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Assorted links
1. What makes Jeff Koons great; the best parts of this insightful article come in the middle and toward the end.
2. Dani Rodrik on Samuelson-Stolper and why it might not hold.
3. Wealth of Nations board game; it seems to emphasize the imperialist reading of Adam Smith. There is more information here.
5. The cap and trade bill fails.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on June 17, 2008 at 02:37 PM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
I can tell you what makes Jeff Koons great in one word: "marketing".
Posted by: at Jun 17, 2008 2:57:52 PM
Weird. My reading of the movie length graph is "Movie length basically unchanged for the last fifty years" rather than "Movies are getting longer".
Posted by: Dave at Jun 17, 2008 3:23:03 PM
Wouldn't the 4th link suggest that movies are NOT getting longer? Two minutes' difference in fifty years? Or am I reading that graph incorrectly?
Posted by: Brandon at Jun 17, 2008 3:23:14 PM
FTS;
http://www.infinitypoint0.com/60/imdb-film-length-project/
I’m not an econometrist, so I hope I’m doing this correctly.
I noticed directly that most old movies are relatively
short. However, there’s also Les Vampires, a French horror
movie from 1915 which is 399 minutes! This is also the
longest film in any of top 50s, followed by Napoleon (1927,
313 mins). Both are French movies.
Les Vampires are a series of serials, so shouldn't really count as a movie.
Posted by: Jonathan Hohensee at Jun 17, 2008 3:43:47 PM
Sadly, I also call foul on the movies bit.
1. The selection of movies isn't really the most informative. I'm less interested in the movies that are rated the highest by IMDB users than I am in the top grossing movies per decade. Does IMDB have the latter set of data?
2. As Brandon (above) noted, and relying on the current set of data (highest rated by IMBD users by decade), once the art form (movies) reaches the 1960s, there seems to be no significant difference in run time.
3. This is stupid and nitpicky (as are 1 and 2 for that matter), but why is a decade the idea width for a histogram column? What if it isn't?
I really think that only slightly more time with a spreadsheet and the interwebs could yield a much more interesting (though hardly any longer) graph. Am I wrong?
I would do the work if I had time myself, but I think I just blew it all reading and posting on this blog.
Posted by: d.cous. at Jun 17, 2008 4:19:20 PM
Are there any good board games out there that emphasize the division of labor? It seems that the turn-based mechanics of most board games would limit the need.
On the computer, I guess there's always real-time strategy games.
Posted by: d.cous. at Jun 17, 2008 4:26:04 PM
Strangely,that is a very illiberal seeming board game.
Posted by: josh at Jun 17, 2008 4:28:55 PM
"Movies are getting longer."
Yet my bladder is not getting bigger. :(
Posted by: Jacqueline at Jun 17, 2008 4:39:55 PM
After reading the online instructions and comments, it seems that the game encourages specialization of economic commodities and encourage trading. That at least gets to the heart of Adam Smith. It would be interesting to run the game with each of its six players actually adopting an economic strategy based on its real world counterpart. "Bolshevia" could try developing without trading and simply try to do everything itself. "Arazzaq" country could try to develop using only one commodity to trade. "Showa Republic" would concentrate on only developing only its industries. The "Federal Provinces" and "Anglica" could adopt free trade and do whatever makes the most money. "Bharat" could try to develop without ever taking on any debt. Then at the end during the Victory Points phase, you see how well each strategy does. That might teach certain economic lessons. I wonder if each startegy would always come to the same result after being tested in multiple games.
D Cous. You may want to try the game Puerto Rico. Each player not only chooses what commodities to develop, but also things like # of workers to make them, storage, marketing timing, etc. Furthermore, everytime I've played the game, many different kinds of people seem to enjoy it as well.
Posted by: Chris Durnell at Jun 17, 2008 4:54:18 PM
The Koons article reads like a critic trying desperately to rationalize other critics' admiration of a fraud. Yeah, OK, he's a Martian, because that's the only possible explanation for how someone could seriously propose such fatuous products as "art".
And his fatuousness isn't even original - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogers_v._Koons. Ya gotta love a guy who hands off a postcard photo taken by someone else to his "assistants" at a ceramics factory in Italy, then passes off the finished product as his own.
Posted by: Oren at Jun 17, 2008 5:24:18 PM
Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker: But then there’s “Hanging Heart (Blue / Silver)” (1994-2006), an immense steel heart in dreamy blue with steel ribbons in glittering silver, which greets visitors to the show. Passing beneath it, you sense its great weight, perhaps with a touch of physical dread like that stirred by Richard Serra sculptures. It looks (and is) incredibly costly—and as sweet as dime-store perfume. It apostrophizes our present era of plutocratic democracy, sinking scads of money in a gesture of solidarity with lower-class taste. Noblesse oblige, never mind that noblesse isn’t what it used to be. (Neither is obligation.) We might wish for a better artist to manifest our time, but that would probably amount to wanting a better time. ♦ describes Koons to a tee.
Posted by: grackle at Jun 17, 2008 7:56:27 PM
Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker: But then there’s “Hanging Heart (Blue / Silver)” (1994-2006), an immense steel heart in dreamy blue with steel ribbons in glittering silver, which greets visitors to the show. Passing beneath it, you sense its great weight, perhaps with a touch of physical dread like that stirred by Richard Serra sculptures. It looks (and is) incredibly costly—and as sweet as dime-store perfume. It apostrophizes our present era of plutocratic democracy, sinking scads of money in a gesture of solidarity with lower-class taste. Noblesse oblige, never mind that noblesse isn’t what it used to be. (Neither is obligation.) We might wish for a better artist to manifest our time, but that would probably amount to wanting a better time. ♦ describes Koons to a tee.
Posted by: grackle at Jun 17, 2008 7:57:02 PM
From this chart, movies got longer from the 1930s to the 1960s, but have been fairly stable since then.
That may have to do with the breakup of the studio system, which raised the ratio of fixed costs to variable costs o due to the complex negotiations required over the last half century. For example, "A Confederacy of Dunces" has been in development hell for 28 years. When they finally do make it, after spending many millions on options, discarded scripts, and meetings, the cost of another 15 minutes of shooting will be relatively small.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Jun 18, 2008 4:47:51 AM
How would a game incorporate division of labor? Tough. Trading with the people you are competing with? Specialization?
Puerto Rico is good for scarce resources, but not much on division of labor. Settlers of Cataan involves trading.
I wonder how a boardgame would incorporate innovation. It would be tough unless you are doing a set technology path as most real-time strategy games do.
Posted by: Andrew at Jun 18, 2008 8:58:54 AM
Most games probably discourage division of labor. You are encouraged to have diverse resource capabilities and penalized if you make a lot of one thing because you hit bottlenecks and can't trade out of them.
For a game to encourage specialization, I'd think you'd need higher returns the more you made of something. Then, you'd have to be able to trade with your competitors, and they'd have to feel compelled (but not forced) to trade with you.
Having an imperialistic edge to the game may not be bad. You could lay out how imperialism is a shortcut that entails wars, which ultimately is bad for business. Or, go the free trade route and be vulnerable to protectionism by others. Now it's getting complicated, but it would be fun game.
I'd be more worried about how such a game encourages central planning.
Posted by: Andrew at Jun 18, 2008 9:52:23 AM
Vanished Planet is pretty good on division of labor, as is Parthenon.
Posted by: asg at Jun 18, 2008 10:24:31 PM
I played the Wealth of Nations board game last night. It has a realistic supply-and-demand driven market, and it does indeed encourage division of labor and trade, because there is a built-in economy of scale in the production mechanism. (E.g. one farm produces one food, but two farms produce three food.)
I'm not really sure there's anything "imperialistic" about it. The players are ostensibly different nations but could just as easily be corporations. You are using food, energy, labor, capital, ore, and money to produce more of the same, and the goal is to make an efficient economic engine.
Posted by: Clay B at Jul 8, 2008 10:21:09 AM
