Marginal Revolution

What's actually in the health care bill

Here's a new blog devoted to that topic.

*The Art of Not Being Governed*

The subtitle is An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia and the author is James C. Scott of Yale University.  Here is a summary from the Preface:

...I argue that the [Southeast Asian] hill peoples are best understood as runaway, fugitive, maroon communities who have, over the course of two millennia, been fleeing the oppressions of state-making projects in the valleys -- slavery, conscription taxes, corvée labor, epidemics, and warfare.  Most of the areas in which they reside may be aptly called shatter zones or zones of refuge.

Virtually everything about these people's livelihoods, social organizations, ideologies, and (more controversially) even their largely oral cultures, can be read as strategic positionings designed to keep the state at arm's length.  Their physical dispersion in rugged terrain, their mobility, their cropping practices, their kinship structure, their pliable ethnic identities, and their devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders effectively serve to avoid incorporations into states and to prevent states from springing up among them.  The particular state that most of them have been evading has been the precocious Han-Chinese state.

Highly recommended, this is a book Gordon Tullock would love.  So far it has received surprisingly little publicity but it strikes me as essential reading about Afghanistan as well.  Here is a much earlier Crooked Timber post on Scott.

Assorted links

1. The vote to defund political science: how it went.

2. Jason Kottke doesn't read books anymore.

3. "Food rewards obsessiveness," the best eater in the United States.  The full article is gated (the link offers only an excerpt), so buy the 9 November New Yorker.  I don't usually link to gated material of this kind, but this was one of the three or four best magazine pieces I'll read in a year.

4. Why Buffett bought that railroad.

5. Weird stuff McDonald's sells around the world.  In the Philippines it is "spaghetti soaked in sugar."

6. Fruitless endeavors, or not?: translating works of literature into games of chess against each other, using a computer program.

7. Were the Neanderthals just unlucky?

8. Françoise Sagan: an appreciation.

Why it's harder than before to get into your favorite college

Caroline Hoxby reports:

This paper shows that although the top ten percent of colleges are substantially more selective now than they were 5 decades ago, most colleges are not more selective. Moreover, at least 50 percent of colleges are substantially less selective now than they were then. This paper demonstrates that competition for space--the number of students who wish to attend college growing faster than the number of spaces available--does not explain changing selectivity. The explanation is, instead, that the elasticity of a student's preference for a college with respect to its proximity to his home has fallen substantially over time and there has been a corresponding increase in the elasticity of his preference for a college with respect to its resources and peers. In other words, students used to attend a local college regardless of their abilities and its characteristics. Now, their choices are driven far less by distance and far more by a college's resources and student body. It is the consequent re-sorting of students among colleges that has, at once, caused selectivity to rise in a small number of colleges while simultaneously causing it to fall in other colleges. I show that the integration of the market for college education has had profound implications on the peers whom college students experience, the resources invested in their education, the tuition they pay, and the subsidies they enjoy. An important finding is that, even though tuition has been rising rapidly at the most selective schools, the deal students get there has arguably improved greatly. The result is that the "stakes" associated with admission to these colleges are much higher now than in the past.

Here is one summary of the paper.  The ungated version is here.  Note that the incomplete nature of globalization for higher ed means this process still has a long way to run.

By the way, does this logic also apply to romance?  To really good sporting events?  To meeting and befriending celebrities?  Is this a more general prediction in a superstars model?

How to run a successful blog

...They understand that public opinion matters...they understand that it’s a little harder to criticize someone after you’ve met him and he’s given you free cookies...they couldn't possibly have expected to change anybody’s mind, they understand that it’s better to talk to your critics than to avoid them. Waldman talks about some of the techniques used to make the attendees [readers] feel like they were being treated as special guests.

Whoops!  That's not advice for running a successful blog.  Those are James Kwak's comments on how Treasury tries to trick visiting bloggers.  We bloggers should know.  We give away lots of free stuff too, more than cookies even if it is sometimes sour rather than sweet.

Assorted links

1. More lessons from the VHA.

2. Net use does not lead to social isolation.

3. IQ predicts portfolio diversification, at least in Finland.

4. Finish time variation in marathons, across time and across Boston and New York.

5. What your phone might do for you two years from now.

6. John Cassidy on the health care bill.

Talks at TEDx Midatlantic

The talks are here, including one by yours truly on the limits of story-based thinking.  I was happy to meet Sonja Sohn.  One thing I learned from this experience is that if you follow professional entertainers, the "status rub-off" effect dominates the "suffer by comparison" effect.  The audience is primed to be sympathetic to you and many of them do not actually know which of the speakers are truly the high status people.  Perhaps the talk has to meet some minimum quality standard, or involve some minimum level of self-confidence, for the rub-off effect to hold.

Addendum: Arnold Kling comments.

Impressions from Treasury

I will enumerate a few (you can trace other accounts here):

1. Tim Geithner is very smart and he was conceptually stronger than one might have expected.

2. I believe that the long, L-shaped hallways encourage "visits to offices" rather than hallway conversations; this is a speculation and perhaps some reader can confirm or deny it.

3. The quality of the painted portraits of Treasury Secretaries declines as time passes.

4. The free cookies were good and fresh, with a warm, fluid chocolate interior.  There was water to drink, but no mineral water.

5. For all their talk about outreach, etc. I believe at least a few of them wanted to hear from an outside source whether we think they are totally ****ed or not.  They heard. 

6. I worry less than did some of the other bloggers about the Treasury awareness of major economic problems going forward.  As governmental institutions go, Treasury has a real incentive to a) worry about the fiscal future, and b) worry about worst-case scenarios, including for financial institutions.  Their daily interaction with the bond market gives them a longer time horizon and a more economics-friendly perspective than most of their bureaucratic counterparts.  The problem is Congress.  For instance if someone at Treasury had a Yves Smith view of the banking system, they could not much act on it.

7. "You guys are a welcome change of pace," or something like that, remarked one senior Treasury official.  Although this was flattery, I believe it was meant sincerely.  They were also a welcome change of pace.

8. I asked one senior Treasury official which book, thinker, or economic theorist had most shaped his thinking about the financial crisis.  In the ensuing discussion the book Lords of Finance was recommended, though I could not say whether it was intended as a totally direct answer to the question as stated.

*You Are What You Choose*

Scott DeMarchi and James T. Hamilton have a new book out and the subtitle is The Habits of Mind That Really Determine How We Make Decisions.  I take this to be the key paragraph:

It's called fast food, but your decision-making process in ordering a chicken sandwich can be incredibly complex.  In the following section, we describe six core habits of mind that affect how you make decisions in all areas of your life.  We call these TRAITS: Time, Risk, Altruism, Information, meToo, and Stickiness.

Here is a review and explication of the book.

The wisdom of Garett Jones

Workers mostly build organizational capital, not final output. This explains high productivity per 'worker' during recessions.

That is from Twitter, the link is here.