Results for “age of em” 15694 found
Giving Thanks
I went to Wegman’s less than 24 hours before Thanksgiving and purchased a turkey, yams, cranberries, a pumpkin pie, wine, cranberry cheese, fresh bread, peanut butter and some more wine. Not a single item was in short supply let alone in shortage. I give thanks for capitalism.
The rise of randomized trials in economic research
Using randomized prospective trials in economic development policy is not new. Since the 1960s, the U.S. has occasionally implemented them to answer important practical questions in health care, welfare and education policy. By randomly splitting people into two groups, one of which receives an experimental intervention, researchers can set up potentially simple, unbiased comparisons between two approaches. But these evaluations typically cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars, largely putting them out of reach of academic researchers, says development economist Abhijit Banerjee of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The emergence of cheap, skilled labor in India and other countries during the 1990s changed that, Banerjee says, because these workers could collect the data inexpensively. At the same time, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were proliferating and started looking for ways to evaluate their antipoverty programs.
In 2003 Banerjee and his colleagues Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan founded an M.I.T. institute devoted to the use of randomized trials, called the Poverty Action Lab. Lab members have completed or begun a variety of projects, including studies of public health measures, small-scale loans (called microcredit), the role of women in village councils, AIDS prevention, and barriers to fertilizer use. The studies typically piggyback on the expansion of an NGO or government program. Researchers work with the organization to select appropriate measures of the program’s outcome and hire an agency to collect or spot-check the data.
Here is the full story. Here is the home page of Poverty Action Lab. Here are their completed projects. Here is the Primary School Deworming Project. And on this Thanksgiving weekend, I once again express my gratitude for the link from www.politicaltheoryinfo.com.
Rational man
Thousands of pilgrims are pouring into the dense jungle of southern Nepal to worship a 15-year-old boy who has been hailed as a new Buddha.
Devotees say that Ram Bomjon, who is meditating silently beneath a tree, has not eaten or had anything to drink since he sat down at his chosen spot six months ago.
Witnesses say they have seen light emanating from the teenager’s forehead. "It looks a bit like when you shine a [flashlight] through your hand," said Tek Bahadur Lama, a member of the committee responsible for dealing with the growing number of visitors from India and elsewhere in Nepal.
Photographs of Ram, available for about 10 cents from his makeshift shrine, have become ubiquitous across the region. "Far and wide, it’s the only topic of conversation," said Upendra Lamichami, a local journalist…Ram’s mother, who is called Maya Devi, like the Buddha’s mother, acknowledges anxiety, particularly at mealtimes, but she tells herself: "God took him to the forest and I have faith that God will feed him."
"He’s definitely got thinner," she said. "Early in the morning he looks sunken, like there’s no blood in him, but as the sun rises he seems to get brighter and brighter."He said no claim had emerged of Ram breaking his fast or moving, even to relieve himself.
Santa Raj Subedi, the chief government official in Bara District, appealed to the capital, Katmandu, for assistance in dealing with the influx of visitors, and for a team of scientists to examine the case.
Local doctors failed to reach a final conclusion, although they were allowed no closer than five yards from the boy mystic, declaring that they could confirm no more than that he was alive.The fervor increased last week when a snake is said to have bitten Ram, and a curtain was drawn around him.
After five days it was opened and he spoke. "Tell the people not to call me a Buddha. I don’t have the Buddha’s energy. I am at the level of rinpoche [lesser divinity]. A snake bit me but I do not need treatment. I need six years of deep meditation."
Despite his protestations, "Buddha boy" is famous.
A thriving market has grown in the once pristine forest, supplying pilgrims with everything from chewing tobacco and bicycle repairs to incense and religious amulets. The ground is covered with litter.
A fence was built around Ram’s tree to prevent pilgrims from prodding him, then a second, and now a third is planned, as well as a bus park, leaving Ram at the center of an ever-growing circle of commerce.
Here is the link.
Intellectual megalomaniacs deserve attention
Among contemporary writers, perhaps no one deserves a retrospective anthology at midcareer as much as William T. Vollmann, whose staggering rate of production has made it all but impossible to keep up with him—just blink and it seems he has brought out yet another doorstop. Since his debut novel, You Bright and Risen Angels: A Cartoon, appeared in 1987, he has completed four outsize installments of his magnificent Seven Dreams project, a "symbolic history" related through novels that stretch back in time to the first Norse incursions into Greenland and Newfoundland, and portray the clashes of European colonizers and their descendants with indigenous North Americans. He has also published The Atlas, a collage of dispatches from some of the world’s riskiest locales; An Afghanistan Picture Show, or, How I Saved the World, a memoir of sorts recounting his 1982 trip in search of mujahideen at war with the Soviets; Europe Central, just out this spring, a collection of fictionalized portraits that explore the lives of intriguing and often morally ambiguous figures who lived under the twin totalitarian evils of Stalinism and Nazism, with emphasis on the war years; and five books, set in the present, that have emerged from his abiding fascination with prostitutes, mostly, along with a supporting cast of urban-underbelly types. Alternately hard-edged and lyrical, lurid and incandescent, Vollmann’s visions of contemporary life—especially in Whores for Gloria and the monumental Royal Family, in which he’s forged a phantasmagorical urban realism to chronicle San Francisco’s lower depths—are shot through with brutality, yearning, and fever-dreams that fuse squalor and transcendence.
As extensive as this listing of works is, it falls well short of encompassing the full cyclone of Vollmann’s creativity, which also includes poems, reviews, occasional pieces, and even numerous "book objects," which feature his own artwork along with contributions by collaborators such as photographer and friend Ken Miller. At the core of his oeuvre, though, is what he himself describes as his life’s work, some twenty years in the making, the seven-volume, 3,352-page treatise Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom, and Urgent Means, first published by McSweeney’s in 2003 and reissued in a single-volume abridgment last year by Ecco Press. Toiling in a sweatshop of his own devising, clocking up to sixteen hours a day at his desk, the forty-five-year-old Vollmann has exacted a considerable toll on his body at a relatively young age. In his 1998 essay "Writing," considering his "swollen and aching fingers," he tells how "sometimes the ache oozes up to my shoulders, sometimes only to my wrists; once or twice I’ve felt it in my back. Poor posture, they say, or ‘repetitive stress injury,’ or possibly carpal tunnel. . . . Writing is bad for me physically, without a doubt, but what would I do if I stopped?"
Here is the longer and fascinating story. Here is my previous post on Vollmann, and do offer comments if you have read his works.
Gambling on Science
In 1990 my colleague Robin Hanson wrote:
Imagine a betting pool or market on most disputed science questions, with
the going odds available to the popular media, and treated socially as the
current academic consensus. Imagine that academics are expected to "put up
or shut up" and accompany claims with at least token bets, and that
statistics are collected on how well people do….This would be an "idea futures" market, which I offer as an alternative to
existing academic social institutions.
More and more it looks like Robin was right on. Consider this story from the London Times:
WHEN Ladbrokes teamed up with New Scientist magazine
in August last year to offer odds on five great breakthroughs being made by
2010, it looked like a typical silly-season stunt.It is now expected to become a very expensive one. As soon as the book
opened, physicists began to put their money where their theories were and backed
themselves to find gravitational waves – ripples in space and time predicted by
Albert Einstein but not yet proven to exist.Alan Watson, of the University of Leeds, was astounded
to see odds of 500-1 on a discovery that he considered a matter of when, not if,
and promptly wagered £50.So many other scientists did likewise that by lunchtime Professor Jim Hough,
of the University of Glasgow, who leads a team seeking the waves, was allowed to
stake only £25 at odds that had fallen to 100-1. When his colleague Sheila Rowan
placed her bet in the early afternoon, the odds were down to 5-1, and when the
book was closed they were 2-1.
It’s amazing how far we have come since Robin proposed idea futures, especially given that the idea could have been implemented hundreds of years ago. But Robin’s vision is even more radical than betting markets. Robin proposes that betting markets can substitute for many of the funding arrangements that we use today. Consider the part of the quote I excised above:
Imagine that funding
agencies subsidize pools on questions of interest to them, and that
research labs pay for much of their research with winnings from previous
pools.
Imagine indeed! We are not there yet but the odds are increasing in Robin’s favor.
Review of File-Sharing Papers
Rufus Pollock draws the following conclusions from the literature on file-sharing:
The basic result is that online illegal file-sharing does have a
negative impact on traditional sales. The size of this effect is
debated, and ranges from 0 to 100% of the sales decline in recent
years, but a figure of between 20 and 40% would be a reasonable
consensus value (i.e. that file-sharing accounted for 20-40% of the
decline in sales not a 20-40% decline in sales).
Beyond this
basic result several other very interesting facts have emerged.First
is the differential impact of file-sharing on an artist depending on
their existing popularity. According to Blackburn who investigates this
issue the ‘bottom’ 3/4 of artists sell more as a consequence of
file-sharing while the top 1/4 sell less.Second is the first tentative estimates (by Waldfogel and Rob) of the
welfare consequences of file-sharing. Waldfogel and Rob’s dramatic
result is that file-sharing on average yields a gain to society three
times the loss to the music industry in lost sales.
The conclusion seems right to me – file-sharing increases social-welfare, so in theory a win-win solution is possible, but in practice the increase comes at the expense of music firms. See here for the blog post and here for a summary of each of the main papers in the literature.
Hat-tip to Cory Doctorow at Boing-Boing Blog.
China fact of the day — life insurance for bird flu
Some Chinese insurance companies are taking a big chance on the possible spread of avian influenza among humans as an opportunity to expand their business. Beijing Minsheng Life Insurance on November 7th was first to launch a policy that would pay the insured if they are infected by the H5N1 virus. Four days later, Shenzhen based Hua-an Property Insurance followed. The Hua’an policy costs 100 yuan for each 200,000 yuan of compensation. It is valid for a year for anyone aged 3 to 70. Analysts say the odds are that the two insurers will make money given what they consider is the low probability of a serious pandemic.
SimonWorld comments. In my view, the business model captures pure profit. If avian flu kills many humans, the company would in any case go bankrupt. In the meantime it rakes in cash from "positive selection," which is the opposite of adverse selection. Often the people who buy insurance are the super-safe ninnies, afraid they might not do something they were supposed to. On the other hand, if you are still a chicken culler in China, you are probaby somewhat reckless, or too poor to buy life insurance.
The first ever signed copy of Freakonomics
What will it go for? Proceeds will be directed to charity.
Thanks to Tim Harford for the pointer, and of course use the comments to guess what it will go for, no sarcasm please!
How to get bigger tips
Scrawling a patriotic message on a restaurant tab is a great way to boost tips — at least in northern Utah. Communications professors John S. Seiter of Utah State University and and Robert H. Gass of California State University at Fullerton instructed two waitresses to serve up four different types of bills to 100 diners at two local restaurants.
The servers wrote "United We Stand," and "God Bless America" or "Have a nice day" on the bills. A control group received no personal note.
Patrons gave a 20 percent tip on tabs that included "United We Stand" but only 15 percent when they got no message at all. The other two messages garnered slightly more than 15 percent, Seiter and Gass reported in a recent article in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology.
That is Richard Morin from The Washington Post, someday the link will show up here. You can buy the article here. Here is my previous post about tipping.
Why is welfare losing political popularity?
I mean welfare programs in the narrower sense of targeted redistribution to the poor, not transfer programs per se. Robert Moffitt, editor of the American Economic Review, offers some hypotheses in a recent interview:
…increased labor force participation of middle-class women was part of the cause [of falling popularity]. That transformation really changed the attitude of voters. Once a large percentage of middle-class women were working and putting their children into day care, the public began to question why we shouldn’t expect the same thing from poor women. There was no longer the support for paying women to stay at home with their children, which was the goal of the original legislation in 1935.
Another turn against welfare, I think, has to do with the changing composition of the welfare caseload. In the 1960s, the caseload was largely composed of divorced women. One could imagine that members of the middle class, while not looking favorably upon divorce, understood it because many of them were getting divorced too. But by the 1980s, the caseload started to become composed largely of young women who had never been married and were having children out of wedlock. That is a completely different group, and the middle class had a great deal less sympathy toward those women.
A final factor is that I think the attitudes among women receiving welfare changed. If you look at attitudinal studies from the early 1990s, many welfare recipients said that they didn’t like welfare, that they thought other women were gaming the system to stay on welfare, and were not really trying to improve their lives. Welfare recipients had incorporated the social norms of the middle class. And once the legislation led some recipients to move off welfare, it had a snowball effect. They began to exert social pressure on other women to find work. I think that increased stigma within poor populations made it easier to overhaul the welfare system. But it took a major shock; incremental reform would not have done it.
Here is the full interview, which is interesting throughout, from the Richmond Fed’s Region Focus.
The Treaty of Tripoli
In the late 1790s the US was having difficulty with Muslim pirates in the waters off Northern Africa. After some difficulty, a treaty was signed in 1796 with the Bey of Tripoli promising friendship, trade and an end to hostilities. The 11th article of the treaty provides a remarkable contrast between how these sorts of issues were handled by the founders and how they are handled today. It reads:
As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense
founded on the Christian Religion; as it has in itself no character of
enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen; and as
the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility
against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no
pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an
interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
The Treaty was read aloud in the Senate and approved unanimously. In his proclamation John Adams said, "I John Adams, President of the United States of America, having seen
and considered the said Treaty do, by and with the advice consent of
the Senate, accept, ratify, and confirm the same, and every clause and
article thereof." The treaty was published in a number of leading newspapers. It never aroused any opposition.
The Mansion Wars
John Tierney had an excellent column on "mansionization" in yesterday’s NYTimes (I am cited). Unfortunately, it’s behind the great wall (which I predict will be down within 6 months) but here are some key grafs:
In the town where I live, a once placid Washington suburb, the mayor has just sent out a letter asking the natives to stop throwing eggs at each other’s homes. Such is life on the front lines of the anti-mansionization war….
My first impulse was to side with the mansionizers [because]…of my knee jerk libertarian reaction to the moralizers…Who were they to control other people’s property?…But when I talked to housing experts, they pointed to another message from the market… A majority of new homes in rapidly growing urban areas are in communities governed by private homeowners assocations that impose much stricter rules than governments do.
Some people chafe at the restrictions [but] Amanda Agan and Alexander Tabarrok…found that a home in the Virginia suburbs of Washington that was part of a private community typically sold for 5 percent more than a similar home nearby not governed by a homeowners association…
[M]ost people apparently want aesthetics to be regulated – not by politicians at the city or county level, but by homeowners in the neighborhood. That’s why the developers of private communities write constitutions that give so much power to the homeowners associations…Those founding fathers learned by trial and error that empowering local busybodies is the best way to maximize home values and minimize strife.
Aesthetic and other rights held by homeowner assocations and condominiums are a relatively new but rapidly growing type of property, the private but collective property right. Figuring out the best form for these rights will be an evolutionary process but one that is greatly aided by the fact that developers and homeowners have the same incentives – to make the home as valuable as possible.
Addendum: Art Woolf points me to the Rutland Herald which has Tierney’s column in full.
Torture, terrorism, and incentives
President Bush, Dick Cheney and others who support the use of torture by the United States and its agents usually rely on the ticking time bomb argument. Sometimes torture is necessary to prevent a greater evil. I accept this argument. If my kid were kidnapped and the suspect was refusing to talk, I’d want Vic Mackey to do the questioning.
But it does not follow from the "ticking time bomb" argument that torture should be legal. The problem with making torture legal is that the government will abuse its powers. I do not trust the government, any government, to use this power responsibly. Leviathan must be heavily restrained, especially when it comes to torture.
Here is where economics can make a contribution. By making torture illegal we are raising the price of torture but we are not raising the price to infinity. If the President or the head of the CIA thinks that torture is required to stop the ticking time bomb then they ought to approve it knowing full well that they face possible prosecution. Only if the price of torture is very high can we expect that it will be used only in the most absolutely urgent of circumstances.
The torture victim faces incredible pain and perhaps death at the hands of his torturer. If these costs are to be born by the victim then we had better make damn sure that the benefits are also high and the only way we can do that is to make the torturer also bear some of the costs. Torture must not be cheap.
My avian flu policy paper
The piece is about forty pages, here is the pdf link. Your comments are welcome, either below or by email. You already have heard bits and pieces of this: pro-intellectual property, pro-decentralization, and skeptical of quarantine and centralized stockpiles. A good plan also should prove useful for catastrophes other than avian flu. Here is the Executive Summary of the piece:
To combat a possible avian flu pandemic, we should consider the following:
1. The single most important thing we can do for a pandemic–whether
avian flu or not–is to have well-prepared local health care systems. We
should prepare for pandemics in ways that are politically sustainable
and remain useful even if an avian flu pandemic does not occur.2. Prepare social norms and emergency procedures which would limit
or delay the spread of a pandemic. Regular hand washing, and other
beneficial public customs, may save more lives than a Tamiflu stockpile.3. Decentralize our supplies of anti-virals and treat timely distribution as more important than simply creating a stockpile.
4. Institute prizes for effective vaccines and relax liability laws
for vaccine makers. Our government has been discouraging what it should
be encouraging.5. Respect intellectual property by buying the relevant drugs and
vaccines at fair prices. Confiscating property rights would reduce the
incentive for innovation the next time around.6. Make economic preparations to ensure the continuity of food and
power supplies. The relevant “choke points” may include the check
clearing system and the use of mass transit to deliver food supply
workers to their jobs.7. Realize that the federal government will be largely powerless in
the worst stages of a pandemic and make appropriate local plans.8. Encourage the formation of prediction markets in an avian flu
pandemic. This will give us a better idea of the probability of
widespread human-to-human transmission.9. Provide incentives for Asian countries to improve their
surveillance. Tie foreign aid to the receipt of useful information
about the progress of avian flu.10. Reform the World Health Organization and give it greater autonomy from its government funders.
We should not do the following:
1. Tamiflu and vaccine stockpiling have their roles but they should
not form the centerpiece of a plan. In addition to the medical
limitations of these investments, institutional factors will restrict
our ability to allocate these supplies promptly to their proper uses.2. We should not rely on quarantines and mass isolations. Both tend
to be counterproductive and could spread rather than limit a pandemic.3. We should not expect the Army or Armed Forces to be part of a useful response plan.
4. We should not expect to choke off a pandemic in its country of
origin. Once a pandemic has started abroad, we should shut schools and
many public places immediately.5. We should not obsess over avian flu at the expense of other
medical issues. The next pandemic or public health crisis could come
from any number of sources. By focusing on local preparedness and
decentralized responses, this plan is robust to surprise and will also
prove useful for responding to terrorism or natural catastrophes.
Cosby was Correct
In Debunking Cosby on Blacks Washington Post columnist Michelle Singletary attacks Bill Cosby for his speech last year to the NAACP.
Poor blacks are bad parents because they waste what little money they have
buying high-priced, brand-name shoes, Cosby chided.
"All this child knows is gimme, gimme, gimme," Cosby said, according to
a transcript of the speech. "They are buying things for the kid. $500 sneakers.
For what?"
Cosby was lauded by white conservatives and some blacks for being brave
enough to speak out. But like the price of sneakers that Cosby got wrong, he was
incorrect about much of what he said.…the comedian was rattling off
nonsense much like his Fat Albert character Mushmouth.
I was curious so I went to 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.
The survey then lists expenditures on a wide variety of goods from eggs and fish to books and televisions; to do a proper comparison we would have to correct for income and other demographic variables but some figures just jump out at you, including this:
Expenditures on footwear by whites and other races: $274
Expenditures on footwear by blacks: $440.
Chalk one up for the good Dr. Cosby.