Marginal Revolution

DNA for work and love

University of Akron demands DNA sample from faculty as condition of employment.

Dating sites use your DNA to find a perfect love match.

Hat tip to my true major histocompatibility complex match.

Markets in everything?

A gang in the remote Peruvian jungle has been killing people for their fat, the police said Thursday, accusing the gang’s members of draining fat from bodies and selling it on the black market for use in cosmetics...

Three suspects have confessed to killing five people for their fat, said Col. Jorge Mejía, chief of Peru’s anti-kidnapping police. He said the suspects, two of whom were arrested carrying bottles of liquid fat, told the police it was worth $60,000 a gallon.

Colonel Mejía said the suspects had told the police that the fat had been sold to intermediaries in Lima, the capital. While police officials suspect that the fat was sold to cosmetic companies in Europe, he said he could not confirm any sales.

That's from The New York Times, not The Weekly World News.  Medical "experts" express varying degrees of skepticism about the depth and liquidity of this market, but if you read the whole article you will encounter some truly graphic descriptions of the production process.  Caveat emptor.

Giovanni Peri's latest on immigration and productivity

Here is the abstract and it has to do with a Smithian theme, namely division of labor:

Using the large variation in the inflow of immigrants across US states we analyze the impact of immigration on state employment, average hours worked, physical capital accumulation and, most importantly, total factor productivity and its skill bias. We use the location of a state relative to the Mexican border and to the main ports of entry, as well as the existence of communities of immigrants before 1960, as instruments. We find no evidence that immigrants crowded-out employment and hours worked by natives. At the same time we find robust evidence that they increased total factor productivity, on the one hand, while they decreased capital intensity and the skill-bias of production technologies, on the other. These results are robust to controlling for several other determinants of productivity that may vary with geography such as R&D spending, computer adoption, international competition in the form of exports and sector composition. Our results suggest that immigrants promoted efficient task specialization, thus increasing TFP and, at the same time, promoted the adoption of unskilled-biased technology as the theory of directed technological change would predict. Combining these effects, an increase in employment in a US state of 1% due to immigrants produced an increase in income per worker of 0.5% in that state.

The paper is here.

Kelo update

Those who would sacrifice property rights to development end up with neither.

Markets in everything: 8 year old child custody for two Damien Hirsts edition

Kapernekas, a 49-year-old New York art dealer filed a suit in federal court in Manhattan claiming an interest in the two Hirsts, which have been valued at an estimated $47.6 million, court documents show. The custody suit, involving their 8-year- old daughter, was being heard in New York County Family Court.

Kapernekas has agreed to drop the federal suit and claims on the Hirsts in exchange for: custody of their daughter (Brandhorst gets visitation and vacation rights); a one-time payment of $100,000; a $500,000 trust for the daughter’s education; a loft on Wooster Street in Manhattan’s Soho district valued at about $5 million to be held in the daughter’s name as sole owner; $5,000 a month in child support; and $640,000 to cover Kapernekas’s legal expenses, according to Kapernekas.

The full story is here and the pointer is from Felix Salmon.  Felix writes:

Need I add that one of the Hirsts is entitled “In this terrible moment we are victims clinging helplessly to an environment that refuses to acknowledge the soul”?

Countercyclical "asset" of the day -- burglary watch

With a lot more unemployed people, a lot more people are staying home, and they see more in their neighborhood," said Sgt. Thomas Lasater, who supervises the burglary unit of the police department in St. Louis County, Mo., where authorities recorded a whopping 35 percent drop in burglaries during the first six months of 2009.

The falling price of raw materials -- which had been producing copper and other thefts -- may be another reason for the change in trend.  Here is the story and I thank Daniel Lippman for the pointer.

How should we price the "public option" for dogs?

David, a loyal MR reader, asks:

Why do I have to make an appointment, wait in line, fill out a slew of paperwork, and pay $70 to adopt a dog that otherwise would likely have been euthanized (at the taxpayers' expense), and yet bringing your very own human child into the world takes nothing more than a few shots of tequila or a broken condom?

I am not suggesting that we stand at a first-best equilibrium, but I can think of one reason for this apparent pricing anomaly.  If dogs were free (or if dog ownership required only that you show up with a fresh condom), too many people would experiment with owning dogs and then abandon them to the public commons.  The $70, or whatever it costs, screens for serious dog owners, as does the paperwork requirement.  

So should the price of kids be changed?  I would suggest that for most women bringing a child into the world (much less raising it) requires more than "a few shots of tequila or a broken condom".  That too screens for serious mothers to some extent.  If we raised the price of kids, as we could do easily with tax law and EITC reforms, we'd have fewer kids in the world.  If we raised the price of adopting dogs, there would be more do-it-at-home puppy production and more dogs.  Neither population change strikes me as an especially desirable outcome and thus we have what we have.

Mandates don't stay modest

A tactic used by insurance companies to deny expensive behavioral therapy to autistic children has been deemed illegal by a Los Angeles judge.

In a preliminary ruling, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant found that Kaiser Permanente's refusal to pay for a child's autism treatment because the provider was not licensed by the state runs counter to California's Mental Health Parity Act. That act requires insurers to cover care for mental and behavioral problems at the same levels they do for physical illnesses.

Here is the full account.  Three different (but not unrelated) takes on this story are:

1. Whatever you think of occupational licensing, as a matter of social status it seems odd to apply it to dog doctors, or for that matter toilet and sink doctors (i.e., plumbers), but not to those who treat autistic children.

2. These treatments can cost $50,000 a year or more and there is little reliable RCT evidence that they actually work.

3. Yesterday I saw two separate television ads, on two separate channels, campaigning for the Virginia State legislature on the grounds that one's opponent had opposed mandatory insurance coverage for autism treatments.  The ads simply take it for granted that such coverage would be a good thing.  (Rest assured I do not usually watch TV, or its commercials, but the first was in a restaurant at Eden Center and as for the second it was the first day of the NBA season.)

China rule of the day

Salute every passing car on your way to and from school.

That's only in one town.  There's also this one:

Another county in Guizhou Province in southern China compelled state workers last year to help inflate the number of tourists visiting the ruins of an ancient village. Every government office was ordered to organize field trips to the site so the county could report 5,000 visitors within two months.

The involuntary visitors had to take several buses to get to a village 20 miles from the county seat. From there, they hired motorcycles to carry them another nine miles down dirt roads, the newspaper Guangzhou Daily reported.

The Guizhou Commercial News reported that some government offices were left unattended while state employees served as tourists.

Facts about airline water

Fact 1:

In the United States, drinking water safety on airlines is jointly regulated by the EPA, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). EPA regulates the public water systems that supply water to the airports and the drinking water once it is onboard the aircraft. FDA has jurisdiction over culinary water (e.g., ice) and the points where aircraft obtain water (e.g., pipes or tankers) at the airport. In addition, air carriers must have FAA-accepted operation and maintenance programs for all aircraft, this includes the potable water system. (EPA)

Fact 2:

...the news carried stories that the US EPA had determined that 15% of water on a sample of 327 aircraft flunked the total coliform standards and inspections showed that all aircraft were out of compliance with the national drinking water standards.

Rest assured, the EPA has crafted new rules to address the problem.