« Ain't My America | Main | The future of Toyota »
Assorted links
2. Income inequality, from Greg Mankiw
3. How much appearing on Colbert helps your book
4. India's "brain gain"
Posted by Tyler Cowen on April 20, 2008 at 08:35 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
"Don't fire John Woo"
An admirable sentiment, but probably not what you intended.
Posted by: talboito at Apr 20, 2008 9:25:11 AM
"Wūhū", as they said in ancient China.
Posted by: hanmeng at Apr 20, 2008 10:06:22 AM
Regarding the third link about the Colbert bump, I believe that those were rather misleading statistics because there were 3-4 obvious outliers that skewed the colbert bump average.
Posted by: JW at Apr 20, 2008 10:37:20 AM
The Clintons are pure public parasites. If they had confined their rent seeking/stealing to just being lawyers (admittedly, some of what lawyers do is not rent seeking, but a lot of it is), they would have had higher than average incomes, but nothing like the $100 million plus they've garnered since boyclinton.con skipped out of 1600 Theft Central unindicted.
Still another reason to adhere to the libertarian slogan, "Don't Vote, It Only Encourages Them."
Posted by: Bill Stepp at Apr 20, 2008 11:14:24 AM
"From 1980 to 2005, the earnings of the 90th percentile full-time male worker increased 49 percent more than the earnings of the 10th percentile worker. Among full-time female workers, there has been a similar divergence between high and low earners."
- Mankiw
Actually the female divergence is much lower.
An interesting potential driver of this recent divergence of high and low earnings of male workers is refusal of high skilled visas. Non-immigrant entry has dropped, while visa applications soar. The H1B visa cap was recently dropped again.
I don't have data for all of 1980-2000 right now, but I know a few things: the majority of high skilled visa occupations are male dominated; when applicants are turned away, demand rises for the Americans in the same occupation and drives up their wages; when companies cannot find a worker in that field for an affordable price, their demand for complementary (lower skilled) employees drops, reducing demand and wages for them.
If this trend in capping high skilled entry has been ongoing from 1980, the bidding up of high skilled American workers (and coincidentally reducing demand for the low skilled worker) would drive a wedge in wages of the two groups.
Just a thought, and for more (plug!) a paper on H1B capping, of which I am co-author, will be coming out next week on Heritage.org
Posted by: liberty at Apr 20, 2008 11:34:46 AM
But as these highly intelligent professionals returned to India, land value sky-rocketted,agricultural land shrinked affecting urban-fringe cultivation (Gurgaon itself in agriculture dominated Haryana state near Delhi lost several acres of fertile land) and encroachment by the neo-rich in the rural side aggrevated food crisis,luxury consumption increased,inflation became uncontrollable,the lives of common Indians doing all sorts of menial jobs became horrible.....
Posted by: GVV at Apr 20, 2008 12:25:48 PM
I agree with JW. The Colbert Bump article is flawed by grouping a whole bunch of books into certain categories and then giving the mean for those categories, when in reality it looks like a very few books get a large Colbert Bump.
Another issue I was thinking about is that authors go on book promotion tours, and they usually do many interviews within a rather short period of time. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that the ones that seemed to get the biggest bump were also giving several other interviews during the same week or even day.
There may yet be a Bump for a selected few authors, but I am far from convinced by the seemingly convincing article.
Posted by: happyjuggler0 at Apr 20, 2008 12:33:40 PM
Much more deep impact has been created by non-resident highly mobile Indians, who enter in to temporary contracts in various countries and who maximise their life time income.They have created a buying boom in real estates in urban India and the land/house prices are ever rising at an alarming rate.These rich Indians are absentee landlords who keep unoccupied (not even given for rent)flats and houses in every cities.The construction boom has given rise to a real estate mafia/land mafia/encroacher mafia and even soil and quarrying mafia groups.Wanton destruction of the environment also threatens India.
Posted by: GVV at Apr 20, 2008 12:38:03 PM
GVV,
Farming is not the road to escaping poverty, it itself is poverty. The brains that are returning are creating new well paid support jobs for countless others, starting new companies that employ huge numbers of well paid people, and personally spend money on local services that would've been spent on locally in Califronia or London or elsewhere outside of India. Those local services also provide better paying jobs than that of the poverty stricken farmer.
You really need to get over your socialist framing and realize that the key to bettering the poor in India is destroying insanely huge number of regulations that hinder employing poor Indians outside of the farm.
I can't help but notice that the biggest reforms are all aimed at helping those who are already the cream of India's crop do even better, while the laws that make manufacturing and 21st century retailing extremely hard to move to India are dramatically retarding potential progress for the poorest Indians.
I squarely lay the blame for this on continued socialist thinking of the type which you (GVV) showed in your post.
Posted by: happyjuggler0 at Apr 20, 2008 12:44:29 PM
Happyjugglero,
India is going through the periods of an alarming food crisis.the globalisation and free market policies totally neglected agriculture.Without a strong food-base no country can reach a higher growth level.The brain gain creates more jobs (but what type of jobs?)and generates income, I agree.But food availability per capita has drastically declined and cost of food basket is alarmingly increasing.India is on the verge of a food crisis.
Posted by: GVV at Apr 20, 2008 1:21:04 PM
I'm not a John Yoo expert, but based on everything I've read by him, people are accusing him of directly *advocating* things like testicle-crushing and so forth, when he seems to just be explaining his views of the Constitutional basis for the executive branch's exercise of certain implicit powers.
And frankly these "enhance interrogation techniques" aren't torture. Don't insult the victims of real torture by calling threats, loud noises, sleep deprivation, and other psychological games and frat hazing tactics to real torture. Jeepers, we do worse than that to our own soldiers, when they have to do that tear gas exercise.
Posted by: Jacob Oost at Apr 20, 2008 2:15:39 PM
Happy, perhaps you have a secret decoder that finds socialism lurking beneath statements of fact, but your responses to GVV are evasive. We have, in Myrdalian language, spread and backwash effects operating in India simultaneously. GVV perhaps underplays, but doesn't deny, the spread effects. The backwash effects are, however, quite real: landless agricultural workers who live hand to mouth die when food prices rise sharply. There are environmental consequences from rapid suburban development.
Appropriate policy responses to this are another, interesting discussion. There are surely burdensome regulations and taxes, but most Indian nonfarm employment is pretty lightly regulated, especially in comparison to the United States!
Posted by: Colin Danby at Apr 20, 2008 2:56:40 PM
we do worse than that to our own soldiers, when they have to do that tear gas exercise.
Could this sort of argument be permanently retired, please?
It is one thing to do something to our own soldiers who:
a) Are volunteers
b) Know that it is part of training and will stop before they are harmed
c) Know that it will not be done repeatedly
and quite another to do it to prisoners who
a) Are obviously not volunteers
b) Cannot be sure the process is limited
c) Do not know how often they will be subject to this or worse treatment
In other words, the circumstances surrounding the activity are an important part of defining whether it is torture.
Think of this. If a man grabs you and slams you to the ground he has committed a crime. But not if he's tackling you in a football game. The fact that the tackle is not a crime does not mean the assault isn't one either.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Apr 20, 2008 3:20:33 PM
Colin Danby,
You are conflating things that don't belong together.
GVV also had two posts before my post decrying "socialist thinking" (not socialism, although I have issues with that too of course). However my post responded only to his first, he snuck the second one in while I was composing my response and I didn't see it.
The marginal loss of farmland isn't causing the dramatic rise in food prices in India. The whole world has dramatically rising food prices.
Second, the regulations in India that I have problems with aren't about agriculture. My problem is manufacturing, retail, and employment law in general.
India has far less manufacturing than it "should" given its status as a country where there are lots of poor people willing to work at low wages (because where else are they going to work?). Why? Because the government makes it not profitable enough, so while manufacturing is starting to move from China (which is higher paid than India) to elsewhere, it is going to low wage Viet Nam and other countries instead.
Therefore India has far more desperately poor people than it should, and therefore they have a much harder time feeding themselves than they would have if India didn't shoot itself in its foot with regard to manufacturing and employment regulations.
Similar but different problems are in retail, where India has tried hard to not have efficient superstores that would lower prices for desperately poor Indians. Even if it did nothing to lower food prices, it would free up household money from lower prices to enable them to spend more on food than they would have otherwise. Not to mention the increase in jobs and standard of living.
I don't deny the environmental problems that India is facing, and will continue to face. But "saving the farm" is a terrible policy that puts uneducated Indians in poverty, and it retards the ability to bring them out of poverty. Every country in the world that escaped from poverty has seen a smaller and smaller percentage of its citizens working on the farm, and that is a good thing. Farming is miserable work, however noble it may be.
India simply must enable more nonfarm jobs to be created by "greedy" capitalists of it won't be able to handle the inexorable rise in global food prices and other commodities. This rise in commodities prices (including food) is due in no small part to a huge amount of people in the world moving out of poverty and increasing their living standards by doing things like buying meat, noting that meat can require roughly 10x as much grain to produce on a per calorie basis compared to a vegetarian diet.
The world isn't going to stop transforming itself for the better because India's poor are hurt by it. The only workable response for India is to step up its pace and increase economic freedom even more, especially with regards to blue collar workers, but white collar workers too who directly and indirectly are responsible for employing poor Indians. I fear however that India will instead face a socialist minded backlash due to globally rising food prices and go in the wrong direction instead.
Bashing new job creation that occurs during the "brain gain" is simply counterproductive.
Posted by: happyjuggler0 at Apr 20, 2008 4:15:58 PM
Bernard, it's a point used mainly for illustration. And I think part of the point of interrogation is that you *don't* know how long it is going to go on or how far it could go. It's one thing to wear down a person's resistance by being irritating, not letting them sleep, frightening them, using psychology, etc., it's another to pluck out eyes and crush bones, dunk people in boiling water, etc. That's *real* torture. It's categorically different from the "enhanced interrogation techniques."
And there's a difference between an innocent person ambushed by a criminal and a terrorist or militia member who knowingly undertakes a risky enterprise.
Posted by: Jacob Oost at Apr 20, 2008 7:51:49 PM
On income disparity, like most left wing propaganda, the article doesn't distinguish between skilled and unskilled workers. Skilled workers in general are making a killing. Should they apologize for making money? This is just more class warfare propaganda. I suggest you read Alan Greenspan's book and refer to the chapter on income disparity and education.
I would think that if Indians are starving, there would be rioting in the streets. Of course, when food subsidies are removed, the socialists go nuts. By giving food away, we prevent farmers in other countries from making profits that can keep their farms and production expanding. Of course, the liberals won't let them use pesticides to kill insects and to make their land more productive.
Posted by: jorod at Apr 20, 2008 9:39:21 PM
Jorod,
Take your blinders off. Did you actually read through the whole article? It's not left wing propaganda and it does distinguish between skilled and unskilled workers- that's the whole point of the article!
Posted by: Cliff at Apr 20, 2008 10:48:43 PM
Re. Yoo: the most direct beneficiaries of tenure seem to be the stanchest supporters of the sanctity of tenure (surprise). The question is simple: would Yoo have been granted tenure if his full body of work had been known. If so, then don't fire him. If not, then consider it.
Posted by: at Apr 20, 2008 11:23:24 PM
Bernard, it's a point used mainly for illustration.
To illustrate what?
It's categorically different from the "enhanced interrogation techniques."
Actually, it's not. Waterboarding and sleep deprivation, among other things, are generally understood to be torture. To dismiss things like that as "frat hazing tactics" is simply inaccurate.
And there's a difference between an innocent person ambushed by a criminal and a terrorist or militia member who knowingly undertakes a risky enterprise.
You've missed the point entirely. The context in which one commits an act affects the morality and legality of the act. The whole "frat-boy" argument completely overlooks the critical issue of consent. It's exactly like arguing that there's no such thing as rape because some peopel have sexual relations voluntarily.
Besides, many of the detainees are neither terrorists nor militia members. Even though some are, there are laws governing our treatment of them.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov at Apr 20, 2008 11:37:44 PM
Happy,
You say:
"Similar but different problems are in retail, where India has tried hard to not have efficient superstores that would lower prices for desperately poor Indians. Even if it did nothing to lower food prices, it would free up household money from lower prices to enable them to spend more on food than they would have otherwise".
I disagree.Superstores are coming to operate in urban areas.They have driven away hundreds of small and medium retail sellers (both in the status of employees and self employed)from the market.It has created a vanity-induced bandwagon effect among the neo-rich who get a psychological snobbish satisfaction by not mingling with the the common people.
In India shopping is a process for many buyers especially in the rural areas,that is, to visit the trader-friend in the nearby town and to engage in a nice conversation with him while his assistants pack things.This care free shopping habits of the average Indian is threatened by the superstores.Moreover most of the super stores withdraw all initial price cuts after some time period.
Posted by: GVV at Apr 21, 2008 5:26:15 AM
Mankiw rights:
But neither is education irrelevant. If Mr. Blankfein had left the New York public school system and gone directly to work, instead of attending Harvard College and Law School, most likely he would not be the head of a major investment bank today.
If the Clintons had been content with high school diplomas and not attended Georgetown, Wellesley, Oxford and Yale, they most likely would not have reached the White House and Senate, and it is a good bet that they would not now be getting multimillion-dollar book deals and $100,000 speaking dates. A top education is no guarantee of great riches, but it often helps.
This seems a very weak analysis to me. If not Mr. Blankfein or the Clintons then it would have been someone else. Now if you gave everyone a college degree, and believe me it could be done, the value of the degree would be reduced to next to nothing. IMO it is not what is learned that is valuable in the diploma but that it show ability and even more so relative ability.
I see a few things contributing to the gap. The return on capital is rising, I think that some of this is due to decelerating inflation. A more rapid replacement of labor with capital. Growing complicity of systems that increase the demand for intelligence, btw some of these are due to complexity created by government like tax code and building codes. Returns to licenses, in medical industry, medicine is up to 17 percent of GDP and it is an industry with a high return to having a license.
Posted by: Floccina at Apr 21, 2008 9:47:42 AM
Wow that:
Mankiw rights
was stupid. Should have written: Mankiw writes
wew!
Posted by: Floccina at Apr 21, 2008 10:31:59 AM
jorod--when the Indian government gives food away within India it has to buy the food from other countries. This may keep domestic food prices low and discourage domestic crop production. But it does not discourage food production in other countries.
Would you care to explain how you reached your conclusion. It appears to me you seem to believe the food the India government gives away is a free good.
Even US food aide is not a gift. Rather, it is financed through a long term loan from the US government.
Foreign aide to India has always been used to finance irrigation, fertilizers,pesticides, improved seeds, etc..
Even at the peak of US food aide in the 1950s and 1960s when India actually suffered famines, India imported less food grains then was consumed by rats within the country.
I keep trying to think of a single statement in your comments that had any relationship to reality. But I am hard pressed to think of a better example of concentrated ignorance.
Posted by: spencer at Apr 21, 2008 10:33:03 AM
