Results for “age of em” 17231 found
My favorite things Barcelona and Catalan
1. Cellist: Pao Casals; see my comments under Puerto Rico.
2. Artist: Joan Miró, who remains underrated. Oddly many people do not see him as better than the guy who puts the squiggles on their design bags. Almost everything he did — across media — was phenomenal in terms of composition and textures. I am fond of Antoni Tapies, although his work does not reproduce well on-line. Aristide Maillol, who was French Catalan, did paintings and sketches. Dali is now so vilified by some intelligent people that he can rightly be considered underrated.
3. Novelist: Albert Sanchez Piñol's Cold Skin
4. Architect: I have mixed feelings about Gaudi; it feels to me like he is trying too hard. How about LluÃs Domènech i Montaner? Try this one too.
5. Composer: Isaac Albeniz, especially as played by Alicia de Larrocha. There is also Federico Mompou. I grew up playing the guitar music of Fernando Sor, though it is less fun to listen to.
6. Economist: Xavier Sala-i-Martin; his home page is full of interesting links.
7. Bandleader: Xavier Cugat. Wong Kar-Wai likes him but mostly he is forgotten. Here is a good video and you can hear his unusual Spanish accent as well.
8. Medieval theologian and memory expert: Ramon Llull. I am a big fan of Llull, a cosmopolitan polymath and early advocate of animal welfare. I wrote a part of my next book about him, although I ended up cutting it out of the final draft because it didn't quite fit.
9. Movie, set in: I've never seen Barcelona (is it good?), so I have to go with Vicky Cristina Barcelona. There's probably a better movie set in Barcelona, but offhand I don't know it.
10. Chess opening. Duh.
They have a bunch of opera singers too.
The bottom line: This is an impressive showing, yet what ties it all together remains elusive in my mind. Perhaps that is what makes the region so interesting.
Hennessey on CAFE
Excellent post, filled with detail, by Keith Hennessey on CAFE. Some highlights:
The NHTSA analyses look at a range of benefits to society, including economic and national security benefits from using less oil, health and environmental benefits from less pollution, and environmental benefits from fewer greeenhouse gas emissions (this is new). They also consider the costs, primarily from requiring more fuel-saving technologies to be included by manufacturers….
Rather than maximizing net societal benefits, [the Obama] proposal raises the standard until (total societal benefits = total societal costs), meaning the net benefits to society are roughly zero…
The Obama plan will increase costs enough to further suppress demand for new cars and trucks. This will cause significant job loss, and probably in the 150K 50K range over 5-ish years, with a fairly wide error band….[updated to reflect an error in calculation, AT]
The Obama option would reduce the global temperature by seven thousandths of a degree Celsius by the end of this century….[and] would reduce the sea-level rise by six hundredths of a centimeter. That’s 0.6 millimeters.
…As early as this fall, greenhouse gases could become “regulated pollutants” under the Clean Air Act. Once something becomes a “regulated pollutant,” a whole bunch of other parts of the Clean Air Act kick in, and EPA is off to the races in regulating greenhouse gases from a much (much) wider range of sources, including power plants, hospitals, schools, manufacturers, and big stores.
One of the scariest elements of this is called the “Prevention of Significant Deterioration” permitting system. In effect, EPA could insert itself (or your State environmental agency) into most local planning and zoning processes. I will write more about this in the future. It terrifies me.
Gary Gorton’s new paper
Find it here, with this abstract:
The
'shadow banking system' at the heart of the current credit crisis is,
in fact, a real banking system – and is vulnerable to a banking panic.
Indeed, the events starting in August 2007 are a banking panic. A
banking panic is a systemic event because the banking system cannot
honor its obligations and is insolvent. Unlike the historical banking
panics of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the current banking panic
is a wholesale panic, not a retail panic. In the earlier episodes,
depositors ran to their banks and demanded cash in exchange for their
checking accounts. Unable to meet those demands, the banking system
became insolvent. The current panic involved financial firms 'running'
on other financial firms by not renewing sale and repurchase agreements
(repo) or increasing the repo margin ('haircut'), forcing massive
deleveraging, and resulting in the banking system being insolvent. The
earlier episodes have many features in common with the current crisis,
and examination of history can help understand the current situation
and guide thoughts about reform of bank regulation. New regulation can
facilitate the functioning of the shadow banking system, making it less
vulnerable to panic.
Addendum: Arnold Kling summarizes some of the recommendations:
1. Senior tranches of securitizations of approved asset classes should be insured by the government.
2. The government must supervise and examine "banks," i.e.,
securitizations, rather than rely on ratings agencies. That is, the
choices of asset class, portfolio, and tranching must be overseen be
examiners.
3. Entry into securitization should be limited, and any firm that enters is deemed a "bank" and subject to supervision.
The Politics of Cap and Trade
Good overview in the NYTimes on the politics of cap and trade. The bottom line:
How did cap and trade, hatched as an academic theory in obscure
economic journals half a century ago, become the policy of choice in
the debate over how to slow the heating of the planet? And how did it
come to eclipse the idea of simply slapping a tax on energy consumption…
The answer is not to be found in the study of
economics or environmental science, but in the realm where most policy
debates are ultimately settled: politics…Cap and trade…is almost perfectly designed for the buying
and selling of political support through the granting of valuable
emissions permits to favor specific industries and even specific
Congressional districts.That is precisely what is taking place now in the House Energy and Commerce Committee…
Here is how Tyler and I put it in Modern Principles: Microeconomics
With a tax, firms
must pay the government for each ton
of pollutant that they emit. With pollution
allowances, firms must either use
the pollution allowances that they are
given or if they want to emit more they
must buy allowances from other firms.
Either way, firms that are given allowances
in the initial allocation get a
big benefit compared to having to pay
taxes. Thus, some people say that pollution
allowances equal corrective taxes
plus corporate welfare.
That’s not necessarily the best way of
looking at the issue…
…To make progress against global warming, may require building
a political coalition. A carbon tax pushes one very powerful and interested
group, the large energy firms, into the opposition. If tradable allowances are
instead given to firms initially, there is a better chance of bringing the large energy
firms into the coalition. Perhaps it’s not fair that politically powerful
groups must be bought off but as Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s first chancellor,
once said,”Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.”
We can only add that producing both laws and sausages requires some pork.
Careful readers may recognize a friendly jab at a competitor.
Ferguson on Regulation and Deregulation
Human beings are as good at devising ex post facto explanations for big disasters as they are bad at anticipating those disasters. It is indeed impressive how rapidly the economists who failed to predict this crisis – or predicted the wrong crisis (a dollar crash) – have been able to produce such a satisfying story about its origins. Yes, it was all the fault of deregulation.
There are just three problems with this story. First, deregulation began quite a while ago (the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act was passed in 1980). If deregulation is to blame for the recession that began in December 2007, presumably it should also get some of the credit for the intervening growth. Second, the much greater financial regulation of the 1970s failed to prevent the United States from suffering not only double-digit inflation in that decade but also a recession (between 1973 and 1975) every bit as severe and protracted as the one we’re in now. Third, the continental Europeans – who supposedly have much better-regulated financial sectors than the United States – have even worse problems in their banking sector than we do. The German government likes to wag its finger disapprovingly at the “Anglo Saxon” financial model, but last year average bank leverage was four times higher in Germany than in the United States. Schadenfreude will be in order when the German banking crisis strikes.
Niall Ferguson writing in the NYTimes. Recommended.
Assorted links
1. The new Bruce Bartlett book.
2. Markets in everything: smart memory bras, from Slovenia.
My Markey-Waxman query repeated: what are the climate benefits of the bill?
Barkley Rosser, who is not held in the thrall of the Cato Institute, posts in the comments:
Maybe it's still early but this apparent gap in the literature is not encouraging. I'll repeat my query. What would be the climate benefits of this bill? If you want to cite an estimate involving strategic interdependencies with China and India, fine. But please cite something that puts forward and defends a particular estimate.
Is there a better case for this bill than: "it will raise government revenue, which I favor anyway, and raise the costs of unsavory corporations, which doesn't strike me as so terribly unjust anyway, and on the estimate of climate benefits I will just fudge it and hope for the best and claim we must do something?" David Frum comments.
Matt Yglesias has a different argument: better to start now than never.
I would phrase a related point more technically: acting now may be
keeping open a valuable option on doing more later. Still, I wish to
know what that option is worth, noting that if major action is impossible today it may be impossible tomorrow as well.
In the comments section of this post I'm not interested in being lectured about CO2 in the time of the trilobites, corrupt scientific groupthink, hearing that geo-engineering would be cheaper, or reading that various wimps won't face up to the need for nuclear power. I'm also not interested in hearing whether the costs of shifting to greener energy are high or low, at least not today. I just want to see the benefit estimates on this particular policy and if you put any serious estimate forward in due time I will assess it and report back to you.
Yes it is hard to model international interdependencies and option value — two of the major potential benefits — but we try to model such complexities for other policies all the time. Surely it's worth some group doing a 50-100 page study of what we can hope to achieve. Then we could see how plausible is the case for the bill.
If there is such a study, I promise I won't complain about the discount rate, I won't pretend that uncertainty militates in favor of inaction, and I won't dismiss it by saying a carbon tax would be better and then refusing to judge cap and trade vs. nothing. I want to see whether you need crazy or sensible judgments to get large aggregate benefits from proceeding.
Comments, of course, are open but subject to the above caveats. No trilobites!
Cocalero
I was very taken by this movie, which is much more insightful than the recent The End of Poverty?. The film is an attempt to pay homage to Evo Morales and his supporters but it actually shows a far bleaker and more Caplanian picture of life on the ground. It's one of the best movies on poverty, albeit unintentionally in whole or in part. The two most unforgettable scenes are when the Morales supporters cannot get the calculator to give them an arithmetical answer ("we need a better calculator") and when they discuss how they torture wrongdoers by tying them to a post and letting the ants come and eat them for a while. The discussions of how coca leaves are actually good for you are classics of political reasoning. The lighter-skinned elites don't come off looking so good either. Recommended, if you're into this sort of thing.
China kiln fact of the day
At around the time of the Industrial Revolution:
Pottery, for instance, was manufactured in both England and China. The
design of the kilns differed greatly, however. English kilns were cheap
to build but very fuel inefficient; much of the energy from the burning
fuel was lost through the vent hole on the top (Figure 4). The typical
Chinese kiln, on the other hand, was more expensive to construct and,
indeed, required more labour to operate. Figure 5 shows how heat was
drawn into the chamber on the left and then forced out a hole at floor
level into a second chamber. The process continued through many
chambers until the air, by then denuded of most of its heat, finally
exited up a chimney. In England, it was not worth spending a lot of
money to build a thermally efficient kiln since energy was so cheap. In
China, however, where energy was expensive, it was cost effective to
build thermally efficient kilns. The technologies that were used
reflected the relative prices of capital, labour, and energy. Since it
was costly to invent technology, invention also responded to the same
incentives.
Check out the accompanying sketch, from a short essay by Robert C. Allen, drawn from his new book The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. The bottom line seems to be this:
Success in international trade created Britain’s high wage, cheap
energy economy, and it was the spring board for the Industrial
Revolution.
Here is what WolframAlpha gives you for "Industrial Revolution."
Stuff they don’t teach in graduate school
Chris Blattman has a problem to do with his research that they just don't teach about in graduate school. Which type of anti-malarial drugs should he provide for his research assistants?
be really fantastic if none of them fell deathly ill because of, well, my
research papers.
Here's the question. We have at least two perfectly
common anti-malarial options–doxycycline and mefloquine–each of which cost a
few cents each. They've been around a while, so we know what to expect. Doxy:
sun sensitivity in the occasional case, and no milk in your coffee that morning
(which is a tragedy). Mefloquine: crazy dreams among a few (including
me).
Along comes a fancy-pants new drug, Malarone. It costs $6 a pill,
with insurance, and has to be taken every day. Why would I pay 120 times more
than the generic? Is it 10 times as effective? 1.2 times? Just as effective? As
far as I can tell, there aren't studies on the matter.
Amazon as book publisher
Here is the latest:
In its most significant foray into publishing, Amazon has acquired world English rights to a self-published novel by a midwestern teenager called Legacy. The acquisition is the first for the e-tailer's newly launched publishing banner, AmazonEncore. Amazon is re-releasing the fantasy title, in hardcover, in August. The book, by Cayla Kluver, is part of a planned a trilogy–it was published under the banner Forsooth Books, founded by Kluver and her mother–and, according to Amazon, is the first in a currently unknown number of titles from AmazonEncore.
Economic theory predicts that if Amazon were to start publishing, it would publish nobodies rather than established star writers. Can you explain why?
Defining Fat Down
Americans are more overweight than ever but Burke, Heiland and Nadler find:
…that the probability of self-classifying as overweight is significantly
lower on average in the more recent survey, for both men and women, controlling
for objective weight status and other factors….The shifts in self classification are not explained by differences between
surveys in body fatness or waist circumference, nor by shifting demographics. We
interpret the findings as evidence of a generational shift in social norms
related to body weight, and propose various mechanisms to explain such a shift,
including: (1) higher average adult BMI and adult obesity rates in the later
survey cohort, (2) higher childhood obesity rates in the later survey cohort,
and (3) public education campaigns promoting healthy body image. The welfare
implications of the observed trends in self-classification are mixed.
The decline of chewing
According to Gail Civille, in the past Americans typically chewed a mouthful of food as many as twenty-five times before it was ready to be swallowed; now the average American chews only ten times.
That is from David Kessler's The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite. This is a good book even if you've already read seven prior books on exactly the same topic. It's the best applied study in behavioral economics to date. I do object, however, to how the author aggregates fat, salt, and sugar, as if they were equally bad for you.
Via John Nye, here is a good article on how French baguettes are succumbing to the global trend for softer foods:
Bakers say that they are merely responding to market forces,
determined by the growing proportion of customers who demand a baguette
pas trop cuite (not too cooked). They argue that they cannot
impose a crunchy surface on a society that has grown accustomed to the
notion that food should melt in the mouth .
Mr Kaplan is appalled. “The question is: do the French care any
more, do they care about taste? When you eat their tomatoes, their
carrots and their merlotised wine, you start to wonder. Are they not
collaborating in their own cultural demise?”
…According to Kaplan, bakers are cutting cooking time – usually
between 18 and 22 minutes at 250C to 260C – by 60 seconds or more in
search of a less crusty crust.
The upshot is the loss of the Maillard reaction, a chemical process
occurring at high temperatures and leading to browning and crispiness,
that Kaplan says is vital to the production of a good loaf.
Here is Alex's earlier post on the declining quality of French bread.
Medical care without third party payment: the autism example
It's a common claim that health care would be more efficient and cheaper if not for third party payment. Sometimes, yes, but often these claims are overstated, especially when the link between treatment and improvement is murky.
To consider one example, for the most part autism-related services are not covered by private health insurance. Government aid is often scarce as well. Also in Canada medical benefits for autism-related services are quite limited. So when it comes to autism, this is a fee for service setting for the most part.
And what does this world look like?
1. Services are not especially cheap nor do they seem to be falling in price.
2. Market participants are not well informed about what works. Many parents of autistic children pursue hopeless treatments or unvalidated or even refuted theories. Some of the treatments, such as chelation, are harmful in many cases and yield no benefits.
3. There is lots of innovation — in terms of advertised methods of treatment — but it is unclear, to say the least, what percentage of these innovations succeeds. Very often it is parents "buying hope."
The point is not that insurance coverage would solve all these problems. Third party coverage would slant the relative prices toward more mainstream treatments and away from the fads; how good or bad this would be depends on your point of view as to what brings better (worse) outcomes.
Overall I don't view the autism example as a good selling point for the view that third party payment is the basic problem behind U.S. health care. Nor do I see critics of third party payment citing autism services as a model example for their ideas. (By the way, it is an open question how much autism should be an education issue and how much it should be a health care issue; de facto it is often a health care issue but this should not be taken for granted.)
Another lesson is this: the more emotional the issue, the less effective any health care system will be. Policy discussions of "health care" often require more disaggregation.
Addendum: There is, by the way, a movement afoot to require that private insurance cover some autism-related services, such as ABA. Given the costs of the treatment, and the unclear link between treatment and results, I would be curious to hear if "universal coverage" advocates would include this in their ideal public policy. I would say they should admit that any notion of "universal coverage" is value-laden rather than purely descriptive.
Congress opts out
Here is my latest column. Excerpt:
It’s not that anyone is behaving illegally or unconstitutionally,
but rather that Congress seems to want to be circumvented and to
delegate more power to the executive branch as well as to the Fed, at
least temporarily.
While Congressional leaders are consulted on
the major policies, Congress is keeping its distance, perhaps to
minimize voter outrage. This way, Congress can claim credit if a
recovery comes, but deny responsibility if the price tag ends up higher
than advertised or if banks seem to be receiving unfair benefits from
the government.
The Fed and the FDIC have become the major tools for enhancing executive power and working around Congress:
The traditional division of labor among policy makers was that the Fed
determined the quantity of money in the economy – it set monetary
policy – and Congress decided precise government expenditures – it
handled fiscal policy. These new programs blur that distinction and, in
essence, the Fed is running some fiscal policy.
The FDIC issues guarantees under the expectation that Congress will have to ratify them ex post but ex ante the executive branch is calling the shots.
Is this all good or bad? For any single choice, it is probably good. Congress does not, in general, improve the quality of economic policy, relative to the executive branch. But it is also a kind of deficit spending on the quality of future governance. The more Congress is accustomed to being allowed to punt, the worse Congress will become in the longer run. The executive branch will overreach more and also voters will apply successively more cynical standards to evaluating Congress, leading to a self-fulfilling prophecy.
To put it more concretely, this Congress shies away from accepting responsibility for the various bailouts, yet we think it will somehow solve far tougher problems? I, for one, am worried.