Results for “been listening to” 65 found
Friday assorted links
1. Yemen facts of the day, the negative projections seem more or less on track.
3. Japan fact of the day: “…the number of foreign workers, though still relatively small, has nearly doubled over the past eight years, and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling party is considering policies to speed up arrivals.” Please note the link is noisy.
4. “Professional chefs, who one might think would be an ideal demographic, are not frequent customers. Sven says they have a haughty attitude toward cookbooks.” Link here.
5. What do FDI flows really measure?
6. What is the most relaxing song of them all? (Frankly, it pissed me off.) And this: “But time and social change have been rough on the Beach Boys. Their best-known hits (say, “California Girls,” “Help Me, Rhonda,” “I Get Around”) are poems of unenlightened straight-male privilege, white privilege, beach privilege. It is hard to imagine that they helped anyone toward self-determination or achieving their social rights.” I say they’re mostly about melancholy, thank goodness not everything is didactic.
The welfare benefits of global migration
Don’t forget market size! Via the excellent Kevin Lewis, there is a new paper on this topic, by Amandine Aubry, Michal Burzynski, and Frédéric Docquier. Here is the abstract:
This paper quantifies the effect of global migration on the welfare of non-migrant OECD citizens. We develop an integrated, multi-country model that accounts for the interactions between the labor market, fiscal, and market size effects of migration, as well as for trade relations between countries. The model is calibrated to match the economic and demographic characteristics of the 34 OECD countries and the rest of the world, as well as trade flows between them in the year 2010. We show that recent migration flows have been beneficial for 69 percent of the non-migrant OECD population, and for 83 percent of non-migrant citizens of the 22 richest OECD countries. Winners are mainly residing in traditional immigration countries; their gains are substantial and are essentially due to the entry of immigrants from non OECD countries. Although labor market and fiscal effects are non-negligible in some countries, the greatest source of gain comes from the market size effect, i.e. the change in the variety of goods available to consumers.
Evelyn [Evelina] Petrova
She has been my most significant musical discovery of the last year, and these days it is rare when I find something new in music which truly surprises me.
Dave Gelly put it this way:
At the Queen Elizabeth Hall, I found myself listening open-mouthed to a Russian woman playing the piano accordion while making wordless vocal sounds into a microphone. Her name was Evelina Petrova and the sounds varied from whoops and bird-like twitterings to a kind of demented lamentation. God knows what it was all about, but it had me transfixed.
What could sound less appealing than Russian accordion music? I say imagine the devilish imp which sometimes runs around Stravinsky’s borrowings from Russian folk music, hook it up to an accordion, and pinch it repeatedly and irregularly.
Here is a good, descriptive review of her first album. Here is her home page. Here is a YouTube duet with piano, good but I prefer her solo. Try this solo clip for her dirge side. Here is another good (and more lively) solo clip. Her CDs are on Amazon here, buy Living Water if you only get one.
She also has collaborated with Jethro Tull, or so I am told.
Is happiness inequality up or down?
Steven Quartz writes:
…our current Gilded Age has been greeted with relative complacency. Despite soaring inequality, worsened by the Great Recession, and recent grumbling about the 1 percent, Americans remain fairly happy. All of the wage gains since the downturn ended in 2009 have essentially gone to the top 1 percent, yet the proportion of Americans who say they are “thriving” has actually increased. So-called happiness inequality — the proportion of Americans who are either especially miserable or especially joyful — hit a 40-year low in 2010 by some measures. Men have historically been less happy than women, but that gap has disappeared. Whites have historically been happier than nonwhites, but that gap has narrowed, too.
In fact, American happiness has not only stayed steady, but converged, since wages began stagnating in the mid-1970s. This is puzzling. It does not conform with economic theories that compare happiness to envy, and emphasize the impact of relative income for happiness — how we compare with the Joneses.
Here is part of the answer, consistent with what I argued in my book What Price Fame?:
…social status, which was once hierarchical and zero-sum, has become more fragmented, pluralistic and subjective. The relationship between relative income and relative status, which used to be straightforward, has gotten much more complex.
…A new generation of ethnographers has discovered an explosion of consumer lifestyles and product diversification in recent decades. From evangelical Christian Harley-Davidson owners, who huddle together around a motorcycle’s radio listening to a service on Sunday mornings, to lifestyles organized around musical tastes, from the solidarity of punk rockers to yoga gatherings, from meditation retreats to book clubs, we use products to create and experience community. These communities often represent a consumer micro-culture, a “brand community,” or tribe, with its own values and norms about status.
The article is very interesting throughout, hat tip goes to Claire Morgan.
Note that the closing bit of this piece is…this: “Money may not buy happiness in the long run, but consumer choice has gone a long way in keeping most Americans reasonably content, even if they shouldn’t be.”
What is it like to hear your own voice in an automated system?
…Most disturbing for Mr Briggs, was when he received a phone call from himself trying to flog payment protection insurance.
Briggs was also the voice of Siri for a while. Here is from another person who has been the voice of Siri:
The 65-year-old confesses she found listening to Siri a bit creepy. It was not that she hated hearing herself — that is an everyday occurrence for the voice recording artist. She is used to hearing her voice over tannoys at airports and stores, as well as telephone on-hold systems. She is her son’s bank’s automated voice and it tickles her to assume that voice and taunt him by saying: “Thank you for calling the bank. You are overdrawn.”
It was interacting with herself that felt so peculiar. “It was very strange having my voice coming back to me from my hand. I said, ‘Hi Siri, what are you doing?’ Siri said, disgustedly: ‘Talking to you.’”
That is from Emma Jacobs at the FT, interesting throughout.
From the comments, on Scottish independence
In response to my original post, Alex Buchanan writes:
Where to start? As a Scot living in Scotland and very much intending to vote YES I have to take issue on many things stated here. First of all your emphasis on the term “partnership”. There has never been a partnership between England and Scotland, Scotland has always been told what to do and if Scotland doesn’t like it Scotland has to lump it. We are more socially aware of our society with a more caring emphasis on what is good for OUR nation, Scotland, as a whole, not the dog eat dog right wing politics of England which is more of a right wing society. See Tory and ukip voting patterns. As for the currency we will be using? It will be sterling! Sterling does not just belong to England and if we’re in a currency union or not, we will still use sterling just like many other former commonwealth countries did before. The matter of us being in the EU is still debatable. Many EU institutions have intimated that Scotland will be welcome with open arms and even some unionist politicians have said we will have no problems joining. Ask your Westminster government they can get the answers. By the way I don’t think it has escaped your notice that we are already dominated by the EU and Westminster to boot. So what’s new? We can cut out the middle man whose sole interest is to look after London first. We are also getting an in-out referendum on membership of the EU in 2017. Can you tell me if we’ll still be in the EU after that? Tell me Tyler? What is the mechanism for evicting an already member of the EU? I don’t think there is one.
You cite that we have no practical reason to leave. Well how about self determination? How about being able to take decisions for ourselves? How about not going into useless wars? How about not having nuclear weapons, that England won’t have, located on our doorstep? Or how about having our wealth squandered on the South East of England while we are accused of being subsidy junkies? Are they practical reasons?
Alex Salmond has sound economics to back up his claim of Scots receiving more money under Independence. UK government records show that we contribute 9.9% (no doubt massaged down) of the exchequer’s total income, but we receive back only 9.3% back in total spend. Whereas the latest treasury figures were disowned straight away by the professor who they used as a source for their findings. The professor said that they had misrepresented his figures by a factor of 12 times more.
No being British is not good enough. I see day-in-day-out my country being turned into a region, a region of Britain you may say, but when in reality we all know what Britain means to the people down in England, don’t we? Britain simply means England in most people’s eyes in England. If you looked at the latest census carried out in Scotland you would have seen that nearly 75% of the population consider themselves Scottish and not British, only a mere 18% considered themselves Scottish and British. If it’s any consolation to you I can’t understand many English dialects either. Try listening to a Geordie, Scouser, Brommie, Cockney or even someone from Pashtun.
I expect the YES vote to prevail and I just want to point out to you that ignorant articles like this will hasten that vote.
He is an articulate fellow, but he hasn’t changed my mind, quite the contrary.
John Ralston Saul on the decline of political speech
Via www.bookforum.com, from an interesting interview:
GB Who are the best speakers in the world today, politically?
JRS Long silence. The reason for which there is a ‘long silence’ is that, with the gradual bureaucratization of politics, we have ended up with – through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s – politicians increasingly reading speeches written for them by somebody else; that is, politicians being made to feel that they were not the real political leaders, but rather – in a sense – heads of a large bureaucracy. The result has been that politicians may think that they have a responsibility to speak in a solid and measured way – with the consequence that they not only became boring and bad speakers, but sound artificial and are not listened to. Modern speech writers started adding in ‘rhetoric,’ which sounded artificial, and led to people listening even less to political speeches. This also came with a rise in populism; that is, we saw the revival of populist speaking – with populist politicians winning power here and there – meaning that the speech writers started putting populist rhetoric in as a gloss on top of the boring managerial material that they had been producing. So what we now have are sensible, elected leaders giving speeches that, at one level, are boring, solid stuff and, at another level, cheap rhetoric.
…Many political leaders think that it is dangerous to speak well. In fact, they are looking to bore people – and we feel that. As a result, when we stand up and say real things, people are quite shocked. And that is because they are always working on this level of measurement. If we take someone like a Trudeau or an FDR, or an LBJ, or a de Gaulle – someone like that – they knew that speeches are not about who will like them and dislike them. Speeches are actually about whether people will respect you because you have spoken to them in a way that they take to be honest – as if they are treated in a way that is intelligent. Trudeau was often boring, but his secret was that, even when he was being insulting, he was talking to you as if you were as smart as he was.
Hollywood opposes betting markets on film revenue
While the industry’s opposing comments were not yet final on Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Pisano and others said they were expected to cite a host of potential problems. Those include the risk of market manipulation in the rumor-fueled film world, conflicts of interest among studio employees and myriad contractors who might bet with or against their own films, the possibility that box-office performance would be hurt by short-sellers, difficulty in getting or holding screens for films if trading activity indicated weakness and the need for costly internal monitoring to block insider trades.
Among the potential abuses, the studios contend, is that a speculator might leak an early version of a film to the Internet and then profit from its subsequent poor performance at the box office.
The full story is here. I suspect that once you cut past the rhetoric the most important factor on that list is: "difficulty in getting or holding screens for films if trading activity indicated weakness…"
The recorded music industry has collapsed for a number of reasons, but one is that pre-purchase web listening helps consumers avoid songs and albums they don't really want to buy. There are fewer mistaken music purchases today than in say 1986 but of course that also means fewer music purchases. That's good for consumer welfare, even if it's not always good for the music corporations and artists. If the same trend came to the movie sector, many current business models would prove unsustainable. As it currently stands, previews often try to trick audiences rather than enlighten them; sampling a pre-purchase MP3 file in contrast can only enlighten you.
Counterintuitively, introduction of the betting markets could make movies worse in quality (relative to my tastes at least), by inducing producers to focus on making "the sure thing," especially if betting on the movie starts very early. (Keep in mind that the fixed costs of using theaters may require a minimum level of market interest above some threshold.) I don't so much mind bad movies because I simply walk out of them, so I prefer a higher variance in quality than may be socially optimal.
So much of our cultural industries have been built on consumer mistakes and those days are coming to an end, rapidly.
Aid Realism for the Idealist
The failure of foreign aid to lead to economic development has left many cynics in its wake. For this reason, I enjoyed The Blue Sweater, Jacqueline Novogratz's story of moving from aid-idealism to aid-realism without ever passing through the way-station of aid-cynicism. As a naive, aid-idealist Novogratz spent a lot of time on the circuit in Africa; eventually hard lessons wore away the naivety but not the idealism. Of course, Novogratz learned a lot about the corruption, failure to experiment, and lack of accountability of the aid agencies but she also learned to be realistic about the do-gooders:
Philanthropy can appeal to people who want to be loved more than they want to make a difference.
But the hardest lessons were about the poor. In the late 1980s, Novogratz worked with a group of native women to build up a thriving business in Rwanda. Inevitably some of her friends became terrible victims of the 1994 genocide. Perhaps even worse, some of her friends became perpetrators. Hard lessons like these drove Novogratz's evolution.
I've read the following sort of thing many times:
It is so often the people who know the greatest suffering–the poor and most vulnerable–who are the most resilient, the ones able to derive happiness and shared joy from the simplest pleasures.
I've heard it so many times, I tend to dismiss it but Novogratz follows up with this:
That same resilience, however, can manifest itself in passivity, fatalism, a resignation to the difficulties of life that allows injustice and inequity to strengthen and grow…
Which, for me at least, turned a trite observation into an important insight.
Novogratz's experiences eventually developed into the Acumen Fund, a venture capital firm for aid. The idea is to invest patient capital in scalable, for-profit businesses that deliver services to the poor. The fund, for example, has invested in a firm producing drip irrigation systems in Pakistan, a Tanzanian firm that produces mosquito nets and an Indian firm producing internet-telephone kiosks in small villages.
The fact that the businesses have been for-profit has been critical. In selling bed nets for example the Tanzanian firm learned that talking about malaria doesn't sell. What sells, in the words of one of their top salespersons is, "The color is beautiful, and you can hang the nets in your windows so that your neighbors know how much you care about your family." As Novogratz puts it:
Beauty, vanity, status and comfort….The rich hold no monopoly on any of it. But we're a long way from integrating the way people actually make decisions into public policy instead of how we think they should make them.
Patient capital is no panacea–what is?–but by investing in entrepreneurs who must listen to their customers a charitable venture-capital firm can multiply the effectiveness of its philanthropy.
There is a powerful role both for the market and for philanthropy…Philanthropy alone lacks the feedback mechanism of markets, which are the best listening devices we have; and yet markets alone too easily leave the most vulnerable behind.
My favorite world music recordings of 2008
My services as an aggregator are probably of most value in this area, if only because there are so few other reliable aggregators. I very much liked the following:
The Roots of Chicha: Psychedelic Cumbias from Peru; I bought it in 2008 at least.
Un Dia, Juana Molina. Quirky, oddly textured songs from Argentina. She’s not just a one-trick pony but she now has a string of excellent albums.
Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, Gurrumal. Aboriginal music from Australia, on acoustic guitar, truly moving. I don’t regret having paid $40 for it.
Calcutta Chronicles: Indian Slide Guitar, by Debashis Bhattacharya.
Anything from Network Medien. Anything. They’re the single best and most useful music label today. The picks on any of their collections are impeccable and always worth the price. This year I’ve been enjoying their Music of the Americas, Desert Blues (multiple parts), Golden Afriques Part II, and Sufi Music, among others.
Here are other world music picks.
On the popular music front, I’m now listening to Fleet Foxes at least once a day. I’m also starting to like the new Bon Iver and the new Kanye West.
Credit Card Crunch?
Frankly, I am tired of this topic but every time I try to check the data – as best as I can – it doesn’t seem to support the rhetoric we are hearing from people at the top [despite real problems blah, blah, blah]. Here’s Paulson today:
At least some of the remainder [of the bailout money], Paulson said, should be used to
reinvigorate the market for credit cards, student and auto loans —
which combined account for some 40 percent of consumer credit."This market, which is vital for lending and growth, has for all practical purposes ground to a halt," Paulson said. (emphasis added)
I’ll focus on credit cards. It is true that credit card offers, i.e. junk mail, is down:
…one billion fewer offers mailed during the course of the year.
Households with incomes under $50,000 will receive about 700,000 fewer
offers in 2008 compared to 2007. These households account for the
majority of the cutback and clearly indicate a major change in strategy
by card issuers."The souring economy and industry consolidation have driven volumes
down to levels not seen since 2003 [Crisis! AT]" said Andrew Davidson, Vice
President of Competitive Tracking Services for Synovate’s Financial
Services Group. "Card issuers are taking a more cautious approach, with
lower income and high risk households receiving fewer offers or no
offers at all."
But even so:
Despite the decline in offers for new cards, US consumers still
have access to an increasing amount of credit. Household credit lines
across all cards edged up to an average of $27,626 per household (YTD
3Q 2008) from $26,902 in 2007 despite evidence that issuers are cutting
credit lines on certain customers.…"Much has been reported about issuers reducing credit lines for
certain customers but this is not the case for the majority of people.
Across the industry as a whole, we continue to see credit access and
usage at record high levels" said Davidson.
By the way, after listening to Tyler and me debate this topic Bob Murphy and Megan McArdle decided to run some tests. So if you prefer your data by anecdote you can read Bob’s results here and Megan’s here. I am partial to Megan’s hypothesis #5.
Resume normal programming
I’m now done with my week guest blogging. The week has flown by.
My final observations are about econo-blogging:
- It has been fun. Thanks for listening.
- The intertubes can be an interesting and challenging place for discussing ideas and economics. This might be obvious to you, but for many of us in the ivory tower, the seminar room and the printed page remain our primary fora. Not coincidentally, they are also where the strongest career incentives lie.
- I’ve loved being welcomed and challenged by the Pareto Optimists here at MR.
- I’ve been amazed by how much work blogging can be. More than anything else, this past week has simply increased my admiration for the work that Alex and Tyler put into this site and our community.
I’m still thinking about how my experiences this week will shape my own future views about the who/what/when/where/why of both doing economics and communicating findings. I’ll be sure to report back if I figure out how one should deal with the (many) alternatives.
So, let me end on a personal note, albeit quoting:
I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road, babe
Where I’m bound, I can’t tell
But goodbye’s too good a word, gal
So I’ll just say fare thee well
How much music is enough?
I’ve been sampling the Bach box and I pronounce it worth buying. Compared to the available full-price recordings, I give it a 7 out of 10 and that is for 65 cents per disc. The sound is generally quite good, the performances of the chamber music are excellent, the harpischord occasionally stale (I prefer Bach on piano), the masses and passions are above average, and most of the cantatas are "good enough." It won’t displace my very favorite Bach recordings, but these make good second choices pretty much across the board. To be frank, even among experienced classical music listeners, no more than one person in ten can tell the difference and yes that means you.
Yesterday Jane Galt asked "how much music is enough." Ha! But two days earlier, after receiving the new Amon Tobin CD, I vowed not to buy another CD for an entire year. It’s not a question of money, rather I am looking for a new listening experience.
Let’s see how long I last, I’ll let you all know when I snap.
Why don’t redistributionists like big band music?
Gabriel Rossman writes to me:
A few days ago there was a discussion on this blog about the book Conservatize Me and more broadly, about taste and politics. Many of the questions can be answered systematically since in 1993 the General Social Survey included a list of questions about musical taste. The simplest question to ask is how different types of music correlate with ideology (polviews). Generally speaking, the stereotypes hold up. Country is correlated with the right whereas classical, rap, rock music, and heavy metal are all correlated with the left. Opinions about folk music aren’t correlated with politics. Note though that even the strongest correlations are relatively weak (r<0.20) so there are plenty of liberals out there listening to country and no shortage of conservative rap fans.
Another way to look at it is to break politics into two dimensions. Let’s treat whether the government should reduce income differences (eqwith) as a measure of economic attitudes. Folk, classical, and big band music are very unpopular with redistributionists. (I guess nobody dreamt about Joe Hill the night before the survey). Rap, metal, and blues are popular with redistributionists. Country, rock, and bluegrass aren’t correlated with fiscal attitudes. For social attitudes, let’s use opinion of sex before marriage (premarsx). Folk, country, classical, bluegrass, and big band fans tend to disapprove of fornication, whereas rap, rock, metal, and blues fans think it’s fine. (If you substitute gay sex for premarital sex the pattern is the same, except for rap fans who tend to oppose it). I experimented with looking for distinctively "libertarian" taste patterns but couldn’t find any.
This is all back of the envelope stuff. A more sophisticated analysis would use factor analysis on dozens of attitudinal questions and find corresponding patterns in them.
You can find the 1993 GSS at Princeton’s Cultural Policy and Arts National Data Archive. http://www.cpanda.org/codebookDB/sdalite.jsp?id=a00006. There’s a self-explanatory web engine that allows you to compare any two variables. (Want to know how many opera fans have been in fist fights? Or how people who have paid for sex feel about nuclear power? Now is your chance.) More advanced users can download the full dataset in SPSS, ASCII, or CSV and do whatever they want with it.
Gabriel Rossman is very smart. Here is his home page. Here is a summary of his dissertation. Here is an abstract of his paper on the Dixie Chicks and where they received less play time. Here is his paper on "Who Picks the Hits on Radio"?
Addendum: Here is Benny Goodman on YouTube. Here is Stan Kenton. Here is Count Basie. I could give you more.
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?"