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Assorted links
1. Is National Review finally collapsing?
2. The smartest man Pete Boettke ever met; he is high on my list too.
3. Markets in everything: 19th century vampire killing kit
4. The public choice case against a GM bailout
Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 17, 2008 at 01:37 PM in Economics | Permalink
Comments
I didn't see anything on the vampire-killing kit page which indicated any authenticity. This is fine for the casual collector, but somebody dropped quite a lot of money on it.
Would the price go down if you found that all of the items are indeed 19th Century antiques, but that they were assembled much later into the kit?
Posted by: d.cous. at Nov 17, 2008 3:11:20 PM
The vampire kit is probably a fake. First, the kit is supposedly from the mid-19th century but our current conception of vampires only dates to the 1897 publication of Dracula. See Barber's Vampires, Burial, and Death for the origins of vampire mythology and contrasts between folklore and modern pop culture. Second, there's a confession that the kit is a fake:
http://www.lesvampires.org/dewinter.html
Posted by: Gabriel Rossman at Nov 17, 2008 3:23:50 PM
I doubt that the national review is going anytime soon. The peripatetic and patrician air of the Buckly editorship would make the current crop of writters seem dim in comparison, but any organization will have short term foibles that need not become entries in some publishers Doomsday Book. I for example have been on the staff of a paper long enough to see its golden age turn to silver with a bronze age about to reach its peak. The question is not one of survival but one of glory. Can the National Review becoem better than it was? If that question depends on a name than no. If that name dependes on the strenght of the instituion then possibly.
Posted by: Wesley James Young at Nov 17, 2008 3:45:38 PM
That's an interesting take on Nozick, but I had a different experience with him. I got to know him a bit, and have a few casual conversations with him. One time, I told him that I was still more in his camp than Rawls, but over the years I'd drifted towards Rawls. He told me, "Me too."
I also asked him if he would be interested in studying Talmud, and told him that he would be good to study it with. He told me, "Not in this life". He died a few years later.
Posted by: Don the libertarian Democrat at Nov 17, 2008 5:07:55 PM
As for the National Review, lets face it, most people don't like stuck up elitists/ intellectuals. I think this part of the American political punditry scene has changed in the past 40 years. It's not just the GOP which as issues with the intellectual. It's the whole country. If the National Review wants to stay relevant, it should try to be more wonkish, in a libertarian type way.
Posted by: thehova at Nov 17, 2008 5:24:28 PM
I got to know Robert Nozick very well
back in 1965. He was indeed brilliant,
but there are others more brilliant than
he was, with Tyler's major prof, Thomas
Schelling, probably being among them.
Posted by: Barkley Rosserr at Nov 17, 2008 5:40:18 PM
It is perhaps a bad idea to ask someone's political opponents if his days are numbered. National Review also likes to talk about the poor state of affairs at The New York Times. Both publications will likely exist for a little longer.
Posted by: Zubon at Nov 17, 2008 5:44:24 PM
If you've worked in good universities, the smartest man you've ever met might well be some barely articulate mathematician. Though how you (or I) are fit to judge that is a knotty problem.
Posted by: dearieme at Nov 17, 2008 6:38:58 PM
So National Review has been tainted "...by the tone of blogs, reader comments and e-mail messages."
How on earth did that get through the fact checkers?
Posted by: Thaddeus McMonster at Nov 17, 2008 11:00:36 PM
This spring, disaster loomed in the global food market. Precipitous increases in the prices of staples like rice (up more than a hundred and fifty per cent in a few months) and maize provoked food riots, toppled governments, and threatened the lives of tens of millions. But the bursting of the commodity bubble eased those pressures, and food prices, while still high, have come well off the astronomical levels they hit in April. For Americans, the drop in commodity prices has put a few more bucks in people’s pockets; in much of the developing world, it may have saved many from actually starving. So did the global financial crisis solve the global food crisis?
Temporarily, perhaps. But the recent price drop doesn’t provide any long-term respite from the threat of food shortages or future price spikes. Nor has it reassured anyone about the health of the global agricultural system, which the crisis revealed as dangerously unstable. Four decades after the Green Revolution, and after waves of market reforms intended to transform agricultural production, we’re still having a hard time insuring that people simply get enough to eat, and we seem to be more vulnerable to supply shocks than ever.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Over the past two decades, countries around the world have moved away from their focus on “food security” and handed market forces a greater role in shaping agricultural policy. Before the nineteen-eighties, developing countries had so-called “agricultural marketing boards,” which would buy commodities from farmers at fixed prices (prices high enough to keep farmers farming), and then store them in strategic reserves that could be used in the event of bad harvests or soaring import prices. But in the eighties and nineties, often as part of structural-adjustment programs imposed by the I.M.F. or the World Bank, many marketing boards were eliminated or cut back, and grain reserves, deemed inefficient and unnecessary, were sold off. In the same way, structural-adjustment programs often did away with government investment in and subsidies to agriculture—most notably, subsidies for things like fertilizers and high-yield seeds.
The logic behind these reforms was simple: the market would allocate resources more efficiently than government, leading to greater productivity. Farmers, instead of growing subsidized maize and wheat at high cost, could concentrate on cash crops, like cashews and chocolate, and use the money they made to buy staple foods. If a country couldn’t compete in the global economy, production would migrate to countries that could. It was also assumed that, once governments stepped out of the way, private investment would flood into agriculture, boosting performance. And international aid seemed a more efficient way of relieving food crises than relying on countries to maintain surpluses and food-security programs, which are wasteful and costly.
This “marketization” of agriculture has not, to be sure, been fully carried through. Subsidies are still endemic in rich countries and poor, while developing countries often place tariffs on imported food, which benefit their farmers but drive up prices for consumers. And in extreme circumstances countries restrict exports, hoarding food for their own citizens. Nonetheless, we clearly have a leaner, more market-friendly agricultural system than before. It looks, in fact, a bit like global manufacturing, with low inventories (wheat stocks are at their lowest since 1977), concentrated production (three countries provide ninety per cent of corn exports, and five countries provide eighty per cent of rice exports), and fewer redundancies. Governments have a much smaller role, and public spending on agriculture has been cut sharply.
* from the issue
* cartoon bank
* e-mail this
The problem is that, while this system is undeniably more efficient, it’s also much more fragile. Bad weather in just a few countries can wreak havoc across the entire system. When prices spike as they did this spring (for reasons that now seem not entirely obvious), the result is food shortages and malnutrition in poorer countries, since they are far more dependent on imports and have few food reserves to draw on. And, while higher prices and market reforms were supposed to bring a boom in agricultural productivity, global crop yields actually rose less between 1990 and 2007 than they did in the previous twenty years, in part because in many developing countries private-sector agricultural investment never materialized, while the cutbacks in government spending left them with feeble infrastructures.
These changes did not cause the rising prices of the past couple of years, but they have made them more damaging. The old emphasis on food security was undoubtedly costly, and often wasteful. But the redundancies it created also had tremendous value when things went wrong. And one sure thing about a system as complex as agriculture is that things will go wrong, often with devastating consequences. If the just-in-time system for producing cars runs into a hitch and the supply of cars shrinks for a while, people can easily adapt. When the same happens with food, people go hungry or even starve. That doesn’t mean that we need to embrace price controls or collective farms, and there are sensible market reforms, like doing away with import tariffs, that would make developing-country consumers better off. But a few weeks ago Bill Clinton, no enemy of market reform, got it right when he said that we should help countries achieve “maximum agricultural self-sufficiency.” Instead of a more efficient system, we should be trying to build a more reliable one.
...That's from James Surowiecki,
which parallels arguments by JAMES K. GALBRAITH in THE PREDATOR STATE
And Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of THE BLACK SWAN and FOOLED BY RANDOMNESS, who argues for redundancy, not efficiency.
Free Markets are dead, and so is the conservative ideology.
Posted by: at Nov 17, 2008 11:09:07 PM
Hi Marginal Revolution,
I'm emailing you in regards to a followup email I sent you a month ago in response to a partnership, have you had a chance to think about it?
If you have any questions or would more information, please advise me and we can go from there.
Kind Regards,
Andrew Knight
Posted by: Andrew Knight at Nov 18, 2008 1:02:21 AM
Two things that are killing National Review right now are Mark Krikorian and Maggie Gallagher. NR has been hijacked by fringe so-called conservative interests, like anti-immigrant and traditional marriage. The Catholic influence that WFB harnessed to inspire debate and discussion has given way to parochial Catholic culture warriors. The only thoughtful person they have left is Jonah Goldberg, and it is a crying shame that libertarians lost him a decade ago to the conservatives.
Posted by: BoscoH at Nov 18, 2008 2:25:38 AM
When Jonah Goldberg ranks as the resident "thoughtful person", you know all is lost.
Posted by: shecky at Nov 18, 2008 3:10:26 AM
Am I the only one that sees irony in the NY Times commenting on loss of reputation for erudition at the National Review?
Posted by: John Fisher at Nov 18, 2008 5:17:11 AM
#1. “I think the problem of conservative magazines is they often follow the party line more than liberal magazines,”
I see this a lot. It seems to be an accepted standard in the establishment. But, is it any more rational to judge ideas positively based on their disloyalty to a party as judging them negatively based on loyalty to a party? This is the kind of thinking that makes heroes out of "mavericks" like McCain, when in fact he could just be an angry, confused man. Why should interesting journalism make for good policy? Sometimes, when all you have is incoherence, all you have is incoherence.
#4: Good for Matt
Posted by: Andrew at Nov 18, 2008 5:58:02 AM
Bad for Matt
http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/11/depression_chart.php
Too often "he follows the party line." It seems his fame results from the fact that he doesn't always. Nice racket.
Why do they conveniently cut the chart off at 1929. I always like helpful assertions scribbled all over the graphs I'm trying to interpret.
Posted by: asweeney2112@gmail.com at Nov 18, 2008 6:40:56 AM
National Review has been in intellectual decline for a long time. K-Lo is particularly bad. Lots of hacks there now, though it is still fun to read The Corner. NR and NRO would do well to invite more serious people to write for them. Adler, for example, is always a great read and more writers like him would spice things up quite a bit.
As for most brilliant person I've ever met, Richard Epstein would have to be up there. James Buchanan is pretty damn smart too, but I met him for the first time later in life.
Posted by: at Nov 18, 2008 12:00:42 PM
1. Is National Review finally collapsing?
This would be an amusing question, if not brought up by the NYT, where the only question
is the old gret lady's collapse greater in credibility or financial dimensions?
There's a certain amount of gleefulexpectation in the use "finally" as a modifier.
On its worst day, NR is still better than rags like The Nation.
Posted by: Superheater at Nov 18, 2008 12:33:44 PM
When NR locked up WFB in the attic because they got tired of his rants against the drug war, Iraq War, and the current administration, the original voice of dissent within the ranks was lost. He was the only one that kept the magazine interesting and non-predictable.
Now they try to stay "hip and current" with has-been neocons and rationalize anything any self proclaimed "conservative" does be it leftist economic policies or endless wars.
Yes it is a step above The Nation and the Weekly Standard but that's not saying much.
Posted by: j at Nov 19, 2008 7:16:53 AM
