Results for “best book” 1948 found
Why economists should feel conflicted about the Grokster ruling
…it is difficult to judge how a given level of illegal downloads will affect economic efficiency. First, the quantity of music sold in a given year is not a very accurate indicator of how much value consumers receive from music. Fans commonly experiment by buying a number of CDs, only a few of which pay off and become favorites. Many or most of the products bought are quickly regarded as disappointments and discarded; in this regard the market for CDs differs from the market for refrigerators. Whether consumers like what they bought is at least as important as the absolute size of the industry.
The Internet already helps music companies track fan demands. When fans sample on-line music, usually they can figure out whether or not they would like the entire CD. Many of these fans still buy the CD, to get better sound, to have the music in more convenient form, to receive the packaging, and so on, as discussed above. These fans usually will be happy with their purchases. As a result, it will be harder for the music companies to issue low quality CDs. Of course this tighter monitoring of quality may cause the number of new issues to decline. In nominal terms the industry will shrink, but at the same time it may produce more real value for consumers. For this reason, a shrinking music industry, as measured in terms of either dollars or new releases, can be desirable from an economic point of view.
Evaluating the efficiency consequences of illegal downloads is difficult for a more fundamental reason. Most generally, we do not understand the demand for music very well. We do not understand what most fans want from their music. Just as book buyers are not always readers, the music market is not always about the tunes. Sometimes it is about symbolic values.
It is a mystery why fans spend almost all of their music money on product of very recent vintage. Until we untangle this puzzle, and we have not yet, we will not understand how Internet music is likely to affect consumer welfare.
Most consumers are not interested in buying much music from 1950, regardless of its objective quality in the eyes of the critic. Music from 1650 is even less popular. Few people search the history of music for “the best recordings” and focus their buying on those. Rather, in any given year the most recent recordings dominate the charts. At a typical moment, all of the Billboard Top 40 singles, or albums, come from the last two years of recorded output. Every now and then there is a Beatles revival, but such events are the exception rather than the rule. Consumers evince an overwhelming preference for music produced in the very recent past.
Most likely the music market is about more than simply buying “good music,” as a critic might understand that term. People buy music to signal their hipness, to participate in current trends, or to distinguish themselves from previous generations. Buyers use music to signal their social standing, whether this consists of going to the opera or listening to heavy metal. Others value partaking in novelty per se. They find newness exciting, a way of following the course of fashion, and the music market offers one handy arena for this pursuit. For some people music is an excuse to go out and mix with others, a coordination point for dancing, staying up late, drinking, or a singles scene. Along these lines, many fans seem to enjoy musical promotions, hype, and advertising as ends in themselves, and not merely as means to hearing music. They like being part of the “next big thing.” The accompanying music cannot be so bad to their ears as to offend them, but the deftness of the harmonic triads is not their primary concern.
In other words, the features of the market that matter to the critic may not be very special to consumers at all. Most of all, consumers seem to care about some feature of newness and trendiness, more than they care about music per se. So how much does it matter, from a consumer’s point of view, if weaker copyright protection reshapes the world of music?
Under one hypothesis, the specific musics of our day are easily replaced, or in economic terminology, highly substitutable. All other things equal, people will buy the new, but they could get along with alternatives almost as well. For instance perhaps “ravers” could use Gregorian chants to define their cultural status. Indeed one chant CD (“Chant”) had a very long and successful chart run. Young rave and techno fans were among the largest buyers of this recording.
Or perhaps half the supply of music could do almost as good a job of supplying symbolic goods, especially if music companies can track fan demand with greater facility. Alternatively, individuals could rely more heavily on alternative means, such as fashion, to signal their social standing and participate in trends. These points are all speculations, but they show the difficult of pinning down what music fans really care about.
Consider two further examples. First, in the former Soviet Union, dissident rock and roll bands performed many popular culture functions and commanded a fervent following. These bands fell short of the objective critical quality of their Western counterparts. Still they provided consumers with many useful services, including a means to signal rebellion against the Soviet state. Second, in 1941, the major radio stations refused to carry the catalog of the music publisher ASCAP, in a dispute over fees. At that time ASCAP, the leading music publisher and clearinghouse in the United States, dominated the music market. The stations instead played BMI music, which was more oriented towards rhythm and blues and offered less Tin Pan Alley, crooning, and big band. Radio listeners seemed to take the sudden change in stride; there is little evidence of a serious problem. Music fans continued pretty much as before, except for the change in styles and associated music publishers.
For whatever reason, most consumers find it harder to reorient their attention towards older musics. Perhaps only new music allows for effective signaling and sorting. When music is new, individuals can show that they are connected to current modes of thinking and feeling. Not everyone can know “what is in,” because “what is in” is changing so frequently. That very fact makes it worthwhile for consumers to put effort into following the new. The music market might therefore churn product to help people communicate their identities to others, and to help people play an ongoing dynamic game of clues and cues. Furthermore previous generations already have claimed older musics, making them less well suited for social differentiation. Perhaps musical taste is a game of secession and repudiation more than anything else.
So the music of Chuck Berry “no longer fits” the world of 2005, and cannot be made to fit it. Critics still love the music, and some niche consumers will be drawn to its merits, but it can never hold the current place of Britney Spears. That is why hit reissues are rare. It is not because consumers still remember the older musics. Rather most consumers do not care about them very much. It thus appears that the value of popular music, to most consumers, consists of some temporally specific tracking quality. This may involve an ability to follow, correspond to, or perhaps even shape the spirit of the times. Rejection of the previous Zeitgeist may be part of this same process. For consumers, this tracking quality is a significant part of the value of music. The music industry is delivering the goods when its product performs this tracking function, and otherwise not. The Internet helps music perform tracking functions of this kind.
The bottom line: The welfare economics of music do not resemble those of bread or buttons. Right now we do not even know whether music is being oversupplied or undersupplied, relative to an optimum. Beware of any analysis of this case which does not consider these deeper underlying issues.
Is Grade Inflation All Bad?
Grade inflation has not been constant through time. Mark Thoma at Economist’s View offers some hypotheses.
There are two episodes that account for most grade inflation. The first
is from the 1960s through the early 1970s. This is usually explained by
the draft rules for the Vietnam War. The second episode begins around
1990 and is harder to explain….My
study finds an interesting correlation in the data. During the time
grades were increasing, budgets were also tightening inducing a
substitution towards younger and less permanent faculty. I broke down
grade inflation by instructor rank and found it is much higher among
assistant professors, adjuncts, TAs, instructors, etc. than for
associate or full professors. These are instructors who are usually
hired year-to-year or need to demonstrate teaching effectiveness for
the job market, so they have an incentive to inflate evaluations as
much as possible, and high grades are one means of manipulating student
course evaluations.
But what are the consequences of grade inflation? A new study takes advantage of a tres bon experiment. In May of 1968 French students rioted, were suppressed by the police, but then joined by 10 million striking workers leading to a near revolutionary situation. To quiet things down many students that year were accepted to universities which in former and later years they would not have qualified for. What happened to those students?
Eric Maurin and Sandra McNally write:
We show that the lowering of thresholds at an early (and highly selective stage) of the higher education system enabled a significant proportion of students born between 1947 and 1950 (particularly in 1948 and 1949) to pursue more years of higher education that would otherwise have been possible. This was followed by a significant increase in their subsequent wages and occupational attainment, which was particularly evident for persons coming from a middle-class family background. Finally, returns were transmitted to the next generation on account of the relationship between parental education and that of their children.
The results are surprising but consistent with Bowen and Bok who argue that affirmative action did not harm minority students who were accepted at universities at which they would not have qualified based on grades alone.
I’m puzzled but not yet ready to retire my reputation as a tough grader – my best students deserve no less.
Comments are open.
Simple advice for academic publishing
Last week I gave a talk on career and publishing advice to a cross-disciplinary audience of graduate students. Here were my major points:
1. You can improve your time management. Do you want to or not?
2. Get something done every day. Few academics fail from not getting enough done each day. Many fail from living many days with zero output.
3. Figure out what is your core required achievement at this point in time — writing, building a data set, whatever — and do it first thing in the day no matter what. I am not the kind of cultural relativist who thinks that many people work best late at night.
4. Buy a book of stamps and use it. You would be amazed how many people write pieces but never submit and thus never learn how to publish.
5. The returns to quality are higher than you think, and they are rising rapidly. Lower-tier journals and presses are becoming worth less and less. Often it is the author certifying the lower-tier journal, rather than vice versa.
6. If you get careless, sloppy, or downright outrageous referee reports, it is probably your fault. You didn’t give the editor or referees enough incentive to care about your piece. So respond to such reports constructively with a plan for self-improvement, don’t blame the messenger, even when the messenger stinks. Your piece probably stinks too.
7. Start now. Recall the tombstone epitaph "It is later than you think." Darth Sidious got this one right.
8. Care about what you are doing. This is ultimately your best ally.
Here is a good article on academic book publishing and how it is changing.
Birdsong and human song
Here is a site on bird song, and yes I am recommending the actual music clips. The slowed down versions sound like Miles Davis. The accompanying book is excellent, and not only because you can read it in an hour.
If you want music by humans, try Lee Perry’s new four-CD collection I Am the Upsetter; it is the best Perry anthology (better than Arkology or Open the Gate, although buy all three) and therefore one of the best CDs sets, ever.
Fischer Black as macroeconomist
Black’s economic thought is centered around the view that all profit opportunities will be exploited. So what happens if the central bank decides to add zeros to the accounts held at the Fed?
Here is the standard account. In Black’s view banks were already holding all the dollars they wished to. One reaction is for banks to borrow less money at the discount window, or perhaps borrow less from each other. Money will leave the system as quickly as it entered. Another reaction is simply for banks to sit on the new money. Prices will not go up. Alternatively, it could be argued that an indifference relation holds, and whatever people expect to happen will happen. Multiple equilibria obtain. Prices might go up, fall, or stay constant. Monetarism is then true only if people expect it to be true.
Can this be for real? Won’t banks make more loans, thereby increasing the money supply? Black was fond of an arbitrage argument. If banks wanted to make more loans, such loans must be profitable. Ex ante, banks already would have attracted more reserve dollars to make these profitable loans. Black once told me that in such a world, banks would be willing to bid more than a dollar (in expected value terms, using future dollars) for a (current) dollar. Since that would violate the no-arbitrage condition, banks must not want to make more loans.
How do interest rates enter the picture? Perhaps banks didn’t want to make more loans at old interest rates, but now they would make some more loans at the new, lower interest rates. But as I understand Black’s sometimes-murky writings and comments, it is begging the question to suppose that interest rates will change. Why should they? The Fed sopped up some pieces of paper — T-Bills — and replaced them with other pieces of paper (well, zeros in account books, in both cases). Why should this have much if any influence on real interest rates?
My best shot is to postulate that banks have a downward-sloping demand curve to hold reserves, which they treat as differently from T-Bills (is this begging the question?). Give them more reserves, and they — acting in conjunction with their borrowing agents — will push those reserves into other markets. The effect on real rates of return will be small, but nominal variables will rise. The MU curve of bank reserves slopes down ever so slightly, but the resulting adjustments make the Fed a mighty power indeed.
Can that be true? Common sense — not to mention fear of embarrassment — forbids me from siding with Black. But that doesn’t mean I am convinced he is wrong.
Soon we will look at his business cycle hypothesis.
Koran abuse
It turns out that terror suspects have been complaining about Koran abuse for some time now. Perhaps they are lying but I fear the worst.
Rarely is it explained just how important the Koran is to Islam. As I understand it, the Koran itself is seen as holy, the closest to an extension of God that we have on earth. No, Muhammed is not parallel to Jesus, but in some regards the Koran is. That is one reason why it is so important to learn the book in Arabic.
Desecrating the Koran approaches a direct attack on God; it is much worse than tearing up a Bible in Christianity. Of course this sacred status for the Koran also makes it harder to have a Reformation in Islam.
For many years I failed to understand the attraction of the Koran (for the record, I am a non-believer). It seemed to me rather simple and not as dramatically gripping as the Bible. Then I heard an amazing Koranic recital in Arabic. This was the best introduction to the Islamic world I have found; it hadn’t occurred to me that a musical dimension was needed. You can buy my favorite Koranic recording here. I recommend this highly, both as an aesthetic, musical (not until Robert Ashley did Western music catch up), educational, and for some religious, experience.
Why is slow life history correlated with intelligence?
…corvids and psittacines [have cognitive powers superior to most apes]. That’s really the culmination of studies beginning in the
1970’s (most famously Irene Pepperberg’s studies on grey parrots and Herrnstein’s on pigeons) and is something that has only just become, I think, mainstream biological thought around now: but it rests on as firm experimental obsrvation as any studies of primates (certainly of orangutans). Corvids and psittacines simply outperform even chimpanzees in many ways. …On the other hand, the selective pressures on birds are pretty nasty. Their biochemistry seems a hell of a lot better than ours (witness the longevity of these things). So perhaps it’s an alternate route to great intelligence: if you know that say four out of five young are going to die anyway you can take the risk of 80% of the offspring being quickly developed morons. I don’t know enough about the field to validate that but I think it’s an interesting idea.
The General Theory on-line
Here it is, that maddening yet brilliant book.
The worst part is the talk about the socialization of investment. My favorite parts — not the same as the best parts — are the notorious chapter 17 (remember all that talk of "own-rates of interest"?), the discussions of "animal spirits," and the short notes at the end about mercantilism and Silvio Gesell. This book is more poetic, and more image-rich, than just about any other economics tract. That is one reason why it it has been read in so many contradictory ways.
What is, after all, the central message? That aggregate demand matters? That wages and prices are sticky? That wages and prices are not always sticky but ought to be, to prevent an ever-worsening downward spiral? That monetary factors prevent the rate of interest from equilibrating ex ante savings and investment, thereby requiring income adjustments to equilibrate them ex post? That the rate of interest is simply too high? That the stock market can screw everything up? That expectations are the key to the macroeconomy? All of those?
Keynes’s great contribution was to create an economics in which a persistent Great Depression was possible. But on policy recommendations, I would stick with Milton Friedman, or for that matter Keynes’s earlier Tract on Monetary Reform. We can recognize the dangers of deflation without embracing Keynes’s seductive yet unworkably byzantine analytical framework.
Thanks to Brad DeLong for the pointer.
Why aren’t you a zombie?
Christof Koch, in his The Quest for Consciousness, claims that dual strategy beings can outcompete zombies. Yes parts of the brain are designed for rapid, single purpose use, as you might find in a zombie. But other more integrative and judgmental parts require more powerful central processing units, namely your conscious mind. In his view consciousness is not just an epiphenomenal feeling, as in much analytical philosophy, but rather it is a functional set of qualia. In other words, consciousness helps you interpret "meaning" and thus use information about the natural world more effectively. Consciousness allows you to summarize the present state of the world in abbreviated fashion and to make plans on that basis. Consciousness is a sometimes-slow but always flexible strategy.
Here is one good summary of the argument; read this excerpt:
Consider the following situation: You see an outstretched hand, but instead of shaking it immediately, which instinct would dictate, you are required to close your eyes and wait several seconds before doing so. Koch and Crick suspect that without a short-term memory, a zombie could not do this task, or any other in which an artificial delay was imposed between “an input and the associated motor output.” Absence, like presence, has a neurological signature, and Koch imagines a kind of “conscious-ometer” that could be used to measure who and what is consciously aware.
Note also that efficient zombie-like behavior often requires conscious learning in the first place. Isaac Stern might best play the violin by "letting go," but he first needed many hours of conscious practice to reach this state. So consciousness and zombie behavior are often complements rather than substitutes.
If you are interested in these issues, this book is the place to start. Try also this skeptical response.
What do the Iraqi insurgents want?
Rather than employing the classic rebel tactic of provoking the foreign
forces to use clumsy and excessive force and kill civilians, [the Iraqi rebels] are
cutting out the middleman and killing civilians indiscriminately
themselves, in addition to more predictable targets like officials of
the new government. Bombings have escalated in the last two weeks, and
on Thursday a bomb went off in heavy traffic in Baghdad, killing 21
people.
More generally, the insurgency does not appear to have put forward any program or unifying vision; read more here.
I have no particular expertise on the empirics, but from a game-theoretic point of view I can think of seven possible "strategies" at work:
1. Chaos is seen as a path to a new Sunni dictatorship.
2. The goal is not to impose a particular solution on Iraq, but rather to punish the U.S. for intervening, by making matters look bad.
3. The attacks are fundraising events, just as one might hold a cocktail party for donors. They help the rebels attain focality and make the headlines; the attacks are not domestic political tactics per se.
4. Deliberate amorphousness is the best strategy against a determined and powerful United States. U.S. public opinion must not be able to identify a discernible enemy. Perhaps the U.S. is most likely to quit Iraq if we view the Iraqis as "crazy," or "not deserving of freedom." We are less likely to stop thinking about a visible opponent, such as bin Laden.
5. Unlike Bob Lucas’s modeled rational expectations agents, Iraqi insurgents do not hold the "true economic model" in their heads. Young men at war are notoriously overconfident. Just as some al Qaeda members thought the U.S. was a weaker opponent than the Soviet Union, the Iraqi insurgency has some similarly crazy view of the world. What we perceive as failure simply does not deter them much.
6. The insurgency is smaller than we think. The violent actions we observe are the "noise" of a minority within a minority. There is no rational explanation, but we had underestimated how much havoc a small group can wreak.
7. The insurgents are simply mad (how’s that for high-powered game theory?), read Jane Galt.
Unfortunately, all of these are possible, and in various combinations. Nor do they point to any common direction in terms of policy recommendations for a response.
Claims my Russian wife laughs at (a continuing series)
Start with the idea that the United States can no longer really be regarded as a "new nation." There is no doubt that America is singularly lacking in ancient chateaux and schlossen…But this scarcely constitutes evidence of youth. The first settlers arrived when James I was on the throne and England was not yet Britain. Galileo was offered a chair at Harvard University, which was founded in 1636, before Charles I had his head cut off. The Declaration of Independence was signed a century before the unification of both German and Italy…Many of the traditions which define Britain as an old country in the minds of admiring Americans — the pomp and circumstance of empire, the rituals of Charles Dickens’s Christmas, Sherlock Holmes’s deer-stalker hat – were invented a century after the American constitution. "The youth of America is their oldest tradition," Oscar Wilde quipped more than a century ago.
At least I think it is true. That is from The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge. This book is the best introduction to the history of the so-called "American Right." It is a worthy successor to George Nash’s earlier tome.
The War on Drugs
Becker and Posner both argue against the War on Drugs. Becker writes:
After totaling all spending, a study by Kevin Murphy, Steve Cicala, and
myself estimates that the war on drugs is costing the US one way or
another well over $100 billion per year. These estimates do not include
important intangible costs, such as the destructive effects on many
inner city neighborhoods, the use of the American military to fight
drug lords and farmers in Colombia and other nations, or the corrupting
influence of drugs on many governments.
The best economics piece on this issue is Drug War Crimes a short book by Jeffrey Miron published by Independent Institute where I am the director of research. Miron demonstrates that the war on drugs greatly increases the violent crime rate (just as it rose during alcohol prohibition) and that the policy is not very effective in reducing consumption.
One interesting reason why the drug war reduces consumption less than people imagine is that prohibition reduces some costs. Drug sellers, for example, do not pay social security taxes for their employees, they do not follow minimum wage laws and they do not obey costly FDA regulations. On net prices are still pushed up by the threat of prosecution but the lack of taxes and regulations is a countervailing factor.
Which skills do computers reward?
Gligoric, on the basis of his own experience, considered the optimal age of a chess player to be 33-36. But today, with the appearance of powerful computers and the Internet, chess is rapidly growing younger. There has been a revolutionary change, not only in the process of preparation, but also in chess thinking itself: now there is little sense in relying, as before, on general evaluations of the type ‘unclear’ or ‘with compensation’ – you have to think very concretely. Instead of deep reflection and philosophising at the board, what has come to the forefront is the ability to calculate intensively and to maintain extreme concentration of thought throughout the game. Computer programs help young talents to quickly acquire the necessary knowledge, since a tenacious young memory can store a great amount of information, and deficiencies in positional understanding are compensated by precise calculation and the ability to maintain the tension of the struggle.
That is from Gary Kasparov, who really does know. It counters the usual belief that the rise of computers rewards broad human intuition, which the computer cannot so easily replicate. But Kasparov sees the question more clearly. It is not how humans and computers compete in chess, but rather how they can best cooperate.
Can it be true more generally that computers reward calculating ability more than general intuition? Perhaps the Internet gets the young up to speed on the facts in a given area and then they race ahead on their superior speed and analytical abilities. What can better teach these skills than a super-fast computer, noting that you can’t use the computer in all settings to replace the human.
I am reminded of my favorite dictum about academic co-authorship: the best co-authors are those with similar skills, not radically differing skills. Let’s not also forget that it is similar countries which trade the most with each other, not radically differing countries. So maybe the people who can best "trade" with computers are…er…people who are (relatively) like computers.
By the way, Kasparov just retired; he is 41 years old.
Eggbeaters
If the transformation of eggs by heat seems remarkable, consider what beating can do! Physical agitation normally breaks down and destroys structure. but beat eggs and you create structure. Begin with a single dense, sticky egg white, work it with a whisk, and in a few minutes you have a cupful of snowy white foam, a cohesive structure that clings to the bowl when you turn it upside down, and holds its o wn when mixed and cooked. Thanks to egg whites we’re able to harvest the air, and make it an integral part of meringues and mousses, gin fizzes and souffles and sabayons.
The full foaming power of egg white seems to have burst forth in the early 17th century. Cooks had noticed the egg’s readiness to foam long before then, and by Renaissance times were exploiting it in two fanciful dishes: imitation snow and the confectioner’s miniature loaves and biscuits. But in those days the fork was still a novelty, and twigs, shreds of dried fruits, and sponges could deliver only a coarse froth at best. Sometime around 1650, cooks began to use more efficient whisks of bundled straw, and meringues and souffles start to appear in cookbooks.
That is from Harold McGee’s superb On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen. Imagine the writing and expository skills of a Richard Dawkins, but applied to applied chemistry in the kitchen, and maintained at a consistent and gripping level for 809 pages. The only problem with this book is that the magnitude of the quantity and quality is simply overwhelming.
Dan Klein and I used to have a saying: "You so much learn the whole book." In marked contrast is Roger Penrose’s The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. Penrose remains a brilliant scientist and writer. But never before have I seen a book that so clearly consists of material that I either a) already know, or b) will never know.
Steve Levitt’s Freakonomics
What five terms in a housing ad correlate with higher prices?
1. Granite
2. State-of-the-Art
3. Corian [read here, I didn’t know what it was either…]
4. Maple
5. Gourmet
And what correlates with lower prices?
1. Fantastic
2. Spacious
3. !
4. Charming
5. Great neighborhood
In economics language, it is the costly signals which carry real value. You use general words when you have nothing better to say, and remember that for next Valentine’s Day.
The list is from the new Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything [you can pre-order, Amazon lists May 1 but it hits the stores April 12], by Steve Levitt and Steven Dubner. Imagine the best of Levitt put into readable form by an excellent journalist. When it comes to the popular exposition of contemporary economic research, this book is a milestone. Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How do we know that sumo wrestlers cheat? Here is Alex’s previous post on Levitt and names and race. Here is my previous post on Levitt and teacher cheating.
The bottom line in one sentence: "People lie, numbers don’t."