Results for “culture that is germany” 105 found
Tuesday assorted links
1. The economic value of book awards. And “Perhaps even more impressive: the original English edition tops the current bestseller lists in both Germany and France.” Link here.
2. 538 is hiring economics writers, and MRU is hiring.
3. Even low-wage Cambodia is automating.
4. Why don’t hotels give you toothpaste? (The article could use a bit more Coase.)
5. “…we find that a surprising number of behavioral, demographic, and physiological measures (23 of 122), including fluid intelligence, reading ability, weight, and psychiatric diagnostic scales, correlate with head motion.” Very often I find that observing head motion is a good way to get better insight into people.
6. Is Hitchcock’s Marnie underrated or overrated? Is Andrew Wyeth underrated or overrated?
Modern German nationalism
There are plans to legally restrict the export of some paintings from Germany, and so far the proposed policy is not working out well. Collectors are rushing to take their loans off museum walls and get them out of the country, or hold them incognito.
The law would apply to works of historical importance more than fifty years old, worth more than 150,000 euros, and judged by regional boards to be of historic importance. It is interesting which works may fall under this designation:
In one interview, she [Germany’s culture minister] raised the prospect that foreign works could be classified as national treasures. For example, she said the Warhol silk-screens of Elvis Presley and Marlon Brando that were sold by the state-owned casino were “emblematic” of the collecting history of the Rhineland.
Apparently Gerhardt Richter is a hard-core libertarian, like most other painters, because he asserted: “No one has the right to tell me what I do with my images.”
For the pointer I thank Cyril Morong, a loyal MR reader.
Friday assorted links
1. The culture that is Wisconsin.
2. One first person account of “the wife bonus.”
3. Branko Milanovic on FIFA corruption.
4. Utah fights against homelessness.
5. Indian MIE: the “Luft-wafer.”
6. Can nostalgia boost creativity? (speculative)
7. The economics of ad blockers. And more relevant material here.
The early history of British (free?) trade
Stone Age Britons imported wheat about 8,000 years ago in a surprising sign of sophistication for primitive hunter-gatherers long viewed as isolated from European agriculture, a study showed on Thursday.
British scientists found traces of wheat DNA in a Stone Age site off the south coast of England near the Isle of Wight, giving an unexpected sign of contact between ancient hunter-gatherers and farmers who eventually replaced them.
The wheat DNA was dated to 8,000 years ago, 2,000 years before Stone Age people in mainland Britain started growing cereals and 400 years before farming reached what is now northern Germany or France, they wrote in the journal Science.
“We were surprised to find wheat,” co-author Robin Allaby of the University of Warwick told Reuters of finds at Bouldnor Cliff.
“This is a smoking gun of cultural interaction,” between primitive hunter-gatherers in Britain and farmers in Europe, he said of the findings in the journal Science.
…The find of wheat “will make us re-evaluate the relationships between farmers and hunter-gatherers,” he told Reuters.
There is more here, and the original research is here. As I’ve said in the past, believing that early trade and globalization were more extensive than is usually believed is one of my “crank views.”
Assorted links
1. Japan markets in everything. And the culture that is Japan, involves plastic wrap.
2. When it comes to immigration, the refugee gap seems to be closing.
3. Bulletproof three-piece suits.
4. Some observations on Germany’s current account surplus. I would stress the point that “countries which don’t use their borrowing or investment well” are better pinpointed as the problem. And is austerity endogenous?
5. Colorado voted decisively against investing more tax dollars in primary education.
Assorted links
1. That was then, this is now. Advances in plastic surgery.
2. On resolving the Mpemba paradox.
3. How much of the Flynn effect is a retesting gain?
4. Germany now allows “indeterminate gender” at birth as a valid category.
Another way of thinking about the European economic collapse
Let’s start with a few claims that (most) people agree with:
2. The U.S. has higher income inequality than most of Europe and our high earners have done quite well for some time.
3. Many events happen in the U.S. first.
4. The U.S. is more flexible than most European economies, though not obviously more flexible than say Germany or Sweden.
OK, let’s tie those pieces together, but please keep in mind that I consider the following to be speculative.
IT and China, taken together, seem to imply a big whack to median income. This whack should be higher for the less flexible polities, and furthermore the wealthy and the well-educated in the U.S. get back a big chunk of that money through tech innovation and IP rights. Plus we’ve had some good luck with fossil fuels and even the composition of our agriculture. If you had a country without those high earners in the tech sector, and an inflexible labor market, those economies will have to contract and I don’t just mean in a short-term cycle. Equilibrium implies negative growth for those economies, at least for a while.
By how much? If the relatively flexible U.S. lost 8% of median income, perhaps Italy and Spain and Greece have to lose 15%, but with no offsetting major gains on the upper end of the income distribution. (How flexible is Ireland or for that matter France is an interesting question and so far the answer is not obvious.)
In sum, the less flexible European economies will lose at least 15% of their gdps, due to trade and technology.
There is then the question of what the path downwards will look like and feel like. Being in the eurozone makes adjustment much harder, and brings the doom more quickly, for reasons which are by now well-discussed.
The initial path looks like this. The real sectors of those economies start to appear weaker, and this sets off some deposit flight and also a credit contraction. AD and AS fall together and set off some further negative interactions. In the case of Greece the expectation of the country being “a European economy” gets replaced with the expectation of the country being “a Balkan economy,” to the detriment of investment of course. Along the way, the true nature of the EU political equilibrium is revealed, expectations of EU cooperation decline, and that sets off further AD and AS downward spirals.
Trying “austerity” will hasten the fall, but at the same time it is hard to see how an economy contracting by 15% could in the longer run keep its previous level of government spending, or for that matter find a “good” time to do fiscal consolidation. It will appear that “austerity” is more causally important than it really is.
All sorts of particular stories will get told along the way, including the austerity story. Those stories may look true, but ultimately they are more about timing and trajectory than about fundamental causes. What I call “time compression” will very often appear to be causality.
A lot of the problems caused by fiscal consolidation are in fact “sectoral shift” problems. For instance cuts in government spending lay off workers and the Mediterranean private sector — in the midst of a significant contraction and somewhat inflexible to begin with — is unlikely to rehire those workers. The fiscal policy advocates actually have an argument against their “let monetary policy do all the work” critics, although their obsession with AD prevents them from emphasizing the sectoral shift aspects of the fiscal story, which are in fact the paramount aspects.
How much has the Greek economy contracted already? (Hard to say with black markets and bad numbers but I think at least 20%). It is predicted that the Cyprus economy will collapse by 20% over the next three years. Think of their banking sector as unsustainable in the first place, but its decline being hastened rather suddenly by the curious structure of the euro and bank runs (again, time compression). It is not crazy to expect a ten percent permanent contraction for Italy and a very slow recovery for Spain after what is already a major contraction.
By the way, UK employment is now at an all-time high, as jobs have been reshuffled to lower-value service sector activities, and out of oil and finance. Does that fit the Keynesian story? Sorry people, but I have to say “no way.” Maybe the UK economy — which is flexible but not well-geared to export and to compete internationally — is on a path to lose five or ten percent of its gdp, with or without “austerity.”
Empirically, how would one distinguish this story from a more traditional Keynesian account?
1. Both imply that “austerity” appears causally correlated with bad outcomes. (By the way, ngdp targeting is still the way to go, although the lack of such a policy is a secondary or residual problem rather than the primary problem.)
2. Given the massively high unemployment we have seen, the Keynesian account would lead us to expect corresponding rates of price deflation comparable to those of the Great Depression, such as negative ten percent. We’re seeing rates of inflation between zero and two percent, with prices often continuing to move up. Inertia in sticky wages won’t get prices moving up like that, not if AD is supposedly collapsing to an extreme degree and as a driving force. This is pretty close to a “one fact” refutation of the simple Keynesian account. Study economic history all you want, 0-2% inflation may be suboptimal but the associated AD implications simply aren’t that bad, nor will adjusting for a few VAT hikes make it so. What we get is a series of blog posts measuring AD collapse by invoking surrealistic standards, and obscure concepts from modal logic, and failing to notice that price level behavior simply does not fit the story.
3. The Keynesian account implies a fairly quick bounce back for the plagued countries which (eventually) reject “austerity” and goose up AD. The theory here implies a quick bounce back for flexible economies, economies with IP and resources, but no rapid bounce back for the euro periphery, no matter what their policies, at least short of an extremely radical and probably impossible set of structural reforms, such as making Italy into Sweden. In any case, this test has not yet been run as those countries are still on the downswing.
In this account, AD economics, including its Keynesian and neo-monetarist forms, is correct, but it is also far from the entire story.
Should B. emigrate from England?
A request from a loyal blog reader. I attended a talk in Oxford by Martin Wolf from the FT a few months ago, in which he gave a very pessimistic assessment of prospects for the British and European economies. A member of the audience asked what his advice for a young graduate entering the job market would be, and his response was ’emigrate’.
So two requests, really:
(1) Do you agree?
(2) If so, where should I go?To put things in context, I am a 21-year-old male, a final year student at Oxford University reading for a BA in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (concentrating on the latter two subjects). I have work experience in the financial sector, moderate language ability (high school level French and German, but a fast learner), and I am willing to consider a wide range of locations. I am an EU citizen, so obviously have freedom of movement within the EU. I am open to staying somewhere for a relatively long period, but at the moment I am more inclined to think of it as a below-ten-year stay. Assume, perhaps, the prospect of permanent residence is not excluded. Feel free to edit the request as appropriate for the blog.
I say:
1. The key data point is the polarization of labor market returns, including in the United Kingdom and much of Western Europe. Given that your background and reading habits signal smarts and hard work, you probably will do fine staying at home.
2. Switching languages will set you back by years, even if you are a quick study. Stick to the Anglo world, or to an English-speaking job at least.
3. It is not already obvious to B. that he should move to the United States. That’s fine, so perhaps he quite likes England already and indeed who wouldn’t? That lack of obsession with America also means he does not have a diehard commitment to maximizing pecuniary returns and that is yet further evidence he should stay in England.
4. If you want to travel and live abroad, try to start with an English multinational and then signal a willingness to move far afield. Or consider the foreign service. Or work for a year or two and then do a Jodi Ettenberg for as long as you can. All of those options sound better to me than moving to Stuttgart and trying to master the intricacies of “dass ich nicht habe lachen mussen,” (or is it “dass ich habe nicht lachen mussen”?, or do they mean different things?) while petitioning the Knigge Society for a knowledge of manners.
5. “A man who is tired of London is tired of life.”
Two tweets from Dani Rodrik
Josef Joffe is precisely wrong: Europe’s crisis IS about macroeconomics — not microeconomics: http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2012-04-16/germany-reformed-its-social-model-europe-can-too.html
I would say it is about the connection between microeconomics and macroeconomics. I understand full well that Sweden is doing fine (despite a very recent slowdown), but I do not get why so many Keynesian economists are so reluctant to condemn the legal and regulatory policies, and rent-seeking practices, of the eurozone periphery. Stronger nominal aggregate demand is called for but it cannot make everything there fine.
Unfortunately Argentina’s government has been giving unorthodox policy a bad name by associating thuggish behavior with it.
I would say this correlation is no accident, and that there are credibility reasons why many economically small countries are so reluctant to break with consensus approaches and international agreements. An Ireland trying to mimic Iceland would have had a very tough time of it, and it remains to be seen which country has the stronger long-run prospects. Moisés Naim put it well:
Argentina suffers from high inflation, slowing economic growth, ballooning subsidies, price controls, capital flight, decaying infrastructure and a less than welcoming environment for foreign investors.
Perhaps the good news is this:
It has had limited access to the international financial system since defaulting on its debts in 2001.
We should expect unorthodox approaches and thuggish behavior to be correlated, even if there is no causal connection between the two. If you then think of the choice variable as “political culture,” rather than “policy today,” that suggests unorthodox approaches are not nearly as good as they may seem upon first glance.
Apprenticeships v. College
In my post, College has been oversold, I discussed the 40% college dropout rate. In a piece in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education, Tuning in to the Dropping Out, I reprise some of this material but also discuss high school dropouts and the importance of alternative education paths.
In the 21st century, an astounding 25 percent of American men do not graduate from high school. A big part of the problem is that the United States has paved a single road to knowledge, the road through the classroom. “Sit down, stay quiet, and absorb. Do this for 12 to 16 years,” we tell the students, “and all will be well.” Lots of students, however, crash before they reach the end of the road. Who can blame them? Sit-down learning is not for everyone, perhaps not even for most people. There are many roads to an education.
Consider those offered in Europe. In Germany, 97 percent of students graduate from high school, but only a third of these students go on to college. In the United States, we graduate fewer students from high school, but nearly two-thirds of those we graduate go to college. So are German students poorly educated? Not at all.
Instead of college, German students enter training and apprenticeship programs—many of which begin during high school. By the time they finish, they have had a far better practical education than most American students—equivalent to an American technical degree—and, as a result, they have an easier time entering the work force. Similarly, in Austria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland, between 40 to 70 percent of students opt for an educational program that combines classroom and workplace learning.
…In the United States, “vocational” programs are often thought of as programs for at-risk students, but that’s because they are taught in high schools with little connection to real workplaces. European programs are typically rigorous because the training is paid for by employers who consider apprentices an important part of their current and future work force. Apprentices are therefore given high-skill technical training that combines theory with practice—and the students are paid! Moreover, instead of isolating teenagers in their own counterculture, apprentice programs introduce teenagers to the adult world and the skills, attitudes, and practices that make for a successful career.
For more see Launching the Innovation Renaissance and–showing the opportunity for consensus on this topic–a recent post on apprenticeships from the Shanker blog.
Assorted links
“The moral superiority of the Germans”
Ryan Avent tweeted:
Dear
@tylercowen, Germany and the periphery ARE morally equivalent.
How might a response go? Not an argument that German citizens are morally superior to other Europeans; that would be false and indeed repugnant. I mean the kind of “system-wide” moral judgments that progressives offer up when they judge the institutions of Denmark to be superior to the institutions of Mexico, of course without ever judging the residing individuals per se. Let’s play at intellectual Turing test — with no commitment to endorsing these views — and draw up a short list of, dare I so label them, (ostensible) German moral superiorities:
1. When it comes to default, there is no moral equivalence of debtor and creditor. The debtor is the one breaking the agreement and breaking his word.
2. When it comes to debt, the periphery countries simply don’t want to pay up. Their national wealth is many times their gdp and thus much much greater than their debts, even for Greece. It’s amazing how many people won’t come out and utter or recognize this simple truth. Italy for instance doesn’t have to make a huge fiscal adjustment.
3. It is a privilege for a poorer country to be in an economic union with Germany, France, the Netherlands, and other wealthy EU countries, just as you might feel privileged to co-author a piece with a great scholar. If the poorer countries have to engage in some economic sacrifice to stay on good terms in such a union, so be it. There is also such a thing as catch-up growth, and it is robust in the broader world today, at least if a country is willing, like the East Asian countries have been, or for that matter Turkey and Brazil these days. The sacrifices being asked from the periphery countries are quite small in comparison.
4. We did a deal with East Germany, and the terms of that deal violated a lot of precepts of economic theory. It even included an overvalued currency for the poorer region and a long period of adjustment. Yet we insisted up front that all dealings be done on the terms of the more successful region and culture, with very little compromise. This transition, for all of its short-term flaws, will go down in the history books as a great long-run success. In part it succeeded because it was all done on the terms of the values of the successful nations of northwestern Europe. (I am surprised that this angle is not discussed more in the press, given Merkel’s own story.)
5. Economic unions do not succeed by lowering all members to the standards of the economically less successful and less responsible members.
6. If it wasn’t for us, would Greece, Spain, and Italy (plus Ireland and Belgium) all currently have technocratic, reform-oriented governments as they do?
7. If you are trying to estimate the future economic fate of a country, shouldn’t you put aside a bit gdp drops and the like, and instead look at what do people in that country esteem and which values are transmitted by their system of education? Do read the Estonia story at the previous link.
8. The German emphasis on rules, and the attachment to the idea of an abstract order, worthy of loyalty in its own right, above and beyond any immediate personal connection or loyalty, is exactly what makes them able to run such a successful economy and successful social welfare state. When it says “Don’t Walk,” they don’t cross the street, even if no cars are coming. An economic union should be set up to support those principles, not tear them down, and social democrats should value this most of all.
Even if you disagree with these perspectives, they shape real world behavior. And might you still bet on a country which stuck to them? Be honest now. Let’s go back into intellectual Turing test mode:
9. One clear warning sign of trouble is when you see “trade imbalances” put at the center of the argument, as if “being very productive” and “not being productive enough” were somehow the same kind of disease.
10. There is a view something like “Germany has benefited from the eurozone, and therefore it is obliged to…”, as if those arguments were stronger than the nine principles outlined above. By the way, might left-wing American intellectuals occasionally engage in a bit of transference and view Germany as a stand-in for the American top earners, the American financial system, and so on? It isn’t.
11. Another doozy is to think the problem is due to some weird German obsession with Weimar-era inflation, as if there is a need to apologize for an elderly uncle who went bonkers. I would instead start with the simpler point that Germany does not want to transfer resources to countries which do not wish to pay back their creditors, and which will not commit to good economic policy in the future.
Let’s move out of Turing mode and back to Tyler. I believe that the Germans have approached this crisis with some bad economic theories, a lack of understanding of how government spending cuts can be self-defeating in the short run, and a good deal of more or less deliberate self-deception about its partners in the union, not to mention Germany’s own ability and willingness to act “fully European.” I’m also not sure that Germany has a path out of this which leaves their own financial system intact. You can rack up the moral and practical minus points there in considerable number. That said, I see a lot of intellectuals dismissing the perspective outlined above, rather than figuring out why it makes so much sense to so many people, not just in Germany. I think the financial elites in the periphery countries themselves actually see it quite clearly.
The result is significant misunderstandings about what can happen and will happen in the eurozone. Germany cannot and will not drop its moral perspective, even if there is some theory — and yes theory is the right word here, because no one knows these broad guarantees will work — of how a broader and far more costly commitment can set things right.
In reading American discussions of the eurozone, I am frequently reminded of earlier discussions of the Soviet Union. Most outsiders simply didn’t realize how little social capital was left in the system, though some of the Soviet insiders did. Might the same be true of the eurozone? I’m not calling these countries corrupt, rather there may be remarkably little cross-national cultural capital, and remarkably little deep public support for a costly EU bargain, so little that many German (and other) insiders know that no grand bargain can be sustained or even seriously attempted.
I believe we need to be exposed to this moral perspective, and this intellectual Turing test, as a bracing slap in the face, as a wake-up call, and I see our unwillingness to do anything with this perspective, other than summarily dismiss it as a kind of tragic juvenile moralizing, as a sign of our own decline, right here in the USofA.
Addendum: This piece is actually pretty good.
Assorted links
1. The pecan thieves, many of them will be felons.
2. Mexican economy slated to grow at 5.5% this year, in spite of drug war escalation.
4. TGS and Canada.
5. The fate of the arts in Norway?, and the UK tax on athletes isn’t working.
Best non-fiction books of 2011
I’ve already covered best economics books, best fiction, and the very best books. General non-fiction remains missing. It’s been a very good year, and these are the other non-fiction books which I really liked, a stronger list than the year before:
Anatol Lieven, Pakistan: A Hard Country.
Daniel Treisman, The Return: Russia’s Journey from Gorbachev to Medvedev.
Frank Brady, Bobby Fischer’s Remarkable Rise and Fall — from America’s Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness.
Javier Cercas, The Anatomy of a Moment: Thirty-Five Minutes in History and Imagination. In the waning of Franco’s time, how did Spain turn away from military rule and toward democracy? Can a mediocre man make a difference in history simply by retreating at the right moment? Can a political life boil down to a single response, under gunfire at that? Half of this book is brilliant writing, the other half is brilliant writing combined with obscure, hard-to-follow 1970s Spanish politics (does Adrian Bulli understand the life of John Connally? I don’t think so). Cercas is a novelist, intellect, and historian all rolled into one, and he is sadly underrated in the United States. There’s nothing quite like this book. On top of everything else, if you can wade through the thicket, it is an excellent public choice account of autocracy.
Hamid Dabashi, Shi’ism: Religion of Protest.
Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life. This vivid biography brings its subject to life through the extensive use of correspondence and quotation. The reader gets an excellent feeling of how Bismarck’s government actually worked, his intensity and also his mediocrities, and also the importance of Bismarck in building up Germany as a European power. The story is as gripping as a good novel. Sadly, almost no attention is paid to the origins of the welfare state. Still, this has received rave reviews and rightly so.
Daniel Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts.
Jacques Pepin, The Origin of Aids.
Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created.
Mara Hvistendahl, Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men.
David Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Peoples, and their Regions.
Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. Funny thing is, I read this on Kindle, didn’t have a physical copy to put in “my pile,” had no visual cue as to the continuing existence of the book, and thus I forget to cover it on MR. I enjoyed it very much.
John Gimlette, Wild Coast: Travels on South America’s Untamed Edge. This book covers Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. A revelation, I loved it. Could Gimlette be my favorite current travel writer?
Robert F. Moss, Barbecue: The History of an American Institution.
Anna Reid, Leningrad: The Epic Siege of World War II.
John Sutherland, Lives of the Novelists, A History of Fiction in 294 Lives. I’ll blog about this remarkable book soon.
What is striking is how many “big books” make this list, and that is exactly what you would expect in an age of Twitter, namely that a lot of shorter books are being outcompeted — aesthetically though not always economically — by on-line reading.
Here is the best “best books” list I’ve seen so far, apart from my lists of course.
Assorted links
1. Jazz for cows, via Chris F. Masse, excellent video.
3. New Cochran and Harpending blog.
4. Interesting interview with Robert Lucas and why he voted for Obama.
5. The pessimism and optimism of Matt Yglesias.
6. Rumored version of the EU plan in the works, involves lots of leverage! Not ready until November 4th, according to this report. Caveat emptor, but to me it sounds plausible as a prediction. Can work if Germany is willing to guarantee the trillions.