Results for “age of em” 15649 found
Me on China
There is more to talk about than just food:
The trade effects of a revaluation of the yuan are unlikely to be
large, in part because many Chinese exporters specialize in assembly.
China sends out money buying components like semiconductors and turns
them into finished goods, thereby running a trade deficit with East
Asia. A new and higher value for the yuan would largely be a wash for
these activities. With a stronger currency, China would have a harder
time selling its electronic goods, but this would be offset by its
greater purchasing power over the semiconductors. It would not do much
damage to the Chinese competitive position.The Chinese keep the yuan low, relative to the dollar, by buying up United States Treasury
securities; as of early 2006, the Chinese central bank held up to $470
billion in Treasury securities. This huge accumulation of relatively
low-yielding assets is the investment strategy of risk-averse
bureaucrats, but it may bring longer-term benefits. Those assets can
someday be sold or otherwise transferred to underdiversified Chinese
financial institutions. The accumulation gives the Chinese a stake in
American prosperity and signals that the Chinese are committed to
long-term participation in the global economy. On the American side,
the Treasury market is more liquid and the budget deficit can be
financed at lower cost.
Here is the full argument.
What does voice pitch indicate?
Women in almost every culture speak in deeper voices than Japanese women. American women’s voices are lower than Japanese women’s, Swedish women’s are lower than American’s, and Dutch women’s are lower than Swedish women’s. Vocal difference is one way of expressing social difference, so that in Dutch society, which doesn’t differentiate much between its image of the ideal male and the ideal female, there are few differences between male and female voice. The Dutch also find medium and low pitch more attractive than high pitch.
That is from the new and interesting The Human Voice: How this Extraordinary Instrument Reveals Essential Clues About Who We Are, by Anne Karpf. Here is an interesting dissertation abstract on voice pitch, some of which relates to economic ideas on signaling.
Are new concert halls worth it?
Here is a good NYT article, and here is my favorite part:
“This is all redistributing people’s expenditures from one activity to another,” said David Galenson, an economist at the University of Chicago who focuses on the arts.
Tyler
Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University and the
author of “Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts
Funding,” said there was little solid research measuring the economic
impact of arts centers on a city, although there was for sports
stadiums. Such research shows no benefit for a city’s growth, he said,
adding that he was skeptical about economic claims for new concert
halls.“The glorious tales are typically exaggerations,” said
Mr. Cowen, who also contributes a monthly economics column to The New
York Times.
Random rants on music and books
1. Bob Dylan’s latest has received rave reviews just about everywhere. Who can doubt an honest effort from the elder statesman? In reality it is little more than a repackaged version of his last two (superb) albums and thus mostly predictable and mostly boring. By the way, it is becoming clearer — against all former odds — that he was often a horrible lyricist but he remains, even in his dotage, a remarkable vocalist.
2. I loved the first half of Samuel Beckett’s Watt, but then lost the thread of the book. Beckett’s fiction remains underread, if only because we’ve yet to figure out just how good it is (or isn’t). The best parts are astonishing, but at times I feel I am listening to one of those unfunny British radio comedy shows.
3. Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children is a novel about thirty-somethings, in a pre- and post 9-11 NYC, transitioning (or not) into adulthood. That is a recipe for literary trouble. But I bought it anyway, trusting Meghan O’Rourke, and yes it deserves the sterling reviews. I kept expecting Megan McArdle to show up as a character and give them all a good talking-to about microeconomics, which is exactly what the characters need.
4. The best world music release of the last year or so remains Amadou and Mariam, Dimanche a Bamako. It is also the best pop album of the last year. The two Mali musicmakers are blind and also married to each other. I don’t see how anyone could help but love this music. After a year from its purchase, I’m still listening to it.
5. Steven Slivinki’s Buck Wild: How Republicans Broke the Bank and Became the Party of Big Government is exactly what the subtitle suggests. How did that happen? One factor is that the Republicans found Democratic rule too horrible a prospect to bear and they became more populist. Let’s hope the Democrats don’t make a comparable mistake.
6. Stephen Miller’s Conversation: The History of a Declining Art. I loved the title, hated the subtitle. Much of the book, which considers the preconditions of good conversation, is fascinating and, despite its popular level, goes beyond the muddled arguments of Habermas. It collapses when it argues that the quality of conversation is declining in the modern world. The evidence consists solely of examples of bad modern conversations.
Spite
My point was that the rich are spiteful–that they enjoy the envy of the poor.
Putting aside whether the poor are more spiteful toward each other (which is in fact my view), at the relevant margin the spiteful rich mainly enjoy the envy of the other rich, not the envy of the poor. A rich person who sought or enjoyed the envy of the poor would be considered a loser by the other rich. And having that reputation is a terrible fate. The rich have a strong incentive to train themselves out of such "low level" forms of spite, which are viewed as no better than naming your kid "Jed" or buying a velvet painting of Elvis.
Brad follows up:
Surely public policy should weigh the spite-generated utility the rich
gain from their conspicuous consumption as worth less than nothing,
shouldn’t it?
In my view the "spite game" of the rich is not so grim. It is mostly positive-sum, if only because in the rich-on-rich competition, each rich person self-deceives, defines a new dimension of quality, and calls himself the winner. This process is sometimes sad, but I don’t see an ethical reason to downgrade those pleasures. Am I in fact so different? I enjoy being part of (what I think is) the best "struggling to redefine libertarianism, economics survey, scattered cultural recommendations, occasional dating advice" blog out there. It doesn’t much bother me that Leibniz or for that matter Joe Stiglitz was/is much smarter than I am.
I view status competition as closer to a Tiebout hypothesis of quasi-efficient sorting; perhaps Brad views it as a long and potent hammer, deliberately wielded so as to crash into the front door of homes in Camden.
Many of the poor resent the successful Korean grocer more than they resent Paris Hilton. Yet I wouldn’t want to tax the grocer for that reason, even if he does sometimes gloat. Those "formerly poor who are making it" are often the people I least want to tax (in fact both Brad and I wish to subsidize them through EITC), yet they are often the most envied.
The bottom line: I’m not denying the standard efficiency-combined-with-Willie-Sutton reasons for taxing the rich, but I would not add spiteful preferences to those rationales.
Addendum: Here is Greg Mankiw’s response to Brad.
Making Globalization Work, or Joe Stiglitz watch, part II
Joe Stiglitz’s new book claims the main problem is that "we" have not "managed" globalization very well. It has benefited mainly the rich and not the poor. Funny me, I thought the main problems were tyranny, dictators, corruption, and low-quality and weak governments.
On p.144 Stiglitz seems to defend Putin’s jailing of Khodorovsky; after all it did bring money back to the Russian people.
Here is one snitty but not altogether inappropriate review. Here is a New York Times review.
What makes individuals take up science?
In a nutshell, mentors:
The most common response to the question ‘What inspired you to take up science?’ – given by respondents including Dr Colin Berry, Peter Cochrane, Jorge Mayer, Simon Singh and Christopher Llewellyn Smith – is that they were inspired by teachers or mentors. Typical of such reponses are Alom Shaha‘s description of ‘gifted teachers, whose enthusiasm for their subjects was relentless and infectious’, and Michael Wilson‘s account of ‘inspirational and rigorous teachers in high school, who engendered an insatiable intellectual hunger for factual knowledge, and who encouraged observation and deductive thinking’.
Survey respondents often point to one or two particular individuals who made a lasting impact. Josef Penninger, for instance, was inspired by ‘a great mentor and teacher’, and argues that ‘most of us became what we became because of one dominating person, who moved us into a certain direction’. Frances Downey, James Enstrom, Pat Norris, John Zarnecki and Anton Zeilinger describe inspirational mathematics and physics teachers, Thomas Addiscott and Eliot Forster discuss inspirational chemistry teachers, and Kenneth Freeman had ‘a very capable and very overworked teacher’ who taught him mathematics, physics and chemistry. Meanwhile, Professor Sir Colin Berry, Keith Davies and William Ledger found inspiration in their biology teachers.
Here is much more, via www.politicaltheory.info. Here is the answer of Sophie Petit-Zeman: falling in love with the teacher.
Joe Stiglitz watch
Let me start with the concessions. Joe Stiglitz is one of the most brilliant economic theorists of the last thirty years. The current Bolivian distribution of wealth is drastically unfair and is a legacy of prior and indeed ongoing theft and oppression. Large enough resource confiscations, as occurred when the Saudis nationalized Western oil interests, can make a people better off.
Now let’s move to the train wreck, quoted from The New York Times Book Review, written by Alma Guillermoprieto:
Stiglitz and his wife first visited Bolivia four years ago, and returned in May. "Morales’s election was such a big thing," he said in a recent phone conversation, "that we decided to make the effort to go down there and take a look." He spent one day of the visit listening to Powerpoint presentations by members of Morales’s economic team, most of whom are academics who at some point have studied abroad. He found his interlocutors thoughtful and impressive, he said.
In May, Evo Morales decreed the nationalization of the energy industry…In July, Stiglitz, who has written about energy resources and how they are used, did not seem to find the policy startling or irrational, even though it has enraged the representatives of the companies that have invested in Bolivia’s tempting deposits of natural gas.
It should be noted that the Bolivians were receiving only 18 percent royalties on these resources, and that figure was calculated on a base lower than market prices might imply, given that the country is landlocked and does not receive market prices for its gas. So yes it is unfair.
But under the new regime, the gas yields only $820 milliion in revenue a year. That is over $100 a person a year. Lots of money for a poor Bolivian, but hardly enough to retire on or hardly enough to then stagnate. And Bolivia wrecks its credibility with foreign investors. And a renegotiation of the deal with the private companies would have been possible. And most state energy companies are very badly run. And energy and indeed natural gas shortages are already popping up in Bolivia. And many people in the wealthier, eastern part of the country (e.g., Santa Cruz) opposed nationalization; they are keen to do business with Brazil. And few poor countries — dare I say any? — have done well going down the route of economic populism. And if we are going to be populist, is anyone — read: Stiglitz — calling for that money to go directly to Bolivia’s citizens? That includes the indigenous ones who live on the barren altiplano and even now don’t control the government and probably never will. Yup, those people. (I might add that I have such a hat, which I cherish, although Natasha asks I do not wear it in the United States.)
Addendum: Here is Brad DeLong on Paul Krugman’s economic populism: "…when I read Paul’s call for "smart, bold populism," I am reminded of earlier calls a couple of decades ago by Milton Friedman, Marty Feldstein, and their ilk for smart, bold conservatism or smart, bold libertarianism. But they did not get what they ordered: on the economic policy front the policies of Reagan and of Bush II have been a horrible botch. What populist policies that we can think of would be smart? And how can we make our high politicians allergic to populist policies that are stupid?"
China clinic of the day
The first clinic for internet addiction opened up in China last year, but now internet-addicted teens can take advantage of an improved facility, the Shanghai Sunshine Community Youth Affairs Center, an actual halfway house set up to soothe and detox the internet-riddled souls of young Chinese addicts.
According to the BBC, "internet addiction is reaching epidemic proportions in China". Internet addiction, like most of the so-called addictions, is usually diagnosed as a compulsion which requires intervention.
That is from Alina Stefanescu.
Matt Yglesias could be the Gilbert Arenas of libertarianism
If only he wanted to. Matt writes:
I actually think I am pretty cynical about government. I’ve learned a lot from my various libertarian friends, from my seminar with Robert Nozick, from libertarian blogs, etc. and I think public choice economics is a very important perspective. The upshot of this is that, as a general matter, I’m considerably less enthusiastic about regulatory solutions to policy problems than are most liberals.
Sadly, though, the upshot of my libertarian-infused cynicism has mostly been to push me left of where I used to be on domestic policy issues. It’s cynicism about government and the political process that, for example, has made me much more enthusiastic about labor unions and much more hostile to means-testing entitlements than I used to be. If I believed that the deliberative democracy people weren’t naive fools, I’d be much more sanguine about various "third way" approaches to things.
Matt is probably the closest I will ever get to thinking I could be a Democrat. But I am not sure what he is favoring in his post.
One view is that a once-and-for-all change favoring labor unions would produce a stream of ongoing benefits greater than we could achieve through smaller piecemeal government interventions. On empirical grounds I am skeptical of our ability to manipulate the union participation variable in a very useful way, and that is assuming I were to like labor unions more than I do (I do like them somewhat; I am not a union-basher, but I am not nearly as keen on unions as Matt.) Union participation varies largely with whether "unionizable" sectors of the economy expand and contract. Clearly we are headed away from labor unions as manufacturing shrinks as a percentage of gdp.
Another view, not excluding the first, is that Matt has abandoned Rawls’s "publicity condition." That is, he is willing to advocate policies he knows to be bad, out of fear that they prevent a political tidal wave. Means-testing Medicare, for instance, might lead the whole system to lose favor and collapse. Therefore we shouldn’t means-test, even if the idea taken on its own terms has merit. I don’t dismiss this possibility.
If Matt is willing to admit I am right about unions (I am pretty sure about that one), I am willing to call the other question a draw. Deal?
Addendum: Here is Matt’s new book-to-be.
The most suprising two paragraphs so far today
“How tall your parents are compared to the average height explains
80 to 90 percent of how tall you are compared to the average person,”
Dr. Vaupel said. But “only 3 percent of how long you live compared to
the average person can be explained by how long your parents lived.”“You
really learn very little about your own life span from your parents’
life spans,” Dr. Vaupel said. “That’s what the evidence shows. Even
twins, identical twins, die at different times.” On average, he said,
more than 10 years apart.
Here is the full story, which is interesting throughout. But of course the day is young, and I haven’t seen Bryan, Robin [Hanson], and Alex yet…
Does the youth dependency ratio drive economic growth?
Jane Galt and Malcolm Gladwell have a tiff.
Gladwell, citing David Bloom and David Canning, suggested that changes in the "youth dependency ratio," account for a big chunk of Irish economic growth. The youth dependency ratio refers to how many young-uns require support, relative to the broader population. The Irish legalized contraception in 1979, birth rates continued to fall, and later the economy boomed. But is the connection a causal one?
Here is a basic argument and model that the youth dependency ratio can matter.
I can see three possible mechanisms. 1) Fewer babies mean that more women work. 2) Fewer babies mean that each baby gets more parental investment; in the long run those people are smarter. 3) Fewer babies raises the savings rate.
Which of these might have operated in Ireland?
On Mechanism #1, Irish women still work much less than the OECD average, yet Ireland is wealthier than almost anywhere else in Europe. If a theory of growth first postulates a big or dominant effect, and then predicts rates but fails when it comes to predicting levels, I worry.
If we look at "rates of growth" only, this estimate suggests that more Irish female labor accounts for 1.5 percent Irish growth a year. That hardly covers the growth gap between Ireland and the rest of Europe. One estimate of elasticities suggests that an extra kid lowers an Irish woman’s chance of working full-time by 11.3 percent, but raises her chance of part-time work by 7.7 percent. How far does that get us? Bloom is a renowned labor economist but his article is far from state of the art macroeconomics. Do note that increases in "total factor productivity" — often driven by foreign investment — seem to be more important than "growth in labor inputs" by a three to two ratio.
It ought to be easy to show evidence that the Irish boom has been strongest in the sectors where women work the most, such as services and not manufacturing. I can’t find that evidence, can my readers?
Mechanism #2 is for the long run and it cannot explain the Irish boom of recent times or the timing of its possible connection to contraception. Higher skills are a big part of the Irish story, but the trend started in about 1967.
Mechanism #3: In Ireland, since the mid 1970s, gross private savings rates have been falling, more or less. More generally, time series models for a single country, including demographic ones, don’t predict savings rates very well.
These studies I am citing have their defects, but they do show that the overall question is not so simple.
Notes:
1. These graphs show that, for developing countries, the change in the youth dependency ratio has "eyeball power" for 1975-1990, but not for 1960-1975.
2. This study of Asia suggests that the youth dependency ratio matters, often through the savings rate (not the Irish scenario); the entire story is conditioned by "institutional factors."
3. Latin America has had falling birth rates but has failed to cash in. As Bloom stresses, favorable birth rates help only if the country has good policies for putting the new female workers into productive positions. In this regard Galt and Gladwell may not be so far apart.
The bottom line: How much of the Irish boom is caused by the change in the youth dependency ratio? I don’t know. If I had to offer a "I’m just a poor lil’ ol’ blogger but I’ve read lots of real business cycles macroeconomics simulation papers" seat of the pants sort of estimate, I would opt for a maximum of 15 to 20 percent. That’s certainly worth writing about, but it is not the major story either. I’d like to see a sectoral decomposition analysis, and I suspect that would point our attention toward FDI, education, and a favorable tax regime as bigger factors.
Addendum: Malcolm adds more.
Elin Danielson-Gambogi
She was a Finnish painter from the turn of the century, that is her self-portrait. Here is another self-portrait, especially radiant. Here are more images. Here is an old photo.
Lynne Munson reviews my book
She covers Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding, in The Weekly Standard. Here is the link, which offers only a bit of the review to non-subscribers. Here is an excerpt from the critical part of her review:
…few critical observers would agree that contemporary American art has put its best work forward in recent decades, when our artists and art institutions have enjoyed more riches than at any other time in history. Contemporary American artmaking has been monopolized for nearly a half-century by postmodernism, a politics-obsessed formulaic approach that has yielded such shock-art masterpieces as Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (which finds itself in numerous museum collections). Artists who do not work in the postmodern mode are excluded from museum exhibitions and the best galleries.
Of course, no better can be said of the products of the European art world, whose denizens have, at best, striven to vie with their postmodern American counterparts for the prize of Most Shocking. But to argue, as Cowen does, that "the American model encourages artistic creativity [and] keeps the politicization of art to a minimum," is to be unaware of how narrow and prescriptive American artmaking has become. The simple fact is that artmaking in America has been taken over by a single bad idea, despite the ample and diverse funding it receives.
Her last sentence is a good illustration of how two people can look at the same facts and see such very different patterns.
Everybody Coffins
Caterina reports:
Everybody Coffins produces coffins that are easy to assemble without tools, IKEA-style, and ship flat easily. They’ve built them for emergencies, but I think they will probably see another big market from people who want economical coffins, unlike those gilt mahogany extravaganzas that funeral homes try to push upon the bereaved.
Don’t think the lower-middle class is being denied the benefits of economic growth.
If you prefer a more modern look, here are coffins designed to look like sleek cocoon-like pods, made out of soy and jute. They decompose in fifteen years.