Marginal Revolution

Sentences to ponder

Jason Kottke reports:

The collective optimization of individual driving routes by drivers using realtime traffic maps slows everyone down. That is, everyone picking the "fastest" route on the map results in overall slowdowns. Interestingly, the solution to this problem may be to remove some roads so that drivers have fewer options for route optimization.

Here is more.  To how many other problems can this point be applied?

Assorted links

1. Motley Fool podcast, by me.

2. Sean Wilentz on Lincoln.

3. Chess players play the "beauty contest" game.

4. The Robot Gamelan Orchestra.

5. Markets in everything, a new use for pigeon blood, the link is safe for work but not for everybody.

6. Which public health interventions work?

From the comments: who lives longer?

Adam reports:

At birth, someone living in the Netherlands can expect to live 2.35 years longer than someone born in the US, but at age 65, the difference is reversed, and someone living in the US can expect to live 0.4 years longer than someone living in the Netherlands. This difference can be explained by assuming that semi-socialized health care is better for young and worse for old people, or, at least as likely, different policies are not the main cause of the difference

Sources: CDC national vital statistics 2004, www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr56/nvsr56_09.pdf and RIVM 2007 levensverwachting, www.rivm.nl/vtv/object_document/o2309n18838.html (in Dutch)

One interesting feature of this data is that it can be used to argue for a number of different points of view.

*Imperial*, by William Vollmann

It is glorious in its 1100 pp. plus of text, analytical diatribes, love stories, monomaniacal rants, ecological analyses, and unevenly eloquent prose.  I'm on p.206 and so far it's a first-rate book on the Mexican-American border (Imperial is a county in California), low lifes, the desperation of America's empty spaces, and this is from an author who issues books like others do blog posts.

Suddenly I turn the page and see a heading: Warning of Impending Aridity.  Some text follows:

This book represents my attempt to become a better-informed citizen of North America.  Our "American dream" is founded on the notion of the self-sufficient homestead.  The "Mexican dream" may be a trifle different, but requires its kindred material basis.  Understanding how these two hopes played out over time required me to cultivate statistical parables about farm size, waterscapes, lettuce prices, etcetera.  I have harvested them (doubtless bruising overripe numbers on the way), and now present them to you.  Some of them may be too desiccated for your taste.  If you skip the chapters devoted to them, you will finish the book sooner, and never suspect the existence of my arithmetical errors.  As for you devotees of Dismal Science, I hope you will be awestruck by my sincerity about Mexicali Valley cotton prices.

Jason Kottke has an excellent post on Vollmann's book, with links and excerpts.  One description is: "Just write that it's like Robert Caro's The Power Broker," she said, "but with the attitude of Mike Davis's City of Quartz"...but even that turns out to be inadequate:

Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange.

How's that for the best sentence I read last night (it's from Sam Anderson)?  As Vollmann himself once said: 'I used to think the Imperial Valley was hot, flat and boring,'

You can buy it here.  Here is an Imperial slide show.

Palermo, Sicily bleg

In a bit of time I will be there for four days.  Please tell me what I need to know, food of course included.  I'll be able to do a day trip, but mostly I'll be in Palermo.

Assorted links

1. Top ten books in international economic history?

2. Slovakian review of Create Your Own Economy.

3. Eric Falkenstein on high-frequency trading.

4. Cronenberg to film DeLillo's Cosmopolis.

5. Surprising facts about best-selling authors; yes Sidney Sheldon is the same guy behind I Dream of Jeannie.

Coincidence? I think not.

From a very good piece in the NYTimes on lobbying:

One of the largest sources of campaign contributions to Senate Democrats during this year’s health care debate is a physician-owned hospital in one of the country’s poorest regions that has sought to soften measures that could choke its rapid growth.

According to the Times, the hospital has been quite successful in its efforts.  And where is this powerful hospital with all the lobbying money located?  Why in the metropolitan area of McAllen, Texas.  McAllen, Texas?   Hmmm...now where I have heard that name before? 

Keep this in mind when you hear promises of Medicare savings from Washington.

*Au Revoir To All That*

The subtitle is Food, Wine, and the End of France and the author is Michael Steinberger.  This is a very readable and interesting book on France's decline as world culinary leader, building on an informal "economics of cuisine."  Even in France I would usually rather eat outside of Paris and this book helps explain why.

South Korea fact(s) of the day

The household savings rate in South Korea will have plummeted from a world-beating 25.2 percent in 1988 to a projected world low of 3.2 percent in 2010, according to the OECD.

Here is much more.  In fact:

South Koreans work more, sleep less and kill themselves at a higher rate than citizens of any other developed country, according to the OECD. They rank first in time spent online and second to last in spending on recreation, and the per capita birthrate scrapes the bottom of world rankings. By 2050, South Korea will be the most aged society in the world, narrowly edging out Japan, according to the OECD.

And here's one problem with aggregate savings rates:

...South Korea ranks first in per capita spending on private education, which includes home tutors, cram sessions and English-language courses at home and abroad.

An obsessive pursuit of educational achievement, it seems, is one of the driving forces behind the low savings rate. About 80 percent of all students from elementary age to high school attend after-school cram courses. About 6 percent of the country's gross domestic product is spent on education, more than double the percentage of spending in the United States, Japan or Britain.

Markets in everything

This one is from Jacqueline:

"Tap water?" said Alison Szeli, 26, picking up the clear plastic bottle with orange letters: "Tap'd NY. Purified New York City tap water."

She studied the description: "No glaciers were harmed in making this water." She compared prices: Smartwater cost $1.85. Tap'd NY was 35 cents less.

I suspect this will seem odder to you, the older you are.