Results for “age of em” 16718 found
Assorted links
James Cameron moves to the culture that is New Zealand
The story is interesting throughout, I liked this bit:
Adrienne Staples, mayor of the South Wairarapa District Council, recalls that being her first reaction when told in early February that a supposedly famous filmmaker had bought farmland in her zone.
It was not a particularly easy day for Ms. Staples. An avid horsewoman, she was trying to impregnate a mare with semen being flown to Wellington from a Spanish stallion on the South Island. She drove across the Rimutaka Range, twice, to get the semen; juggled calls from the press; and offered to bake Mr. Cameron a cake, because, after all, this is rural New Zealand.
Who is right about China?
Here is one bit from a very good FT piece, “The caustic soda connection,” by Merryn Somerset Webb:
Huge credit growth and some whopping pumping up of the property bubble. By 2011 residential real estate made up nearly 10 per cent of GDP, 14 per cent of the workforce was in construction and China was using up more cement per capita than even Spain at the peak of its construction bubble. Prices were soaring: global investment management firm GMO’s Edward Chancellor points to a 2010 NBER study that showed house prices up 140 per cent in three years in the biggest Chinese cities. Everyone with any cash or any way of getting any cash owned houses: even on official estimates 18 per cent of households in Beijing owned two or more properties and 40 per cent of flats in the major cities were being bought not for use but for investment. They were often left vacant. Overall numbers from Eclectica Asset Management suggest that China has spent twice as much as the US on its property bubble, relative to the size of its economy. Not bad, given what has happened in the US since.
The boom has infected the entire economy. Chancellor reckons that around 35 per cent of bank loans are “directly or indirectly related to Chinese property”. Local governments have also taken out huge loans backed by land grants to finance their increasingly extreme-looking infrastructure projects, while on some estimates a good 50 per cent of China’s GDP is linked to the property market one way or another. That makes it pretty much the biggest emerging market property bubble ever.
From The Economist, here is a much more optimistic view.
Having just been in Beijing, I would say that a visit here probably will not change the views of most people, I mean even more than is usually the case,. Virtually everyone agrees there is a real estate bubble and considerable excess capacity in China. (In contrast, I see factual disagreement about how serious underlying provincial and trust-based debt problems are.) The question is what you think that means, given that the Chinese government, unlike say the ECB, will pull out all stops to try to keep things on track. Check back with me in a year or two…
Markets in Everything: Hair
Sometimes markets in everything surprises even me. Who knew that the market for human hair entangles the Russian mafia, Indian mystics, and Paris Hilton’s “precious.” Here is one bit:
In the state of Andhra Pradesh in southeastern India is a cluster of seven hills. Perched atop one is Tirumala Venkateswara. Dating back nearly two thousand years, it is the most visited religious site in the world. With attendance three times that of the Vatican, Tirumala hosts nearly 20 million pilgrims a year. About half are women participating in a ceremony they hope will bring good luck. Perhaps they still haven’t found a husband. Perhaps their child is sick. For their luck to change, they believe, a special action is required.
So, after waiting in a queue that is miles long, 25,000 women each day mount the steps of a special building. Inside sit some six hundred barbers. The women bend over and, with a few deft strokes of a straight razor, the barbers shave off their hair. The hair used to be thrown away. These days, if it is virgin — that is, never colored, never processed, never cut, having cascaded from her head two or three feet or more — it will have a significance that is not merely spiritual. It is auctioned to licensed peddlers; this past year Tirumala held several online auctions, in one day reaping $27 million. Peddlers sell the hair to exporters, who sell it to manufacturers, who process it and sell it to distributors, who sell it to salons, who attach it to the heads of millions of Western women. Removing the hair had been a means of ego eradication; adding it serves now as an ego boost.
Hat tip: Daniel Lippman.
The best argument for a more expansionary monetary policy?
It’s not very glorious or motivational, but here goes: the costs of inflation, within reasonable ranges, are not very high.
I am more agnostic about the gains from monetary expansion than are many of its advocates. I think we do not know where the point of “potential output” lies, I think sticky nominal wages (especially for new labor market entrants and the unemployed) are overrated as a problem, I doubt the ability of the Fed to make credible commitments at this point, and often I view “hiring” as more of an multi-dimensional investment and longer-term commitment, which requires various variables to be set at the right places, not just the short-run real wage in spot markets.
A bit more personally or perhaps psychologically, the contrarian in me gets nervous when I read the ongoing ritual excoriation of Ben Bernanke in the blogosphere, every time the Fed decides to take no further major action.
Still, at the end of the day if we try further monetary expansion and it fails to stimulate employment, I don’t see a huge social cost to having a three or four percent rather than a two percent inflation rate.
Addendum: Arnold Kling offers related thoughts. Ryan Avent also comments. Scott Sumner replies. Matt Yglesias comments.
Signaling flips
A while ago Bryan and Arnold had an interesting exchange as to whether on-line education might ever “flip” into being a higher-status signal than is currently the case. A conversation with Karina points me to one interesting example of a signal status flip, this time from Beirut (and possibly other places as well?):
Apparently, here in Beirut, nose jobs have become so popular that those who cannot afford them, or don’t even actually need them, can still opt to wear bandages across their nose…to fake a nose job. Yup. The newest trend to hit the Beirut fashion scene is the post-op nose bandage.
There is a bit more here.
Assorted links
What does a contract with Coursera look like?
The contract [with University of Michigan] reveals that even Coursera isn’t yet sure how it will bring in revenue. A section at the end of the agreement, titled “Possible Company Monetization Strategies,” lists eight potential business models, including having companies sponsor courses. That means students taking a free course from Stanford University may eventually be barraged by banner ads or promotional messages. But the universities have the opportunity to veto any revenue-generating idea on a course-by-course basis, so very little is set in stone.
And this stunner:
When and if money does come in, the universities will get 6 to 15 percent of the revenue, depending on how long they offer the course (and thus how long Coursera has to profit from it). The institutions will also get 20 percent of the gross profits, after accounting for costs and previous revenue paid. That means the company gets the vast majority of the cash flow.
The full story is here, and for the pointer I thank my colleague Debra Lattanzi.
Is Modern Music Boring?
Here, via Kevin Drum, is statistical evidence that modern pop music is boring or at least more homogeneous than in the past (yes, Tyler already linked to Kevin’s post but I wanted to link to the underlying dataset (see below)).
We find three important trends in the evolution of musical discourse: the restriction of pitch sequences (with metrics showing less variety in pitch progressions), the homogenization of the timbral palette (with frequent timbres becoming more frequent), and growing average loudness levels.
The picture at right shows the timbral variety:
Smaller values of β indicate less timbral variety: frequent codewords become more frequent, and infrequent ones become even less frequent. This evidences a growing homogenization of the global timbral palette. It also points towards a progressive tendency to follow more fashionable, mainstream sonorities.
The underlying data is from the Million Song Dataset which looks pretty cool and is open.
Markets in everything, Indonesian traffic jockeys
To reduce the number of cars on the road, lawmakers have designated several main arteries as what they call “Three in One zones.” During the morning and afternoon rush, you can’t drive there unless you have at least three people on board. That’s why, near the entrances to the zones, men, women and children line up – raising their index finger – offering to rent themselves to commuters in a hurry.
20-year-old Litjak climbs into a black sedan, cradling her 2-month-old daughter Nabilah. Together, they’ll help a college student get to class on time. The baby gives Litjak a competitive advantage, providing two passengers for the price of one.
Litjak says she can make at least two trips in a morning, collecting two or three dollars to help pay for household expenses. She never worries about her safety, and she likes the work. People who can afford to pay have nice cars, so she sits in air conditioned comfort, listening to the radio.
She and others in this line of work are called traffic jockeys. They dress neatly each day and may have regular customers. For some, it’s their only income. Others, like 21-year-old Adik, see this as an easy way to make extra cash when he’s not on the job parking cars.
Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Nick Lawler. It is not legal to work as a traffic jockey in Indonesia.
Assorted links
1. Why is UK employment up and output down?
2. Genetics vs. paleoanthropology?
3. Price inflation and stock returns (pdf), and here, and here, and most recently here; “There is a consistent lack of positive relation between stock returns and inflation in most of the countries.” I am urging a) a bit of caution, and b) engagement with the literature on this topic. I do favor a more expansionary monetary policy, but I see the balance of evidence as different from how it is frequently portrayed in the blogosphere.
4. New archery gold medal winner is legally blind, and here.
Who reads Chinese fashion magazines?
Lena Yang, general manager of Hearst Magazines China, who oversees nine publications including Elle and Marie Claire, says that the typical reader of Hearst Magazines in China is a 29.5-year-old woman who is more likely to be single than married. She has an average income of about $1,431 a month and spends $938 a season on luxury watches, $982 on handbags and shoes and $1,066 on clothes.
Ms. Yang says these women often live at home and turn to their parents and grandparents to pay for them. The study also showed that many readers in their 20s saved little.
“Most of them, they are a single child,” Ms. Yang said. “That means they don’t have to pay for their rent. So all of that goes to pocket money. They have the parents support them and the grandparents. They actually have six persons to support them.”
Here is more.
Assorted links
1. A decentralist defense of the minimum wage?
2. MIE: restaurants that will serve your dog (as customer).
3. Progress in athletic performance.
4. Can poor teachers learn to become good ones?
5. New Fuchsia Dunlop cookbook due February 2013, pre-order here.
Pharmaceutical innovation is very, very good
We examine the impact of pharmaceutical innovation, as measured by the vintage of prescription drugs used, on longevity, using longitudinal, country-level data on 30 developing and high-income countries during the period 2000-2009. We control for fixed country and year effects, real per capita income, the unemployment rate, mean years of schooling, the urbanization rate, real per capita health expenditure (public and private), the DPT immunization rate, HIV prevalence and tuberculosis incidence. Life expectancy at all ages and survival rates above age 25 increased faster in countries with larger increases in drug vintage. The increase in drug vintage was the only variable that was significantly related to all of these measures of longevity growth. Controlling for all of the other potential determinants of longevity did not reduce the vintage coefficient by more than 20%. Pharmaceutical innovation is estimated to have accounted for almost three-fourths of the 1.74-year increase in life expectancy at birth in the 30 countries in our sample between 2000 and 2009, and for about one third of the 9.1-year difference in life expectancy at birth in 2009 between the top 5 countries (ranked by drug vintage in 2009) and the bottom 5 countries (ranked by the same criterion).
Eight top young economists on where the field is going
It starts with Nicholas Bloom and Raj Chetty, and includes Ali Wyne and Peter Leeson and Justin Wolfers, among other luminaries, courtesy of Big Think. Here is Bloom:
I do not think that any one single breakthrough will happen. The progress is likely to be heavily empirical—simply because more and more data is becoming available, and it is easy to analyze with fast computers (so empirics is now advancing faster than theory)—and spread across many hundreds of topics. So economics has gone from Victorian science, where one genius in his shed could invent the steam engine over the weekend, to industrial science, where innovation comes in thousands of tiny steps made by dozens of research teams.
Here is Wolfers:
Economic theory will become a tool we use to structure our investigation of the data. Equally, economics is not the only social science engaged in this race: our friends in political science and sociology use similar tools; computer scientists are grappling with “big data” and machine learning; and statisticians are developing new tools. Whichever field adapts best will win. I think it will be economics.