Results for “age of em” 17231 found
Who should take in more Syrian refugees?
Of course the United States should take in more Syrians, but we are not the only laggard:
Of the 4 million Syrians who have fled their country since the war began, including hundreds of thousands who have poured into Europe, the number who have been resettled in Britain could fit on a single London Underground train — with plenty of seats to spare.
Just 216 Syrian refugees have qualified for the government’s official relocation program, according to data released last week.
By the way, not long ago there were over 1.2 million Iraqi refugees in Syria (pdf), I wonder how they figure in all the recent numbers we are seeing.
Before the 1920s, large numbers of Syrians (Syrian-Lebanese) emigrated to Brazil, most of all to Sao Paulo, with a second and smaller wave coming in the 1950s. As of March:
Since 2013 when Brazil opened its doors, 1,740 Syrian refugees have been registered in the country – far more than in the US.
But still that is not many compared to the preexisting total. According to the above link, Brazil has about 15 million Arabs and about three million people of Syrian descent, and by virtually all accounts this connection has benefited the rest of Brazil too, not just the migrants.
Here is my earlier post Will Latin America Stay Underpopulated for Another Century? And can you guess where that top photo is from?
Marketing Pork
Here is a great little story by Danny Vinik from Politico’s The Agenda on how so-called marketing boards are surreptitiously turned into lobbying boards.
Industries with a large number of producers find it difficult to organize collectively because of the free rider problem. Mostly, that’s a good thing because it prevents cartels. Collective action, however, could also be used to perform research or marketing that’s good for the industry as a whole but too expensive for any small subset of producers. In theory, therefore, some type of collective action could be beneficial and in agriculture governments have created checkoff programs which force producers to pay a tax to fund collective goods.
Checkoffs exist for dairy farmers, mushroom producers, and even popcorn processors. Critics say they violate economic freedom and distort the market; big corporate farmers, they allege, easily find ways to influence the boards and siphon the money off to push their own causes.
“In one sense, it’s a classic case of the larger producers are the more powerful political forces within these organizations,” said Dan Glickman, the Agriculture Secretary at the end of the Clinton administration who largely supports checkoff programs.
For the unhappy hog farmers, the current problem started with the 1985 Pork Law, when Congress set up the National Pork Board and required all farmers to contribute. Today, hog farmers must hand over 40 cents out of every $100 in revenue from pork sales. The board uses the money, totaling nearly $100 million a year, to conduct research and promote the pork industry, but is not allowed to lobby.
But as Adam Smith said “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Quite so. And in this case by creating a National Pork Board the government is providing the meeting hall and paying for the conversation. According to the law, the money from the checkoff program isn’t supposed to go for lobbying but here is where the story gets interesting.
You may recall the slogan, “Pork: The Other White Meat.” The slogan hasn’t been used for years but the National Pork Board still pays $3 million a year every year for the rights. Why would the Pork Board pay millions for an unused slogan? The key is who they are paying. The slogan is owned by National Pork Producers Council. The NPPC is a lobby group and you won’t be surprised to know that it is closely connected with the NPB (having once even shared offices).
…critics say the two groups have never been as separate as the law calls for, and now are essentially colluding through a deal that lets the Pork Board funnel money to the NPCC by assigning an absurdly inflated value to the “other white meat” slogan; the money then goes to promote the NPPC’s lobbying agenda.
A neat trick. The story is also a good object lesson in Mancur Olson’s thesis about how special interest groups grow in power over time, slowly choking off innovation as they cartelize the economy.
Who amongst us knew that Gillian Tett wrote with Ernest Gellner?
Her new The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers is a tour de force of economics, anthropology, Pierre Bourdieu, management theory, and anecdotes about Sony and Facebook and UBS and Cleveland Clinic.
It turns out Gillian wrote her doctoral thesis in anthropology on Islamic marriage practices in Tajikistan.
How many manufacturing jobs pay less than $15 an hour?
In Mississippi, 7.3% of all workers in the state are manufacturing workers who make less than $15 an hour. Losing many of these jobs would have a serious negative impact on the state.
Because of its sample size, the CPS is of more limited use for small geographies. However, there is a relatively large number of observations for Los Angeles County, CA. Almost 400,000 manufacturing workers live in the county, and 55% of them make less than $15 an hour. Many of these workers will be affected by $15 minimum wages that have been approved for the City of Los Angeles and the unincorporated parts of Los Angeles County.
This data suggest that if the minimum wage was increased to $15 an hour across the U.S., it would impact a significant number of manufacturing workers, with some states being hit harder than others. This reflects the fact that lifting the minimum wage to $15 an hour would not just be quantitatively larger than previous U.S. experience, but qualitatively different in that it would affect a different set of workers and industries. Leisure/hospitality and retail make up 54% of the workers who make less than $8 an hour, but only 34% of those making less than $15 an hour. As the minimum wage rises it affects other sectors. For manufacturing, at least, the effect is likely to be greater.
That is from Adam Ozimek, more at the link.
My International Trade reading list for Fall 2015
This is quite long, so it goes under the fold…class starts tomorrow night!
Books: Jacob Viner, Studies in the Theory of International Trade (on-line, optional).
All videos can be found on MRUniversity.com, if not in the international trade section than in the development economics class or a few on Mexico in the Mexico class. In general I recommend viewing the videos before tackling the readings.
I. Comparative advantage and free trade
Bernhofen, Daniel and John C. Brown. 2005. “An Empirical Assessment of the Comparative Advantage Gains from Trade: Evidence from Japan.” American Economic Review.
Autor, David H. David Dorn and Gordon H. Hanson. Untangling Trade and Technology: Evidence from Local Labour Markets. The Economic journal, 2015, 125 (584), p. 621 – 646.
Acemoglu, Daron, David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson. 2014. “Import Competition and the Great US Employment Sag of the 2000s.” NBER Working Paper.
Feenstra, Robert C. 2008. “Offshoring in the Global Economy.” Ohlin Lecture Series, Lecture 1 only, through p.66 only.
Grossman, Gene M. and Esteban Rossi-Hansberg. 2006. “The Rise of Offshoring: It’s Not Wine for Cloth Anymore.” Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.
Donaldson, David. 2011. “Trade and Labor Markets.” powerpoint.
Khandelwal, Amit. 2009. “The Long and Short (of) Quality Ladders.” Review of Economic Studies.
Baldwin, Richard. 2011. “How Trade and Industrial Organization After Globalization’s 2nd Unblundling: How Building and Joining a Supply Chain are Different and Why it Matters.” NBER Working Paper. Also this is a chapter in the NBER book Globalization in an Age of Crisis: Multilateral Economic Cooperation in the Twenty-First Century (2014), Robert C. Feenstra and Alan M. Taylor, editors, pp. 165–212.
Goldberg, Pinelopi Koujianou and Nina Pavcnik. 2007. “Distributional Effects of Globalization in Developing Countries.” Journal of Economic Literature.
Tyler Cowen, “Why the theory of comparative advantage is overrated,” Marginal Revolution blog post, https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/09/why-the-theory-of-comparative-advantage-is-overrated.html
Videos: The two videos on Comparative Advantage, Sources of Comparative Advantage, Development and Trade, empirical evidence, Evidence on Comparative Advantage from Japan, Factor price equalization, Specific Factors Models, Economics of Offshoring, The Rybczynski Theorem, Trade, Investment, and Migration as Substitutes, Unbundling the Supply Chain.
II.Tariffs
Paul Krugman. “The One-Minute Trade Policy Theorist.” (powerpoint)
The Economic Benefits of U.S. trade, Office of the President of the United States, May 2015.
Broda, Christian, Nuno Limao, and David Weinstein. 2008. “Optimal Tariffs and Market Power: The Evidence.” American Economic Review.
Arkolakis, Costas, Arnaud Costinot and Andres Rodriguez-Clare. 2012. “New Trade Models, Same Old Gains?” American Economic Review.
Melitz, Marc J. “The Impact of Trade on Intra-Industry Reallocations and Aggregate Industry Productivity,” Econometrica 2003.
Kehoe, Timothy J. and Kim J. Ruhl. 2006. “How Important Is the New Goods Margin in International Trade?” NBER Working Paper, and now just published, Journal of Political Economy 2013.
Bernhofen, Daniel M., Zouheir El-Sahli, and Richard Kneller. 2012. “Estimating the Effects of the Container Revolution on World Trade.” University of Nottingham Discussion Paper Series.
Nunn, Nathan and Daniel Trefler. 2010. “The Structure of Tariffs and Long-Term Growth.” American Economic Review.
Dave Donaldson, “Trade and Growth (Empirics)”, MIT Lectures notes.
Videos: Tariffs v. Quotas, International Trade Disciplines Monopolies, Monopolistic Competition and International Trade, Effective rate of protection, Theory of Optimal Tariffs, Trade and Variety, Does “fair trade” help?, Malawi restrict trade in corn, Market reforms in Bangladesh, John Stuart Mill Terms of trade, The Shipping Container.
III. Heckscher-Ohlin and factor abundance theories of trade
Helpman, Elhanan. 1999. “The Structure of Foreign Trade.” Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Debaere, Peter. 2003. “Factor Abundance and Trade.” Journal of Political Economy.
Deardorff, Alan V. 1979. “Weak Links in the Chain of Comparative Advantage.” Journal of International Economics.
Trefler, Daniel. 1993. “International Factor Price Differences: Leontief Was Right!” Journal of Political Economy.
Davis, Donald R. and David E. Weinstein. 2001. “What Role for International Trade.” NBER Working Paper.
Davis, Donald R. 1995. “Intra-Industry Trade: A Heckscher-Ohlin-Ricardo Approach.” Journal of International Economics.
Trefler, Daniel. 1995. “The Case of the Missing Trade and Other Mysteries.” American Economic Review.
Costino, Arnaud and Jonathan Vogel. “Beyond Ricardo: Assignment Models in International Trade,” NBER Working Paper, October 2014.
Videos: What is at Stake in Trade Theories?, The Heckscher-Ohlin Theorem, Evidence on the Heckscher-Ohlin Theorem.
IV. Increasing Returns
Donaldson, David. “Increasing Returns to Scale and Monopolistic Trade.” Powerpoint, on-line, http://economics.mit.edu/files/7444
Helpman, Elhanan. 1987. “Imperfect Competition and International Trade: Evidence from Fourteen Industrial Countries.” Journal of the Japanese and International Economics.
Davis, Donald R. and David E. Weinstein. 2003. “Market Access, Economic Geography, and Comparative Advantage: An Empirical Test.” Journal of International Economics.
Antweiler, Werner ; Trefler, Daniel. Increasing Returns and All That: A View from Trade, American Economic Review, 1 March 2002, Vol.92(1), pp.93-119.
Debaere, Peter. 2005. “Monopolistic Competition and Trade, Revisited: Testing the Model Without Testing for Gravity.” Journal of International Economics.
Yi, Kei-Mu. 2003. “Can Vertical Specialization Explain the Growth of World Trade?” Journal of Political Economy.
Harrigan, James. 2001. “Specialization and the Volume of Trade: Do the Data Obey the Laws?” NBER Working Paper.
Bernard, Andrew B. ; Jensen, J. Bradford ; Redding, Stephen J. ;Schott, Peter K. “Firms in International Trade,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 1 July 2007, Vol.21(3), pp.105-130.
Helpman, Elhanan. Foreign Trade and Investment: Firm‐level Perspectives,” Economica, 2014, Vol.81(321), pp.1-14.
Tybout, James R. 2001. “Plant- and Firm-Level Evidence on “New” Trade Theories.” NBER Working Paper.
Bernard, Andrew B. and J. Bradford Jensen. 2004. “Why Some Firms Export.” Review of Economics and Statistics.
Baldwin, Richard ; Harrigan, James. Zeros, Quality, and Space: Trade Theory and Trade Evidence,” American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 1 May 2011, Vol.3(2), pp.60-88.
Armenter, Roc and Koren, Miklos. “A Balls-and-Bins Model of Trade.” American Economic Review, 2014, https://www.aeaweb.org/articles.php?doi=10.1257/aer.104.7.2127.
Videos: Trade and External Economies of Scale, Monopolistic Competition and International Trade, Trade and Increasing Returns: Evidence, Paul Romer, Robert Torrens on strategic trade policy, The Economics of Bollywood.
V. Is there a trade and industrialization slowdown?
Hausmann, Ricardo, Jason Hwang, and Dani Rodrik. “What You Export Matters.” Journal of Economic Growth, 12, 1, March 2007, 1-25.
Rodrik, Dani. “The Future of Economic Convergence.” Harvard Kennedy School, August 2011, RWP11-033.
Rodrik, Dani. “Unconditional Convergence in Manufacturing.” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2012.
Rodrik, Dani. “The Perils of Premature Deindustrialization.” Project Syndicate, 11 October 2013.
Rodrik, Dani. “Are Services the New Manufactures?” Project Syndicate, October 13, 2014.
Davies, Gavyn. “Why world trade growth has lost its mojo.” The Financial Times, January 9, 2015.
VI. Gravity models
Anderson, James and Eric van Wincoop. 2004. “Trade Costs” Journal of Economic Literature.
Head, Keith. 2011. “Gravity for Beginners.” Presented at US-Canada Border Conference.
Donaldson, David. 2011. “Gravity Models.” No Journal—powerpoint.
Hummels, David. 2007. “Transportation Costs and International Trade in the Second Era of Globalization.” Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Anderson, James and Eric van Wincoop. 2003. “Gravity with Gravitas: A Solution to the Border Puzzle.” American Economic Review.
Eaton, Jonathan and Samuel Kortum. 2002. “Technology, Geography, and Trade.” Econometrica.
Chaney, Thomas. “The Network Structure of International Trade,” American Economic Review 2014.
Video: The Gravity Equation and the Costs of Trade.
VII. Trade in economic history
Harrison, Ann and Andres Rodriguez-Clare. 2010. “Trade, Foreign Investment, and Industrial Policy for Developing Countries.” Handbook of Development Economics, Volume 5, Ch 63, also the same is Ann Harrison and Andres Rodriguez-Clare. 2009. “Trade, Foreign Investment, and Industrial Policy for Developing Countries.” NBER Working Paper.
Irwin, Douglas. 2002. “Interpreting the Tariff-Growth Correlation of the Late Nineteenth Century.” American Economic Review.
Irwin, Douglas. 2002. “Did Import Substitution Promote Growth in the Late Nineteenth Century?” NBER Working Paper.
John Nye, “The Myth of Free Trade Britain and Fortress France,” Journal of Economic History, 1991.
Irwin, Douglas. 1997. “From Smoot-Hawley to Reciprocal Agreements: Changing the Course of U.S. Trade Policy in the 1930s.” NBER Working Paper.
Irwin, Douglas. 1998. “The Smoot-Hawley Tariff: A Quantitative Assessment.” The Review of Economic Statistics.
Crowley, Meredith A. and Xi Luo. 2011. “Understanding the Great Trade Collapse of 2008-09 and the Subsequent Trade Recovery.” Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Francois, Joseph and Julia Woerz. 2009. “The Big Drop: Trade and the Great Recession.” No Journal, article online.
Videos: Corn Law debates, Friedrich List, Robert Torrens on sliding tariffs, The Deindustrialization of India, Tariffs and Growth in the late 19thCentury, South Korea and Industrial Policy, The Smoot-Hawley Tariff, Why Did Trade Plummet in the Great Recession?
VIII. FDI and multinationals
Blonigen, Bruce. A Review of the Empirical Literature on FDI Determinants, Atlantic Economic Journal, 2005, 33, 4, pp.383-403
Ramondo, Natalia and Andres Rodriguez-Clare. 2013. “Trade, Multinational Production, and the Gains from Openness.” Journal of Political Economy, 2013, vol. 121, no. 2.
Antras, Pol and Stephen R. Yeaple. 2013. “Multinational Firms and the Structure of International Trade.” NBER Working Paper, it is also Pol Antras and Stephen Yeaple, “Multinational Firms and the Structure of International Trade,” 2013, Handbook of International Economics,Volume 4, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-444-54314-1.00002-1
Cole, Harold L., Jeremy Greenwood, and Juan M. Sanchez. “Why Doesn’t Technology Flow From Rich to Poor Countries?” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, 20856, January 2015.
Videos: Basics of multinational corporations, Intra-firm Trade, Intra-industry Trade, Gains from Multinationals, Who Gains from FDI?, Productivity in firms, Foreign investment in India, Competition from foreign retailers, What is a Maquiladora? Introduction to NAFTA, NAFTA and Mexican Agriculture, The Effect of NAFTA on the Mexican Economy.
IX. The politics of trade
Grossman, Gene M. and Elhanan Helpman. 1994. “Protection for Sale.” American Economic Review.
Goldberg, Pinelopi Koujianou and Giovanni Maggi. 1999. “Protection for Sale: An Empirical Investigation.” American Economic Review.
Mayda, Anna Maria and Dani Rodrik. 2005. “What are Some People (and Countries) More Protectionist than Others?” European Economic Review.
Grossman, Gene M. and Elhanan Helpman. 1995. “The Politics of Free-Trade Agreements.” American Economic Review.
Harrison, Ann and Jason Scorse. 2010. “Multinational and Anti-Sweatshop Activism.” American Economic Review.
Videos: The Political Economy of Tariffs, Does Trade Help the Environment?, Regulation as a Major Trade Barrier, Who Supports Free Trade?, The Cultural Diversity Critique of Markets.
Extra readings and videos will be added, as global events indicate.
Monday assorted links
1. Human capital leading up to the Industrial Revolution.
2. How will European cinema fare under a single digital market? “Is he a collaborator?”
3. In America, is there too much TV?
4. What the Chinese 2008 stimulus looked like. And the Chinese use a bevy of animals to clear the parade skies.
5. How is the Greek election shaping up? Exit interview with Olivier Blanchard.
6. Consumption inequality tracks income inequality by more than we used to think. Is scalping ruining the Disney dining experience?
Romer on Urban Growth
Here’s one bit from an excellent interview of Paul Romer on urban development:
Q. How are economics and planning and development of cities related each other?
Urban Expansion is an exception to the usual rule that an economy does not need a plan. Creating new built urban area requires a plan for the public space that will be used for mobility (sidewalks, bus lanes, bike lanes, auto lanes …) and for parks. At a minimum, this plan should provide for a network of arteries big enough to allow bus travel and dense enough that no location is more than 0.5 km from such an artery. This is the only thing that needs to be planned up front for land that is not yet developed. Everything else can wait. But if informal development comes first, it is too late. The area will never have enough public space to allow successful urban development.
I think Romer is correct. What surprised me most when studying Gurgaon in India was that despite strong demand, there wasn’t a lot of common infrastructure being built. The transaction costs of ex-post planning were simply too high.
In addition to transport arteries, I would also mention the importance of setting aside space and access points for sewage, electricity, and information arteries. It’s not even necessary that government provide these services or even the plan itself (private planning of large urban areas is also possible) but a plan has to be made. By reserving space for services in advance of development, developers and residents can greatly improve coordination and maximize the value of a city.
A simple, minimal urban plan is analogous to the rules of the game.
Should the Fed tighten?
1. I do not know what the Fed should do, and I do not know what the Fed will do. I don’t even like that phrase “should the Fed tighten?,” but the superior “what kind of multi-dimensional expectational monetary path should the Fed indicate?” is awkward.
2. Starting in 2008, I thought money was too tight during 2007-2011, and in general I am not afraid of upping the dose of inflation, ngdp, however you wish to express it. I have never had “tight money” in my blood, so to speak.
3. There is good evidence from vacancies and the like that labor markets are fairly tight right now, equities are high and apparently China-robust, and we just had a gdp report of 3.8%. So something other than more monetary loosening ought not to be out of the question. Those variables simply cannot be irrelevant for the Fed’s current choice.
4. There is not a stable Phillips curve. So the lack of strong price inflation does not carry clear labor market implications, nor does it mean we can boost employment through looser money.
5. Often I buy the “asymmetry argument.” That suggests more price inflation probably won’t hurt us much, but monetary tightening could damage labor markets, so why tighten? Paul Krugman among others makes this argument.
6. Now the risks look fairly symmetric. The first reason is that zero short rates for so long might be encouraging excess risk-taking in the financial sector. This can be the “reach for yield” argument, which in spite of its lack of replicable econometric support commands a lot of loyalty from serious observers within the financial sector itself.
7. The second reason for symmetric risks is that zero short rates for so long might be encouraging zombie companies:
The end of ultra-low interest rates may bode ill for the productivity of British businesses, which is already poor. Output per hour is still lower than before the crisis of 2007, whereas in America and even France it has grown. Tight monetary policy should be bad for productivity, since it makes business investment more expensive. As the cost to businesses of borrowing has fallen by more than half since 2008, investment by firms has risen by 20%. The worry now is that dearer borrowing will curb the investment binge, making productivity even more dismal.
Yet there is another side to the productivity equation. Kristin Forbes, a member of the MPC, points out that, as in Japan in the 1990s, cheap borrowing may allow inefficient “zombie firms” to survive for longer than they normally would. In Britain interest payments as a share of profits have fallen from about 25% in 2009 to 10% today, bringing down company liquidations with them. As they stagger on, zombie firms hold down average productivity levels in their industry and, as a result, put a lid on wage growth. Rising interest rates could slowly start to sort the wheat from the chaff.
That is from from The Economist and of course you can adapt it for an American context.
8. Those two arguments might be meaningful with only a chance of say fifteen percent each, but that still would put the risks in a broadly symmetric position. I don’t see that the critics have made the case that a mere quarter point rate increase should be so damaging.
9. The contrarian in me rebels when I see article after article, blog post after blog post, consider the monetary policy problem in only two dimensions, namely as would be expressed by a Phillips curve. See #4. The “nice view” of monetary policy, as Faust and Leeper suggest (pdf), is probably wrong.
10. If I were at the Fed, I would consider a “dare” quarter point increase just to show the world that zero short rates are not considered necessary for prosperity and stability. Arguably that could lower the risk premium and boost confidence by signaling some private information from the Fed. But it’s a risk too — what if the zero rates are necessary?
11. The prospect of a stronger dollar, and the subsequent hit on American exports, remains a domestic reason not to let rates rise. I doubt if it is a global Benthamite reason, but it is probably a reason held by some within the Fed.
12. The biggest piece of information here is that both Janet Yellen and Stanley Fischer both seem genuinely uncertain as to what the Fed should do. No, they haven’t been absorbed by the hard money Borg. They have their own version of these arguments and it seems they see the risks as being relatively symmetric, and thus the correct monetary policy choice is far from obvious. No one has yet said anything that is smarter or more potent in Bayesian terms than what they probably are thinking.
13. Let’s say the Fed did decide to allow rates to rise. How exactly would they make that happen? How hard would it prove to accomplish? That’s an under-discussed angle to all of this. And the Fed might either wish to postpone this curiosity or get it over with, another set of symmetric risks.
We’ll know more soon.
A very good paragraph and a half
Claire Messud on Elena Ferrante in the FT:
…the novelist remains true to her broadest undertaking: to write, with as much honesty as possible, the unadorned emotional truths of Elena Greco’s life, from timid peasant schoolgirl to respected literary icon, riven always between her origins and her ambitions, between her intellectual pursuits, her romantic desires, and her maternal responsibilities — always with Lila as her fractured mirror.
I’ve pressed Ferrante’s novels on friends with mixed results. Some fall upon the books with a familiar eagerness, but by no means all: one woman said, of My Brilliant Friend, “How’s it different from Judy Blume? Just girls getting their periods.” But I end up thinking that the people who don’t see Ferrante’s genius are those who can’t face her uncomfortable truths: that women’s friendships are as much about hatred as love; that our projections determine our stories as much as does any fact; that we carry our origins, indelibly, to our graves. To imbue fiction with the undiluted energy of life — to make of it not just words upon a page but a visceral force — is the greatest artistic achievement, worth more than any pretty sentences: Ferrante has done this, if not perfectly, then with a rare brilliance.
Here is a good review of Ferrante from The Economist. As I’ve been saying for a while, this is one of the important literary projects over the last decade or more. And of course we still don’t know who Elena Ferrante really is, her (his?) true identity remains a secret. And here is the new Vanity Fair interview with Ferrante.
Saturday assorted links
1. Which Republican candidates actually cut government spending?
2. Will the financial mainstream pick up on the block chain idea?
3. Emmanuel Todd is getting himself in trouble.
4. When it comes to travel, skip the iconic.
6. Interview with Josiah Ober on ancient Greece.
7. “But we are not utilitarians. We are Americans.” Is there a coming car revolution?
The economic history of one NYC block
Here is the academic paper, by William Easterly, and Laura Freschi, and Steven Pennings:
Economic development is usually analyzed at the national level, but the literature on creative destruction and misallocation suggests the importance of understanding what is happening at much smaller units. This paper does a development case study at an extreme micro level (one city block in New York City), but over a long period of time (four centuries). We find that (i) development involves many changes in production as comparative advantage evolves and (ii) most of these changes were unexpected (“surprises”). As one episode from the block’s history illustrates, it is difficult for prescriptive planners to anticipate changes in comparative advantage, and it is easy for regulations to stifle creative destruction and to create misallocation. If economic growth indeed has a large component for increases in productivity through reallocation and innovation, we argue that the micro-level is important for understanding development at the national level.
It is a block on Greene St., near NYU, and so a section of this paper focuses on whorehouses. History made them do it. Here is the interactive site. I am in general a big believer in this kind of micro-history, which remains undervalued in the economics profession.
The pointer is from Kottke.
Friday assorted links
1. More on China and the silver standard.
2. Is there too much cream cheese on your bagel for the same reason the air conditioning is too cold?
3. The gravity model (trade) in ancient times. A remarkable piece.
4. Switzerland launches special trains for Asians, Rigi-Kulm edition. But back home in China: “The service sectors we do have data for have flat or falling output similar to other industries.” Lots of signs of pending negative growth in there. And the NYT covers the rise of China’s zombie factories.
5. Critique of Daniel Bell on Chinese meritocracy.
6. The theological poverty economist. And she is moving to GW.
7. The cash or the tuna? The law firm is taking the cash.
8. One of Facebook’s founders is taking on the Fed.
9. New AEA video on how good and interesting the life of an economist is. I don’t find it so informative, and it is odd how little economic reasoning it uses.
How left-leaning are lawyers?
Adam Bonica, Adam S. Chilton, and Maya Sen have an extensive new paper (pdf) on this subject:
American lawyers lean to the left of the ideological spectrum. To help place this in context, the mean DIME score among the attorney population is -0.31 compared to -0.05 for the entire population of donors. Moreover, some 62% of the sample of attorneys are positioned to the left of the midpoint between the party means for members of Congress. Morover, the modal CFscore is in the center-left. This places the average American lawyer’s ideology close to the ideology of Bill Clinton. To be more precise, the modal CFscore for American lawyers is -0.52 and Bill Clinton’s CFscore is -0.68. This confirms prior scholarship and journalism that has argued that the legal profession is liberal on balance. To our knowledge, however, this figure represents the most comprehensive picture of the ideology of American lawyers ever assembled.
There is however a (quite slight) bimodal nature to the distribution and a cluster of right-leaning attorneys has views similar to those of Mitt Romney. Not so many lawyers are true extremists, at least not in this data set. Figure 2 on p.19 will not reproduce for me but it is an excellent picture of the data, including comparisons with other professions.
We learn also that female attorneys are considerably more liberal than male attorneys, but the number of years of work predicts a conservative pull. Being a law firm partner also predicts views which are more conservative than average. If you consider “Big Law” attorneys, while they are overall to the Left, they are more conservative on average than the cities they live in, such as NYC or Los Angeles. Lawyers in Washington, D.C. are especially left-leaning.
The top fourteen law schools all have distributions which lean to the Left (pp.28-29), and UC Berkeley has the most left-leaning alumni. The five law schools, of the fifty surveyed, with right-leaning alumni are University of Oklahoma, Texas A&M University, University of Georgia, Louisiana State University, and Brigham Young University. Pages 38-40 of the paper rank different major law firms by how left- or right-leaning their employees are.
Oil and gas, M&A, and energy lawyers are relatively conservative, see p.45. Entertainment lawyers are relatively left-leaning, same for civil rights and personal injury lawyers. Don’t even ask about law professors. Public defenders are far more left-leaning than prosecutors, though prosecutors are still more left-leaning than lawyers as a whole.
This paper is interesting throughout.
My Product Hunt dialogue
I very much enjoyed this Live Chat, and I thank the participants for all of their stimulating questions and remarks. Here is one excerpt:
Ben Casnocha:
How do you think your career and life would have been different if blogging, twitter, and digital media had be ubiquitous in your teens and 20’s? Would you have still pursued an academic path or would you have become a full-time columnist/commentator/speaker earlier on? I seem to recall you saying at one point that you’re glad the internet didn’t exist early on in your life as it gave you the time to read the classics and develop a substantive base of knowledge.
Tyler Cowen:
I am glad I was forced to live in “book culture” and “meat space’ for my first forty years. Or maybe thirty-five years would have been enough. People these days have lost the sense of information being scarce, and counterintuitively that makes it harder for them to develop profound thoughts. It’s like practicing chess by asking the computer right away, all the time, what the right move is.
[and later] …contemporary academic is overly bureaucratized and there is a very good chance I would [if I were starting today] look for another model of success and contentment. It is an open question whether or not I could find one. Whatever its limitations, there is still a followable formula for academic success, which of course is part of the problem.
Other topics include when is the best age to live in various parts of the world, Alban Berg and Rilke, Marc Andreessen, my one hidden talent, Rene Girard, labor market networks, optimal travel into the past, and which is the most underrated or overrated wisdom tradition. Do read the whole thing.
What I’ve been reading
1. William Skidelsky, Federer and Me: A Story of Obsession. An excellent short book on how tennis has changed through technology, the nature of excellence in human performance, and why fans are interested in sports and sports stars at all. There is no great tennis stagnation.
2. Bill Hayton, The South China Sea: The Struggle for Power in Asia. If you wish to be convinced that no one has much of a good claim to the Spratlys, this is the place to go. The best guide to current disputes.
3. Padraig O’Malley, The Two-State Delusion: Israel and Palestine — A Tale of Two Narratives. This “substance on every page” book can be read profitably no matter what your point of view on this conflict. It has lots of economics too, most of all a good discussion of what it would take for a Palestinian state to be economically viable. Definitely recommended.
4. Barry Allen, Vanishing into Things: Knowledge in Chinese Tradition, is a consistently interesting take on the history of ideas in China, including Daoism, Chan Buddhism, and much more. It is unusual for a book to both make scholarly contributions and engage the common educated reader, most of all on these sometimes arcane topics.
I don’t currently have time to read it, but Robin Lane Fox’s forthcoming Augustine: Conversions to Confessions looks quite good.
Patrick Modiano’s newly translated Pedigree: A Memoir is perhaps excellent in the original French, but I found very little in it to hold my attention.
Jeremiah D. Lambert’s The Power Brokers: The Struggle to Shape and Control the Electric Power Industry is full of useful and interesting facts, organized by the stories of various personalities, including Paul Joskow and Kenneth Lay. Cintra Wilson’s Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling American Style is written in exactly the opposite manner, breezy and fun but at times could use more facts.