Results for “age of em” 17235 found
Will American mass transit make a comeback?
Transit ridership fell in 31 of 35 major metropolitan areas in the United States last year, including the seven cities that serve the majority of riders, with losses largely stemming from buses but punctuated by reliability issues on systems such as Metro, according to an annual overview of public transit usage.
…Researchers concluded factors such as lower fuel costs, increased teleworking, higher car ownership and the rise of alternatives such as Uber and Lyft are pulling people off trains and buses at record levels.
I know, I know — if only we would spend more money, do it better, and so on. An alternative and really quite simple hypothesis is that mass transit is largely a 20th century technology, it is being slowly abandoned, and in the United States at least its future is dim. The more you moralize about the troglodyte politicians and voters who won’t support enlightenment, the harder it will be to give that hypothesis an analytically fair shake.
And what about the D.C. area?:
Metro’s ridership dropped by 3.2 percent. The trend was largely driven by a 6 percent decline in bus ridership. Dramatic losses to subway ridership, including a 10 percent decline in 2016, had appeared to level off by 2017, when the total number of trips fell by about a percent and a half.
Metro has said about 30 percent of its ridership losses are tied to reliability issues, with teleworking, a shrinking federal workforce, Uber and Lyft, and other factors to blame for the rest.
Here is the full WaPo story by Faiz Siddiqui.
Will there be a trade war with China?
No. That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column. Here is one bit:
Keep in mind that the U.S. is a relatively large buyer in many markets; in economic lingo, it has some monopsony power. So if it cuts back purchases of, say, Chinese toys, China cannot simply reroute those now-surplus toys and sell them to Canada or Indonesia at the same price. This gives the U.S. significant power in trade conflicts. And China cannot throw around its weight as a buyer in similar fashion because it does not import on the same scale.
The Chinese don’t have that many ready American targets for economic retaliation. Aircraft are one of the major U.S. exports to China, where market demand for domestic flights is rapidly growing. Beijing has a backlog of about 400 orders with the Boeing Co. It could try to switch some or all of those orders to Airbus SE, but that would mean delays. Airbus would also know it could increase its prices and the Chinese would have to pay. As a buyer, China doesn’t have as much leverage in this market as it might appear.
The U.S. has many more targets when it comes to restricting foreign investment, as there is plenty of Chinese capital that would love to flee. The Chinese government already limits the activities of the big technology companies and many other U.S. multinationals in China, so they don’t have as many extra sticks in this regard.
The reality is China has margins for responding to the U.S., but they are mostly not in the economic realm.
I thank Ray Lopez for a useful email conversation related to this column.
Monday assorted links
1. Europe is dropping the ball on AI and in some ways positively discouraging it. And too many crummy firms in Europe: “Using a new survey, we show that the dispersion of marginal products across firms in the European Union is about twice as large as that in the United States. Reducing it to the US level would increase EU GDP by more than 30 percent. Alternatively, removing barriers between industries and countries would raise EU GDP by at least 25 percent.”
2. Remember when Clearchannel was going dominate all radio, forever?
3. Marcel Gauchet on democracy and the sweep of history.
4. How two economists got access to IRS tax data. Bravo to them I say, but it’s worth noting that the shift from regression-driven to data set-driven economics has been a remarkably inegalitarian development, widely praised by most top academic economists. So often progress means a willingness to disregard or even stomp on egalitarian norms.
5. The economics of why some restaurants need to leave Queens.
6. Kling on the new Chetty-Hendren-Jones-Porter results.
7. Those new service sector jobs: Iraqi war architect Paul Bremer now a ski instructor in Vermont.
The day job
ONCE UPON A time, artists had jobs. And not “advising the Library of Congress on its newest Verdi acquisition” jobs, but job jobs, the kind you hear about in stump speeches. Think of T.S. Eliot, conjuring “The Waste Land” (1922) by night and overseeing foreign accounts at Lloyds Bank during the day, or Wallace Stevens, scribbling lines of poetry on his two-mile walk to work, then handing them over to his secretary to transcribe at the insurance agency where he supervised real estate claims. The avant-garde composer Philip Glass shocked at least one music lover when he materialized, smock-clad and brandishing plumber’s tools, in a home with a malfunctioning appliance. “While working,” Glass recounted to The Guardian in 2001, “I suddenly heard a noise and looked up to find Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time magazine, staring at me in disbelief. ‘But you’re Philip Glass! What are you doing here?’ It was obvious that I was installing his dishwasher and I told him that I would soon be finished. ‘But you are an artist,’ he protested. I explained that I was an artist but that I was sometimes a plumber as well and that he should go away and let me finish.”
That is from Katy Waldman in the NYT. You will find similar themes discussed in my earlier book In Praise of Commercial Culture. In her article I also enjoyed this part:
Edi Rama, the Prime Minister of Albania, sometimes feels his hand doodling as he contemplates a political decision. The art pours out to center and steady him. In 1998, Rama left a promising career as an artist in Paris to become Albania’s minister of culture. Now the country’s leader, he shows his loose, improvisatory drawings and sculptures in galleries around the world. “I found myself drawing almost all my working time whilst interacting with people in my office or on the phone,” he said in a 2016 interview. “I began to understand that my subconscious was being helped … by my hand to stay calm while my conscious had to focus on demanding topics.”
Recommended.
Very good sentences (about Facebook)
It is telling that two of the greatest ethical scandals to have hit Facebook in recent years both involved academics…
That is from a very good William Davies piece in LRB, via an anonymous correspondent.
Iranian “CyberAttack” Threatens Elsevier Not USA
Here’s what Geoffrey Berman, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said when announcing charges against a group of Iranian “cyber attackers”:
“We have worked tirelessly to identify you,” Berman said. “You cannot hide behind a keyboard halfway around the world and expect not to be held to account. Together, along with our law enforcement partners, we will work relentlessly and creatively to apply the legal tools at our disposal to unmask and charge you. We will do all we can to bring you to justice. While the defendants remain at large, they are now fugitives from the American judicial system.
So what are these horrendous people being charged with? Stealing unreleased scripts of Game of Thrones and a bunch of academic articles. I am not making this up.
…members of the conspiracy used stolen account credentials to obtain unauthorized access to victim professor accounts, through which they then exfiltrated intellectual property, research, and other academic data and documents from the systems of compromised universities, including, among other things, academic journals, theses, dissertations, and electronic books.
(That is from the press release and here is the earlier press release on GOT, with which this has been combined in many news accounts. The full indictment is here).
In other words, the Iranians were running something like Sci-Hub, the website that some of you have probably used to bypass publisher paywalls to read articles linked to on MR that you haven’t paid for. I don’t defend such actions but neither do I want the federal attorney working tirelessly to identify you. As crimes go this is a yawner.
Indeed, since Sci-Hub is already used in Iran, one wonders how useful the additional Iranian hacking was. A few companies are also listed as targets, although they turn out to be publishers, a stock image company, two online car companies etc. A few government agencies are thrown in for good measure although that appears to be window dressing.
The federal attorney claims the hacking (hacking not attacking) cost billions which they estimate because:
Through the course of the conspiracy, U.S.-based universities spent over approximately $3.4 billion to procure and access such data and intellectual property.
That’s just DoJ making up some number to make them look good. The direct losses in this scheme almost certainly amount to zero, bupkiss, nada. Universities certainly haven’t lost anything – the data was copied, not taken. The publishers might have lost a bit, but even then it would only be the revenue they would have got from papers that would have been bought if they hadn’t been copied. A useful estimate of the size of that loss still being zero, bupkiss, nada.
Frankly, this is a joke of an indictment. But headlines like “US Charges 9 Iranians With Massive Cyberattack” are certainly fortuitously timed for new national security designate John Bolton and others who want to take a hardline on Iran.
U.S. metro regions with the biggest intra-national trade deficits and surpluses
First, the biggest deficits (data for 2010, in billions of dollars):
Washington: -$86 billion
Miami: -$68 billion
San Francisco: -$41 billion
Atlanta: -$35 billion
Baltimore: -$33 billion
…Next, the biggest surpluses:
Los Angeles: +$63 billion
Memphis: +$29 billion
Greensboro: +$18 billion
Corpus Christi: +$18 billion
New Orleans: +$15 billion
Buffalo/Niagara Falls also has a sizable trade surplus as a percent of its gdp.
Which is the better list to be on? Very often the surplus or deficit has a lot to do with demographics and population changes:
Now, I don’t think many people would consider New Orleans an economic winner. In fact, its population declined 11 percent from 2000 to 2010, partly because of Katrina, but also because of wider problems. And that very decline means that savings generated in New Orleans go elsewhere in search of returns.
That is from Paul Krugman at the NYT. When it comes to Australia, by the way, one reason the country can run perpetual trade deficits, without inducing a financial crisis, is because of its rapidly growing population.
You might be interested in this Andrea Ferrero piece from the 2010 JME:
This paper investigates the contribution of productivity growth, demographics and fiscal policy in accounting for the evolution of the US external imbalances against industrialized countries during the last three decades. Productivity growth plays a dominant role. Demographics explain a non-negligible and nearly permanent component of the US trade deficit. Furthermore, the international demographic transition is crucial for large US external imbalances to be consistent with the persistent decline of world real interest rates observed in the data. Fiscal policy is of minor importance.
Productivity growth matters because foreign countries wish to invest capital in countries, such as the U.S., which employ it relatively well.
How economists use Twitter
When using Twitter, both economists and natural scientists communicate mostly with people outside their profession, but economists tweet less, mention fewer people and have fewer conversations with strangers than a comparable group of experts in the sciences. That is the central finding of research by Marina Della Giusta and colleagues, to be presented at the Royal Economic Society’s annual conference at the University of Sussex in Brighton in March 2018.
Their study also finds that economists use less accessible language with words that are more complex and more abbreviations. What’s more, their tone is more distant, less personal and less inclusive than that used by scientists.
The researchers reached these conclusions gathering data on tens of thousands of tweets from the Twitter accounts of both the top 25 economists and 25 scientists as identified by IDEAS and sciencemag. The top three economists are Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz and Erik Brynjolfsson; the top three scientists are Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian Cox and Richard Dawkins.
Here is further information, via Romesh Vaitilingam. But I cannot find the original research paper on-line. These are interesting results, but still I would like to see the shape of the entire distribution…
Testing the eggheads in the cryptocurrency market
Some of the world’s best-known economists on Thursday announced plans to create what could be described as the thinking person’s cryptocurrency. Saga aims to address many of the criticisms frequently thrown at bitcoin, the world’s biggest cryptocurrency, to position itself as an alternative digital currency that is more acceptable to the financial and political establishment.
It is being launched by a Swiss foundation with an advisory board featuring Jacob Frenkel, chairman of JPMorgan Chase International and former governor of the Bank of Israel; Myron Scholes, the Nobel Prize-winning economist; and Dan Galai, co-creator of the Vix volatility index. The Saga token aims to avoid the wild price swings of many cryptocurrencies by tethering itself to reserves deposited in a basket of fiat currencies at commercial banks. Holders of Saga will be able to claim their money back by cashing in the cryptocurrency.
The currency also aims to avoid the anonymity afforded by bitcoin, which has raised financial crime concerns with regulators and bankers. Saga will require owners to pass anti-money laundering checks and allow national authorities to check the identity of a holder when required.
Oh so respectable sounding! They’re not doing an ICO, instead there is a variable fractional reserve system, and the ruling principle is that Saga, the asset, “entitles its investors to a rising number of Saga as usage of the cryptocurrency grows.” It sounds like a bet on the notion that bootstrapping is central to crypto success. But do investors really want “safe harbours from the raging volatility”? Do investors want a currency at all? By the way, this one is proof of stake, not proof of work.
Here is their web site, and here is the White Paper. Here are other readings on the asset. Here is the original FT article, FTAlphaville is less impressed.
Do the participants have too much skin in other games? So far I don’t see the point of doing this one, as it doesn’t create an asset with a truly different risk profile than the others, not from what I can see.
Friday assorted links
1. The rate of draws is not going up in chess, even though play is improving and likely the perfectly played game is a forced draw (model this). And Noah Feldman on game theory in the Middle East, the Saudis and Kushner too.
3. A claim that India is becoming a minoritarian dystopia.
4. Diamonds embedded in the human being are the new trend in engagement rings.
5. The academic who defended colonialism. Good piece.
6. I did a short podcast with the new Institute for Innovative Governance Research about…innovative governance, starting with charter cities and seasteading but also going beyond that. Here is an associated essay by Mark Lutter.
Are the Amish unhappy?
We were able to recruit 52 Amish participants for our study of which 56 % were male and for which the average age was 44. Interestingly, the average levels of life satisfaction as measured by the SWLS (Diener et al., 1985) was 4.4; just above the neutral point. Above neutral scores are consistent with the idea that “most people are mildly happy” (Diener & Diener, 1996), and that mild happiness is evolutionarily advantageous (Fredrickson, 2001). Comparatively, the Amish satisfaction in our study can be interpreted as meaning that the Amish fall lower than members of many other groups. In a study of more than 13 thousand college students from 31 nations, for example, only students from Kenya (whose average life satisfaction was 4.0) scored lower than the Amish (Diener & Diener, 1995).
Anecdotally, the Amish society in which we conducted our study was fraught with contrasts. On the one hand, the Amish had a pronounced pro-social attitude. One man I interviewed, for example, had donated tens of thousands of US Dollars toward the medical treatment of his neighbor’s son, with no thought of repayment. Similarly, the Amish often helped one another in quilting, construction, and food preparation. On the other hand, these neighborly behaviors were confined to in-group members. There was a conspicuous degree of prejudice toward out-group members, especially ethnic or religious minorities. One bishop, for example, asked me whether I thought the space shuttle Challenger exploded because there was a Jewish person (Judith Resnick) aboard.
Another set of contrasts could be found in the relationship between the Amish and the larger “English” society in which they live. While on the one hand there is a strong cultural push to remain separate from industrialized society. The Amish I spoke with were highly invested in publicly conforming to group norms related to abstaining from the use of industrial technologies and from remaining aloof from broader society. Privately, however, the Amish revealed themselves to be as curious and as human as people from any other society. One participant, for example, admitted that he used his workplace telephone—an allowable technology—to phone a newspaper number that hosts recordings of the world’s news. Another informant revealed that she had secretly flown on an airplane. These examples reflect the on-going tension of a society that must—individually and collectively—continually re-negotiate its relation to the larger society in which it exists. Where subjective well-being is concerned, the tension between retaining traditions and adapting to new circumstances is an interesting issue for research.
…global and specific domain satisfaction should, theoretically, be in agreement. For example, if a person is satisfied with her romantic life, her friendships, and her family relationships—all specific domains—she should, logically, report about the same amount of satisfaction with her overall social life (the global domain). Diener and colleagues found that this correspondence occurred in some cultures, such as Japan. In other cultures, however, they discovered an inflationary effect. People in Colombia and the United States, for instance, are likely to inflate their global reports of satisfaction over that reported for specific satisfaction.
That is by Robert Biswas-Diener, there is much of interest in this paper on happiness in small societies. Via Rolf Degen. By the way, this article about Norway is worth a ponder too.
What should I ask Balaji Srinivasan?
I will be doing a Conversation with him, no associated public event. Here is his home page, here is his bio:
Balaji S. Srinivasan is the CEO of Earn.com and a Board Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Prior to taking the CEO role at Earn.com, Dr. Srinivasan was a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Before joining a16z, he was the cofounder and CTO of Founders Fund-backed Counsyl, where he won the Wall Street Journal Innovation Award for Medicine and was named to the MIT TR35.
Dr. Srinivasan holds a BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Chemical Engineering from Stanford University. He also teaches the occasional class at Stanford, including an online MOOC in 2013 which reached 250,000+ students worldwide.
His latest Medium essay was on ICOs and tokens. I thank you all in advance for your wise counsel.
*Waste of a Nation*
The authors are Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey and the subtitle is Garbage and Growth in India, here is one excerpt from this worthy book:
In India, the tool for cleaning teeth and gums had long been a twig usually taken from a neem tree…, which can be plucked each morning, chewed into a teeth-cleaning brush, and then thrown away. Neem also has medicinal properties. Tooth powders gained popularity in towns and cities in preindependence times, but in smaller towns as late as the 1960s shops that sold toothpaste had to be searched for. Consumption of toothpaste was meager. India’s toothpaste industry in the mid-1970s was estimated to produce about 1,200 metric tons a year for a population of more than 600 million. An Australian population of 16 million consumed 5,000 metric tons of toothpaste. By the late 1980s, the Indian market was said to be growing rapidly, but the industry estimated that only 15 percent of the population used toothpaste and that per capita consumption was only 30 grams a year.
…By 2014, a single new factory set up in Gujarat by Colgate-Palmolive was capable of making 15,000 metric tons of toothpaste a year, more than ten times the quantity produced in all of India two generations earlier.
Recommended.
Sheriff Takes Food from Prisoners, Locks up WhistleBlower
A sheriff in Alabama bought a house using money that was budgeted to feed jail inmates. When I saw this headlined a week ago I assumed that this was a run-of-the-mill story about white collar fraud and I ignored it. Yesterday, prodded by new developments, I investigated further. The truth is much worse than I had imagined. What the sheriff did was perfectly legal.
Alabama has a Depression-era law that allows sheriffs to “keep and retain” unspent money from jail food-provision accounts. Sheriffs across the state take excess money as personal income — and, in the event of a shortfall, are personally liable for covering the gap.
Etowah County Sheriff Todd Entrekin told the News that he follows that practice of taking extra money from the fund, saying, “The law says it’s a personal account and that’s the way I’ve always done it.”
Sheriffs across the state do the same thing and have for decades. But the scale of the practice is not clear: “It is presently unknown how much money sheriffs across the state have taken because most do not report it as income on state financial disclosure forms,” the Southern Center for Human Rights wrote in January.
And if that isn’t bonkers enough. It gets worse. The primary source for the story, written by journalist Connor Sheets, was Sheriff Entrekin’s lawnmower, Matt Qualls. Qualls has since been arrested and is now in a jail overseen by Sheriff Entrekin.
Sheets’ initial story was published on Feb. 18. On Feb. 22, Qualls was arrested and charged with drug trafficking after an anonymous call complained of the smell of marijuana from an apartment.
Qualls, who had never been arrested before, faces six charges and is being held on a $55,000 bond, Sheets reports. He is detained in a jail that Entrekin oversees.
…The sheriff’s office denies involvement in Qualls’ case, noting that the landscaper was not arrested or charged by the sheriff’s office. The extra charges were added by the Drug Enforcement Unit, which consist of agents drawn from the sheriff’s department, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
Addendum: You may be reminded of the story that Tyler and I use to open our principles of economics textbook. Ship captains in the 18th century were paid to ship convicts to Australia according to a very similar procedure as used today (!!!) to fund prisoner food in Alabama–and the results were equally predictable.
Monday assorted links
1. The Freedom Party wants to give Austrians (the people, not the economists) the freedom to smoke (NYT).
2. Facebook will now be more reluctant to share with social scientists.
4. The Arnold Kling high school memoir. More people should write pieces of this kind.
5. “You might see chairs thrown amid a torrent of f-bombs, freestyle rapping mid-game, and a never-ending barrage of trash talk. This is the new, online era of chess.” Link here.