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Assorted links
1. Prices, Poverty, and Inequality: Why Americans are Better Off Than You Think, by Christian Broda and David E. Weinstein. The full text is free on-line at the link.
2. The economics of Scientology.
3. 5, 322, and $4250 are the relevant numbers in this story of a journal run amok. Shocking (or is it?).
4. NYT 100 Notable Books. It's an OK enough list and you can think of these as the mainstream picks.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 28, 2008 at 07:14 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
I tend to contrast consumer progress with environmental losses. I can have a new iPod, but I can't catch and eat as many ocean fish as I want (even in unrestricted species I'd worry about mercury & etc.)
Posted by: odograph at Nov 28, 2008 9:41:09 AM
Maybe you first and third items have more in common than I first realized.
Broda and Weinstein's book is 63 pages long (52 pages of actual text and tables) and written roughly in the style of a journal article. So why was this intriguing discovery published as a book put out by an ideologically-driven think tank instead of in a refereed journal? Broda and Weinstein do not seem to have any refereed publications with this inequality result although its been widely touted by certain blogs.
Did El Naschie's journal of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals turn them down?
Posted by: a student of economics at Nov 28, 2008 10:29:16 AM
Most important answer about bagels: way too many calories.
Posted by: Peter at Nov 28, 2008 10:42:16 AM
The El Naschie soap opera is priceless. Reminds me of the Damon Wayans' Oswald Bates character.
Posted by: meter at Nov 28, 2008 10:54:41 AM
Re #1:
Haven't read the book but from the abstract it seems that the argument is that standard of living increases more than compensate for declining real wealth. I can see the argument from a technology, transportation and housing perspective - we are able to buy more house, travel further with nicer amenities, and purchase better technology for relatively less money as time marches on - but I wonder if they account for skyrocketing health care costs, education costs, and food costs?
There's a reason most American families used to be able to exist on the sole breadwinner model but can no longer do so. Leaving out those who have overreached on housing, it would be very difficult for the average family to run an average household on a single average income.
Posted by: meter at Nov 28, 2008 11:11:50 AM
damn you MR! I just spent half an hour reading the entire comment thread on the El Naschie affair. The one thing that surprised me is the fact that anybody is surprised that Elsevier journals are pieces of junk. I thought that was well known.
Posted by: ramster at Nov 28, 2008 11:17:00 AM
ramster,
It may be overpriced, but is the Journal of Econometrics junk? How about the Journal of Public Economics and the Journal of Economic Theory? Elsevier journals are arguably overpriced, but many are not junk. (Of course I am biased as I happen to edit an Elsevier journal)
I have put a post on n-category cafe, given that I have both published in CS&F (three times even!) and actually met El Naschie and found some of his 1994 papers on empty Cantorian sets quite intriguing. I am in no position to judge his e-infinity theory, however, and his practice of publishing five papers by himself in a single issue is simply way over the top. He clearly needs to step down, and it appears that he is being forced to do so.
Personally, he is very engaging and interesting. However, I do suspect that he plays some not so straightforward games. For years he was listed on the journal masthead as being at Cambridge University, but then his Wikipedia entry (since deleted) had nothing about that in it.
I have not read the journal in several years (not easy to access, I used to see it in the engineerng library at the University of Wisconsin, but they stopped taking it some years ago). It would appear that its quality has declined and El Nashie has gone wild.
I would note, however, that it has a respectable impact factor, and this might be due to the fact that many of the papers appearing in it are handled by associate editors who follow proper procedures. It has an economics section, which was edited for about a decade by the estimable Tonu Puu, now retired from Umea University in Sweden. He handled two of the papers that I published in the journal in 1994 and 1996, the first of those actually getting cited a moderate amount by other folks. The last one I published in 2003 was part of a conference proceedings, held at Odense, Denmark in 2001, and it was at that conference that I met El Nashie.
This is indeed a curious and ultimately sad tale. (They also need to lower the price of the journal, as well as get rid of El Nashie.)
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Nov 28, 2008 12:13:36 PM
I should clarify the "junk" comment...it was a bit flippant. I'm sure that there is much quality work published in Elsevier journals and I didn't mean to slander the authors or editors of such material. In my area (electrical engineering), Elsevier journals are noted for being publishing mills. That isn't to say that there isn't good material there but in general, the place to publish is IEEE journals (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering). Its journals (about 100 of them) are peer-reviewed and very well regarded. In contrast, the Elsevier journals tend to be full of second tier material that wouldn't make it into IEEE journals. My comment was also motivated by a more general antipathy towards Elsevier based on their business model and practices. Elsevier has certainly been very successful at extracting a healthy profit from the journal trade. Whether that's been to the benefit of the academic community and the general pursuit of knowledge and learning is a more questionable proposition.
Posted by: ramster at Nov 28, 2008 12:46:06 PM
I would note, however, that it has a respectable impact factor, and this might be due to the fact that many of the papers appearing in it are handled by associate editors who follow proper procedures.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of the impact factor by area. I don't think the aggregate figure means much at all, because of the "E-infinity" papers and other junk. These papers frequently cite each other, and they amount to a large enough fraction of the papers published that they can singlehandedly raise the impact factor.
Posted by: Anonymous at Nov 28, 2008 2:18:02 PM
ramster,
I am aware of the status of the IEEE journals in engineering. I do not know anything
about the Elsevier engineering journals. Given that CS&F was stashed in the engineering
library at UW-Madison, maybe it was or is considered to be one, although I would say that
it is a multi-disciplinary journal about nonlinear dynamics.
I accept that there is much to complain about with regard to Elsevier's pricing and other
business policies. I would only note that at least in the social sciences they have frozen
their subscription fees for some time now, largely in response to the criticisms. None of
their economics journals cost anywhere near what CS&F does. I think that while many do not
like Elsevier, most economists would agree that quite a few of the Elsevier economics journals
are quite good, with several of them in the top 10 to 20 in economics. Another one that is
very highly rated is the Journal of Monetary Economics. I must note that the Journal of Economic
Theory probably should not be counted as it was originally an Academic Press journal, with
Elsevier having taken over AP some time ago. However, JET continues to maintain its high rep.
Anonymous,
This is a valid point and occurred to me as well. I am not all that great a fan of impact factors
myself, which have a number of peculiarities. My sense is the CS&F was never all that highly
ranked of a journal, and apparently has gone downhill in recent years as El Naschie really went off
the deep end. But it has published some decent papers in a number of areas and is not all just junk.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Nov 28, 2008 3:01:58 PM
"it would be very difficult for the average family to run an average household on a single average income."
If most households start to have two incomes, then statement will always be true: it tells you that the average now consists of two-income households, not that costs of living have changed.
To what degree this influences the individual seems unclear. If it's just that our expectations of what a decent household should be able to afford have risen, then nothing has changed, you can live at comparable material wealth to the previous generation, on one income. If the two-income families bid up the price of housing, then the change in the average does make it harder for the individual to buck this trend. I suspect that both of these are true to some extent.
Posted by: improbable at Nov 28, 2008 3:05:48 PM
Broda and Weinstein's article, as such, could be used to argue for universal health care. The question to ask is WHY goods have higher quality. The answers include things like: they save work, they increase play, they last longer and break down less, they do things (like let us communicate) quicker or more efficiently, they take up less space, they amplify or deliver sensations to the senses in ways which were undoable before, etc.
In every case, the extra quality is some form of transaction- or transformation- or transfer-cost reduction -- thereby enhancing the efficiency of some attentional or perceptual process.
This can be applied to social-system-wide functions as well. Increasing quality of goods analogizes directly to the introduction and improvement of social institutions such as healthcare. The well-being in question is not that of better health all around -- although of course that is primary. The well-being that "quality" talks about is the reduction of costs in the performance of the person needing to avail of it.
No doubt there are various questions to answer about any quality provided at a system-wide level: questions of freedom, rationing, innovations, etc. But, for their part, Broda and Weinstein neglect the fact that Americans have lived in times when there were wage increases AND quality increases -- so Americans are probably worse off than they think.
Posted by: Lee A. Arnold at Nov 28, 2008 4:03:33 PM
Subtitlemania: A comment in response to an Assorted Links post
Wow, that's a lot of colons in the nonfiction part of the book list. I think there was a PhD comics about this phenomenon in the titles of research papers in boring subjects.
Posted by: K. at Nov 28, 2008 7:27:57 PM
Two incomes: Excluding Chicago and certain resort towns, it's pretty easy to raise a family comfortably on one income pretty much any place between the Appalachians and the San Andreas fault. One income families are the norm around Dallas.
NY Times 100 List: I know nothing about fiction, but the non-fiction list was absurdly unappealing. More than half of the books seem to focus on either how the Bush Administration is evil or how we need to pay more attention to the suffering/unsung heroism of either the environment or people oppressed by white conservatives. The world is a great place. Why would anyone want whiny books that harp on quasi-fictitious problems.
Posted by: Andrew at Nov 28, 2008 11:44:03 PM
There's a reason most American families used to be able to exist on the sole breadwinner model but can no longer do so.
Americans can't exist on the sole breadwinner model, because American's consumer appetite is so much greater. Someone working at Walmart today can most definitely beat my middle-class grandfather's material wealth in the 1950s.
Eating meatloaf and leftovers, taking the bus and not owning a car, mending your clothing instead of buying new, renting out the spare bedroom to a boarder, where all ordinary things that respectable middle class people would do 1950s, but would be looked down on by many welfare recipients in this day and age... let alone the middle class.
Posted by: Rex Rhino at Nov 29, 2008 2:53:55 AM
"Prices, Poverty, and Inequality: Why Americans are Better Off Than You Think"
The grand strategy of the American establishment in recent years has been to hold down wages _and_ increase consumption. Since that can only be done through increased borrowing, average Americans would end up with huge TVs, huge wheel rims, and huge houses, while the financial elite would end up with huge piles of IOUs signed by the average Americans. Everybody would be happy!
How's that working out for us lately?
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Nov 29, 2008 5:51:41 AM
Just for the record, I have just learned that
Mohammed S. El Nashie will be stepping aside as
Editor of Chaos, Solitons and Fractals early
this coming year. This was apparently reported
in the November 26 issue of Nature.
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