I discuss *Stubborn Attachments* with Russ Roberts
Here is the podcast and partial transcript. Russ describes it as follows:
Tyler Cowen of George Mason University and the co-host of the blog Marginal Revolution talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about Stubborn Attachments, his book-length treatment of how to think about public policy. Cowen argues that economic growth–properly defined–is the moral key to maintaining civilization and promoting human well-being. Along the way, the conversation also deals with inequality, environmental issues, and education.
Self-recommending!
Consumption inequality just hasn’t gone up that much
The new NBER paper is “Consumption and Income Inequality in the U.S. Since the 1960s,” by Bruce D. Meyer and James X. Sullivan. Here is the abstract:
Official income inequality statistics indicate a sharp rise in inequality over the past five decades. These statistics do not accurately reflect inequality because income is poorly measured, particularly in the tails of the distribution, and current income differs from permanent income, failing to capture the consumption paid for through borrowing and dissaving and the consumption of durables such as houses and cars. We examine income inequality between 1963 and 2014 using the Current Population Survey and consumption inequality between 1960 and 2014 using the Consumer Expenditure Survey. We construct improved measures of consumption, focusing on its well-measured components that are reported at a high and stable rate relative to national accounts. While overall income inequality (as measured by the 90/10 ratio) rose over the past five decades, the rise in overall consumption inequality was small. The patterns for the two measures differ by decade, and they moved in opposite directions after 2006. Income inequality rose in both the top and bottom halves of the distribution, but increases in consumption inequality are only evident in the top half. The differences are also concentrated in single parent families and single individuals. Although changing demographics can account for some of the changes in consumption inequality, they account for little of the changes in income inequality. Consumption smoothing cannot explain the differences between income and consumption at the very bottom, but the declining quality of income data can. Asset price changes likely account for some of the differences between the measures in recent years for the top half of the distribution.
This is one big reason why you can believe income inequality is high and/or rising, and not see it as the most significant normative issue.
Intimacy directors: those new service sector jobs
…the theater and film industry are beginning to recognize the need for “intimacy directors,” people who specialize in choreographing onstage intimacy.
They are practitioners who use concrete guidelines and techniques, such as the “four pillars” of intimacy direction, according to Alicia Rodis, a member of Intimacy Directors International.
Consent: Get the performers’ permission — including concrete boundaries and out of bounds body parts, and do it before you start.
Communication: Keep talking throughout the process. What’s working, what’s not, who’s touching who and how and do they feel safe.
Choreography: Performers wouldn’t spontaneously add an extra pirouette to a dance number or an extra kick to a fight scene. Don’t add an ass grab or extra kissing.
Context: Just because you kiss someone in one scene doesn’t mean you can kiss them in another scene without communicating about adjusting the choreography and seeking consent to do so. Just because someone is topless with you on stage, it doesn’t mean they won’t mind being topless around you offstage, or in another scene onstage.
To explore the ideas of intimacy and safety on stage in a variety of situations, LEO spoke with Rodis, as well as Tony Prince, a local director; and Sarah Flanagan, a Louisville-based fight director.
And:
Rodis, the New York intimacy director, started as a fight director, and that led to her new focus. She shared one experience from that evolution.
“There was one show I was working on where there was a woman who slapped the man and then kissed him. So I was brought in for the slap.”
She ended up working on the slap and the kiss. For that kiss, she used her stage combat skills. That included asking standard questions like where do the actors touch each other, and new questions like how long does the kiss last?
Here is the full story, via Catherine Rampell.
Is Cuba putting the brakes on private business?
On Tuesday, Cuba’s government said it would suspend the issuance of permits for a range of occupations and ventures, including restaurants and renting out rooms in private homes.
The suspension included the growing field of private teachers, as well as street vendors of agricultural products, dressmakers and the relatively recent profession of real-estate broker.
The announcement did not say when the issuing of permits would resume and said that enterprises already in operation could continue.
Cuban President Raul Castro expanded an opening of the economy to private-sector employment in 200 categories of business in 2010. It later also legalized nonagricultural cooperatives.
The government has said nearly 570,000 people are employed in the enterprises, which include hundreds of restaurants and guest houses.
The latest moves have created fears that Cuba is putting the brakes on plans to reform its centrally planned economy, though officials said the country is not going back on its economic opening.
Here is more, via the excellent Mark Thorson. Here are related stories, and here is my earlier bearish Bloomberg column on Cuba.
Disaggregating the Flynn Effect?
Overall, the results support co-occurrence theories that predict simultaneous secular gains in specialized abilities and declines in g.
NB: this is for memory tests alone. Here is the paper, via Rolf Degen.
Monday assorted links
1. The costs of sports segregation are higher than you think (NYT): “Dr. Eric Vilain, a medical geneticist, helped create the International Olympic Committee’s hyperandrogenism policy, which requires a competitor with the condition to undergo treatment that lowers her testosterone levels.”
2. Why people think Germans aren’t funny.
3. The Price for Lighting (per million lumen-hours) in the UK in British Pound,1300-2006.
4. The effects of common ownership on bank behavior, properly measured, seem quite small. And newer version of the paper here.
6. Redux: a 2014 NYT column of mine on women in the workplace.
Which countries are surrounded only by bad relations?
Recently Macedonia signed a “good relations” treaty with Bulgaria, so Macedonia cannot be said to have bad relations with all of its neighboring countries; they get along OK with Kosovo too. Israel is another possible candidate, although it could be argued that de facto relations with Egypt are not so bad. How about Palestine? Qatar is a country surrounded by hostile powers, and for the time being they win this designation.
Belarus is on increasingly bad terms with Russia, but Russia has quite a few adjoining countries, and I am not sure if all of those relations are so bad. China has frosty relations with many neighbors, although with Russia you would call it mixed and “not yet negative.” And relations with “the Stans” are not terrible. They don’t like North Korea so much any more, even if they won’t topple it.
I think of Chile as bordering on a hostile Bolivia, but relations with Argentina are acceptable, even if Porteños look down on the Chileans for being provincial.
Africa?
Then there are countries with only one neighbor, such as how Haiti and the Dominican Republic rather uncomfortably share the island of Hispaniola. Relations across Central America seem to have improved considerably.
Which countries are the other contenders for this honorary designation?
My favorite things Austria — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
There’s no point in doing a complete survey, but here are a few observations and suggestions:
1. I am not intrigued by much Mozart written before K330 or so. Piano Concerto #9 is one exception to this. But Toscanini was right to claim that too much of it sounds the same.
2. The string quintets are the best Mozart pieces you might not know, but skip K174.
3. The string quartets and Requiem might be the most overrated Mozart, though the latter would be wonderful if he could have finished it. It is better to listen to the fragmented version, without the artificial Süssmayr ending.
4. The Milos Forman Mozart movie is worth a viewing, if you don’t already know it. I thought I would hate it, but didn’t. Don’t try to learn history from it, however.
5. Clive Geoffrey, The Romantic Enlightenment, has my favorite essay on Mozart. A reasonably priced reissue is needed. The standard biographies are very good, also read Mozart’s letters.
6. The operas reign supreme. Try Currentzis or Colin Davis for Don Giovanni, Haitink or Klemperer for The Magic Flute, Boehm for Cosi Fan Tutte, Giulini for Figaro, and Rene Jacobs for Idomeneo. I don’t know of a definitive version of Abduction from the Seraglio, but Beecham and Krips are good and Harnoncourt does the overture best, as he never lets up on the rambunctious in it. If I had to choose the operas, or all the rest of Mozart put together, I would go for the operas.
Model this is songwriting becoming more complex?
In the 1960s, an average hit song on the Billboard Top 10 had an average of 1.87 writers and 1.68 publishers each year. Songwriting duos were common, and creativity a simpler endeavor…
During the LP era (60s-80s), the number of songwriters and publishers on hit songs didn’t rise as dramatically. Based on the Songdex analysis, in the 70s, hit songs on the Billboard Top 10 had an average of 1.95 writers and 2.04 publishers each. During the 80s, the number of average publishers in top 10 songs slightly rose to 2.06. The number of writers remained the same.
In the 90s, the number spiked to an average of 3.13 writers and 3.49 publishers per top 10 song. Incidentally, the change coincides with the rise of digital music formats, such as the MP3. Napster also launched in 1999. All of which ushered in an era of massive data overload (and that’s before streaming took hold).
Consumers quickly adopted digital music formats, resulting in a “market need for registration, licensing and reporting systems,” says Music Reports. In the 2000s, Billboard Top 10 hits had an average of 3.50 writers and 4.96 publishers each year.
This past decade, streaming has emerged as a major source of revenue for record labels. Using its Songdex catalog registry, Music Reports noted that Billboard Top 10 hits saw an average of 4.07 writers and six publishers.
Here is the full story, I am glad Beethoven never did much co-authoring, with apologies to Diabelli.
What I’ve been reading
1. Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad. At first I feared it was too trendy, but I ended up engrossed.
2. Stephen R. Platt, Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom: China, the West, and the Epic Story of the Taiping Civil War. Pseudoerasmus calls this the best book on the most underrated big war in human history; he is right. It also gives you a good sense of how 50-100 million people might have died.
3. Mark Bowden, Hue 1968: A Turning Point in the American War in Vietnam. Both a very good Vietnam War book, and a very good Vietnam book.
4. Rousas John Rushdoony. The Foundations of Social Order: Studies in the Creeds and Councils of the Early Church. Uneven in argumentative quality, but brilliant in parts, this is one of the conceptually most interesting books on early Christianity. It turns out your views on Christology really do shape your politics, and furthermore there is a coherent version of libertarian Calvinism, except it isn’t very libertarian, and it comes from…having the right Christology. Recommended, it opens up new worlds for the reader.
5. Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg. I had never read this in German before. For all its extraordinary intellectual and emotional peaks, it is also remarkably witty.
The economics of brideprice
There is a newly published article on that topic, by Valerie M. Hudson and Hilary Matfess, here is the abstract:
Approximately seventy-five percent of the world’s population lives in countries where asset exchange upon marriage is obligatory. Rising brideprice—money or gifts provided to a woman’s family by the groom and his family as part of marriage arrangements—is a common if overlooked catalyst of violent conflict. In patrilineal (and some matrilineal) societies where brideprice is practiced, a man’s social status is directly connected to his marital status. Brideprice acts as a flat tax that is prone to sudden and swift increases. As a result, rising brideprice can create serious marriage market distortions that prevent young men, especially those who are poor or otherwise marginalized, from marrying. This phenomenon is especially evident in polygamous societies, where wealthy men can afford more than one bride. These distortions incentivize extra-legal asset accumulation, whether through ad hoc raiding or organized violence. In such situations, rebel and terror groups may offer to pay brideprice—or even provide brides—to recruit new members. Descriptive case studies of Boko Haram in Nigeria and various armed groups in South Sudan demonstrate these linkages, while an examination of Saudi Arabia’s cap on brideprice and its efforts to arrange low-cost mass weddings illustrates the ways in which governments can intervene in marriage markets to help prevent brideprice-related instability. The trajectory of brideprice is an important but neglected early indicator of societal instability and violent conflict, underscoring that the situation and security of women tangibly affect national security.
For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.
Saturday assorted links
1. A theory of what meetings are for.
2. Do today’s teens care less about independence?
3. More on the correct measurement of corporate profits.
4. Taking separation of powers literally, build the wall, Canada style.
5. Did political competition at the Mexican gubernatorial level help drive the drug cartel wars?
6. “Fortune cookies aren’t really about the future; they’re all about you.”
National identity eases cross-cultural trust problems
Amanda Lea Robinson has a new paper “Nationalism and Ethnic-Based Trust: Evidence from an African Border Region,” here is her main result:
In diverse societies, individuals tend to trust coethnics more than non-coethnics. I argue that identification with a territorially-defined nation, common to all ethnic groups, reduces the degree to which trust is ethnically bounded. I conduct a “lab-in-the-field” experiment at the intersection of national and ethnic boundaries in Malawi, which measures strength of national identification, experimentally manipulates national identity salience, and measures trust behaviorally. I find that shared nationality is a robust predictor of trust, equal in magnitude to the impact of shared ethnicity. Furthermore, national identification moderates the degree to which trust is limited to coethnics: while weak national identifiers trust coethnics more than non-coethnics, strong national identifiers are blind to ethnicity. Experimentally increasing national identity salience also eliminates the co-ethnic trust advantage among weak nationalists. These results offer micro-level evidence that a strong and salient national identity can diminish ethnic barriers to trust in diverse societies.
Hat tip goes to Ben Southwood.
The most expensive countries for buying an iPhone
1. Turkey $1200
2. Brazil $1,115
3. Russia, $1,086
4. Greece $1,028
5. Poland $1,005
6. Italy $995
7. Czech Republic $994
8. Norway $993
9. Denmark $986
10. Sweden $982
See the whole list, but the United States is cheapest at $815, tied with Japan, with Hong Kong next at $821. One lesson is that having crummy, overregulated retailing is worse for some of your prices than being an expensive country.
India sentences to ponder
Students in India who cheat on a simple laboratory task are more likely to prefer public sector jobs.
Furthermore:
…cheating on this task predicts corrupt behavior by civil servants, implying that it is a meaningful predictor of future corruption. Students who demonstrate pro-social preferences are less likely to prefer government jobs…
That is from Dishonesty and Selection into Public Service: Evidence from India, by Rema Hanna and Shing-Yi Wang. Here are ungated copies.