returns to farm assets in rural Ethiopia, and an experimental investigation into the effect of stigma on HIV testing behavior. I hope to continue working at the intersection of health and development economics. My interests also include health and poverty-related issues in Canada and the United States.
Here is the abstract on her main paper:
This paper reports results from a field experiment in Uganda. Whether a mosquito net was purchased or received for free affected who within the household used the net. Free nets were more likely to be allocated to those members of the household most vulnerable to malaria, whereas purchased nets tended to be used by the household’s main income earners. The effect was strongest for free nets received by the mother, increasing the probability that all children five and younger slept under nets by 26 percent relative to when nets had been purchased by either parent or given to the father.
In other words, within the household the breadwinners have a greater practical ability to control priced goods than non-priced goods. This hints at one reason why men are often more willing to "think like economists" within the family.
You might think that Vivian has not yet done enough to be judged, but surely she has done enough to be judged as underappreciated. So go appreciate her and remove that label from her name!
Scream this from the rooftops, a continuing series
Indeed, the health-income gradient is slightly steeper in Canada than it is in the U.S.
Here is the paper (can anyone find a non-gated version?), which offers many other interesting points of comparison between the two systems. Here are previous installments in the series.
Politically Incorrect Paper, a continuing series
Several years ago Bill Cosby chided poor blacks for spending their limited incomes on high-priced shoes and other items of conspicuous consumption instead of investing in education. Cosby was widely criticized but I went to the numbers, specifically Table 2100 of the Consumer Expenditure Survey and found the following for 2003:
Average income of whites and other races: $53,292.
Average income of blacks: $34,485.
Expenditures on footwear by whites and other races: $274
Expenditures on footwear by blacks: $440.
As I noted then "to do a proper comparison we
would have to correct for income and other demographic variables." The correction has now been done by three researchers in an NBER working paper (non-gated version). The results didn’t surprise me. How about you?
Using nationally representative data on consumption, we show that
Blacks and Hispanics devote larger shares of their expenditure bundles
to visible goods (clothing, jewelry, and cars) than do comparable
Whites. We demonstrate that these differences exist among virtually all
sub-populations, that they are relatively constant over time, and that
they are economically large.
To give the authors credit where credit is due they also show that the differences in conspicuous consumption are large and important. The differences in spending on clothing, jewelry, and cars, for example, can explain half of the differences in wealth between the races (conditional on permanent income) and a significant share of the differences in education and health spending.
Why do these differences exist? Aside from simple differences in preferences, signaling is one possible explanation. Suppose that high income confers status. Other people judge your income based on your conspicuous consumption and your group’s income. Under plausible conditions, the authors show that if your group’s income is already high conspicuous consumption has a low marginal product. Put differently a black man who wears a very expensive suit gets a bigger increase in status than a white man who wears the same expensive suit because the baseline income prediction is lower for the former.
The theory is plausible but I wonder if other groups haven’t converged on more efficient methods of signaling. Some groups, for example, use education as a signal. Other groups like to show how clever they are by writing pithy summaries of new economics research.