The Dark Triad across academic majors?
In general, I am skeptical of such results and their typical interpretations, still economics plays a role in this paper and perhaps it is worth at least a casual ponder:
The Dark Triad traits (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) have been associated with the desire for power, status, and social dominance in the workplace, and these desires have been hypothesized to draw Dark Triad individuals towards occupations affording such outcomes. Following this reasoning, the Dark Triad may also influence educational choices. Research in other personality traits has shown that Big Five traits impact educational choices: Students in different academic majors differ on Big Five traits at enrollment. The aim of the present study was to explore whether there are also pre-existing Dark Triad differences across academic majors. Accordingly, the Big Five and the Dark Triad traits were measured in a sample of newly enrolled students (N = 487) in different academic majors (psychology, economics/business, law, and political science), and mean scores were compared. Group differences in the Big Five personality traits largely replicated previous findings. Group differences in the Dark Triad traits were also found and included medium and large effect sizes with the largest differences being between economics/business students (having high Dark Triad scores) and psychology students (having low Dark Triad scores). These findings indicate that Dark Triad as well as Big Five traits may influence educational choices.
That is from Anna Vedel and Dorthe K. Thomsen, via Rolf Degen.
So which group is more rational?
China beggar innovation fact of the day
Beggars in Jinan in China’s eastern province of Shandong use QR codes, the technology used by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s [NYSE:BABA] Alipay and Tencent Holdings Ltd.’s [HKG:0700] WeChat Wallet, in hopes of getting money transferred to them by passersby with smartphones.
One panhandler in Jinan’s Wangfu Chizi held a basket with a QR code on it, China.org.cn report, citing accounts from internet users.
The basket-bearer reportedly suffers from mental illness and the QR code was given to him by his family. When reporters’ search for him failed, local business owners said that the beggars might not be ‘working’ due to the rain, but are always around when the weather is good.
Residents living in areas frequented by tourists, such as Qushuiting Street and Wangfu Chizi, said that some local beggars use WeChat — and some even have a POS (point of sale) machine.
Here is the link.
Saturday assorted links
1. The best short guide I’ve seen to Lagos.
2. “At 2,573 pages, it contains a complete account of Sloterdijk’s sphero-immunological thoughts.”
3. A failed artist ponders his own work and history, recommended.
4. What happened to Google book search? Excellent piece, also recommended.
5. Interview with Dave Donaldson, Clark award winner.
6. Christopher Caldwell on Christophe Guilluy, the French thinker who is having an impact today.
When Labor is Cheap
Labor is cheap in India which leads to some differences from the United States.
The first couple of times I took a taxi to a restaurant I was surprised when the driver asked if I wanted him to wait. A waiting taxi would be an unthinkable expense for me in the United States but in India the drivers are happy to wait for $1.50 an hour. It still feels odd.
The cars, the physical capital, in India and the United States are similar so the low cost of transportation illustrates just how much of the cost of a taxi is the cost of the driver and just how much driverless cars are going to lower the cost of travel.
Everything can be delivered.
Every mall, hotel, apartment and upscale store has security. It’s all security theatre–India is less dangerous than the United States–but when security theatre can be bought for $1-$2 an hour, why not?
Offices are sometimes open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Not that anyone is in the office, just that with 24 hour security there is no reason to lock up, so the office physically stays open.
Every store has an abundance of staff. This one is puzzling since it results in worse service. Even in a tiny store, for example, it’s common to have one person tabulate the bill and then hand it to another person to ring you up. My guess is that this is an anti-theft procedure for the owner as it then requires two to collude to rip the owner off.
At offices, cleaning staff are on permanent hire so they come not once or twice a week but once or twice an hour. The excessive (?) cleanliness of the private spaces makes the contrast between private cleanliness and public squalor all the more striking.
That was then, this is now, immigration edition
Some of Trump’s first actions in office were two executive orders meant to crack down on illegal immigration by implementing tougher enforcement not just at the border but also within the country. This week The Washington Post reported that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrested 21,362 unauthorized immigrants across the country since Trump took office, a 32.6 percent increase from the previous year. (The data runs through mid-March.) At first glance these numbers might seem consistent with Trump’s promise to get “the bad ones” out of the country. But the Post also noted that of those arrested roughly a quarter, or 5,441, had no criminal record. That’s more than double the number of noncriminal arrests of undocumented immigrants during the same period in 2016. (Many of those arrested eventually will be deported, but because that process can be slow, changed enforcement patterns show up more quickly in arrest data.)
Look back a bit further, however, and the recent increase in enforcement looks less dramatic. The pace of arrests is running well behind the 29,238 made during the same period in 2014; that year, there were 7,483 noncriminal arrests through mid-March, which represented a similar share of the total as this year’s numbers.
That is from Ben Casselman, et.al. at 538.
Public sector expenditure cut when economies are not already imploding
Portugal slashed its public sector deficit by more than half in a single year, when measured as a proportion of GDP, the national statistics bureau has said, taking the shortfall comfortably below euro zone limits.
The deficit dropped to 2.1% of gross domestic product in 2016, a staggering reduction from its 4.4% level a year earlier.
This confirms Finance Minister Mario Centeno’s prediction last month that the deficit would be “not more than 2.1%”, its lowest share of GDP since the advent of democracy in 1974.
Euro zone members are required to keep their public deficits to below 3% of GDP, but some are struggling to do so.
Portugal’s public deficit shot up into the double digits during the global economic crisis, and despite an international bailout it had difficulty bringing it back down to 4.4% in 2015.
Portugal’s economy expanded by 1.4% in 2016, the national statistics institute said in February, after growing by 1.6% the previous year on the back of stronger exports and private consumption.
Here is the full piece, here is a useful Bloomberg piece on Portugal. Furthermore, by one estimate:
Greek gov’t makes a 6.8%/GDP fiscal adjustment in a single year, without any decline in country’s GDP.
You can quibble over those numbers, and yes I do agree this is bad and also not sustainable, but still people this is not exactly the Keynesian model at work.
Insider trading terrorism
German police arrested a man on Friday suspected of detonating three bombs that targeted the Borussia Dortmund soccer team bus in the hope of sending the club’s shares plummeting and making a profit on an investment, prosecutors said.
In a statement, the federal chief prosecutor said the 28-year old man, a dual German and Russian national identified as Sergei V., had bought options on Borussia Dortmund’s stock before the attack.
The team bus was heading to the club’s stadium for a Champions League match against AS Monaco on April 11 when the explosions went off, wounding Spanish defender Marc Bartra and delaying the match by a day.
Prosecutors last week expressed doubts about the authenticity of three letters left at the site of the attack that suggested that Islamist militants had carried it out.
The prosecutor’s office said the suspect had bought 15,000 put options, or contracts giving him the right to sell Borussia Dortmund’s shares at a pre-determined price, on the day of the attack, using a consumer loan he had signed a week earlier.
Here is the full story at Reuters.
Friday assorted links
1. Which body part hurts most when stung by a bee? A study in self-experimentation.
2. Autocrats build more skyscrapers.
3. Was Trump sad when he won the election?
4. How the San Francisco fire of 1906 drove subsequent land use patterns. And Canaan, Haiti’s start from scratch “city.”
5. Thwarted moon rock markets in everything.
6. How Dan Ariely manages email. In a funny way, I think he has ends and means backwards.
7. Robin Hanson’s forthcoming book now has an Amazon page, you can pre-order.
Why don’t people care more about economic inequality?
That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one bit:
One possibility is that a lot of talk about inequality gives the audience the impression that it is inevitable, and thereby renders potential remedies less urgent. Another speculation is that human beings are constantly evaluating the status of others. To the extent analysts reiterate that some group of citizens doesn’t have as much, maybe they’re actually reminding us that those citizens hold a lower social status. Perhaps subconsciously, we then respond by thinking those citizens deserve less, or by downgrading the urgency of their needs.
Another possibility is that talk about economic inequality increases political polarization, which lowers the chance of effective action. Or that criticizing American society may cause us to feel less virtuous, which in turn may cause us to act with less virtue. Perhaps if critics of inequality praised this nation more for what is has done to redress inequality, rather than criticizing it for the gaps, that might cement a self-image of Americans who are capable of tackling this problem, and thus spur interest in additional progress. That mechanism shouldn’t sound so strange to anyone who has tried to raise children.
When I bring up such points in dialogue, I’ve found that a lot of my fellow academicians retreat to the moral platitude that the “good guys” simply need to fight harder against the special interest groups. Maybe so, or maybe that response is just another way of digging in deeper to what so far has been a losing battle. The reality is that income inequality has gone up a great deal since the early 1980s, and we haven’t done so much to reverse the basic trend. The potentially egalitarian effects of tax increases under the past two Democratic presidents and Obamacare have been outweighed by globalization, which benefits most those individuals who can access global markets, and by increases in the returns to highly skilled labor. The reality is that government expenditures have not become radically more poverty-reducing over the last few decades, although we do send more resources to the elderly.
Do read the whole thing, the various biting comments about other academics are in other parts of the piece.
The Chinese influence on Hollywood box office
Two years later, the quota of imported movies permitted into China was raised to 34 from 20 in a deal negotiated between then-Vice President Joe Biden and then-Vice President Xi. The deal all but guaranteed that most big-budget Hollywood features—except those with content deemed objectionable—would be shown in China.
“I prefer to watch Hollywood films because the chance of a domestic film being crappy is much bigger than a Hollywood film,” said Liu Jing, a 25-year-old postgraduate student studying finance policy in Beijing.
Ms. Jing said she became a fan of superhero films from Marvel Studios as a high-school student and now goes to movie theaters at least once a month.
Hollywood executives can rattle off the rules for getting a movie approved by Chinese censors: no sex (too unseemly); no ghosts (too spiritual). Among 10 prohibited plot elements are “disrupts the social order” and “jeopardizes social morality.” Time travel is frowned upon because of its premise that individuals can change history.
U.S. filmmakers sometimes anticipate Chinese censors and alter movies before their release. The Oscar-winning alien-invasion drama “Arrival” was edited to make a Chinese general appear less antagonistic before the film’s debut in China this year.
The superhero hit “Logan” was 14 minutes shorter in China after Chinese censors cut scenes of beheading and impalement.
For “Passengers,” the space adventure starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, a scene showing Mr. Pratt’s bare backside was removed, and a scene of Mr. Pratt chatting in Mandarin with a robot bartender was added.
Here is the full Eric Schwartzel WSJ piece.
State income tax matters for sports team performance, Miami Heat edition bet against the Raptors
State- and local-income tax rates differ across locations, giving low-tax teams a competitive advantage when bidding for players. I investigate the effect of income tax rates on professional team performance between 1977 and 2014 using data from professional baseball, basketball, football, and hockey in the United States. Regressing income tax rates on winning percentage, I find little evidence of income tax effects prior to 1994, but since then a ten percent increase in income taxes is associated with a three percent decline in winning percentage. A robustness check using within state variation in income taxes affirms this result. The income tax rate effect varies by league, with the largest effect in professional basketball, where teams in states without income tax win 4.5 more games each year relative to high-tax states. The income tax effect is smallest in major league baseball, which could be explained by greater team payroll disparity. Placebo tests using college team performance find no evidence of an income tax effect.
The pointer is from the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Las Vegas average is over no arbitrage condition
Now operators have started scrutinizing complimentary drinks, introducing new technology at bars that track how much someone has gambled—and rewards them accordingly with alcohol. It’s a shift from decades of more-informal interplay between bartenders and gamblers.
Sports books have capitalized on big events, too. During March Madness, a five-person booth at the Harrah’s Las Vegas sports book cost $375 per person, which included five Miller Lite or Coors Light beers a person. In the past, seating at most sports books was free and first-come, first-served, even during big events. Placing a small bet or two could get you free drinks.
“The number-crunchers, the bean-counters have ruined Las Vegas,” said Brad Johnson, who lives in North Carolina and has come to Las Vegas almost every year since the early 1970s. “There’s no value to it; there’s no benefit.”
Casinos on the Strip now derive a smaller share of revenue from gambling. In 1996, more than half of annual casino revenue on the Strip came from gambling. Last year, the share was down to about a third, according to the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. More of the revenue comes from hotels, restaurants and bars.
That is from Chris Kirkham at the WSJ, via Annie Lowrey.
Thursday assorted links
Two rationality tests
If you were trying to assess a person’s rationality on the basis of one not-directly-verbal indicator, given his or her behavior over the course of a meal, what would it be?
And if you could ask only one question of a person, to assess his or her rationality, which question would it be?
That’s from me! As for the first benchmark, you cannot refer to verbal answers to questions you might ask. You could however nominate “the person hesitated for a long time before answering each question,” or something similar along the behavioral dimension. That is what I mean by “not-directly-verbal.”
Part of me wishes to suggest “are they carrying a book or not?”, but alas too many semi-rational people don’t do that. I might consider the process by which they select a menu item and order their food, as a kind of proxy for decision-making more generally. How well they treat the server would be another variable of interest.
As for the second question, I suggest asking the person who he or she thinks are the rational people. If the answer is considered and uncertain and complex, upgrade the rationality of that person. If the answer is dogmatic and refers to holding a particular doctrine…
I considered asking the person if he is himself rational, but that simply will induce lying and false modesty.
Can you think of better tests?
What will Bretton Woods 3.0 look like?
Nigel, a loyal MR reader, asks me:
Is it possible for the US to abuse the dollar’s privileged position, and do you expect a monetary conference to take place in the future that would alter the post-Bretton Woods arrangement in ways less favorable to the US?
A good question, but at current margins I don’t see many directions for movement. I don’t know whether such a monetary conference will take place, but it is unlikely to be a decisive event for shaping actual outcomes. I see these as the relevant questions:
1. Will China move to a true “free float”? And if so, what is the collateral damage along the way?
2. Will some countries leave the eurozone? (and if they do, it is a big deal for them, but probably not a big deal for the global monetary order, unless it is Italy or France)
3. Will more countries attach to the euro (Iceland?) or to the U.S. dollar (additional parts of Latin America?)
4. How many additional countries will institute capital controls?
For the most part, those questions will be decided at the national level, although for potential euro leavers the nature of the proposed EU alternative (another bailout?) will be significant.
The most likely outcome is that more countries will institute partial capital controls, and in that regard we will move closer to some aspects of the initial Bretton Woods 1.0, in which capital controls were an integral feature. Capital controls may come to keep a euro peg (already happened in Cyprus), to try to keep domestic jobs (ha, but recall Trump and Carrier), to prevent an imminent explosive capital outflow (China), to strengthen or preserve a banking system, to limit wild currency swings, or simply because governments will try all kinds of policies before admitting they have failed. Other forms of “capital controls” may come through tax reforms and regulatory barriers designed to keep capital at home.
My best guess on China is that capital outflow pressures eventually will force a free float, but only briefly, and then they will return to capital controls in some form.
So my forecast for the future is much more in the way of capital controls, but without the hegemonic/cooperative international architecture that characterized Bretton Woods 1.0.