Results for “age of em” 17235 found
Sentences to ponder
Well, “Mom”, if flying is a “privilege, not a right,” it’s because over the last century we have gradually accepted the proposition that anything the government tells us it can regulate, it can regulate.
Here is much more, courtesy of The Browser. And this:
Throughout my career – both as a prosecutor and as a defense attorney – I’ve observed a consistent inverse relationship: the more petty a government officer’s authority, the more that officer will feel a need to swagger and demand that you RESPECT HIS AUTHORITAH. Your average FBI agent might search your house based on a crappy perjured warrant, invade your attorney-client emails, and flush your life down the toilet by lying on the stand at your mail fraud trial. But he doesn’t feel a need to vogue and posture to prove anything in the process. He’s the FBI. But God above help you when you run into the guy with a badge from some obscure and puny government agency with a narrow fiefdom. He and his Napoleon syndrome have got something to prove. And he’s terrified that you’ll not take him very, very seriously. When I call FBI agents on behalf of my clients, they’re cool but professional and nonchalant. When I call a small agency – say, state Fish & Game, or one of the minor agency Inspector Generals – they’re hostile, belligerent, and so comically suspicious that you’d think I was asking for their permission to let my client smuggle heroin into the country in the anuses of handicapped Christian missionary orphans. They are infuriated, OUTRAGED, when a client asserts rights, when a client fails to genuflect and display unquestioning obedience. They are, in short, the TSA.
Megan says she is (partially) boycotting flying, but I am surprised by this decision. In relative terms it is the driving experience which has deteriorated, largely because of traffic congestion. Imagine what flying would be like if they were not allowed to charge you a proper price for the experience.
When it comes to airports, some high MU of money users will be better off as a result of TSA abuse; it will lower the price of flights. Personally, I'm happy to put up with the practices if it means less congestion in the airport security line.
Mercados en todo
Investors from the United States believe they have found an exotic new prospect: Latin American baseball players, some as young as 13 and many from impoverished families.
Recognizing that major league teams are offering multimillion-dollar contracts to some teenage prospects, the investors are either financing upstart Dominican trainers, known as buscones, or building their own academies. In exchange, the investors are guaranteed significant returns – sometimes as much as 50 percent of their players’ bonuses – when they sign with major league teams. Agents in the United States typically receive 5 percent.
The full story is here and for the pointer I thank J.C. Bradbury, who has a new book out The Hot Stove: Understanding Baseball's Second Season.
What is the case for the Fed?
Alex asks this question. I am not so enamored of the pre- and post-Fed macroeconomic comparisons. Presumably the Fed advocate also favors deposit insurance and active exercise of the lender of last resort function. Furthermore most Fed advocates today do not want a gold standard, in part because it ties the hands of the Fed in a crisis. I view 1929-1932 as a better illustration of the workings of "a world without a Fed" than "a world with a Fed," even though of course we had a Fed then. If you take the relevant division to be "before and after WWII," the Fed looks pretty good.
It's also the case that the 19th century had much less interconnected leverage than today's world (not only because of the absence of a Fed) and that agricultural productivity was a much bigger determinant of overall volatility.
I see the historical ledger as follows:
1. The Fed made 1979-1982, and the 1970s in general, much worse than they had to be, and for no good reason. Count that as a strike against the Fed.
2. The Fed made the recent crisis much better than it otherwise would have been. Without a Fed, we would have experienced something akin to a Great Depression, including a frozen payments system.
2b. If you wish to give the recent crisis an anti-Fed spin, you can argue that if previous bailouts had not occurred, we might have avoided the high levels of leverage circa 2006 and thus avoided such a major crash. We would have had one or two big recessions earlier on, however. More to the point, I believe that Congress would have done earlier bailouts; after all, that is what just happened in Ireland and TARP was Congress in any case. What is the point of going that route? People think of the gold standard as fetters on the Fed, but I think of the Fed as an excuse for Congress to step back. Consult the wisdom of Garett Jones.
3. A "real Fed" would have made 1929-1932 much better than it was. In my view this #3 more than cancels out #2b. It is unrealistic to ask for a perfect or even a very good Fed, but it is not unrealistic or utopian to advocate "a Fed better than the 1929 Fed" and indeed we've had that ever since 1937.
4. In the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s, and 1990s, I see the Fed as bringing improvements, of unknown magnitude.
5. Historically central banks have been essential in helping nations fight major wars. The world's preeminent military power simply will have a Fed, for the same reason that it has lots of nuclear weapons.
6. More generally, both Fed and Treasury are usually, in relative terms, voices of economic reason within government, even if they're not everything you wish them to be. It is arguably counterproductive to lower their status. Currently, the relevant alternative is a totally politicized Fed, not no Fed at all; see #5.
Addendum: Bryan Caplan offers relevant comment.
Vero on Tyler on the capital gains tax
George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen disagrees with my assessment of the impact of the capital gains tax cut in 1997 on economic growth. He writes:
Why think the Capital gains tax cut gets the credit? With loss offsets in the tax code, isn’t the real rate on capital gains pretty low in any case? And the last decade had a relatively low (nominal, published) capital gains rate but not fantastic growth results. Also, keep in mind that the biggest effects of a cut (or hike) in capital gains rates are on old capital, not new capital. New capital (and other factors) drives growth. But the incidence of capital gains taxes on new capital is largely, through incidence, bounced onto consumers and labor.
I think he may be right. Darn. And then there is this:
Arguments that the maximum CGT tax rate affects economic growth are even more tenuous: Capital gains rates display no contemporaneous correlation with real GDP growth during the last 50 years. Although the effect of capital gains on economic growth may occur with a lag, Burman (1999) tests lags of up to five years and finds no statistically significant effect. Moreover, any effect is likely small as capital gains realizations have averaged about 3 percent of GDP since 1960 and have never been more than 7.5 percent.
What do you guys think? I’d be interested in any argument you may have against or in favor of this paragraph.
Vero’s post is here and do read the comments. I could have put my first point more precisely. I’d like to see an estimate of the real rather than nominal published rate of tax on capital gains. This would take into account loss offsets, carry-over, borrowing against the gains and deducting the interest payments, the option of holding until death, and a number of other factors. I mentioned only loss offsets, which do have a cap and thus one must distinguish between the average and the marginal capital gains rate. A lot of the measured and paid “capital gains tax” is actually slid in from what would otherwise be counted as ordinary income.
In any case, I regard this as one of the great myths of some schools of economics, namely the power of the capital gains tax rate. One can be agnostic on the matter (for one thing the timing of the tax cuts is endogenous), but the data do not show the rate to have a big influence on subsequent economic growth.
Who again is supposed to cut the rate of growth of Medicare spending?
A federal advisory committee said Wednesday that there was adequate evidence that the drug Provenge prolongs the lives of men with advanced prostate cancer, an endorsement that makes it more likely that Medicare will pay for the $93,000 treatment.
The Medicare Coverage Advisory Committee voted that it had “intermediate confidence” in the strength of the data that the drug, developed by Dendreon, improves survival.
The median result in trials is four extra months of life, and the link is here. If you think that four months of life are worth $93,000 of public money, that is a defensible position. But how many times can you apply that argument? I saw this treatment as a good candidate for allocation by market mechanisms, but I suppose that's not how it will be.
The career of a paper mill writer (MIE)
From one of those people who writes other peoples' term papers for a living:
I do a lot of work for seminary students. I like seminary students. They seem so blissfully unaware of the inherent contradiction in paying somebody to help them cheat in courses that are largely about walking in the light of God and providing an ethical model for others to follow. I have been commissioned to write many a passionate condemnation of America's moral decay as exemplified by abortion, gay marriage, or the teaching of evolution. All in all, we may presume that clerical authorities see these as a greater threat than the plagiarism committed by the future frocked.
The article is interesting throughout. The fellow can write a 75-page paper in two days, has never visited a library for his work, and earns far more — $66k last year — than most ostensibly professional writers.
For the pointer I thank David B.
Books of the year, 2010
Here is a meta-list of "best books of the year" lists; the selections I looked at did not thrill me, so here's my own list, in no particular order. First tier:
Ernest Gellner: An Intellectual Biography, by John A. Hall.
Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee.
Charles Emmerson, The Future History of the Arctic.
Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, by Diarmaid MacCulloch.
David Grossman, To the End of the Land.
State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974, by Dominic Sandbrook.
The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry, edited by Patrick Crotty.
Winston's War: Churchill 1940-1945, by Max Hastings.
Kai Bird, Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956-1978.
Peter Hessler, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory.
Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850.
As toss-ins, from the second tier, there are Understanding the Book of Mormon, Philippson's Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam, Peter Watson's The German Genius, Mark Schatzger's Steak, Lydia Davis's Madame Bovary translation, Vietnam: Rising Dragon, Daniel Okrent's Last Call, Gary Gorton's The Panic of 2007, Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, W. John Kress, The Weeping Goldsmith: Discoveries in the Land of Myanmar, a few more good books here, and last but not least Cowen and Tabarrok Modern Principles.
Brought to you by The Age of the Infovore.
How a financial collapse starts
As I've been saying, with a bank run:
Corporate clients have pulled deposits from lenders including the country’s biggest, Bank of Ireland Plc.
With its lenders frozen out of Europe’s money markets and with their deposits shrinking, the Irish government may be forced to seek the bailout ministers have so far resisted.
The EU is pressuring Ireland to accept a bailout and Ireland does not (yet) want it; this should give pause to those who think that "no bailout" policies are time consistent. More generally, the simplest model is that the EU could take care of Ireland and Greece fairly easily, but the spectre of Spanish default lurks in the background. Spain is a much larger economy and the Germans cannot simply pay up to save it. All pronouncements and policies about Ireland (or for that matter Portugal) should be viewed in light of this larger "game." If Spain were fixed essentially the trouble could be paid off to go away, for now at least. But Spain is not fixed.
The longer-run question is why there should be any Irish or Greek banks at all.
Antonio Trujillo’s diabetes nudge bleg
I am a junior faculty at Hopkins and my area of interest is to understand the low level of compliance with prevention among diabetics and hypertensive. Low compliance with medical treatment happens in several health domains. My aim is to develop preventive guidelines that incorporate individual differences. In particular, I am doing some work to measure how non-cognitive skills (eg., self-discipline, persistence, self-control) influence compliance. I have also done research relating cognitive skills and prevention. Most of my work is on low and middle-income countries. However, I think that some of my findings may be generalized.
I am not very familiar with tools from behavioral economics; instead my analysis is heavily based on health economics, labor economics and health policy. Given your knowledge in behavioral economics, I wonder how you would approach this problem.
Here is one article on the topic, and here are a few more, and here. One intuition is that compliance is so weak because people are afraid of bad news, and so they shut the topic out of their minds altogether. Complying reminds them of the topic. Being less worried might help them comply.
A common economic intuition, which I usually disagree with, is to make people post expensive bonds and confiscate the bond if they do not comply. In my view this works only once and afterwards the person wants nothing to do with the game.
An additional method is to make compliance daily, whether or not the technology of compliance requires that. Most people develop a routine for brushing their teeth, even though it is not an intrinsically fun activity.
That many providers have moved from the word "non-compliance" to "non-adherence" is not a good sign; it suggests the actual programs are not working.
This problem is acute in Mexico. One method for that country would be to encourage religious conversions to more extreme points of view, which would limit drinking.
Even for the United States, this is one of our most significant national problems, although it receives very little press. As the rate of diabetes rises, it will continue to grow in import.
What other ideas do you all have?
How does the President order flowers?
I don't post much about the President, so this puzzle caught my eye:
Asked if he has a hard time ordering flowers – as the Michael Douglas character did in "The American President" – Obama said, "The truth is, actually, I get to keep my credit cards, and if I want to go to the florist, I could order some flowers and pay for it." (He did add that if he tried to order the flowers by phone, "they might not believe me.")
What could you say to prove, over the phone, that you are the President of the United States? If you assume the florist is at a working computer terminal and can access Google, you could promise to answer questions about your life, and to answer them so quickly the florist would not think you are googling to those answers. Plus you are dialing from a 202 area code and you sound like President Obama (because you are President Obama), whose voice is well-known and distinct. I would think he would have an especially easy time establishing his identity over the phone. Furthermore the audience, wondering that maybe you are the President of the United States, would fall into the deference mode, even if some residual doubt remained.
Impersonating the President of the United States might draw interest from the law, or at least an inquiry, and that would discourage potential pranksters and make your claim more credible.
Who would have a tougher time establishing a credible identity over the telephone? How about Lady Gaga? Her speaking voice is not well known, fans will know the details of her life on the web and thus pass the Google test, she does not command deference from many florists, and if you impersonate her the Secret Service won't come knocking on your door.
Somewhere in here is a lesson for evolutionary biology…
Kilkenomics
As Martin Lousteau, Argentina’s youngest-ever finance minister, told one audience: “It’s a very bad thing when economists start to be interesting.”
That was said at the recent Irish four-day comedy and economics festival, namely Kilkenomics. Here are other reports from the festival. One bit:
"Ireland needs a new credit rating agency. Moody & Poor," says Colm O'Regan, an IT consultant turned comedian.
And:
The economics festival features more than 20 events, with sessions including “The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own It,” and “What the Hell Just Happened.”
Here are some YouTube videos from the festival; I have not culled through them.
Profile of Morgan Kelly
He is the Irish economist and sage who predicted the decline in property prices and also predicts future political chaos in Ireland. The profile, unnecessarily snarky at points, is here. We again see that economists who have studied economic history are proving especially wise during difficult times:
He was described by the Herald Tribune as "a specialist in medieval demographics"… "whose eyes burn with the passionate intensity of his prophesy".
Here is Kelly on TV. His current prediction?:
Now he is forecasting mass mortgage defaults and an ugly popular uprising. The first stirrings are already visible, he says, with "anxiety giving way to the first upwellings of an inchoate rage and despair that will transform Irish politics along the lines of the Tea Party in America", giving rise to a new "hard-right, anti-Europe, anti-traveller party".
I've already linked to this first-rate Kelly piece on the coming collapse in the Irish housing market. He does not follow every current academic fashion, but here are his (consistently interesting) academic papers. I find this one, about the Industrial Revolution, to be of special import. Here is his potentially important but hard for me to assess paper on the economic impact of the Little Ice Age in European history (or ungated here).
File under "Underappreciated and indeed Hated Economist!"
QEII follow-up: why do people hate the idea?
Philip W., a loyal MR reader, asks:
First, Interfluidity is a wise man.
Second, I believe the price of gold is high because of "financial-existential risk," not because of inflation per se. The U.S. dollar and debt are no longer unambiguously safe and is there any real solution to the triple menace of highly leveraged banks, moral hazard, and financial strategies of extreme negative skewness? It remains to be seen. Given the forthcoming flow of debt finance required to keep Uncle Sam up and running, lots of inflation today wouldn't maximize political rents to leaders or medium-term seigniorage.
Third, the libertarian right is having a hard time seeing the Fed as a relative ally over the last three years, which it has been. That admission implies an unappetizing shift in the goal posts for what is possible, and that sounds like a intellectual surrender to a lot of people I know. I think they are in denial. One alternative to acceptance is to view the Fed as sinister, which then leads you to fear anything they do, including QEII, their current major monetary policy initiative.
Fourth, trust in government is at an especially low level and so monetary policy is viewed through this lens. You need not have absolute trust in government (ha) but I doubt if government today is significantly more sinister, if at all, than in recent times past. Possibly Obama is an arrogant man who wishes to lower your relative status in the broader scheme of things (at least with some "p" this is true), but don't let that influence your analysis of his policies or the policies affiliated with him. Keep your eye on the ball – most of all markets are telling us that future inflation just won't be that high.
Addendum: Scott Sumner makes many interesting points on related issues.
What kind of letters of recommendation are written for women?
In the scholars' analysis of the words that appeared in the letters of recommendation, they found clear patterns of word use for women's and men's letters. Women were more likely to be described with words such as those cited above, as well as "nurturing," "kind," "agreeable" and "warm." Men, in contrast, were much more likely to be described in words classified as "agentive" — words such as "assertive," "confident," "aggressive," "ambitious," "independent" and "daring."
What the analysis showed is that letter writers didn't need to use words like "feminine" to create female stereotypes — and that they did so, time and again, with women who had the same intellectual achievements as their male counterparts.
…The research is based on a content analysis of 624 letters of recommendation submitted on behalf of 194 applicants for eight junior faculty positions at an unidentified research university.
The Irish crisis heats up
Although some diplomats say it is to Ireland’s advantage that the Government is not at present borrowing from the investors, fear of contagion emerged again yesterday as the premium on Spanish and Italian debt jumped to record levels.
The article is here. The Irish have enough funds on hand to finance their government through next summer and they mention this repeatedly. But is that good? The lack of an ongoing market test increases uncertainty about market opinion and perhaps leads more people to wonder about the worst. From other sides it encourages denial about the basic problem. What will that first bond auction look like when it comes? (What will China ask for in return?) Extant bonds are traded, but that market is thin.
Ireland used to say "We are not Greece." These days it is Greece saying "We are not Ireland."
Here are data on Irish competitiveness. The unofficial word is that the hat is being passed for the actual bailout. Merkel is holding tough, which is building pressure on the other weak euro economies. It is a common mechanism that denying a bailout raises the ultimate cost of the bailout you must make.