Jaber Elbaneh is one of the world's most-wanted terrorism suspects. In
2003, the U.S. government indicted him, posted a $5 million reward for
his capture and distributed posters bearing photos of him around the
globe. None of it worked. Elbaneh remains at large, as wanted as ever.
...
Since 1984, the program has handed out $77 million to more than 50
tipsters, according to the State Department. ... In 2004, Rep. Mark
Steven Kirk (R-Ill.) visited Pakistan to assess why Rewards for Justice
had generated so little information regarding al-Qaeda's leadership. He
discovered that the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad had effectively shut down
the program. There was no radio or television advertising. ...
In 2004, Congress passed a law authorizing the State Department to post
rewards as high as $50 million apiece -- a provision with bin Laden in
mind. Last fall, Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla.) went further, introducing a
bill that would raise the cap to $500 million. The State Department has
declined to boost the reward for bin Laden, arguing that more money was
unlikely to do any good and would only add to his notoriety.
Let's see, billions spent via ordinary means, and millions offered
in bounties, and it is the bounties they blame for Al-Qaeda's notoriety
and failing to catch leaders? The billions are spent and gone, while
the millions in bounties we only lose when they actually work. How
then is this data suggesting we should prefer ordinary means to
bounties?
Here is one of my previous posts on bounties. The Rewards for Justice program has actually brought in some big catches.
Mobs are legal entities here. Their fan magazines and comic books are sold in convenience stores, and bosses socialize with prime ministers and politicians.
Here is the full story, which focuses on the continuing powerful role of the mob in Japan. Get this:
The most powerful faction, the Yamaguchi-gumi, is known as "the Wal-Mart of the yakuza" [TC: do they promise "Always Lower Prices"?] and reportedly has close to 40,000 members.
Again, Their individual imperfections being great, they are moreover enlarged by their aggregation; and being erroneous in their single numbers, once hudled together, they will be Error it self. For being a confusion of knaves and fools, and a farraginous concurrence of all conditions, tempers, sexes, and ages; it is but natural if their determinations be monstrous, and many waies inconsistent with Truth. And therefore wise men have alwaies applauded their own judgment, in the contradiction of that of the People; and their soberest adversaries, have ever afforded them the stile of fools and mad men; and, to speak impartially, their actions have made good these Epithets.
You'll find the full passage here. The point resembles Bryan but there is something about the spirit which reminds me more of Robin. It's one of my favorite pastimes to find passages in early texts which in some way presage Robin Hanson; this means having to reread Gulliver's Travels every now and then. By the way, the Burial Urn and the Garden of Cyrus are probably Browne's most compelling works.
When Dante Gabriel Rossetti read the novel Wuthering Heights, he wrote to a friend: "The action takes place in Hell, but the places, I don't know why, have English names.
It seems to me odd to fault the World Bank for advice some 15 years ago
to eliminate import protection--so that domestic prices could come down
at the time--while at the same time complaining about high prices now,
even with the benefit of hindsight. If developing countries had all
kept their import protection, the global supply of food would have been
lower today, not higher. (That is because import protection would have
led global production to be reallocated from efficient exporters to
inefficient importers.) If you are for self-sufficiency, you must be
willing to live with high prices.
Manias can persist even though many smart people suspect a bubble,
because no one of them has the firepower to successfully attack it.
Only when skeptical investors act simultaneously -- a moment impossible
to predict -- does the bubble pop.
...Mr. Bernanke hired finance experts who had broad
interests and were eager to work with the university's deepening bench
of theorists. He lured Dilip Abreu, known for work in game theory, back
from Yale, to which he had earlier defected. Making a virtue of an
institutional weakness, the absence of a business school, Princeton
assimilated the finance scholars into the economics department and
freed them to pursue research.
They are building on work done by the late Hyman
Minsky, whose once-ignored ideas about investing manias are now in
vogue, and the late economic historian Charles Kindleberger, whose 1978
"Manias, Panics and Crashes" is a classic. But compared with Mr. Minsky
or another student of bubbles, Yale's Robert Shiller, the Princeton
trio focuses less on mass psychology than on mathematical models. These
they use to show how bubbles can be created even in markets that
include rational, calculating investors.
These programs serve two functions. First, they are a form of price discrimination. Buyers who are willing to collect and show the cards pay lower prices while the "I can't be bothered with this ****" types pay higher prices.
Second, retail loyalty cards enforce partial collusion ex post in an oligopolistic setting. In other words, cards and frequent flyer programs "lock in" buyers to their favored firms. Once that lock-in is accomplished, all firms have weaker incentives to cut price to lure away buyers from their favorites. (The smarty-pants point is to note that firms have to give buyers a better deal upfront in anticipation of this lock-in but still if the company moves first with a non-negotiable offer it still can come out ahead and raise the P/MC ratio.)
The first function is usually welfare-improving, the second function usually is not. Overall you personally benefit from loyalty card programs if you don't mind holding the cards (you have a thick wallet) and you have a strongly favorite company/product anyway. In the latter case you are likely locked in anyway, so the strengthening of the lock-in effect doesn't so much restrict your freedom. This is tricky of course because you might miss out on preemptive price cuts from your favorite firm to keep you, since maybe they don't otherwise know how much you love their stuff. Still, I will stick with this mechanism as a plausible guess of the net effect.
You suffer from loyalty card programs if...you hate them. Not only do the programs and the smiling clerks bug you but you are the kind of person who ends up paying more. Which means you hate the programs even more. Which means...
But wait: the equilibrium seems to converge and so Kevin Drum's anger at retail loyalty card programs remains, in reality, quite low.
1. Brazil has become a net creditor nation for the first time in its history.
2. About 15% of the Congress is under formal investigation for crimes, ranging from attempted homicide to money laundering.
3. Since 2005 more than 20 million people have entered "the middle class," defined as a monthly income of $635. The percentage of middle-class Brazilians has grown from 34% to 46%.
Those facts are all from "Brazil Joins Front Rank of New Economic Powers," in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal.
...to judge by the most
comprehensive study on the reliability of forensic evidence to date,
the error rate is more than 10% in five categories of analysis,
including fiber, paint and body fluids. ...DNA
and fingerprints are more reliable but still not foolproof....a 2005 study in the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology
suggests a fingerprint false-positive rate a bit below 1%, a widely
read 2006 experiment shows an alarming 4% false-positive rate.
How can we preserve the
usefulness of forensic evidence while protecting the public when it
breaks down? The core problem with the forensic system is monopoly.
Once evidence goes to one lab, it is rarely examined by any other. That
needs to change. Each jurisdiction should
include several competing labs. ...
This procedure may seem like a waste. But such checks would save
taxpayer money. Extra tests are inexpensive compared to the cost of
error, including the cost of incarcerating the wrongfully convicted....
Other reforms should include
making labs independent of law enforcement and a requirement for blind
testing. When crime labs are part of the police department, some
forensic experts make mistakes out of an unconscious desire to help
their "clients," the police and prosecution. Independence and blind
testing prevent that.
That's forensics expert Roger Koppl writing in Forbes. If anything I think Koppl is being kind to CSI. Take bullet lead analysis a procedure used by the FBI for decades that turns out to have no scientific validity whatsoever.
Full Disclosure: Koppl's op-ed is based on a paper in a book called Law Without Romance edited by Ed Lopez to be published by Independent Institute where I am director of research.
Steve Jobs had put some $50 million into the company. It was still reliably losing money year after year. Now he also faced the possibility of millions more in liability; although Disney had agreed to increase its lowball $17.5 million budget for Toy Story to $21.1 million, it still wasn't enough. By 1994, costs were expected to run some $6 million higher. Hence, Disney forced Pixarto obtain a $3 million credit line to cover its share of the overages -- backed, if necessary, by Job's personal guarantee. Weary of watching Pixar's deficits pile up, Jobs had tried to sell all or part of the company many times...
That is from David A. Price's The Pixar Touch, an excellent book. It is good most of all on all the false fits and starts behind a successful entrepreneurial venture.
"I'll be brief because many of you are academics, and you're not here to hear me talk, you're here to hear yourselves talk."
He likes Edmund Burke.
People learn when there's an emotional connection.
All factions of conservative movement united around distrust of government - this ain't enough.
Obama's perceptiveness / self-awareness / stability is striking.
McCain's morality is based on honor, not morality. #1 trait is aloofness - somewhat detached personality.
Conservatism shouldn't have permanent policies (like tax cuts): don't get moral about a situational policy issue.
Conservatism is about not knowing much; modest about what we can know/do.
Conservatism is philosophy first, policy second. Liberalism is policy first, philosophy later.
Conservatism values social mobility more than equality.
Top issues in the election: bipartisanship, immigration, healthcare.
People aren't solely self-interested economic rational creatures.
If this were the case, why would 30% of students drop out of high
school even though it's econ ruinous to do so?
What's the point of being a democrat if you can't play the class card?
Bush seems 40 IQ points smarter in private than in public.
I agree with many of these, although I am not sure that conservatism puts philosophy first. Does it not put experience first? Also, I think the main issue in the election is George W. Bush.
Does the simulation have an evil or indifferent designer?
On the plane I was reading Stanislaw Lem's famous essay on personoretics. It occurred to me that if we are living in a simulation we can make Bayesian inferences about the intentions of the designer. Let's say many designers are creating many simulations. Will the good or the evil designers be more productive in terms of numbers of simulations created? If we define "good" as subject to some ethical constraints, I believe the good designers work under a competitive disadvantage. It's harder to produce cheap apples, for instance, if you pledge to do so only in a "green" way. And so on. Oddly the evil designers may be under a competitive disadvantage as well. Intention has a cost and so in competitive settings it tends to fall out. In our current world most things are made by indifferent machines. I believe the rational inference about the simulation is that at least the demi-urge -- and possibly the Master Creator as well -- is indifferent to our plight.
You very likely own stolen goods. The gas in your car, the circuits in your cell phone, the diamond in your ring, the chemicals in your lipstick or shaving cream — even the plastic in your computer may be the product of theft. Americans buy huge quantities of goods every day that are literally stolen from some of the world’s poorest people.
...The very worst countries — the “sevens” — are places like Burma, Equatorial Guinea, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Taking these very worst countries as the places where the people could not possibly be authorizing the dictators and civil warriors to sell off their country’s resources, we can measure the amounts of stolen resources that enter America each year. By these official U.S. criteria over 600 million barrels of oil–more than one barrel in eight — have been taken illegitimately from their countries of origin. Stolen oil may be in your car’s gas tank right now. Stolen oil might have been used to make the computer mouse in your hand.
That's Leif Wenar, here is more. He proposes suing Exxon to create a chain reaction, thereby lowering the value of dictatorial seizures of natural resources and perhaps preventing them. I'm sure the Chinese are on board. But no -- read further: we must sue them too. After all, their cheap toys are made with stolen oil.
My story is about a world where...GDP growth yields fewer poor people who respond to higher wheat prices by purchasing less meat or wheat, i.e. we have less of a shock absorber. That generates a reduced elasticity of demand of wheat. So prices have to rise by more in order to clear a supply-demand imbalance than was required in the past when there were more poor people who would adjust.
Here is a list by David Remnick, via Jason Kottke. It is good, albeit a bit mainstream for my tastes. I'm glad to see he likes Ascension. I would add more late Miles Davis (Live at Fillmore and In a Silent Way, among others), Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, more Cecil Taylor, the Blakey/Monk album, Solo Monk (my favorite jazz album?), and some Stan Kenton as well. I'm due to cover a reader request for contemporary jazz soon, so I'll leave the moderns out of it for the time being.
Of course if the arena is the difference you would expect shooting guards, who need a good feel for the lights and angles of the basket, to have a bigger relative advantage at home than do the dunking big men. That should be easy enough to test. And maybe a look at Lakers-Clippers or Nets-Knicks history can clear up the importance of arena by holding geographic area constant.
I wonder if a third component of home court advantage has to do with sleep. People sleep better at home, if only because they don't have to go to such great lengths to get sex. I recall reading that Larry Bird became a truly great player only once he...um...calmed down a bit.
Question for the day: what do libertarianism and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics have in common? Interest in the two worldviews seems to be positively correlated: think of quantum computing pioneer David Deutsch, or several prominent posters over at Overcoming Bias, or … oh, alright, my sample size is admittedly pretty small.
...My own hypothesis has to do with bullet-dodgers versus bullet-swallowers.
And it ends with this:
So who’s right: the bullet-swallowing libertarian Many-Worlders, or the bullet-dodging intellectual kibitzers? Well, that depends on whether the function is sin(x) or log(x).
The storm ravaged the city’s architecture and infrastructure, took
hundreds of lives, exiled hundreds of thousands of residents. But it
also destroyed, or enabled the destruction of, the city’s public-school
system—an outcome many New Orleanians saw as deliverance....The floodwaters, so the talk went, had washed this befouled slate
clean—had offered, in a state official’s words, a “once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity to reinvent public education.” In due course, that
opportunity was taken:...Stripped of
most of its domain and financing, the Orleans Parish School Board fired
all 7,500 of its teachers and support staff, effectively breaking the
teachers’ union. And the Bush administration stepped in with millions
of dollars for the expansion of charter schools—publicly financed but
independently run schools that answer to their own boards. The result
was the fastest makeover of an urban school system in American history.
Here you will find regular updates on prediction markets, with the blog-like news function here. You'll see there that the CFTC is requesting public comments on how to regulate "event contracts." The site is launched by these people.
In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the
faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy
debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence
of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just
cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going
to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.
The only way speculation can have a persistent effect on oil prices, then, is if it leads to physical hoarding — an increase in private inventories of black gunk. This actually happened in the late 1970s, when the effects of disrupted Iranian supply were amplified by widespread panic stockpiling.
But it hasn’t happened this time: all through the period of the alleged bubble, inventories have remained at more or less normal levels.
I've never been one to push the bubble hypothesis to explain the high price of oil but I find this an unusual argument to make against bubbles. Isn't it easy enough to argue that the relevant hoarding is of oil in the ground rather than oil in strategic reserves or panic stockpiles? We have lots of state-owned oil companies and maybe their way of speculating is simply to remain sluggish in their exploration and extraction activities, at least for the time being.
I think of a bubble as a market price which is above the fundamental value of the asset, largely for psychological reasons. But with a commodity like oil the fundamental value of the asset depends on the marginal unit and thus how much oil is supplied. Fundamental value, at least at the margin, adjusts to the price and in that sense the bubble hypothesis can seem tautologically false if we apply the traditional definition of a bubble.
The key question, in my view, is how much more the oil-producing nations could bring to the market if a) their state-owned oil companies were not incompetent, and b) they did not tolerate this incompetence as an implicit form of speculation and collusion. I will not offer an estimate here (I genuinely don't have one) but b) does leave some room for bubbly-like phenomena, whether or not stockpiles of pumped oil are high. Note that in b) collusion and speculation work together and a) tosses incompetence into the mix. The whole foul brew is probably easier to sustain in times of rising demand and thus oil price explanations are not going to be very simple, or easily separable, by the nature of the problem.
AdultVest, Inc., the Beverly Hills-based investment bank, which concentrates its practice exclusively on adult industry investments, mergers, and acquisitions, announced today it had been selected by Alternative Investment News as one of four funds nominated for the "Hedge Fund Launch of the Year" award.
Robin Hanson, citing the work of Arthur Brooks, asks:
Would you or I be happier if we let ourselves think more conservatively, such as by attending church more and believing we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps?
Would society be happier if we encouraged more conservative thoughts?
Robin answers that he would rather "believe whatever is true even if that makes me unhappy." But there is always adjustment on some truthful margin that can be made. Robin could play up the relatively conservative thoughts he already believes in and do more of the church-like activities he already partakes in, even if he does not go to church per se. So these results probably should influence our behavior even though of course we should reject the deliberate pursuit of untruth.
In December, the Fed had $775B worth of Treasury securities. That
stock will soon have dwindled to $300B, give or take. The difference,
about $475B, represents an investment by the central bank in risky
assets of the US financial sector.
$475B is an extraordinary sum of money. It is as if the Fed borrowed
more than $1500 from every man, woman, and child in the United States,
and invested that money on our behalf in Wall Street banks that private
financiers were afraid to touch. For bearing all this risk, if things
work out well, taxpayers will earn about what they would have earned
investing in safe government bonds.
...If the Fed were to blow through the rest of its current stock of
Treasuries, it would have invested more than $2500 for every man,
woman, and child in America. Public investment in the financial sector
would have exceeded the direct costs to date of the Iraq War by a wide margin.
Here is much more; the Interfluidity post focuses in fact on the implications of paying interest on reserves. The sad thing is: if I had my finger on the button, I would not have reversed these loans. Ouch!
The American political system has lost the ability for large-scale compromise, and it has lost the ability to accept some pain now for much gain later on.
That is from Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World, a book remarkably full of common sense. It's #7 on Amazon and a good overall guide to globalization and why it matters that America no longer dominates the world, either economically or culturally.
The paper is titled "Hepatitis B Does Not Explain Male-Biased Sex Ratios in China"; here is the abstract:
Earlier work (Oster, 2005) has argued, based on existing medical
literature and analysis of cross country data and vaccination programs,
that parents who are carriers of hepatitis B have a higher offspring
sex ratio (more boys) than non-carrier parents. Further, since a number
of Asian countries, China in particular, have high hepatitis B carrier
rates, Oster (2005) suggested that hepatitis B could explain a large
share (approximately 50%) of Asia's missing women". Subsequent work
has questioned this conclusion. Most notably, Lin and Luoh (2008) use
data from a large cohort of births in Taiwan and find only a very tiny
effect of maternal hepatitis carrier status on offspring sex ratio.
Although this work is quite conclusive for the case of mothers, it
leaves open the possibility that paternal carrier status is driving
higher sex offspring sex ratios. To test this, we collected data on the
offspring gender for a cohort of 67,000 people in China who are being
observed in a prospective cohort study of liver cancer; approximately
15% of these individuals are hepatitis B carriers. In this sample, we
find no effect of either maternal or paternal hepatitis B carrier
status on offspring sex. Carrier parents are no more likely to have
male children than non-carrier parents. This finding leads us to
conclude that hepatitis B cannot explain skewed sex ratios in China.
We should hold up Emily Oster as a role model of a truth-seeker. If the abstract does not make it clear, Emily Oster first won her fame by reporting the opposite result about sex ratios. Here are our previous posts on Emily Oster.
A more general lesson, of course, is simply how difficult it is to get at truth. This is a well-defined data set with a (more or less) well-defined answer. Most policy questions aren't so tractable.
The whole post is interesting, but from this I can only conclude that Altonji, Bharadwaj, and Lange have never taught Introduction to Composition to a large group of freshman in a public university in the United States. Anyone who has taught such a class -- or for that matter talked to anyone who has -- will have some inkling why more people are not going to college. Herein lie the roots of growing inequality -- on the bottom side at least -- and don't let anyone induce you to take your eye off the ball by playing switcheroo and bringing up the (separate) topic of the growing wealth of the top one percent.
Economists who have endorsed John McCain's economic plan
Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Robert Lucas, Robert Mundell, Vernon Smith, Michael Boskin, John Cogan, Steven Davis, Francis X. Diebold, Martin Eichenbaum, Martin Feldstein, Kevin Hassett, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Glenn Hubbard, Anne Krueger, Deepak Lal, Burton Malkiel, Paul W. McCracken, Allan Meltzer, Tim Muris, June O'Neill, Michael E. Porter, Kenneth Rogoff, Richard Roll, Harvey Rosen, George Shultz, Beryl Sprinkel, John Taylor, and Arnold Zellner.
I was sent that list in an email. The opening of the statement reads:
We enthusiastically support John McCain's
economic plan. It is a comprehensive, pro-growth, reform agenda. The
reform focuses on the real economic problems Americans face today and
will face in the future. And it builds on the core economic principles
that have made America great.
His plan would control government
spending by vetoing every bill with earmarks, implementing a
constitutionally valid line-item veto, pausing non-military
discretionary government spending programs for one year to stop their
explosive growth and place accountability on federal government
agencies.
No, I don't do endorsements but if I were tempted to (and I'm not) I would this year be even more suspicious than usual. I feel that the candidates are trying to trick me and the one who isn't -- Hillary Clinton, whose negatives are too transparent to my eyes -- has been trying to trick everyone else.
I'll put the rest of the letter in the first comment, but in the meantime my advice -- at least for this year -- is to vote on the basis of foreign policy.
Somebody last week--was it Jan de Vries? John Ellwood? Somebody
else? I forget who, but it is not original to me--said that the right
model for Harvard over the past century is Yugoslavia. Remember the
story of the Yugoslavian socialist worker-managed firm? If you add
another worker to the firm, that worker gets a pro-rata share of the
firm's value added. The firm's value added has a component attributable
to the firm's capital stock, a component attributable to the ideas
embedded in the firm, a component attributable to the firm's market
position, and a component attributable to the workers. Hire another
worker, and only the last of these goes up: the first three do not, and
so average compensation falls.
This means that a worker-managed firm is likely to shrink whenever
it gets good news that makes it more productive--the larger is the
value added due to ideas, capital, or market position, the more
expensive does it become for the existing workers to replace workers
who leave, let alone hire enough workers to expand. While a competitive
market capitalist firm responds to good news about its productivity and
value to society by increasing employment, a Yugoslavian-model market
socialist firm responds to good news about its productivity and value
to society by shrinking. On this analysis, the very success of Harvard
over the past two generations together with its degree of worker
management has created enormous internal pressures not to expand, the
better to share out the surplus among the existing stakeholders.
Ben Zoma once saw a crowd on one of the
steps of the Temple Mount. He said, Blessed is He that discerneth
secrets, and blessed is He who has created all these to serve me. [For]
he used to say: What labours Adam had to carry out before he obtained
bread to eat! He ploughed, he sowed, he reaped, he bound [the sheaves],
he threshed and winnowed and selected the ears, he ground [them], and
sifted [the flour], he kneaded and baked, and then at last he ate;
whereas I get up, and find all these things done for me.
And how many labours Adam had to carry out before he obtained a
garment to wear! He had to shear, wash [the wool], comb it, spin it,
and weave it, and then at last he obtained a garment to wear; whereas I
get up and find all these things done for me. All kinds of craftsmen
come early to the door of my house, and I rise in the morning and find
all these before me.
At the end of the day, the true advances won't come in the Kindle, but
in the content. Just as the capabilities of the device will shape what
authors decide to do with it, so too will the decisions of authors
shape the evolution of the device. The Kindle as homepage already
features videotaped testimonials from such literary luminaries as Toni
Morrison, Michael Lewis, James Patterson, and Neil Gaiman. But what the
Kindle, and Amazon, need is not their kind words, but more of their written
words, composed with an eye toward the possibilities offered by
electronic text. Just as the early television shows were really radio
programs with moving images, the early electronic books are simply
printed text uploaded to a computer. Amazon could use its unique
position to change that.
Until recently, nearly all the thinking about the risks of space-rock strikes has focused on counting craters. But what if most impacts don't leave craters? This is the prospect that troubles Boslough. Exploding in the air, the Tunguska rock did plenty of damage...
Dan Drezner, who just won the title (congratulations!), gives a list. Oddly he leaves off the most important (only?) benefit, namely that no one can tell you any more that you won't make full professor. I know that sounds silly but in essence you choke off the ability of your university to send you one very particular negative status signal. Nor can they hold that threat over your head.
Sometimes I think this is also a benefit of being married. Let's say you and your significant other are not married. In that case proposing, and having that proposal turned down, often causes couples to split up. By marrying you remove this scenario as the source of a possible split.
There are advantages to sitting at the very top and very bottom of status distributions; it is often the in-between spots that are problematic.
That's the new Simon Winchester book and it concerns Joseph Needham, who wrote the famous series on the history of science in China and focused the attention of the scholarly world on the question: why no capitalism in China? This books offers a love story, a story of a quest, a story of science, a tale of politics, and did you know that Needham (unwittingly) was the guy who taught the Unabomber to use explosives?
Here is one short bit from the book:
In 1989, more than half a century after they first met, Needham and Lu Gwei-djen were married in Cambridge. She died two years later, whereupon Needham invited three other women to marry him. All politely declined.
Definitely recommended. The subtitle is "The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom." Here is one review.
The issue of off-label prescribing is heating up again. A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine by Randall Stafford made the case for greater regulation. I am concerned that the benefits of off-label prescribing are not fully appreciated. Dan Klein and I wrote a letter to the NEJM - which they declined to publish - in response. Here's the letter:
Dear NEJM,
R.S. Stafford writes that off-label prescribing “permits innovation in clinical practice … offers patients and physicians earlier access to potentially valuable medications and allows physicians to adopt new practices based on emerging evidence.” Nevertheless, he calls for greater FDA regulation.
In contrast, we argue that the efficacy of off-label usage suggests that less FDA regulation of first or on-label usage would increase innovation and offer patients earlier access to new medications.
Off-label prescribing is regulated by the judgments of doctors, medical researchers, industry, the patient community, and patients. This system offers patients a more nuanced approach to care than a top-down approach. We should extend this approach to new drugs as well as to new uses for old drugs.
Our perspective is bolstered by a large survey of physicians which demonstrates strong support for off-label prescribing and considerable support for reducing FDA regulations on new drugs.
Daniel Klein Alexander Tabarrok George Mason University
If you're a married woman living in the New York City area, there's
a better than 50 percent chance that you don't work, according to a recent analysis of Census data by economists affiliated with the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank.
More specifically, only 49 percent of white high school-educated
married women in their prime working ages were holding down jobs in the
New York area as of the 2000 Census. To put that in perspective, there
are roughly 2 million woman over 15-years-old who are married in the
New York area.
The national average for this particular demographic is 67 percent.
At the other end of the spectrum is Minneapolis where almost 80 percent
of these married women are employed -- that's larger than the
percentage of working men aged 25 and older in the U.S.
And why is this?
Surprisingly, the economists argue, the most important specific thing seems to be traffic.
And if you do work in these traffic-heavy areas, you are likely to work more hours. But is it all causal?
With all due respect to The Walker Art Center, if I wanted to be a kept woman I would not start my quest in Minneapolis. High density, as you find in Manhattan, means lots of fun things to do in your copious free time as a kept woman and also a higher degree of income inequality and thus the hope of snaring a rich man. There's a reason why they didn't set Sex in the City in Paramus and most of the women there will be working even when the traffic gets worse.
By 2015, Moscow will boast the 10 tallest office buildings in Europe—and already prime office rents in Moscow are going above $2,000 a square meter, 50 percent higher than the most prestigious skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan.
Here is more, interesting throughout, and thanks to John Bailey for the pointer.
Addendum: Don't forget this part -- about corruption -- either:
Indeed, by some estimates, Russia's GDP growth should have been closer to 14 percent—after all, Russia is the world's largest energy exporter at a time when prices have tripled during the last half decade.
I really, really do. All perfume, and yes that means yours too. But I loved the book Perfumes: The Guide, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez. If you are rating this book along the single dimension of how skillfully it informs the reader, it is one of the best non-fiction books I have read, ever.
Plus it has good sentences like:
Nobody ever died from wearing Mitsouko, but lots of babies were born as a result of it.
And:
Fragrances for men are mostly identical crap, designed to trap you and give you away as a lout.
Bryan Caplan on the McCain/Clinton gas tax relief plan
You'll find his contrarian take in The New York Times this morning. It's a second best, public choice argument: according to Bryan we are usually too nasty to energy companies in bad times, so sending them some excess profits is a bit of needed TLC. McCain's plan of course is better in his eyes because it doesn't include the punitive windfall profits tax. And without a gas tax holiday we might be tempted to do something worse. Excerpt:
...even a “giveaway” to the oil industry sets a positive course for the
future. During the last crisis, the industry was a scapegoat for
scarcity. Politicians scrambled to stop oil companies from profiting
from the crisis, even though temporarily high profits end shortages by
giving businesses an incentive to figure out how to increase output.
Stephen Colbert dissents. And here's Bryan's own summary of Bryan. I don't know the data on the average rate of tax paid by energy companies, compared to other endeavors, but looking at that would be one place to start.
I am still thinking about Nick Bostrom's stimulating essay (and Robin Hanson's precursor essay). Nick of course is worried about finding signs of alien life, which would suggest that life has arisen many times, leading to the question "where are they?" and the fear that life dies out pretty easily. For Nick it is cheerier, from our point of view at least, to think it is very hard for life to get underway in the first place.
In pondering the Fermi question, I often wonder if I am not simply missing the party, so to speak. Most people already *do* think they see signs of an alien presence of some kind, of course defining that concept broadly to include The Gods. So how can we say we don't see "them"? Maybe I, the agnotheist, don't see "them" (Him?) but surely most other people think they do.
Doesn't that make the Fermi paradox go away in a snap? No one cites Blind Boy Blake and screams "He doesn't see them!".
Another way of putting it is to say we don't take David Hume's Dialogues on Natural Religion seriously enough. We really have just one data point, so who can say what "they" look like, or what kind of "display" they would have made for us?
Alternatively, I am struck by the tension between the Fermi paradox with the "We are probably living in a simulation" claim. Both are popular with the same group of people because they are nerdy ways of making you believe something weird; in reality the two conundrums don't fit together. If you take the simulation option seriously, you again see the creators all around you, albeit in disguised or cloaked form. Of course you had to use Bayesian inferential reasoning to see them, but what's wrong with that? Better than a telescope, some would say. And since most people believe in God, the creators might even consider their artwork to be already "signed." (I'll note rapidly in passing that the arguments against the simulation hypothesis also strike at the Fermi worries, but establishing that would take lots of work.)
Either way, it seems we see "them," or ought to think we see them, even if that turns out to be a visual mistake of sorts.
After that first species gets control, it makes all the rules. If it shells over all the stars, no other life can even develop, since all the planets are frozen solid. If it wants to let biological evolution continue, it can do that, by avoiding stars with fertile planets. It can prevent any other technology from arising (by monitoring all the planets where life is evolving.) It can guide or change any life that it does find.
This may seem horrible to you -- little robots putting all the stars out! Spreading like a weed and killing or preventing any new life from developing. But you're looking at it the wrong way...The first species out there gets to decide the future, for every species that follows. For lack of any other evidence, let's hope it's us.
Splendid, but I part company at the last sentence. There is some other evidence (of the Bayesian sort) and I think the most logical assumption is -- whether you believe in God or space aliens -- to think of ourselves as their product, one way or another.
Or to put it yet another way, what's the principle of individuation here? Isn't "seeing us" and "seeing them" more or less the same thing?
Charity workers have gathered at Myanmar's embassy in Bangkok,
Thailand, with vehicles, emergency food supplies and medicine, waiting
for their visa requests to be approved.
... it is important that presidential candidates fear economists...
Brad DeLong, writing about why what a politician says about a minor policy like the gas-tax matters. Of course it is even better if the public are informed and on the gas-tax they seemed to have made the right decision.
You're hearing this a lot these days, most of all from Kevin Phillips. David Leonhardt sets the record straight. Here is one excerpt:
During the 1980s and 1990s, though, did you ever stop and marvel at what a small share of your paycheck you were spending at the supermarket? I didn’t. I also didn’t really notice that gas cost less in the late 1990s than it had in the 1980s. Yet lately, every time my wife or I pass a new benchmark for filling up our tank — $40, $50 and now $60 — we have a conversation about it.
Price increases are simply more noticeable — more salient, as psychologists would say — than price decreases. Part of this comes from the notion of loss aversion: human beings dislike a loss more than they like a gain of equivalent size. If you have to sell your house for less than you bought it for, you’re really unhappy. You hate that ground chuck now costs $2.83 a pound, but you didn’t notice that oranges are 31 percent cheaper than they were a year ago.
...The price of major appliances has been flat over the last year. Furniture is 1 percent less expensive. A decade ago, a basic four-door Toyota Corolla LE cost $16,018, according to the company. The 2009 basic model costs $16,650, and it’s a safer, more powerful, more fuel-efficient car than its predecessor.
To top it all off, most people don’t buy any of these items very often. “People tend to remember things they do frequently,” says Stephen Cecchetti, an economist at Brandeis University who studies inflation. “And what do you buy more frequently than gas and food?”
Why did Chinese immigrants to America start so many restaurants? Because Chinese cuisine is glorious, right? Well, no. Chinese immigrants started a lot of laundries, too, and there is nothing wonderful about Chinese ways of washing clothes. As Jennifer Lee explains in this excellent talk, the first Chinese immigrants were laborers. They were taking jobs away from American men, and this caused problems. Restaurants and laundries were much safer immigrant jobs because cooking and cleaning were women’s work.
By the way, here is some work on immigrant complementarity with native labor. George Borjas rebuts.
1. Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights, by Bill Ivey. The concrete discussions of cultural issues are consistently interesting and thoughtful; the overall talk of cultural rights which frames the book is not even well-developed enough to be called absurd. The book is best on copyright and least interesting on the NEA, which Ivey once ran. Most of all the book reflects a creeping horror that the internet will make its entire series of debates irrelevant.
3. The Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve: A History, by Robert L. Hetzel. This is a very serious treatment of what is, from a historical point of view, an understudied topic. Recommended; note that while the monetarist point of view is not heavy-handed, it may not appeal to everybody.
4. Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century. A lengthy and thoughtful volume on how WMD are *the* problem of the future, though I found it didn't get me further to thinking through my views. A good start, however, for those who don't buy the premise.
1. Megan Non-McArdle quits blogging, at least for the time being.
I've long felt that the routine of married life fits the routine of blogging very well; I really do wake up the same hour each morning, more or less. If I weren't married I would still blog but I would feel more conflicted about it and perhaps she does too. ("You're funnier on the blog" one loyal (and beautiful) MR reader once told me upon meeting.) Dating and blogging either means the blog is a secret (but for how long?) or the potential partner "dates the blog" before dating you. Do I really want to be explaining "Markets in Everything" on a first or second date? ("No, I don't want you as a prostitute. Most of the entries are sad, or satirical, but there is a secret code to indicate the ones I approve of. For further explanation, go to the middle chapter in Montaigne's second book of Essays.") Maybe the blog is more charming than I am and I would do better to send it on my dates but that's still an odd place to be. In any case my guess is that Megan Non-McArdle is doing the right thing by quitting. We all wish Megan Non- well in her quest for Mr. Non-McArdle, and in her quest for everything else, etc.
Economists say that people buy insurance to cover themselves if something bad happens. Some experiments by psychologists suggest that people buy insurance because they think it will prevent the bad thing from happening. John Tierney has more.
"The style in which they write is simple and concise, how do they get their sentences so precise?" the rappers wonder.
And the chorus is a gem, too: "He reads the Economist so he can get the gist, its solid competence gives him confidence that his intelligence is correct."
The rappers also weigh in on accusations that the Economist pushes a particular line: "Yes, they have a bias; it's pro-democratic. And pro-free trade; they are very emphatic."
Yet economists talk much more about trade than they do about health care policy, because they think they know something about it in a way the laity don’t...don’t let economist’s tendency to overemphasize their areas of expertise distort your view.
I don't agree with every claim in this Krugman piece, least of all his defense of you-know-who, but I think that psychoanalysis of economists is spot on.
All politics stink. Even democracy stinks. Imagine if our clothes were selected
by the majority of shoppers, which would be teenage girls. I'd be standing here
with my bellybutton exposed. Imagine deciding the dinner menu by family secret
ballot. I've got three kids and three dogs in my family. We'd be eating Froot
Loops and rotten meat.
But let me make a distinction between politics and
politicians. Some people are under the misapprehension that all politicians
stink. Impeach George W. Bush, and everything will be fine. Nab Ted Kennedy on a
DUI, and the nation's problems will be solved.
But the problem isn't
politicians -- it's politics. Politics won't allow for the truth. And we can't
blame the politicians for that. Imagine what even a little truth would sound
like on today's campaign trail:
"No, I can't fix public education. The
problem isn't the teachers unions or a lack of funding for salaries, vouchers or
more computer equipment The problem is your kids!"
George Jones and Bob Willis and Merle Haggard are all in my view somewhat overrated.
3. Louvin Brothers, Tragic Songs of Life (some call it bluegrass), Dolly Parton, Dock Boggs, Patsy Cline, the essential Johnny Cash (there's lots of it), and the country/gospel of Elvis Presley. Dylan's country music is good but is not his strongest suit.
Arguably the best songs of Ryan Adams (alas they are scattered but "Amy" and "La Cienega Just Smiled" are two places to start; does anyone know a more general sourcing?) are as good as anything in the genre. I like Lucinda Williams as well plus Shelby Lynne, most of all I Am Shelby Lynne.
Alternatively, the best collections from the 20s and 30s are mind-blowingly good; for instance try American Primitive on John Fahey's Revenant label, or the Harry Smith collections. That's some of the best American music period though in some ways the blues shouts are closer to rock and roll than to country.
I might add the whole list comes from someone who was initially allergic to country music, so if that is you give some of these recommendations a try. Just think of it as White Man's Blues.
Hillary Clinton's proposal is particularly stupid, in my humble
opinion, because it tries to get the money back from the oil companies
with a windfall profits tax. Tax incidence is tax incidence: if the oil
companies can make consumers pay most of the excise tax, then probably
consumers can stick them with your windfall profits tax too.
I believe that is what they call "true enough." Here is more.
Yes, the first is about agricultural productivity, that still-neglected issue:
Ajit Singh, a farmer in the poor northern state of Uttar Pradesh, had never seen a computer until four years ago when ITC, the Indian agribusiness-to-hotels conglomerate, installed a PC in his village, Kurthia.
Now the thin 47-year-old farmer visits the ITC station, known as an "e-choupal" after the Hindi term for "gathering place", every day for online access to news-papers, crop prices, weather forecasts and farming techniques. As ITC's village manager, he passes on what he gleans to fellow farmers.
Knowing the fair market value of crops allows farmers to fetch better prices and circumvent local traders who used to dictate terms. Farmers can also sell wheat and other crops to ITC.
The result has been a big jump in crop productivity. Annual incomes in Kurthia have risen from Rs40,000- Rs50,000 ($1,000-$1,230) before e-choupal to Rs100,000- Rs120,000 now, says Mr Singh.
What's your guess and why; let us know in the comments and I'll post their answer later today. The book also tackles such hoary chestnuts as "How many piano tuners are there in Los Angeles," although for mysterious reasons (are they mostly part-timers?) they fall far short of the actual number in the L.A. Yellow Pages.
This book isn't for everyone but if you think you might like it you probably will.
Addendum: I post the authors' answer at about comment #31.
Is taking a photo or video of an event for later viewing worth it, even
if it means more or less missing the event in realtime? What's better,
a lifetime of mediated viewing of my son's first steps or a one-time
in-person viewing?
If you take photos you will remember the event more vividly, if only because you have to stop and notice it. The fact that your memories will in part be "false" or constructed is besides the point; they'll probably be false anyway. In other words, there's no such thing as the "one-time in-person viewing," it is all mediated viewing, one way or the other. Daniel Gilbert's book on memory is the key source here.
Furthermore you don't need the later viewing for the photo or video to be worthwhile. It's all about organizing your memories in the form of narratives and that is what cameras help us do, if only by differentiating the flow of events into chunkier blocks of greater discreteness.
A photo that requires retakes might be more effective than a photo you get right the first time.
Personally, I take pictures of Yana only when she tells me to, which I might add is often. I've never owned a camera, but for most people I recommend the photos.
I'm curious to know what you think of these authors, beyond the fact
that they achieved mainstream success, given that the Economics that
came out of the Cowles Comission is more or less the exact opposite of
the Economics coming out of GMU.
Here goes:
1. Tjalling Koopmans. He is a father of operations research and certainly worthy of a Nobel Prize, although perhaps in mathematics (if they had one). His work on optimal routing theory remains central to transportation management and he also laid some foundations for quantum chemistry. True, he doesn't really appeal to my inner Austrian but he was an awesome intellectual figure and he also helped us win WWII. We should all bow down and pay homage to Tjalling Koopmans.
2. Kenneth J. Arrow. His reputation now far surpasses that of Samuelson's and he was more philosophical to boot. Where to start? He understood his own impossibility theorem better than did the commentators plus he is the father of modern health care economics and that is maybe 1/10th of his total contribution! People who know him also claim he is the greatest polymath they ever met.
3. Gerard Debreu. He is the father of general equilibrium theory and also, as a philosopher of time, the real successor to Proust, as he once explained in an interview. His extremely minimalistic approach to economics is better when it comes from the star than from the second-tier imitators but of course a real star he was. I think of him as the father of economic science fiction and no I don't mean that as a snub.
4. James Tobin. About fifteen years ago I realized he was in fact one of the deepest Keynesian thinkers. He also proposed the Tobit model and laid the foundations for modern portfolio theory. He lives in an intellectual world different from my own but he is clearly deserving of his Nobel Prize several times over.
5. Franco Modigliani. He is one of the guys who could have won more than one Nobel Prize. That's one for the Modigliani-Miller theorem (the implications of being able to chop up and carve up assets), one for the lifecycle hypothesis, and perhaps even another for his 1944 article on liquidity preference, which showed the concept was probably not enough to drive the Keynesian model except for the unusual case where liquidity preference was infinitely strong. Sadly this piece remains neglected by modern purveyors of the liquidity trap idea.
6. Herbert Simon. Bounded rationality and behavioral economics have already taken the profession by storm; his insights on computation, neurology, and artificial intelligence have not yet been incorporated into the mainstream in an effective manner, so his long-run influence will only increase.
7. Lawrence Klein. I can't say I am a fan of his macro modelling appro
