Results for “age of em” 15666 found
My favorite things Tennessee
Music: Who is really from Tennessee? Putting the Sun Records and Nashville crowds aside and focusing on birth, you have Lester Flatt, Dolly Parton, Tina Turner, and Aretha Franklin. Honorable mention to Chet Atkins and Isaac Hayes. Add in Bessie Smith and yes I enjoy Justin Timberlake too. Brownie McGee and Sleepy John Estes round out the blues representation. A strong category, and if you count "recorded in Tennessee," it hits the stratosphere.
Elvis Presley song: (Marie’s the Name) His Latest Flame.
Author: James Agee, Let us Now Praise Famous Men. Tennessee Williams does not fit, despite his name. There is not much to choose from here.
Film, set in: Here is a list, but I don’t much like Nashville or The Coal Miner’s Daughter. How about the final scene of Goldfinger?
Director: Quentin Tarantino. He is overrated but Reservoir Dogs is a classic.
Artist: Robert Ryman, here is one image, and no need to write and tell me this is ridiculous. Red Grooms is an alternative pick. There is William Edmondson, if you wish to go the "Outsider" route.
Comments are open…
The future of the book trade?
With its snazzy new "Great Ideas" series released this month, Penguin Books hopes to provide an economical remedy for time-pressed readers in search of intellectual sustenance.
Each of the paperbacks costs $8.95 and offers readers a sampling of the world’s great non-fiction. For example, the Gibbon book is a slim 92-page selection called The Christians and the Fall of Rome. It presents Gibbon as sort of an intellectual tapas to be savored in one sitting.
Here is the full story. Like it or not, I see the non-fiction sector as heading toward shorter and shorter books. Can you do one hundred pages on monetary policy? Get this:
Because "we want readers to be able to get close to the text," the books do not have introductions or prefaces, Penguin publisher Kathryn Court says. "It’s daunting. There are so many books and so little time."
When do creators do their best work?
Randall Jarrell similarly observed that "[Wallace] Stevens did what no other American poet has ever done, what few poets have ever done: wrote some of his best and newest and strangest poems during the last year or two of a very long life."
In contrast:
[Jean-Luc] Godard has directed scores of movies in a career that continues today in its fifth decade, but there is a strong critical consensus that his most important single work is his first full-length movie, Breathless, which he made in 1960 at the age of 30.
Those two passages are from David W. Galenson’s forthcoming Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity. Here is a related working paper. Here are many other interesting papers.
My question: Which economists have done extremely important work after the age of 50? Have done their best work after 50? After 40? Comments are open, I welcome your suggestions but it is not easy…
A Bush plan for avian flu
President Bush said today that he was working to prepare the United States for a possibly deadly outbreak of avian flu. He said he had weighed whether to quarantine parts of the country and also whether to employ the military for the difficult task of enforcing such a quarantine.
"It’s one thing to shut down your airplanes, it’s another thing to prevent people from coming in to get exposed to the avian flu," he said. Doing so, Mr. Bush said, might even involve using "a military that’s able to plan and move."
The president had already raised, in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the delicate question of giving the military a larger role in responding to domestic disasters. His comment today appeared to presage a concerted push to change laws that limit military activities in domestic affairs.
Mr. Bush said he knew that some governors, all of them commanders of their states’ National Guards, resented being told by Washington how to use their Guard forces.
"But Congress needs to take a look at circumstances that may need to vest the capacity of the president to move beyond that debate," Mr. Bush said. One such circumstance, he suggested, would be an avian flu outbreak. He said a president needed every available tool "to be able to deal with something this significant."
Here is the full story. Here is the text of his remarks, with commentary from Glenn Reynolds.
I am hoping to write a longer piece on what we should do, but frankly Bush’s idea had not crossed my mind. For a start, quarantines don’t usually work, especially in a large, diverse, and mobile country. The Army would if anything spread the flu. A list of better ideas would include well-functioning public health care systems at the micro-level, early warning protocols, and good decentralized, robust plans for communication and possibly vaccine or drug distribution. Might the postal service be more important than the Army here? How about the police department, and the training of people in the local emergency room?
Stockpiling Tamiflu is worthwhile in expected value terms, but many strains of avian flu are developing resistance; we should not put all our eggs in this basket. We also should stockpile high-quality masks and antibiotics for secondary infections (often more dangerous than the flu itself), and more importantly have a good plan for distribution and dealing with extraordinary excess demand and possibly panic. Let’s not ignore obvious questions like: "if the emergency room is jammed with contagious flu patients, where will other (non-flu) emergencies go?"
A good plan should also make us less vulnerable to terrorist attacks, storms, and other large-scale disasters. Robustness and some degree of redundancy are key. You can’t centrally plan every facet of disaster response in advance; you need good institutions which are capable of improvising on the fly. In the meantime, let’s have betting markets in whether a pandemic is headed our way; that would provide useful information.
Addendum: It is Bird Flu Awareness Week in the blogosphere, Silviu has the appropriate links.
How Columbia built up its economics department
Here is the story. One excerpt:
“Especially in a place like New York, there is a big temptation to go for assembling people who will be on Charlie Rose, get written up in The New Yorker,” says David Card, who’s credited with helping rejuvenate Berkeley’s economics department. “But that has nothing to do with younger people doing research”–the true measure of a top program.
Here is their home page and list of new arriving faculty. Thanks to Craig Newmark for the pointer.
The Unreported Mexican Immigration Story
Michael at 2blowhards.com asks a good question:
If illegal immigration from Mexico is inevitable, as some make it out to be, then why was there so little illegal immigration from Mexico prior to the mid-1960s?
The composition of Mexican immigration has changed dramatically. Go to El Paso, where many Mexican-Americans have been around for a few generations, and you will see mostly mestizos. Over time, more of the immigrants come from deeply rural Mexico. Often they cannot read or write, their knowledge of Spanish (never mind English) is rudimentary, and they have no idea of decent medical care. They will get a witch doctor to boil corn for a divination. For them, coming to the United States is a major and new encounter with Mexican culture, never mind Yankee culture.
This is one reason why current Mexican immigration is bringing more social problems than before; it is not just the numbers. Nor is there much solidarity amongst immigrants, many of whom hold cultural grudges based on disputes from back home. One acquaintance of mine returned to his home village about two years ago, complaining of "all those Mexicans" in Los Angeles.
Contrary to economic intuition, it is often the poorest migrants who leave last. If I think about the Mexican village where I hang out and buy art, only in the last twenty years has anyone had enough money to catch a bus to the border, much less pay the "coyote" fees to cross. Mexican immigration also works as a chain. One person crosses the border, finds a job, and sends money back so that brothers and friends can cross as well. For all these reasons the flood is, for better or worse, now much harder to stop. As Mexico gets richer, more people are coming.
Intertemporal substitution is especially important for these new migrants. If it were easier to come and go, many Mexicans would spend a big fraction of the year in their home villages. The burden on the U.S. would become less in some ways, more in others. In the U.S., jobs would be more temporary, more Mexicans would live near the border (for easy regular transport), Mexicans would work harder in their time here (and consume their leisure back home in the village), and most importantly, more Mexican males would keep ties to their wives and families. The net effect might well be positive.
If you would like to read more about this, I recommend my own Markets and Cultural Voices: Liberty vs. Power in the Lives of the Mexican Amate Painters.
My next question: Do you think that migration from Bhutan is high or low? Do you have the intuitions of an economist or sociologist? Answer here. Hint: it won’t stay low forever.
More specific foreign words for “rent-seeking”
Do you, like me, cringe at the word "rent-seeking" to express the concept of investing resources to gain transfers of wealth from others? (Forget about Alfred Marshall, isn’t "rent" what you pay for your apartment? And do you really have a consistent definition which delineates "rent-seeking" from "profit-seeking," yet without begging the question?) Here are some more specific concepts, expressed in terms of a single word, taken from a longer list of strange words. How about these?
GRILAGEM Brazilian Portuguese
The practice of putting a live cricket into a box of newly faked documents, until the insect’s excrement makes the paper look convincingly old.
DHURNA Anglo-Indian
Extorting payment from someone by sitting at their front door and staying there without food, threatening violence, until you get paid.
SOKAIYA Japanese
A man with a few shares in several companies who extorts money by threatening to come to the shareholders’ meetings and cause trouble.
If you ever wish to teach rent-seeking to your class, just tell them about sokaiya.
Biloxi Boom!?
Land prices in Biloxi are up. The reason? Mississippi is a poor state and so historically even homes with water views were modest. When the coast boomed, due to gambling and tourism, the land became a lot more valuable in alternative uses like hotels, casinos, and vacation homes for the rich. But it’s costly and takes a long time for developers to buy up small lots and bundle them into bigger packages. The hurricane, however, acted like nature’s form of eminent domain. With the small houses destroyed there are many sellers, bundling is becoming easier, and everyone expects that zoning will be changed to favor the developers.
Absurdly, CNN paints the speculators as almost as bad as the hurricane itself:
But what Katrina spared, the real estate rush now imperils. The arrival of speculators threatens what’s left of bungalow
neighborhoods that are among the Gulf’s oldest communities, close-knit
places of modest means where casino workers, fishermen and their
families could still afford to live near the water.
But while there is a certain sadness in seeing an old way of life decline no one is being forced to sell and those who do sell must be very pleased that there are eager buyers.
Thanks to Edward Johnson for the pointer.
What are Private Governments Worth?
"Private governments,” such as homeowners associations and condominium cooperatives, provide all manner of collective consumption goods, from road maintenance, trash collection, and snow removal to transportation, policing, and medical care. These organizations were practically unheard of in 1960, but today some 54.6 million people in the United States live in various neighborhood associations.
That’s from my latest paper, What are Private Governments Worth? written with Amanda Agan. Despite the explosion of private governments, very little research has been done on measuring their value. Thus, Agan and I compare the value of homes within HOAs (home owner associations) with the value of homes outside of HOAs. After controlling for a wide variety of housing characteristics including age, size, style and so forth we find that homes within HOAs sell for a whopping 5.4 percent or $14,000 more than similar homes outside of HOAs. Put differently a 3 bedroom home within an HOA is worth about as much as a 4 bedroom home outside of an HOA. This result is robust and continues to hold even when we look at similar homes inside and outside of HOAs but within the same subdivision.
For more on HOAs see The Voluntary City (which I edited) and especially Robert Nelson’s excellent new book from the Urban Institute, Private Neighborhoods And the Transformation of Local Government.
How to walk through a museum
Donald Pittenger offers some observations on how to visit or walk through a museum. Here are my tips:
1. In every room ask yourself which picture you would take home (if you could take just one) and why. This forces you to keep thinking critically about what you are seeing. More crudely, you have to keep on paying attention.
2. Almost all museums (MOMA is one exception) hang large numbers of second-rate paintings by first-rate artists. Try to find them. Don’t think it is all great, it isn’t.
3. You are probably better trained at shopping than looking at pictures. Do some basic research on prices and pretend you are shopping for pictures on a budget. This will improve the quality of your viewing.
4. Go with a variety of people (but not all at once). It forces you to see the art through their eyes.
5. If you are visiting a blockbuster exhibit, skip room number one. There is too much human traffic, as the people have not yet admitted to themselves they don’t care about what is on the wall.
A key general principle is to stop self-deceiving and admit to yourself that you don’t just love "art for art’s sake." You also like art for the role it plays in your life, for its signaling value, and for how it complements other things you value, such as relationships and your self-image. It then becomes possible for you to turn this fact to your advantage, rather than having it work against you. Keeping up the full pretense means that you must impose a high implicit tax on your museum-going. This leads you to restrict your number of visits and ultimately to resent the art and find it boring.
Comments are open, in case you have further suggestions for how to visit a museum.
How to teach microeconomics
The initiative was inspired by the discovery that there is no better way to master an idea than to write about it. Although the human brain is remarkably flexible, learning theorists now recognize that it is far better able to absorb information in some forms than others. Thus, according to the psychologist Jerome Bruner, children "turn things into stories, and when they try to make sense of their life they use the storied version of their experience as the basis for further reflection." He went on, "If they don’t catch something in a narrative structure, it doesn’t get remembered very well, and it doesn’t seem to be accessible for further kinds of mulling over." Even well into adulthood, we find it easier to process information in narrative form than in more abstract forms like equations and graphs. Most effective of all are narratives that we construct ourselves.
The economic-naturalist writing assignment plays to this strength. Learning economics is like learning a language. Real progress in both cases comes only from speaking. The economic-naturalist papers induce students to search out interesting economic stories in the world around them. When they find one, their first impulse is to tell others about it. They are also quick to recount interesting economic stories they hear from classmates. And with each retelling, they become more fluent in the underlying ideas.
Many students struggle to come up with an interesting question for their first paper. But by the time the second paper comes due, the more common difficulty is choosing which of several interesting questions to pursue.
The paper is not a complete substitute for the traditional syllabus. But the lasting impact of the course comes mainly from the papers. When students come back to visit during class reunions, the equations and graphs long since forgotten, we almost always end up talking about the questions they have posed and answered during the intervening years.
Having written this blog for over two years now, I feel qualified to agree completely.
Africa fact of the day
Estimated wealth of African wealth held in foreign accounts, expressed as a percentage of African GDP: 172
That is from Harper’s Index, October 2005 issue, p.11, the figure is based on UN sources.
The economics of magazines, and their economists
Arnold Kling criticizes National Review magazine, but don’t bother working through the argument. It will only make your head hurt. Perhaps you have read Brad DeLong on NR as well. Arnold suggests that:
NRO clean out its stable of economics writers and instead choose from some of the other bloggers around. James Hamilton or Andrew Samwick or Russ Roberts or Don Boudreaux or Tyler Cowen or Alex Tabarrok.
I have not been reading NR, so I will not offer an independent assesssment. But consider the basic economics. Most popular political magazines live and die by direct mail. The "burn rate" of non-renewals is very high, and either advertisers or donors will care about subscription numbers. So new subscribers must be found frequently (NB: the real culprit is lack of loyalty of previous subscribers). Given their natural constituencies, that makes it hard for a right-wing magazine to come out against George Bush. The tendency is toward boosterism and taking sides. That is one reason why I — a "small l" libertarian who preferred the economic policies of the Clinton years — am unlikely to receive some particular writing assignments.
On average "out of power" magazines (Reason, American Prospect) should be better than "in power" magazines. But if NR, or NRO, wants a piece on how the Bush years have eaten into our economic, political, and institutional capital, I would be happy to oblige.
My macro class has been asking me what kind of exam they can expect
Try this question:
"Simon Grant and John Quiggin argue that taking the equity premium seriously–-the well-known fact that the average annual historical return of stocks is seven times that of government bonds and other debt-–has many implications, the most robust of which is that recessions are extremely costly even if they don’t lower average consumption and that macroeconomic stabilization policies are more important than has been thought."
True or false, and why? Under what conditions is your answer wrong (always the proper query)? Here is a relevant link, though registration is required.
Brad DeLong, polytheist
Ever since the Mexican peso crisis of 1994-1995, I have been well aware that the Gods of the Dismal Science are cruel and capricious, at times punishing small sins against them with disproportionate retribution.
Here is the full post. Here are a few of my voodoo flags. Here are two more. Here is my favorite.
