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Assorted links
1. Via Jura Stanaityte, Ten simple rules for choosing industry vs. academia. More simple rules here.
3. "Tell-all" book about IKEA.
4. Countercyclical asset: haunted house novels?
5. China's empty city (of the day). YouTube. At about 1:20 you will see that a city built for one million residents remains empty, a' la Austro-Chinese business cycle theory. "Ordos was a government idea, an infrastructure project taken to its limits, the motivation was likely gdp..." -- can you get better than that? After the first minute or so the video is stunning.
Posted by Tyler Cowen on November 13, 2009 at 11:40 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink
Comments
@5 "Almost every single one of these apartment units have been sold, but no-one is living in any of them. And that's because most of the buyers are holding these as investments."
There's something going on here under the surface. Time for a Chinese housing crash?
Also, the Tsinghua professor interviewed in the video has a blog.
Posted by: david at Nov 13, 2009 11:56:15 AM
@5 "Almost every single one of these apartment units have been sold, but no-one is living in any of them. And that's because most of the buyers are holding these as investments."
There's something going on here under the surface. Time for a Chinese housing crash?
Also, the Tsinghua professor interviewed in the video has a blog.
Posted by: david at Nov 13, 2009 12:01:40 PM
The Bayh-Dole story is pretty outdated -- a lot of relevant stuff happened between 2005 and now!
Posted by: Michael F. Martin at Nov 13, 2009 12:04:32 PM
The Bayh-Dole story was very perplexing. First, the story was from 2005, so I wonder why is became an assorted link only in 2009?
But more substantively, (1) the article seems to use "Bayh-Dole" to mean "everything related to patent policy". Columbia University gaming the system with "submarine" patents is not really Bayh-Dole related. Today's NASDAQ companies aren't profitable? Blame it on Bayh-Dole!
(2) Holding up the patent landscape of the software industry as an exemplary ideal to which biotech should aspire seems to have it backwards.
Roughly a third of the new discoveries and more than half of all university licensing income in 2003 derived from just ten schools--MIT, Stanford, the usual suspects.
(3) Didn't I just see something on MR about the stratification of American universities over the last 30 years? Also, who knew that national legislation would not be able to instantly foster a culture of innovation and technology entrepreneurship among all universities' faculties? I guess we should repeal that legislation?
(4) Anyone interested on a different take on Bayh-Dole should see these 2007 hearings from the US House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology.
Posted by: Curt Fischer at Nov 13, 2009 12:21:01 PM
The IKEA story is interesting for its retractions. Some of the quoted language is retracted: "These statements are untrue and are hereby retracted." But the retraction is ambiguous.
The retractions are allegations attributed to Stenebo. It is unclear to me whether the retraction is of the claim, i.e., that IKEA bribed NGOs, or the attribution of the claim to Stenebo.
This is important, for it reflects on the reporters and Stenebo. I am not sure whether the reporter misrepresented Stenebo's claims or whether Stenebo misrepresented IKEA's acts. If it is the first, what kind of reporters are there? If it is the latter, can we believe what Stenebo writes?
Posted by: Allan at Nov 13, 2009 12:46:41 PM
The China piece has been reported by Al Jazeera TV. It is not a story by CNN, WSJ or FE. What is happening here? Is the western media too caught up in singing China's Growth song that it cannot see these bottomless pit projects. Is it (the media) beholden to it's (west's) oriental masters? Is it the case of the addict not turning in the drug peddler? What about non-msm, the western smart new media? One does not see such incisive attempts from them either... Every body seems to be an accomplice to the great Chinese lie.
Posted by: Sunil K at Nov 13, 2009 12:56:11 PM
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/b7ded6f6-c3e3-11de-a290-00144feab49a.html
Thought this was interesting, although it is a bit old.
"Futures in Betting on the march of swine flu" - financial times
Posted by: Marcus at Nov 13, 2009 2:33:24 PM
Back in Janaury 2007, Mishkin gave us this:
"To begin with, the bursting of asset price bubbles often does not lead to financial instability….
There are even stronger reasons to believe that a bursting of a bubble in house prices is unlikely to produce financial instability….
House prices are far less volatile than stock prices, outright declines after a run-up are not the norm, and declines that do occur are typically relatively small. The loan-to-value ratio for residential mortgages is usually substantially below 1...
Hence, declines in home prices are far less likely to cause losses to financial institutions…
Not surprisingly, declines in home prices generally have not led to financial instability. The financial instability that many countries experienced in the 1990s, including Japan, was caused by bad loans that resulted from declines in commercial property prices and not declines in home prices. In the absence of financial instability, monetary policy should be effective in countering the effects of a burst bubble.Despite the clear dangers from asset price bubbles, the question remains as to whether central banks should do anything about them…."
so why does he have ANY credibility now?
Posted by: Gabe at Nov 13, 2009 3:02:14 PM
This is not the first good Al Jazeera video that I have found to illustrate economic ideas. They had two good videos on hyperinflation in Zimbabwe. (See links at http://ingrimayne.com/econ/EconomicCatastrophe/videos05a.htm) I have not found anything from an American network that is comparable. I am now wondering if the people watching Al Jazeera may not be getting a better view of what is happening in the world than those who watch CNN or any of the other American networks.
Posted by: nohype at Nov 13, 2009 3:15:58 PM
I felt this goes along well with No. 1.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9H-SihnHvQ
Posted by: Ted Craig at Nov 13, 2009 4:32:36 PM
I find Al Jazeera the best cable news network in general (unless they're reporting about Israel and Palestine, of course). They don't seem to have figured out that good journalism is not as profitable as live coverage of the latest balloon boy-type story. I hope they never do.
Posted by: Peter at Nov 13, 2009 5:23:19 PM
I too was struck that the China video was from Al Jazeera. Food for thought.
Posted by: dearieme at Nov 13, 2009 5:25:32 PM
"you know that you will need a good post-doc or two before you can be seriously considered for a junior faculty position. .... While you may not relish extending your indentured servitude in academia,...". Bruce Charlton has opined that this academic employment system screens out too many of the very people you need for genuinely creative science.
Posted by: dearieme at Nov 13, 2009 5:31:22 PM
Ah, here's Charlton's argument.
http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/02/why-are-modern-scientists-so-dull.html
Posted by: dearieme at Nov 13, 2009 6:30:15 PM
5 Further to all comments above on AlJazzeera , an article by Kaplan in THE ATLANTIC :
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200910/al-jazeera
Posted by: Rama at Nov 13, 2009 7:27:51 PM
The only issue with Bayh-Dole is the fact that some of the research is federally funded, and the federal government does not get a share of the revenue as it should.
Bayh-Dole was a good idea. It created a property right and the incentive for someone to defend and protect the right. Otherwise, it would be a free good for the pharma companies.
Posted by: Bill at Nov 13, 2009 8:07:16 PM
If Bayh-Dole is a good idea, why are we as taxpayers paying so much for drugs developed only because we as taxpayers funded the research that led directly to the drug discovery?
It has been a real jobs bill for lawyers and bankers.
Posted by: mulp at Nov 14, 2009 12:02:21 AM
I'm a little mystified that people don't think stories like this are reported in the "western" media. (Leaving aside the bizarre assertion that an economy a fraction of "the west's" is its master.) Part of it is, undoubtedly, that people who sound different and say different things are romanticized in the west, even when what they're romanticizing is western. (Undeserved and often mind-boggling American love for the 'quality' reporting of the BBC, for example.) It is odd that people seem to believe that AJ may have a bias and engage in incomplete reporting (cough) when it comes to Israel and Palestine, but on everything _else_, well, they're pretty darn good, objective, complete and accurate.
Beyond that, these issues are and have been discussed for some time outside of network news. There's hardly a shortage of internet-available journalism, including video. This story in particular brings nothing new. It is part commonplace discussion of unsustainable growth in China, and part video with a bit of information stretched over interesting visuals - information that can be gleaned from many other sources online.
What AJ has going for it is its wide range of reporting. It's usually brief, hardly in-depth, but it _is_, at least, video coverage from around the world, something at which the western news networks (yes, even the BBC; and, in fact, I don't see much better from anywhere - not Asia, not Australia) fail miserably. AJ is, to me, complementary to other news. It has no giant home country in which there is a massive amount of news to cover. It does not do in-depth coverage well or often. It is different in a good way, but not better journalistically.
Posted by: BKarn at Nov 14, 2009 4:07:47 AM
BBC World is pretty good in its international coverage also. They just ran a story about Human Rights Watch's report on Beijing's "black jails": illegal detention centers run by corrupt provincial officials to detain people who complain about said corrupt provincial officials to the central government.
CNN is mostly sensationalist garbage.
Posted by: Ricardo at Nov 14, 2009 4:50:35 AM
I don't see why it is necessary for patents produced by Federal research money to be owned by anyone, including the Federal government. In my mind, Federal research money should be used to produce information/products which will benefit American citizens. The private ownership of patents produced with Federal money would seem to make that outcome less likely as entities become focused on protecting their revenue interest/monopoly position rather than the unseen possibilities of extensive derivative work.
Posted by: Basho at Nov 14, 2009 5:36:03 PM
