Marginal Revolution

Assorted links

1. Conservatism and climate change.

2. "Sales of the dolls account for less than 1 percent of the country's $1.2 billion souvenir industry, but officials say more is at stake than money and jobs."

3. Fifteen travel tips, mostly for not-so-safe places.

4. Austan Goolsbee responds to critics.

5. Simulating deja vu.

6. Austan Goolsbee responds to critics.

Betting markets in everything

A Buckinghamshire man diagnosed with terminal cancer is to collect a second winning payout of £5,000 after betting he would stay alive.

Jon Matthews, 59, from Milton Keynes, was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a cancer linked to asbestos, in 2006 and told he had months to live.

He placed two bets, each with a £100 stake at odds of 50/1, that he would be alive in June 2008 and in June 2009.

A third wager will earn him a further £10,000 if he lives until 1 June 2010.

The widower will collect his second lot of £5,000 winnings on Monday.

The full story is here and I thank Leonard Monasterio for the pointer.  Of course you are implicitly betting on your life each time you make an investment or a long-range plan.

Ask Marilyn: IQ vs. the economists

Marilyn vos Savant has (supposedly, read the link) the world's highest recorded IQ at 228.  She is now fielding questions on economics.  Here is one example:

Question: Why has the income disparity grown so much in developed countries? – Matthew Cencich, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Answer: I think the disparity is a normal result of overall economic growth. The bottom incomes (zero) can’t go lower, but the top incomes can go up and up. And so they do, of course.

Here is another:

Question: Do you think that government actively encouraging people to borrow money (and spend it) is the right way to resolve the recession? – Caroline Kelly, Hendon, London

Answer: No. I think that more consumer activity could be modestly helpful to the economy in the short term. And in better times, it would even masquerade as growth. But in the current climate, increasing the family debt would cause added personal financial problems. So I doubt that it’s useful for government to advocate shopping as a form of national service unless elected officials are perhaps a tad more interested in shifting a little of the burden away from themselves than they are in a lasting solution.

She also explains the financial crisis. ("First, an economy based on growth is bound to falter now and then. A whole sector could collapse. It’s a house of cards. Eventually, it must morph into a system that functions on stability, or it will fail – meaning a fall large enough to cause an unstoppable breakdown and widespread hardship.")

Question: on these problems, does she do better or worse than leading economists?

Addendum: Here is Marilyn on YouTube.  Oddly (look just past the 4:00 mark), she can't define IQ properly. 

How to learn about everything?

Eric Drexler offers some tips:

1. Read and skim journals and textbooks that (at the moment) you only half understand. . Include Science and Nature.
2. Seldom stop to study a single subject with a student’s intensity, as if you had to pass a test on it.
3. Don’t drop a subject because you know you’d fail a test — instead, read other half-understandable journals and textbooks to accumulate vocabulary, perspective, and context.
4. Notice that concepts make more sense when you revisit a topic, and note which topics provide keys to many others.
5. Continue until almost everything you encounter in Science and Nature makes sense as a contribution to a field you know something about.

The three-word version of that is "Get context first."

China blog of the day

Here, it is MR translated into Chinese and thanks to Helen Yang for the pointer.  How are the translations?  The comments?  Do they cover "China fact of the day"?  "China blog of the day"?  How many people read it?

Vernon Smith's autobiography

It's called Discovery -- A Memoir and I enjoyed it very much.  If you, like me, wish that more books were just a bit wilder, weirder (I mean that in the good sense), and real, you will like this one.  Here's one brief bit:

...I will grow up to be a loner, protecting myself from distractions, but thereby projecting an image of aloofness that was never part of what I felt inside.

It's a hard book to summarize.  It offers a discussion of whether soda tastes different from the can as opposed to the bottle, a detailed recipe for perfect hamburger, an even more detailed recipe for perfect chili, how and why Vernon used to refer to himself in the third person ("Dingy"), the economic history of Kansas before WWII, Vernon and his mother working for CORE in the 1940s, what it was like to get an economics Ph.d. at Harvard back then, Vernon's lifelong pacifist and anti-war stance, how he almost gave up professional economics and ended up setting rail rates in 1957, a splendid history of thought of economics at Purdue University, an excellent memorial to Jonathan Hughes (and a discussion of Hughes as an ex-Mormon), why experimental economics is important, talk of Vernon's abilities and disabilities when it comes to focus and "attention-shifting," why it is rational to believe in God, and a thought on Kahlil Gibran.

The style eschews silky narration and expects that you can keep up with the flow of information.  Not everyone can.

If you think you might be interested, you probably are,  One Amazon reviewer writes:

'Discovery' is an unfiltered, entertaining read. There is no spin, no self-serving revisionism here. A most original and influential economist tells the reader what happened, what he thought, and how he thinks.

Yummy yum yum at Krispy Kreme doughnuts

Since I live in a county dedicated to the rule of law, I was not surprised to read this:

You know Krispy Kreme doughnuts are bad for your arteries. But the delectable sugar-bombs are apparently lousy for sewer pipes as well, according to Fairfax County.

In a lawsuit filed this month against the company, the county says that doughnut grease and other waste from a plant in Lorton have clogged up the county's sewage system, causing $2 million in damage. The county is seeking to recoup the cost of the repairs and another $17 million in civil penalties.

The problems began in 2004, shortly after the plant opened, when the county's public works inspectors began noticing "deposits of doughnut grease and slime emanating from Krispy Kreme's doughnut production plant," according to the suit, which was first reported by the Examiner.

The muck got so bad that a nearby pumping station began reeking of doughnuts, and a camera inserted into one of the pipes "got stuck in the grease, preventing inspection of the remainder of the line," according to the suit.

One of these days, maybe when the economic crisis is over, I will spend a week blogging Fairfax County rather than the nation at large.

*Up* (no spoilers)

I enjoyed the homages to Howl's Moving Castle and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.  The soundtrack was excellent.  The protagonist, as a young man, resembles Bryan Caplan.  As an old man he resembles Gordon Tullock.  It's some of the most beautiful filmmaking I've seen and probably my favorite Pixar movie to date.

Assorted links

1. The grammar of Bing, the Microsoft search engine.

2. Jeff Sachs on Dambisa Moyo.

3. Clive Granger passes away.

4. Civil politics and understanding the other guy.

5. List of summer reading lists.

The patronage of Carlos Slim

This Carlos Slim profile (so far the link is subscriber only), from the June 1 issue of The New Yorker, is fascinating throughout.  Here was my favorite bit:

Slim had already founded several charitable organizations, although he admitted to me: "I don't believe in charities too much...They can make you popular...but you don't solve any problems."  Aside from his art museum, he has created the Telmex Foundation and the Carlos Slim Foundation, which have rather diffuse mandates.  Through the Telmex Foundation, he has provided a hundred thousand computers to public schools, nearly two hundred thousands scholarships, seventy-eight thousand pairs of eyeglasses, and two hundred thousand bicycles, and has paid for nearly four hundred thousand surgeries; he also supports more than a hundred thousand soccer teams.

And people wonder why he wishes to finance The New York Times.  He says he does read the paper, but only when he's in the USA.