Marginal Revolution

What is the classic book of the 80s and 90s?

That's Ryan Holiday's query.  This is not about quality, this is about "representing a literary era" or perhaps just representing the era itself.  I'll cite Bonfire of the Vanities and Fight Club as the obvious picks.  Loyal MR reader Jeff Ritze is thinking of Easton Ellis ("though not American Psycho").  How about you?  Dare I mention John Grisham's The Firm as embodying the blockbuster trend of King, Steele, Clancy and others?  There's always Harry Potter and graphic novels.

Assorted links

1. ATBC reaps national applause

2. Fringe, starting soon

3. Standard of living and growth issues, from Robert Samuelson.

4. Volume II of Deirdre McCloskey's work in progress.

Does this count as an event study?

...investors are also unnerved by the aftermath of the five-day war in early August.

Russian shares have lost about a third of their value since hitting record highs in May. Russian and Western bank analysts polled by Reuters have cut forecasts for Russia's gold and foreign exchange reserves.

As much as $25 billion in foreign capital may have left Russia since the Georgia conflict started, they said: while their growth forecasts were little changed at 7.5 percent, the crisis sharply cut the liquidity of the banking system.

Here is the article.  The pointer is from Matt Yglesias.

The economic consequences of unwed motherhood

This was published in the American Economic Review in 1994:

We estimate the long-run and life-cycle effects of unplanned children on unwed mothers by comparing unmarried women who first gave birth to twins and unmarried mothers who bore singletons.  We find large short-term effects of unplanned births on labor-force participation, poverty, and welfare recipiency among unwed mothers, but not among married mothers.  Although most of the adverse economic effects of unplanned motherhood dissipate over time for whites, there are larger and more persistent negative effects on black unwed mothers.

Notice that comparing one birth to two, rather than zero to one, tries to address the identification problem, namely that early pregnancy may be correlated with other unfavorable conditions.  For the curious, here are many related articles.  And here is a very useful literature review, which suggests inconclusive results.

Tips for panhandlers, from panhandlers

Currently, the direct, humorous approach is in vogue. That's why in many cities today you'll hear some version of: "I won't lie to you, I need a drink." Panhandlers also report that asking for specific amounts of money lends credibility to pitches. "I need 43 more cents to get a cup of coffee," a panhandler will declare; some people will give exactly that much, while others will simply hand over a buck.

Oddly, the tips are offered on-line:

If it seems unlikely that a homeless person would surf the Web for advice on how to panhandle, that's exactly the point: many aren't homeless and are lying about their circumstances.

And what's the rate of return?:

Anecdotal surveys by journalists and police, and even testimony by panhandlers themselves, suggest that begging can yield anywhere from $20 to $100 a day—though police in Coos Bay, Oregon, found that local panhandlers were taking in as much as $300 a day in a Wal-Mart parking lot. “A panhandler could make thirty to forty thousand dollars a year, tax-free money,” Baker says.

The Anglo Files

Upper-class pronunciations are all over the place.  The Cholmondeleys are pronounced the CHUM-leys.  The Earl of Harewood is the Earl of HAR-wood.  The Beaulieux are the BEW-leys.  In accordance with the convention that French words should be pronounced as far away from the actual French style as humanly possible, just to show those French people who's boss, Beauchamp Place, a street in Knightsbridge, BEACH-um Place.  Jacques, in Shakespeare: JAKE-weeze.  Your valet is your VAL-let.  Madame Tussaud's wax museum?  To some Brits it's MA-dam TOO-sod's).

That is from Sarah Lyall's not fully analytical but often quite amusing The Anglo Files: A Field Guide to the British.

Here is a picture of Thomas Cholmondeley [CHUM-ley], and with this caption: "The trial has opened in Nairobi of an aristocrat accused of murdering a black Kenyan man he suspected of poaching on his family's 100,000-acre estate."  The case, the second of its kind brought against Thomas, remains pending.  Here is more information.  Here is his girlfriend.

Nationalism

What do you get when you plot the genetic fingerprints of more than 1000 Europeans on a grid? An image that looks surprisingly like a map of Europe. The findings reveal that our DNA contains a sort of global positioning system, which researchers can use to pinpoint where in the world both we and our relatives came from....

"I couldn't believe the picture was so clear," says Carlos Bustamante, senior author and statistical geneticist at Cornell University. "I, for one, fell off my chair." Italy and Spain clearly had their own cluster of genetically similar individuals, for example, and there were even distinctions between French-, German-, and Italian- speaking populations within Switzerland.

The results make sense, says Bustamante. Because people in a region are more likely to marry and mate with each other--a factor that may be largely due to shared language--that gene pool will evolve as a separate cluster that corresponds to a place on the globe, he explains. "You don't randomly mate within Europe. ... If you live in Strait of Gibraltar, you're more likely to marry someone in Spain versus someone in Moscow."

That's Science reporting on a new paper, Genes Mirror Geography with Europe, in Nature.