What should I ask Sujatha Gidla?
She is the author of the new and superb Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India. I will be interviewing her later in the month, with a podcast and transcript forthcoming, no public event. Here is her Macmillan bio:
Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable in Andhra Pradesh, India. She studied physics at the Regional Engineering College, Warangal. The author of Ants Among the Elephants, her writing has appeared in The Oxford India Anthology of Telugu Dalit Writing. She lives in New York and works as a conductor on the subway.
Here is BBC coverage of her work. Here is the NYT review of her book. Here are further links about her. The Economist wrote: “Ants Among Elephants is an arresting, affecting and ultimately enlightening memoir. It is quite possibly the most striking work of non-fiction set in India since Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo, and heralds the arrival of a formidable new writer.”
So what should I ask her?
The Catalan and Spanish language issue, from the comments
There are many issues to this Catalan predicament
Bob has been providing arguments to a more nuanced view. He has said that “Spanish is not all that far from being banned from public schools” in Catalonia. That is true, but to put it into context provides additional knowledge. The reality is much worse. 60% of Catalan children has the Spanish language as mother tongue (30%, Catalan language) All primary and secondary schools use Catalan as vehicular teaching language (with an hour a week of Spanish… or nothing) Basically, in practice, you are not allowed to decide in which language do you want your children to be taught. I am sure most of you will think that this cannot be true in a democratic country.
As the United Nations recognizes (21st of February, day of the mother tongue) children should be schooled in the mother tongue whenever possible. But 60% of Catalan children are denied this right by successive Catalan regional governments… 30 years and counting. This has produced a situation in which two generations of Catalan children with Spanish as mother tongue have systematically been denied the possibility to develop his potential mental abilities to the upmost, with the consequences that Tyler, in other contests, has commented regularly. They will forever occupy the lowest range of jobs in the Catalan economy. This is cultural supremacy to the core. You will not find this in any other democratic country… nor by a mile. I will leave for other time, perhaps, which characteristics the teachers and principals of the schools share.
The Spanish Constitutional Court has ruled several times against this discrimination, instructing the Catalan government to remedy the situation. To no avail. The regional government pays not attention, neither the central government or the civil society doing much. Civil society movements, very prominent in Catalonia, are basically arms of separatist parties. Still, the threat of the Constitutional Court is there, so better to get rid of this nuisance declaring independence.
That is from a guy named Felix. Here are data from the government of Catalonia (pdf).
Call it the “Trump tax shift,” not the “Trump tax cuts”
Here is my Bloomberg column on that theme, excerpt:
It’s easy enough to pick on unpopular taxes as the problem, but the main issue is cultural presuppositions about what government should and should not do. That’s where any real tax reform would need to come from.
Do note the plan will be harder to pull off, the more specific it has to become.
Monday assorted links
1. Derek Parfit’s final submitted and published piece?
2. Luis Garicano on Catalonia and principles of secession. And Therese Raphael on Rajoy.
3. The finances of top Chinese universities.
4. The effect of the start-up deficit on aggregate productivity growth.
5. Are Millennials now leaving D.C.?
6. Carroll and Frakt on why Singaporean health care is so cheap (NYT). Notably, they identify the relevant market failure in health care as too much spending.
7. Russia helps North Korea open up a new internet connection (for hacking?).
Is information technology behind industry concentration?
That is the topic of a new paper by James E. Bessen, and it appears the answer is yes:
Industry concentration has been rising in the US since 1980. Why? This paper explores the role of proprietary information technology systems (IT), which could increase industry concentration by raising the productivity of top firms relative to others. Using instrumental variable estimates, this paper finds that industry IT system use is strongly associated with the level and growth of industry concentration. The paper also finds that IT system use is associated with greater plant size, greater labor productivity, and greater operating margins for the top four firms in each industry compared to the rest. Successful IT systems appear to play a major role in the recent increases in industry concentration and in profit margins, moreso than a general decline in competition.
I expect further work in this area.
What does democracy call for in Catalonia?
Hoping for a peaceful democratic process in Catalonia tomorrow. When democracy fails there’s only repression. Thinking of my Catalan friends
That is a tweet from Pete Wishart, Scottish MP; I ‘ve seen dozens more like it. But is it the democratic process behind the Catalonian referendum? Or is it rather a form of electoral terrorism? Here are a few points:
1. Most countries we consider to be democracies have rather stringent restrictions on when referenda may be held and what they may be used to decide.
2. According to extant reports, only 40 percent or so of the people in Catalonia favor independence. It’s not like Kurdistan where independence won almost 100 percent of the vote and not only because of selective participation.
3. Aren’t non-official referendum results always going to be slanted in favor of intense minority opinion? That hardly seems democratic. See #2. Arguably the same is true for official referenda as well, though then at least turnout is more representative. Nonetheless referenda on such big questions may under-represent the interests of the young or the interests of business (and in turn real wages), or they may favor expressive voting too much.
4. Isn’t the truly democratic procedure to let all of Spain vote on Catalonian independence? Maybe you don’t think so, but that begs the question.
5. Is it a fundamental democratic principle that any geographic region can demand a binding separatist referendum? Well, maybe, but it sounds closer to John C. Calhoun than the notions of democracy I am familiar with or would favor.
Overall, I don’t see any positive news in how this is developing. Arguably the situation remains in flux, but still the word is that a unilateral declaration of independence will be forthcoming.
The Productivity Slowdown and the Declining Labor Share
That is the title of a new NBER paper from Gene M. Grossman, Elhanan Helpman, Ezra Oberfield, and Thomas Sampson. It is a very simple hypothesis, but they do show it can explain much of the observed decline in labor’s share:
We explore the possibility that a global productivity slowdown is responsible for the widespread decline in the labor share of national income. In a neoclassical growth model with endogenous human capital accumulation a la Ben Porath (1967) and capital-skill complementarity a la Grossman et al. (2017), the steady-state labor share is positively correlated with the rates of capital-augmenting and labor-augmenting technological progress. We calibrate the key parameters describing the balanced growth path to U.S. data for the early postwar period and find that a one percentage point slowdown in the growth rate of per capita income can account for between one half and all of the observed decline in the U.S. labor share.
In other words, the decreased bargaining power of labor, or for that matter globalization, are not necessarily playing major roles. Here is yet another (ungated) version of the paper.
Sunday assorted links
1. 95 pp. Timur Kuran survey on the economics of Islam.
2. New paper on identification in macroeconomics.
4. Ross Douthat seems to think that Hugh Hefner is something other than underrated (NYT).
5. And who are the “faux” male feminists? (also NYT). And how should the media cover Huma Abedin? (NYT again).
The economic cost of contact sports
By Ray C. Fair and Christopher Champa (pdf), here is the abstract:
Injury rates in twelve U.S. men’s collegiate sports are examined in this paper. The twelve sports ranked by overall injury rate are wrestling, football, ice hockey, soccer, basketball, lacrosse, tennis, baseball, indoor track, cross country, outdoor track, and swimming. The first six sports will be called “contact” sports, and the next five will be called “non-contact.” Swimming is treated separately because it has many fewer injuries. Injury rates in the contact sports are considerably higher than they are in the non-contact sports and they are on average more severe. Estimates are presented of the injury savings that would result if the contact sports were changed to have injury rates similar to the rates in the non-contact sports. The estimated savings are 49,600 fewer injuries per year and 5,990 fewer injury years per year. The estimated dollar value of these savings is between about 0.5 and 1.5 billion per year. About half of this is from football. Section 7 speculates on how the contact sports might be changed to have their injury rates be similar to those in the non-contact sports.
Here is NYT coverage of the piece, and an excerpt:
When he goes to Stanford football games, he [Roger Noll] said, one of the things he notices is the television production people on the sideline walking around with parabolic microphones.
“I’ve asked them why they do that,” he said. “They are catering to their audience. The audience wants to hear heads crack.”
A bit like how they soup up Planet Earth II with all kinds of phony noises for the animal movement.
The new issue of Econ Journal Watch
https://econjwatch.org/issues/volume-14-issue-3-september-2017
Volume 14, Issue 3, September 2017
Twitter Mood Predicts the Stock Market? Johan Bollen, Huina Mao, and Xiaojun Zeng claimed the affirmative in a conspicuous 2011 article. Michael Lachanski and Steven Pav conclude otherwise after looking from many angles, replicating as best they can, and applying robustness tests.
Who Knows What Willingness to Pay Lurks in the Hearts of Men? John Whitehead argues that certain authors claim to know, based on their survey data, more than they do about people’s willingness to pay for a wetlands project. The article continues an exchange from the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.
Fire and Ice: Hannes Gissurarson, who published an article on Iceland in our last issue, picks up the story in 1991, now turning critic of certain narratives about the last quarter-century. A principal opponent, Stefán Ólafsson, provides a reply that criticizes Gissurarson’s interpretations and his characterization of liberalism.
What Adam Smith Told His Teenagers About Domestic Policy: Adam Smith’s jurisprudence course included a section on “police,” or domestic policy, captured in student lecture notes. The notes from 1763–1764 enrich our conversation today about Smith’s sensibilities, as they provide a candid window on his classroom edification.
Glimpses of David Hume: “You hope I shall be damned for want of faith, and I fear you will have the same fate for want of charity.” Anecdotes and miscellanea about David Hume, most drawn from James Fieser’s 10-volume compilation Early Responses to Hume.
An Economic Dream—of Erik Gustaf Geijer, historic Swede, and historian, published in 1847. “It is a dream of national economy…”
EJW Audio
Saturday assorted links
1. How secure is biometric identification?
2. Henry on the national anthem.
3. “Canada MPs to loosen penalties for drunks in kayaks.” That said, “Drinking while flying a hovercraft would remain an offence.” Do note that “An estimated 40% of the boating-related accidents in Canada involve alcohol consumption as a factor.”
No liquidity trap in Puerto Rico
Fewer than half of Puerto Rico’s bank branches and cash machines are up and running, still crippled by diesel shortages, damaged roads and severed communications lines. Bank officials say they are struggling even to find employees who can get to work when there is no public transportation and gasoline is hard to find.
Across the island, people who have spent their last dollars on an $8 bag of ice or $15 for gasoline are waiting for hours outside banks and A.T.M.s in hopes of withdrawing as much money as possible.
That is from Jack Healy at the NYT. How about a literal helicopter drop of newly minted cash?
At a more general level, if the mainland were trying harder with its rescue efforts, where would the binding constraint be? Here are a few possible candidates:
1. Port capacity
2. Ability to land helicopters
3. Ability of the helping forces to organize enough generators
4. Ability to fuel generators
5. Ability to rationally allocate food and other vital resources without enough money and decentralized markets
6. Ability to transport troops and other forces of assistance around the island
7. Data
8. Something else?
Raghuram G. Rajan’s *I do what I do*
The title is apt, the book was published in India, and the excellent Rama Rao was so kind as to send me a copy. It is a collection of columns and memos, many published in India and covering the economic affairs of India. It’s a good way to get a look at what Raghu “really thinks,” at least as filtered through the media while he is central banker or earlier working at the IMF. He writes directly, gets frustrated at people who don’t understand the rate of inflation, favors central bank independence, is skeptical about how much foreign aid can drive growth, and with Luigi Zingales tells us that “Capitalism Does Not Rhyme with Colonialism.”
Here are various Indian reviews. Here is the link to Amazon India.
The long-term effects of American Indian boarding schools
That is a new paper by Matthew T. Gregg, forthcoming in Journal of Development Economics. Here is the abstract:
This paper explores some long-standing questions of the legacy of American Indian boarding schools by comparing contemporary Indian reservations that experienced differing impacts in the past from boarding schools. Combining recent reservation-level census data and school enrollment data from 1911 to 1932, I find that reservations that sent a larger share of students to off-reservation boarding schools have higher high school graduation rates, higher per capita income, lower poverty rates, a greater proportion of exclusively English speakers, and smaller family sizes. These results are supported when distance to the nearest off-reservation boarding school that subsequently closed is used as an instrument for the proportion of past boarding school students. I conclude with a discussion of the possible reasons for this link.
And this is from the paper’s conclusion:
Last, the link drawn here between higher boarding school share and assimilation should not be misinterpreted as an endorsement of coercive assimilation. Unobserved costs generated by the first generation of students might outweigh the estimated gains in long term assimilation. The program itself was extremely costly, which is one of the reasons for the change in policy towards on-reservation schooling during the 1930s. These results do, however, suggest that the assimilation gains from boarding schools are sizable, but, due to data limitations, this study does not reflect a complete assessment of the trade-offs of boarding school attendance.
Here are earlier ungated versions. For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.