Marginal Revolution

Escalation games markets in everything

Dick Thaler writes:

Swoopo has even sold cash using this format — specifically, checks for $1,000. My colleague Emir Kamenica and I looked at 26 such auctions we found in a data set posted on the Swoopo Web site. For each of these, the average revenue to Swoopo was $2,452. Winning bidders also did well: Of the winners, all but two made money even after accounting for the cost of their bids, with an average profit of $658. Still, the important point to remember is that, collectively, bidders are losing money. Only the lucky last bidder is a winner.

At the end of the column Thaler adds:

In my previous column, I tried to nudge Steve Jobs to have an app written for the Apple iPhone that would allow users to sign up easily to become organ donors.

Mr. Jobs can relax. Raymond Cheung from Serenity Integration read the column and made it happen. IPhone users can download the free Donate Lives app and sign up directly on their phones.

Jeremy Taylor quotes Richard Wrangham on the domestication of human beings

I think we have to start thinking about the idea that humans in the last 30, 40, or 50,000 years have been domesticating ourselves.  If we're following the bonobo or dog pattern, we're moving toward a form of ourselves with more and more juvenile behavior.  And the amazing thing once you start thinking in those terms is that you realize that we're still moving fast.  I think that current evidence is that we're in the middle of an evolutionary event in which tooth size is falling, jaw size is falling, brain size is falling, and it's quite reasonable to imagine that we're continuing to tame ourselves.  The way it's happening is the way it's probably happened since we became permanently settled in villages, 20 or 30,000 years ago, or before.

That's from Taylor's interesting new book Not a Chimp: The Hunt to Find the Genes that Make Us Human.  Taylor does stress that this hypothesis is speculation rather than established fact.

By the way, our skulls are becoming thinner, a process known as gracilization.

Umberto Eco on lists

The list is the origin of culture. It's part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order -- not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart's librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists -- the shopping list, the will, the menu -- that are also cultural achievements in their own right.

...At first, we think that a list is primitive and typical of very early cultures, which had no exact concept of the universe and were therefore limited to listing the characteristics they could name. But, in cultural history, the list has prevailed over and over again. It is by no means merely an expression of primitive cultures. A very clear image of the universe existed in the Middle Ages, and there were lists. A new worldview based on astronomy predominated in the Renaissance and the Baroque era. And there were lists. And the list is certainly prevalent in the postmodern age. It has an irresistible magic.

...We like lists because we don't want to die.

Here is much more.  Make sure you read the quotation under the photo; I don't want to reproduce it on a family blog. 

I wonder if this interview was translated from some other language, given the difference between "lists" and "enumeration."  Here is an important MR post: Jeffrey Lonsdale writes.

I thank Cardiff Garcia for the pointer.

Assorted links

1. One defense of "too big to fail" banks.

2. Krugman responding to Scott Sumner?

3. Behavioral economists study sex toys.

4. Pinker reviews Gladwell.

5. Do caring doctors help you recover?