Results for “age of em” 17235 found
Classical music for $100
Enda asks:
Loyal MR reader and consumer of alternative/indie/rock music here. If someone asked me for a broad introduction to the best of the genre with a budget of $100, my personal recommendation would be to purchase Sgt Pepper (The Beatles), skip most of the next two decades, Doolittle (Pixies), OK Computer (Radiohead), Pinkerton (Weezer), Siamese Dream (Smashing Pumpkins), Loveless (My Bloody Valentine), Is This It (The Strokes), Songs for the Deaf (Queens of the Stone Age) and Funeral (Arcade Fire).I have a $100 budget for an introduction to classical music and an essentially blank canvas. Your recommendations?
I'll price this by the CDs rather than the MP3s:
1. Start with a box of the Beethoven symphonies, either Gardiner or van Karajan cost only $20. (For $43 the Klemperer set offers the piano concerti as well.)
5. Mozart, symphonies 40 and 41 and other late symphonies, $15.
That brings us to about $68. For the rest I would draw from Dvorak's New World Symphony, Schubert (Symphony 9 or Trout Quintet, with superb pairings on both CDs), assorted Chopin, Beethoven piano sonatas, or Monteverdi, or Philip Glass Songs from the Trilogy. In general, try whichever pieces might have personal meaning to you; for instance if you liked the movie Black Swan, buy Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake (by either Previn or Pletnev) I've focused on the most accessible pieces, but if you wish to skip ahead Schubert's String Quintet is better than the Trout, Op.31, etc.
Incentives vs. the TSA
Every spring, private security officers at San Francisco International Airport compete in a workplace "March Madness"-style tournament for cash prizes, some as high as $1,500.
The games: finding illegal items and explosives in carry-on bags; successfully picking locks on difficult-to-open luggage; and spotting a would-be terrorist (in this case Covenant Aviation Security's president, Gerald L. Berry) on security videos.
"The bonuses are pretty handsome," Berry said. "We have to be good – equal or better than the feds. So we work at it, and we incentivize."
Somehow, this I had not known, nor had I known it was possible:
Some of the nation's biggest airports are responding to recent public outrage over security screening by weighing whether they should hire private firms such as Covenant to replace the Transportation Security Administration. Sixteen airports, including San Francisco and Kansas City International Airport, have made the switch since 2002.
The full story is here.
Most Popular Marginal Revolution Posts from 2010
Here are the most popular Marginal Revolution posts from 2010 as measured by landing pages and page views.
1. Book lists were very popular as a category. The highest ranked post in terms of page views was Tyler's Books which have influenced me the most which created a blogosphere avalanche. Links to other people's lists (of influential books) was also very popular. As was Books of the year, 2010 and peculiarly this post on The best-selling book of all time.
2. The number one linked post was What happened to M. Night Shyamalan? a one-liner and one-picturer. Also very popular in the category of "quickies" were Barbados v. Grenada, the demand for own-goals, Dead Birds, Freak-onomics, Nazi-Nudging, and Yuck_markets in Everything.
3. One Game Machine per Child on the failure of a computer voucher program to raise grades (but it did increase gaming).
5. The Dark Magic of Structured Finance.
7. Peter A. Diamond.
10. Why Did the Soviet Union Fall? (from 2007).
12. A Theory for Why Latvian Women are Beautiful.
Other substantive posts with high popularity (in the top-50) were my posts Insiders, Outsiders and Unemployment and The Philosophical Cow and Tyler's posts How many children should you have?, Is there a case for a vat?, Does the Law Professor have cause to complain? and Why is Haiti so Poor?
Two of my posts from previous years were also popular in 2010, from 2008 What is New Trade Theory? on Paul Krugman's Nobel and from 2005 Why Most Published Research Findings are False.
Hope you have enjoyed this years offerings. What have I missed?
Assorted links
Free Money
Christopher Beam's piece on libertarianism had some amusing moments:
Say we started from scratch and created a society in which government covered
only the bare essentials of an army, police, and a
courts system. I’m a farmer, and I want to sell my crops. In Libertopia, I can sell them in exchange for money. Where does
the money come from? Easy, a private bank. Who prints the money? Well,for that we’d need a central bank–otherwise you’d have a thousand
banks with a thousand different types of currency.
A monetary system with thousands of banks issuing their own currency! Ho, ho, ho….those wacky libertarians where do they get their crrrrrazy ideas?
Images from Nick Szabo, the Minneapolis Fed, the San Francisco Fed, the Philadelphia Fed and Larry Schutts.
Addendum: Scott Sumner has other bones to pick.
Joseph Gibson on how to improve Congress
Chug refers me to this new book. A few of the ideas are:
1. Make Congress a temporary job, a bit more like jury duty or serving in the military.
2. Allow all financial contributions but require full disclosure on the internet.
3. Lower or eliminate the fixed allotment for Congressional staff, to limit the "bubble" which surrounds Congressmen.
4. Do not allow fundraising while Congress is in session, to make sessions more urgent.
5. Require that bills be written in plain English.
6. Allow formal vote-trading, so minority legislators could have some prospect of promoting their better ideas.
7. Make it easier to repeal unnecessary laws.
8. Eliminate the "hold" and make filibusters much harder.
9. Make confirmations quicker and easier.
10. Make the House smaller.
There is more, but that is a start.
In general I find Congressional reform proposals, including filibuster abolition, difficult to evaluate. There is no simple model at hand. Sometimes the median voter model is useful, but in most cases it implies the reforms don't matter, a conclusion which I would not wish to accept so readily. Multi-dimensional cycling models often imply that either a) it still doesn't matter (the agenda setter remains in charge), or b) it matters some huge amount in a way which is difficult to forecast but the entire political equilibrium can shift and not just locally.
There are many "near median voter models," perhaps too many.
There is also the Becker QJE 1983 model about the bargaining power of different interest groups. Still, when it comes to outlining exactly how the procedural reforms shift the political bargain, we are again looking at a black box. The first cut version of the model seems to imply that political procedures don't much matter.
The overall problem is that plausible models generate either no changes or large, non-local changes. Maybe we should take those results seriously, but then in the former case it doesn't matter and in the then-more-relevant latter case we still can't predict the nature or even the direction of the non-local shift.
The euro: where we are at
Wolfgang Munchau writes:
The EFSF will expire in 2013, at which point a new, tougher crisis regime will kick in. The EU has chosen this particular two-step construction for mainly political reasons, but from a funding perspective it is a nightmare. All existing bondholders will be protected until 2013. All government bonds issued from 2013 onwards will have collective action clauses. This means that if a government cannot service the debt, it can agree a haircut with a majority of investors – with legal force for all investors, including those who disagree with the majority vote. Looking at it from a risk-management perspective, this means that the entire default risk of the eurozone periphery will be concentrated on post-2013 bond issues. No one in their right mind would buy such junk bonds.
The way the new crisis mechanism is constructed ensures that the market for European periphery bonds is going to remain thin. What is now being conceived as a new crisis mechanism may end up as the eurozone’s principal funding agency if no one else will provide the funds. It would issue its own bonds – eurozone bonds – underwritten by the few remaining triple A-rated sovereigns, most importantly Germany and France. It is hard to see how such a construction could be sustainable. Should there ever be a default, Berlin and Paris would have to pay up – or default themselves.
One paragraph on the Lehman bankruptcy
Do you know the old saying "A picture is worth a thousand words"? How about a new saying: "197 words is worth a thousand words"?:
To take one example: Lehman’s holding company (LBHI) filed for bankruptcy, but at the last minute its US broker-dealer (LBI) was kept out of bankruptcy by the NY Fed. The problem was that no one knew about this – most people thought LBI had filed too. Lehman had all sorts of problems getting employees to even show up for work; JPMorgan, which was LBI’s clearing bank, unilaterally shut off LBI’s access to its accounts for several days, and actually started seizing assets of LBI’s prime brokerage clients (a huge no-no); clearinghouses improperly limited LBI’s trading activity; the NSCC mistakenly seized a large amount of LBI’s customer securities; Lehman’s European broker-dealer (LBIE) stopped payments to LBI’s omnibus account even though LBI continued to make payments to LBIE; incoming customer securities to LBI weren’t getting properly segregated; counterparties simply stopped posting collateral they owed on OTC derivatives with LBI; and so on. That first week, the biggest challenge was simply getting someone at Lehman on the phone. (I saw a 63-year-old senior partner do a fist-pump you’d have to see to believe when he finally got an account executive at Lehman on the phone. Unquestionably the highlight of my week.)
The full article is here, hat tip goes to Matt Yglesias.
Economics and mental health care
Jacob, a loyal MR reader, writes to me:
I am a research assistant involved in an evaluation of the quality of mental health care. It turns out that much of “quality” from a clinician's perspective involves coercing/convincing/luring patients into treatment – patients should show up quickly (“initiation”) and repeatedly (“engagement”) and for a really long time (“continuation-phase treatment”). For example, health plans are graded on the proportion of depressed patients that they can keep on antidepressants for 6 months (link – pg 23).
So, how do you think about markets and individual-level-decision making among the severely mentally ill. On one hand, it feels inadequate to throw up ones hands and say everyone is the best ruler of themselves. But it also feels inadequate to defer fully to the experts. I’m sure this topic has been tackled elsewhere but a thoughtful analysis has evaded me so far.
A few points:
1. Here are some recent reported results about conceptualizing mental illness; I cannot vouch for them.
2. Here is an article about the fracturing of the concept of mental illness. Here is The Economist on the same topic.
3. The mentally ill have it tough in China.
4. Here is one story of rational economic man.
5. I disagree with Bryan Caplan's argument that mental illness is a false category; he is making an odd turn toward behaviorism. That the behavior can be reduced to preferences and constraints does not mean that is the best or only way of understanding the phenomenon (which is not just about behavior).
6. Here is the major paper on economics and mental health. Here is a collection on the same topic, by the same authors.
7. You won't find the answers to your questions in any of those places, or here. I do, in the meantime, hold two views. First, historically the concept has been used — indeed abused — to incorrectly rationalize a lot of forcible institutionalization. Second, it is not a meaningless concept, though fractured it may be.
Mexico fact of the day
Until the mid-1990s, Mexico spent just 0.008% of annual economic output on law enforcement, among the lowest rates in the world. The average officer earns $500 a month, or about half the average per-capita income in Mexico. Seven of 10 finished only primary school. More than 400 municipalities have no local police at all.
Here is much more, mostly on the battle with the drug cartels.
Win Steven Landsburg’s Money. Not!
Last week Steven Landsburg posted the classic puzzle:
There's a certain country where everybody wants to have a son. Therefore each couple keeps having children until they have a boy; then they stop. What fraction of the population is female?
Being clever and worldly you may suppose that you know the answer, just as I did. 50%, right?
Every birth has a 50% chance of producing a girl. This remains the case no matter what stopping rule the parents are using. Therefore the expected number of girls is equal to the expected number of boys. So in expectation, half of all children are girls.
Clever! Except Landsburg being even more clever shows that the correct answer is in fact less than 50% (with the exact number depending on how many families there are in the country).
Clever people don't like to be told they are wrong, however, so even after much explanation (follow Landsburg in the comments to the answer post) there remains disagreement. So Landsburg is offering a big money bet:
I am therefore offering to bet him $15,000 that I’m right (with detailed terms described below). If you agree with Lubos, this is your chance to get in on the action. I will take additional bets up to $5000 per person from all comers until such time as I decide to cut this off.
If you want in, you can read the conditions and bet against Steve here.
N.B.: The correct answer does not rely on selection effects (e.g. some families have a greater propensity to have girls) nor does it involve changing the question to the average fraction of girls in a family.
Are CEOS paid enough? A look at sudden deaths
From Bang Dang Nguyen and Kaspar Meisner Nielsen:
An efficient managerial labor market should compensate executives according to their contribution to shareholder value. We provide novel empirical evidence about the relationship between executive pay and managerial contribution to value by exploiting the exogenous variation resulting from stock price reactions to sudden deaths. We find, first, that the managerial labor market is characterized by positive sorting: managers with high contributions to value obtain higher pay. We find, second, that executives appear, on average, to retain about 80% of the value they create. Overall, our results are informative about the workings of the managerial labor market.
Catch Shares
Catch Shares are expanding in California, Oregon and Washington starting in January.
Under the catch-share system, fishery managers set an overall catch limit at the beginning of the season. Each fisherman will own a percentage of that catch. Just like shares in the stock market, the quotas can be traded or sold. The idea is that a market-based system will give fishermen more flexibility.
Not everyone is happy. Larry Collins, president of the Crab Boat Owners Association in San Francisco, is doubtful.
Collins is concerned that a market-based system will bring market manipulation. Under the rules, you don't have to be a fisherman to buy fish quotas, so it's possible that speculators or even environmental groups could buy into the market.
"You want hedge fund managers deciding when the people catch fish? Is that who you want to own your fish, or do you want to own them?" Collins asks.
Collins is also concerned about fishermen who make smaller catches. In Alaskan fisheries that use catch shares, some smaller boats opted to sell their fish quotas.
"That concentrated the resource in fewer and fewer hands. Now, I tend to think that public trust resources should be used to employ as many people as possible," he says.
Both of these features are benefits not costs. It's true that speculation can create bubbles and other problems but speculators also make the market more future-oriented and this will help to avoid the collapse of fishing stocks by making prices a better early warning system. Moreover, if environmentalists want to buy catch shares to increase the fishing stock then I am all for it. In Modern Principles, Tyler and I discuss how we bought and retired some SO2 making the air cleaner for everyone (you are welcome! :)).
Fewer, larger boats is also a benefit not a cost. Under the current system the influx of small boats is simply a form of rent-seeking which raises net social costs–too many fisherman chasing too few fish. Catch shares reduce over-capitilization in the industry raising productivity (see also Modern Principles on this point).
The main problem with catch-shares is setting the size of the catch, which inevitably is a politicized process. Massachussetts congressmen, for example, are trying to withold funds from NOAA until catch shares are increased. Nevertheless with so many fishing stocks nearing collapse it is clear that some limits are needed. Moreover, before catch-shares are put in place few people in the industry appreciate that temporary limits can lead to long-term increases in catch as the fishing stocks recover to sustainable levels. After catch-shares are put in place, however, it is sometimes the fishermen who lobby for greater limits not for monopoly reasons but as they come to recognize that a smaller limit leads to a larger stock and larger profits.
Here is my previous post, Reversing the Decline in Fish Stocks, on catch shares with more links.
Hat tip: Daniel Lippman.
Kalamazoo beer exchange
Depending on what customers purchase, the prices will rise or fall.
“It’s an ever-evolving happy hour,” Flora said.
The prices will never go higher than around 10 percent the base cost, but will drop to as much as 50 percent below base cost.
For example, a Bell’s Two-Hearted Ale may be $3 normally.
But, depending on the “market” activity (i.e. patrons buying tendencies) it could be as much as $3.25 or as little as $1.50 (prices fluctuate in increments of 25 cents).
The prices will change every 15 minutes and there will be, at random, a “stock market crash” – signified by air horns – when all 28 beers are sold at a low rate for five minutes.
The full story is here and I thank Dave Kirsammer for the pointer.
Here is a picture of Kalamazoo.