Results for “age of em” 17233 found
Jim Crow in professional sports
I have already written a post on this topic. My central query was why segregation lasted as long as it did in major league sports. I have since learned more:
1. Black players were common in professional football in the late 19th century and through 1933, when segregation was introduced by team owners.
2. The pressure to segregate came from fan demand, and was enforced by game commissioners, working through a collusive league structure.
3. John McGraw, manager of the New York Giants (baseball), regularly tried to sneak African-Americans onto his team, claiming that they were “Cuban.” The baseball commissioner was both strong and racist, however, so he failed in these attempts.
4. Early football leagues were chaotic and had little power, including little power to enforce segregation in the early days of the sport.
5. Paul Brown, coach of the Cleveland Browns football team, decided to play black players in 1946.
6. The Los Angeles Rams quickly followed suit, in part because they wanted public funds for a stadium, and needed to avoid possible legal problems.
7. The Washington Redskins were the last football team to integrate, and only when they received “artfully applied pressure” from the Kennedy Administration.
8. Bill Walsh, the very successful coach of the San Francisco 49ers, hired a racially conscious sociologist to his staff, in recent times, to manage race relations on his team.
All points are from the recent and excellent Tackling Jim Crow: Racial Segregation in Professional Football, by Alan H. Levy.
Do girls cause divorce?
OK, you probably already read Steven Landsburg on Slate.com. But this article of his is too good a link to pass up. It turns out that divorce is considerably more likely when the child is a girl, rather than a boy. Here are two choice bits:
In the United States, the parents of a girl are nearly 5 percent more likely to divorce than the parents of a boy. The more daughters, the bigger the effect: The parents of three girls are almost 10 percent more likely to divorce than the parents of three boys. In Mexico and Colombia the gap is wider; in Kenya it’s wider still. In Vietnam, it’s huge: Parents of a girl are 25 percent more likely to divorce than parents of a boy.
Here is another:
Take a typical unmarried couple who are expecting a child and have an ultrasound, which more often than not reveals the child’s sex. It turns out that such couples are more likely to get married if the child is a boy. Apparently, for unmarried fathers, the prospect of living with a wife and a son is more alluring than the prospect of living with a wife and a daughter.
It seems that fathers enjoy marriage more when there is a son around the house, confirming an old stereotype. The original research was done by Gordon Dahl and Enrico Moretti.
Shutting up talkers
Robin Hanson suggests that time is a scarce, yet unpriced resource in group conversations, conferences, and seminars. We are all familiar with the conference participant who talks too much, this is really just tragedy of the commons. So let’s attach a price to talking.
Robin argues that each person should receive a fixed number of tokens. Every now and then a buzzer will go off randomly. If you are talking when the buzzer goes off, you lose a token. If you lose all your tokens, you can’t talk any more. So presumably you will speak only when you feel it is important, to conserve your time. My note: I don’t see why the randomization is necessary, why not just use something like chess clocks to limit how much each person talks?
Robin and I have talked of trying this out. Would it work? I can see a few problems:
1. It may violate fairness norms to shut up a person who has lost all of his tokens.
2. Without rationing, smarter people can persuade/bully their way into talking more, and this is better than giving everyone equal time. (Note: you can have non-egalitarian variants of the scheme, or perhaps allow people to donate their tokens to the smart.)
3. The methods and procedures of implementation may distract from the discussion. Imagine the buzzer going off in the middle of your briliant point.
4. Conferences are not about ideas production, they are about the production of publicity, and the device does not work toward this end.
I am most concerned with #2 and #4, but I still see merit in the idea. If and when we try it, I will let you know, let me know if you have ever tried some version of the proposal.
Here are some other wild ideas that Robin likes, most or all of them wilder than the buzzer idea.
Addendum: Here is Robin’s own description of the idea.
Self-deception conference
Tomorrow I am attending a conference on self-deception, directed by Robin Hanson and me. We will have numerous luminaries, including Robert Trivers and Thomas Schelling, in attendance. By the way, blogging will continue.
Here are a few self-deception pointers for the day:
However much I examine my vanity, I can’t see in it the same disagreeable tone of the vanity of other people, all of which is just a further stage of vanity.
by the poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade.
Or, did you know that Stalin, when revising his official biography for publication, ordered that this sentence be inserted:
Stalin never let his work be affected by the least shadow of vanity, presumption or idolatry.
Thomas More once wrote:
Most men like their own writing best of all.
All of these bits are from Lies We Live By: The Art of Self-Deception, by a very underrated Brazilian economist named Eduardo Giannetti. Few economists are so well-read in the humanities, so ironic at the right moment, and so on the mark in their understanding of human psychology. If anyone out there knows Eduardo’s email address, please forward it to me, I would like to write him.
Economics and literature
I just received my copy of The Literary Book of Economics, compiled and edited by Michael Watts of Purdue University.
I love the book, it contains excerpts from literary works that present economic themes. On opportunity cost, you get to read Robert Frost on “The Road Not Taken”.
On equality, you get to read Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron”, one of the most biting critiques of egalitarianism ever penned. The story is truly short, just a few pages, do click on the link and read it if you have the time.
Here is the opening to the story:
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
Or are you familiar with the economic proposition, sometimes associated with Aaron Wildavsky, that the demand for safety rises with wealth and income? British poet Alexander Pope first stated that idea in 1737, for his short poem “Imitations of Horace,” click here.
You don’t have to read this book in one fell swoop, it offers 348 pp. of wonderful browsing. In addition to the authors cited above you get John Milton, Ayn Rand, Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Victor Hugo, and George Orwell. Highly recommended.
Java-based ID cards in Taiwan
Everyone is getting one.
Each card contains a microprocessor with 32 kilobytes of memory that allows data such as allergy information, emergency contact numbers, medication, and personal insurance to be stored.
Let’s not forget Thailand:
In an even larger scheme in Thailand, the government plans to issue a Java-based national ID card to all 61 million citizens, according to a report in the Bangkok Post. The card will contain biometric identification, as well as insurance, tax and welfare benefit information. The scheme is expected to be launched later this year.
For more information read here.
My favorite book on privacy is David Brin’s thought-provoking The Transparent Society, for an interview with Brin, summarizing the book, click here. He says you’re not going to have your privacy anyway, get used to it, besides most people don’t even care about you, and this new world will prove liberating. I also am taken by Richard Posner’s point that few people truly want privacy, rather than want to selectively control how their images are presented to the outside world; they use talk of “privacy” as a rhetorical device to attempt to gain such control.
Will the current lawsuits against file-sharers work?
Lawrence Solum tells us no.
Here is an early part of his insightful, multi-tiered post:
On the one hand, the RIAA simply cannot bring enough lawsuits to create a real deterrent effect. First, the number of suits is so small that the actual risk of becoming a defendant times the cost of settlement equals a miniscule amount. Second, the perception among users of P2P programs is that one can avoid any risk of suit by keeping the number of files shared on any one service below a threshold (usually thought to be 1000 files). On the other hand, there is no evidence that the RIAA is changing copynorms.
His recommendation?
When the RIAA sends the message, “copying is theft,” they are fighting the norms. No one believes that copying is the moral equivalent of theft, because everyone thinks that private, noncommercial copying is just fine. Even the RIAA seems to have thought that when they agreed to the provisions of the Audio Home Recording Act that permit noncommercial analog copying. And the fact that copynorms diverge from norms about theft is rooted in the underlying economic reality–consumption of intellectual property is nonrivalrous, whereas consumption of tangible property is rivalrous.
So here is an alternative message that the RIAA could try:
Share with your friends, not with strangers!
In other words, the RIAA could try to get the public to see that P2P programs are the moral equivalent of giving away hundreds of videotapes or compilation tapes. Those activities are not socially acceptable. They may not be socially unacceptable either. Mass giveaways are rarely a social problem, because the cost is high enough to deter the behavior without either legal or social sanction. That is what the P2P technology changed. P2P enables the low cost mass gift.
It is worth reading Solum’s whole post, I might add he is one of the smartest bloggers out there.
Eating Apes
1. Bushmeat hunters in Africa typically earn in the range of $250 to $1050 a year.
2. In one sampled African market, ape meat cost about twice as much as beef or pork.
3. “In the big cities of Central Africa, it seems relatively easy to find a gorilla head or some hands, or perhaps a chimpanzee hand or two or four, for sale in the medicinal and fetish markets…In a Brazzaville fetish market, a dealer once offered me a gorilla head for the equivalent of $40 and a hand for about $10.”
4. Hunters of ape meat often rely on the trails cut by loggers
5. Ape meat supply has largely gone underground in recent years, although in a given market most people know whom to ask to get the meat.
6. Many village and hunter-gatherer societies have a special word for “meat-hunger.”
7. Central Africans eat at least as much meat per person as Americans or Europeans do.
8. Hunters claim that if a champanzee is wounded and cornered and about to meet his death, that he will beg for his life with the same expressions that a human being would use.
9. One hunter wrote: “It is this lurking reminiscence of humanity, indeed, which makes one of the chief ingredients of the hunter’s excitement in his attack of the gorilla.”
All of these bits are from Eating Apes, by Dale Peterson. This is a remarkably intelligent and disturbing book, the photos are unforgettable. The author is sympathetic to the plight of the great apes but he also understands how markets work, what the life of the poor is like, and why a naive ban on hunting is unlikely to succeed.
By the way, today’s Cnn.com reports that the Orangutan may be extinct within 10 to 20 years.
Neuroeconomics and trust
Today’s Financial Times runs a feature article on neuroeconomics, an offshoot of experimental economics.
Why do people cooperate in experimental games?
…during the games, Prof Smith’s team scanned players’ brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging. The FMRI scan showed that players who co-operated were using parts of their brain called Brodman’s areas 8 and 10. These areas had previously been associated with thinking about the mental activities and the motivations of others, and of delaying gratification to receive higher rewards later. Non-cooperative players did not use these parts of the brain, and neither did those who knew they were playing against computers instead of human opponents.
This, argues Prof Smith, is consistent with the reciprocity explanation: players are thinking about the likely responses of other players and deciding to trust them.
Brain scans are not the only tool of neuro-economists. Other approaches include measuring pulse rates, skin conductivity and hormone levels. And as a result of such experiments, neuroeconomics boasts an eclectic collection of findings – one of them being that ovulating women are less trustworthy than the rest of us…
Would you like to hear more about ovulating women?
Prof [Paul] Zak has also found that women who take part in the trust game while they are ovulating send back substantially less money to their fellow player than other women or than men – crudely, they are less trustworthy. He explains: “The physiological reason is that progesterone suppresses the effect of oxytocin. The evolutionary biological reason is that is that if you’re about to get pregnant, you should be very careful about overreacting to the social signals you receive. In addition, you don’t want to be giving away resources.” Prof Zak points out that since trust is fundamental to economic development, a better understanding of the oxytocin and the physiology of trust could be fundamental for promoting development. The Bangkok Post has already picked up on his work: the newspaper says that since the oxytocin stimulants massage, food and sex are much beloved of Thais, Thailand’s economic development is assured.
For those interested, GMU researcher Kevin McCabe has started a fledgling neuroeconomics blog.
Economic freedom indices
Niclas Berggren offers a very useful survey of the economic freedom indices, what they show, and their limitations. The piece just appeared in The Independent Review. The introductory blurb states:
Although not without limitations, the EFI [economic freedom index] supports Adam Smith’s contention that free-market processes, more than any alternatives, can advance wealth and welfare.
If you are interested in another point of view, here is a left-wing critique of the Fraser index, suggesting that economic freedom is not positively correlated with the real quality of life.
My take: Even economists, much less the general public, underestimate the long-run value of economic growth for human welfare. Today’s poor have a higher standard of living than the upper middle class of a century ago. While it makes good sense to discount the dollar returns on investments, there is less of a good normative argument for the positive temporal discounting of human welfare. So we should care greatly about the standard of living in the distant future, which suggests investing in economic growth today. For a lengthy presentation of the argument on discounting, click here.
How to spread the wealth
The [Marshall] Field chronicles tell us that it is not taxes or mismanagement that erode family fortunes, but multiple marriages. While it is often difficult for siblings to amicably take over the running of a huge enterprise, the situation becomes more challenging when divorce introduces half-brothers and stepsisters. Marshall Field’s 22,000-word will was an extraordinary document, the longest ever probated in Chicago. He left the bulk of his fortune to his two underage grandsons, but stipulated that most of the money be kept in trust until they turned fifty…
What Marshall Field did not foresee was his male offspring’s high turnover of wives. Of the six generations bearing the name Marshall Field, only Marshall II and, as of the present, Marshall VI (married in 1992) had one wife. Marshall Field III and IV each had three wives; Marshall Field V married twice and his half-brother Ted three times. The founding father’s will that for sixty-five years carried the fortune forward collapsed in 1982 when Ted demanded his share of the Field Enterprises.
From the recent book The Marshall Fields, by Axel Madsen.
How well can we measure performance?
Imagine Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler writing a co-authored book review for The New Republic. The book is Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, which pretends to be about baseball but is in fact a profound meditation on behavioral economics, management science, and how hard it is to measure value. An obvious question: if it is so hard to measure the performance of first basemen, when there is a slew of publicly available statistics, how about the rest of the economy?
Thanks to Will Baude for the pointer.
The Dumbing Down of Safety
Under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, parents are supposed to be allowed to transfer their children from “persisently dangerous” to safer schools. But, according to this article in the NYTimes, “44 states have set the legal threshold for persistently dangerous schools so high that no schools in those states fit the definition.” Consider Locke High School in Los Angeles which in the last three years has had “33 assaults with a deadly weapon, 116 beatings, 66 robberies and 17 sex offenses.” But these crimes resulted in only 11 (!) expulsions and CA requires a school like Locke to have 30 explusions before allowing parents to transfer their kids to a safer school.
The fact that the standards qualify virtually no schools is accidental, say state officials in CA and elsewhere. Nonsense. It would be easy enough to write the standards in terms of percentages. Define any school in the top x% of schools for violence as qualifying. (We can then argue whether, for example, x should be 5, 10, or 25 percent.) A percentage standard would always qualify the worst schools even if they were pretty safe but remember that all we are talking about is giving parents the option of moving their children. Is it too much to ask that we err on the side of child safety?
Does Milton Friedman believe in free will?
“In a sense we are determinists and in another sense we can’t let ourselves be. But you can’t really justify free will.”
So spoke Milton Friedman in a recent interview. Read here for the full account.
I have long felt that this whole issue poses great difficulties for the merit-based argument for the market. If people don’t “deserve” the value they create, the moral case against redistribution becomes weaker.
The usually crystal-clear Friedman also says the following about luck:
“My wife and I entitled our memoirs, ‘Two Lucky People.’ Society may want to do something about luck. Indeed the whole argument for egalitarianism is to do something about luck. About saying, `Well, it’s not people’s fault that a person is born blind, it’s pure chance. Why should he suffer?’ That’s a valid sentiment.”
So what are the implications of luck for public policy?
“You’ve asked a very hard question,” he said. In part, he added, because it’s not clear that what we think of as luck really isn’t something else. “I feel,” he said, “and you do, too, I’m sure, that what some people attribute to luck is not really luck. That people are envious of others, you know, `that lucky bastard,’ when the truth of the matter is that that fellow had more ability or he worked harder. So that not all differences are attributable to luck.”
How to improve our schools
William Ouchi, the well-known management theorist and consultant, just put out Making Schools Work. His more substantive recommendations include the following:
1. The school principal is an entrepreneur and fully in charge.
2. The school, not a central office, controls its own budget.
3. Everyone is accountable for student performance and for budgets.
4. Families have school choice.
Plus all the usual rhetoric of caring about learning.
Ouchi and co-author Lydia Segal claims that these principle are found in the (successful) public school districts of Edmonton, Seattle, and Houston, plus they are used by Catholic schools in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, again successfully. There is some fluff in this book, but it also offers a no-nonsense account of some practical value.