My guess is positive because California and New York tend to have a lot of
high income people. Around 0.4? Fabio
On Thu, 16 Dec 2004, Bryan Caplan wrote:
I've calculated the correlation coefficient between per-capita state
income and the percent of the vote Kerry got. Guesses? I'll post the
Yes - evidence: the population of Canada is highly clustered around the
border. I have hunch they would bolt the second the border was opened.
Fabio
On Thu, 8 Apr 2004, Bryan Caplan wrote:
Question: If there were free migration between the U.S. and Canada,
would Canada lose a lot of
experts weigh in? That includes all Canadians. Eric?
fabio guillermo rojas wrote:
Yes - evidence: the population of Canada is highly clustered around the
border. I have hunch they would bolt the second the border was opened.
Fabio
On Thu, 8 Apr 2004, Bryan Caplan wrote:
Question
I think the argument goes like this:
1. The policies both parties agree on is smaller in size than what each
party advocates individually. I.e., the equilibrium of the bargaining game
is smaller than the whole policy space.
2. In general, most of what each party wants is un-libertarian and
Simple - you can anonymously buy impotence treatment over the Internet. No
need to tell a real person that you ahve a sexual problem. I've also heard
people use v!agra for enhancing sexual experience, not too cure a medical
problem. Those people probably want to avoid doctors.
Fabio
On Tue, 20
On Tue, 30 Dec 2003, Bryan Caplan wrote:
The Political Business Cycle story has not fared well empirically in
recent years (though Kevin Grier has done interesting work on Mexico's
PBC). But it seems overwhelming in the Oscars. It seems like roughly
half of the big nominees get released in
At Chicago, econ math GRE's tend to be substantially higher than other
social science Ph.D.'s. Verbal scores are comparable to humanities
Ph.D.'s. Also remember that econ depts take a lot of asian students, which
probably pushes down the verbal GRE score. More generally, any time you
require math,
In the book Sociology and its publics, Neil Smelser has a chart
comparing GRE's for various disciplines. His point was that sociology, in
comparison to other social sciences such as economics, get bad recruits.
Fabio
On Mon, 15 Dec 2003, Bryan Caplan wrote:
Do you have a cite for that, Zach?
Related to this is the question of whether there really is a median voter.
Let's take 10 issues--abortion, gun control, gay rights, trade policy, tax
rates, immigration, middle east policy, racial preferences, CO2/global
warming policy, and SDI/star wars missile defense. What percentage
I couldn't access the article. Could anyone either copy and paste it to me
(privately so as not to distrub others) or perhaps just give me a briefy
summary? Thank you.
David Levenstam
The article discusses Levitt's research style: his tendency to ask odd but
interesting questions and be
The article discusses Levitt's research style: his tendency to ask
odd but interesting questions and be clever enough to be able to
test the hypotheses with publically available data. It also has some
discussions of his career path and a little about his personal life.
Fabio
Thanks,
Seriously - consider the use of a pay phone, or a hotel phone. It is often
hard for me, and many other customers, to get completely accurate
information on phone call prices. When it comes to phone calls, I've
always missed some charge or tax, or there is change from when I last got
the info.
What I found interesting is that in economics, like in many other fields,
there are problem solvers (people who figure out specific paradoxes,
empirical facts, etc) and theory builders. Levitt is a supremely
able problem solver, a niche that didn't exist 30-40 years ago in the
economics
and on (including work by ICES colleagues)... On balance I would argue that
Levitt is indeed unusually clever (in the sense that he comes up with good
questions and also finds interesting natural manipulations to study them),
but that his particular approach to economic science is not novel:
I help run a large non-profit colocation and hosting center for various
groups of which an implementation of this would fit perfectly with our
mission.
If people are interested in trying this in a fully transparent method I am
willing to provide our resources and my time to make it happen.
Could this not be an opportunity? Maybe a private sponsor could set up the
market? Fabio
On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Robin Hanson wrote:
That sure looks like the likely outcome. We never really got a chance to
correct misconceptions about the project. (For example, it was never
intended to
On Tue, 29 Jul 2003, Jeffrey Rous wrote:
I seem to remember looking at the Iowa Electronic Market right before
the 2000 election and noticing that it had Gore winning the
winner-take-all and Bush getting a higher percentage of the vote. And
I remember thinking that this was just an
Ok - let's put game theory to the test: what is the normal form of
declaring your candidcay for California governer-game? What's the
predicted outcome? And what would Robin Hanson wager on the answer?
Fabio
On Mon, 28 Jul 2003, fabio guillermo rojas wrote:
Ok - let's put game theory to the test: what is the normal form of
declaring your candidcay for California governer-game? What's the
predicted outcome? And what would Robin Hanson wager on the answer?
Fabio
It seems that optimal strategy
1. Why is fertility higher in dictatorships? Do dictators like bigger
populations, and democrats like smaller populations? Does population
growth influence choice of government? Or is there a third factor that
affects both fertility and form of government?
The question should be: what causes
Robin said:
The conflict you describe is that some people want more of a fair fight, and
others put more weight on wanting my team to win. Of course the second
group doesn't want to win via too easy or obvious an advantage. They may want
the rough appearance of fairness, but in fact want
The usual response to someone ought to do X is why not you?. Introductory
classes must meet a lot of constraints. They must prepare those who will
continue in the tools that are actually used at higher levels. And they
must give the rest some tools they can actually use to understand some
Political labels are notoriously contextual. The passage of a few years
renders many labels unintelligible. However, there is something more
interesting to say. Political parties frequently co-op specific policies,
which distorts our association of a label with a policy. Example:
the two
I remember a discussion with Bryan, where he claimed that the average
proportion of income donated to charity is about 1% or 2%. Say somebody
makes $30K, that $300/year. I can easily imagine a religious person
giving a few bucks a week to church ($2x52= $110) plus maybe some extra
during fund
Not sure if this made it... fabio
While it may appear that the Warnick Theory of Perverse Government Tangents
has thus been born full grown, it is nevertheless recognized that
improvements or amplifications may be possible. They are welcome.
Walt Warnick
Sorry, Walt. You've been beaten
Absolutely speaking, sure. But e.g. the U.S. and U.K. have been
*relatively* more sympathetic to these ideas for centuries.
Prof. Bryan Caplan
I think my email got crunched, but if you are talking relative levels,
then some Latin American countries have semi-decent
While it may appear that the Warnick Theory of Perverse Government Tangents
has thus been born full grown, it is nevertheless recognized that
improvements or amplifications may be possible. They are welcome.
Walt Warnick
Sorry, Walt. You've been beaten to the punch:
Read Meyer and
Now Pete Boettke asked me if there are any peoples with the opposite
combination: bad personal culture, good political culture. The best
Prof. Bryan Caplan
Note that insistence on free markets, limited gov't, democracy, etc. is a
pretty recent phenomena - so one
How would one estimate the accuracy of self-reports of self-defense? I
know in medical research you can assess the validity of self-reported
health by doing follow up medical exams or seeing if the respondent dies
or becomes seriously ill shortly after the survey.
Is self-defense just one of
On Mon, 3 Feb 2003, William Dickens wrote:
That is not what I meant. Of course there is. Its thermodynamics.
However, to an outsider it looks to impose about as much structure on
weather modeling as the notion of general equilibrium imposes on
macro-modeling - - that is that the devil is in
IIUC, macro was characterized by multiple schools but there was an
outstanding critique that the micro picture was flawed or asbent, which
served to undermine one popular school. The anomaly didn't serve to usher
in a new macro, but unravel some old science, which still has adherents in
a
Well maybe macro *is* in a scientific state, from your description.
Sticking to Kuhn's terminology, normal scientific activity occurs when
scientists use existing models to solve outstanding issues. From one
perspective, maco is organized around general equilibria, and the fighting
is over the
On Sun, 2 Feb 2003, William Dickens wrote:
don't fit easily into Kuhn's categories. We're in the same situation
as meteorology (only worse because our subjects have minds of their
own). We know that weather systems are chaotic and therefore
unpredictable beyond very limited time frames.
I'm teaching a course on the sociology of science and we read Kuhn's
structure of scientific revolutions. FYI, Kuhn says that science is
characterized by paradigms - most science works from basic assumptions
justified by model achievements. Scientific change occurs when anamolies
- observations
Is there an economic explanation of why Europeans seem to want to give up
soveriegnty to the EU or the UN? Fabio
Also consider the possibility that many departments get budgets based on
enrollments - and tough grades scare students away! Fabio
On Tue, 14 Jan 2003 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
In the Rhetoric Department at Iowa instructors who tried to actually teach
writing and therefore generated many
Has anybody tested the hypothesis that professors assign easy grades
because it sucks up too much time?
Consider the costs of tough grading - spending more time correcting
papers, extra time spent arguing grades with students and the extra effort
it takes to design challenging tests and
Question: At what can humans engage in economic behavior? Are there
studies showing when children learn to trade ?
Fabio
Humans start to engage in economic behavior as soon as they are born.
Trade is not a necessary characteristic of economic behavior. The issue is
rather whether
Oh, come on!! Animals are economic actors only in the most general sense.
Animals are economic actors.
as to:
For example, at what age are children able to understand
the concept of interest?- any baby knows that something is better now
then tommorrow.
That's not the same as interest.
This is a great page! It's exactly what I was lookign for. Fabio
On Sat, 11 Jan 2003, john hull wrote:
Fabio-
You may profit from visiting the page of an old prof.
of mine at Oregon,
http://harbaugh.uoregon.edu/index.htm , specifically,
his Nanoeconomics? Pedianomics? The Economic
Question: At what can humans engage in economic behavior? Are there
studies showing when children learn to trade ?
Fabio
How sticky is the price for university overhead? Fabio
On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Rodney F Weiher wrote:
As a purchaser of university research, we often bargain with the PI on
overhead, who in turn must bargain with their administration.
Rodney Weiher
fabio guillermo rojas wrote:
Do
I presume you mean irrationaly optimistic self-assesment? I'd say quite
a lot. But then comes the
hard question: what policy implications follow from this conclusion?
Yes, irrat self-assesment is a good word for it. Robin, I know you are a
fan of taxing people for not using their
Having publications before you go on the market can make a very big
difference. At least 10 years ago very few people did and having
- - Bill Dickens
An article in the Journal of Human Resources about 10 years ago showed
that having 1 article had a big effect on landing a job, 2 articles a
Occasionally, someone mentions the theory of teams. Can someone please
tell me what the economic theory of teams is?
Fabio
friend had a paper go three rounds at AER and that took 3 years. I
wouldn't be surprised if a lot of bad papers get rejected quickly and
that would bring down the average turn around time a lot.
That is indeed the case. Journals get many papers of low quality, and it's
easy to reject the bad
The data are average times (measured in months)
between initial submission and acceptance at various
economics journals in the year 1999.
It seems that the long times quoted in this article
are something different than what fabio was talking
about. I have not read the article but the
Anyone have any idea why the norm in economics allows referees so much
time to do a report? Why its so different from other fields? Is this one
of those soft vs. hard field things? Its my impression that the
physical science journals all want fast turn around on their referee
reports.
It seems to me, that traffic school makes everybody out to be a greater
risk than their driving record indicates. If risk is a primary factor in
an insurance company's rate determination, doesn't that mean that
traffic school makes everybody's rates higher than they otherwise would
Be?
One possible explanation for tenure is that university departments
are to a large degree worker managed firms. One problem with a worker
David Friedman
David's explanations make sense, but I'm empirically skeptical on
two grounds:
(1) Why is it that only educational worker managed firms
raise. Government subsidies and private charity give universities the
cushion they need to avoid being put out of competition by
performance-oriented for-profits.
Prof. Bryan Caplan
While I share Bryan's skepticism, I don't buy his argument because
Seriously, why does tenure exist at all? I know the motivations
for tenure, but why isn't it competed away somehow? I would like
to know what economic process ensures its continued existence.
Fabio
Diego! Diego! The definitive source on outlandish, but possibly
true facts is the weekly Straight Dope Column in the Chicago
Reader, written by Cecil Adams. To sum up Cecil's column,
yes, there a few authenticated cases of feral children, but
most researchers doubt that any of these were raised
But I do have a naive question: Is there a median
voter for each issue, so that if there n issues, there
can be up to n median voters? Or, is there only one
median voter who satisfies the vector median as I
described above? Can such a person be proven to
exist, sort of like a voter
Another MVT deviation:
Marijuana decriminalization
Fabio
Imagine that a nation like the US were run like a corporation. To live
How would you enforce shareholder rights and monitor managers? For
corporations inside nations, one could appeal to the state for law
enforcement or start a lawsuit. What recourse do shareholders have in
such a worlds?
Does anyone think, at least in the excerpts we read, that the article
attacked libertarian or libertarian-leaning economics as much as it attacked
economics generally?
David Levenstam
It's typical to say that bad science is X, and my political
opponents just happen to do X. IMO, it is
The real charlatans in academia are the many frauds who build
their whole careers by getting their names put on coauthored
papers to which they have not legitimately contributed.
That's a sort of embezzlement; but `charlatan' implies
that the *content* of the papers is fraudulent.
Anton
Are state-enforced lawsuits really what keeps large multinational
corporations honest now? If not, then the concept here is to use
mechanisms similar to whatever large corporations now use.
Robin Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hanson.gmu.edu
Multinationals come in different flavors.
That makes sense for the cars all made by the same company, or which
share subcontractors. But Toyota, Honda, Subaru, and Ford all make cars
with virtually the same shape and layout.
Robin Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hanson.gmu.edu
Among management theory/organizational sociology
Or to rephrase in economic terms, risk averse managers prefer copying
a proven strategy (low risk/low payoff) than engaging in RD (high
payoff/high risk).
reduce drag coefficients to increase fuel economy. The summer I sold cars
(1997 at a Pontiac-Mazda-Jeep-Eagle dealer) one of the
Is there really a transitional gains trap? If a majority of NYers
seriously wanted free entry in cabs, wouldn't it happen regardless of
the opinions of cab companies?
Prof. Bryan Caplan
Uh-oh. The Median Voter Theorem rears its ugly head again.
Alternative hypothesis: people will accept money only if other people
are accepting money.
Fred - next weekend, I want you recruit a person who will get in line
before you. When you arrive, announce that you will give $20 to somebody
who will let you cut in line. That planted person will then
In other words, all of the main items in the budget are popular and
indeed if anything the public wants them to be larger. (Presumably views
Question: could public opinion be endogenous? Ie, maybe there might
be some status quo bias? Would people before the New Deal or the Great
Society have
When I play the prisoner's dilemma in class, I see very little cooperation.
I know one researcher who has repeated a trust game (not prisoner's
dilemma) with many classes of students and groups of business men.
He finds that students are remarkably untrustworthy and businessmen
tend to give
The part about students being socially isolated from each other and lacking
social experienceis interesting. Are there any studies that might confirm
this? I teach at a community college, so the students probabl mix with each
other less than they do at other colleges. If I recall
In the real world we have almost 600 in Congress, dealing with
innumerable matters more or less simultaneously. One of the things each
CongressCritter does is to decide what to do not about, say, farm
subsidies generally, but about SB1234, sponsored by Sen. This and Sen.
That, which goes
In any case, all of the deficiencies in children's brains you point out
more or less sound like extensions of their low absolute IQ.
Not really. One listed deficiency is memory. That might be correlated with
IQ, but it's certainly not the same as IQ. Analogy: a computer with a
small storage
Come on, Fab - pointing out examples of brain differences explaining
behavioral differences is hardly convincing evidence that brain
differences are the right explanation in this case.
My point is that behavior is more than cost-benefit calculations
with IQ as an intervening variable. My
If it is common knowledge that picking stocks is no better than
using an index, then why is stock picking so popular?
Ie, why do people accept lower returns just for the privilige of
picking the stocks themselves?
Fabio
Double entry means that you have one column for money going out
of an account and one column for money going into an account. Thus,
it very easy to keep track of cash inflow and outflow (just add up
the columns). With single entry, there is more error because you
mistakenly count a debit as a
What's wrong with negative numbers?!
Prof. Bryan Caplan
Bryan - it's not mathematical. It's book keeping. Keeping the two
columns separate is simply easier for finding mistakes. With spreadsheets
its easy, but if its teh 13th century and all is done by
On Thu, 27 Jun 2002, William Dickens wrote:
Does anyone answering here know any accounting or are people just guessing?
Just enter double entry accounting into google and you can easily
find some answers. It hard for us modern people to understand, but
simply accounting techniques can make a
These are all good comments on the Republican reversal. Thus, I take it
that the list agrees that democracy works pretty well in reflecting the
wishes of the voters.
Alex
I'd say democracy reflects general trend in voter opinion pretty
well, although some policies may be way out of whack.
Let me also add that the basic assumption of Frey's article is also
wrong - the assumption that editors slavishly follow referee's.
My take is that it's editors choose referees, so the editor's
really do choose the articles because they choose referees
and indirectly choose the outcomes.
Fabio
Plausible, but then the question is: *why* do people have a disutility
of paying for toilets? Does this fit into any pattern of the sorts
of things people have a disutility of paying for?
As noted earlier, people did pay for toilets before and it is common in
Europe. So it seems we are
Imagine that an alien arrives on planet earth and asks you what
is a market? What kind of economic system would count as a market?
I know this can be a sticky question, but how would you describe the
economy of Russia or China, and why doesn't it count as a market? Is it
just the lack of the
I recently visited a web page by a political scientist
that seemed to suggest that NAFTA was a failure. I'd
-jsh
Could you summarize the evidence he/she presents?
Fabio
Why don't you email Bryan Caplan, this list serve's moderator and founder?
He's published stuff on exactly these issues. Fabio Rojas
On Sat, 20 Apr 2002 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Is there a website that might have data on the opinions of economists on general
questions like the role of
The effect of this is to draw students away from math, science and
economics and towards the softer social sciences. Similarly, within
departments students are drawn away from harder graders and towards
softer graders. Budgets go where students go! Thus grade inflation
causes a
2) To attract good thinkers to become historians,
schools must keep the wage high enough to compete with other
disciplines and occupations that require intelligence. Therefore,
I think this is a big part of it. Compeitition to get into
the best humanities programs is as fierce as law
Most observers have always been very surprised that there never was a
big demand for socialism in the United States - even at the height of
the depression. The New Deal was very much driven by the Executive
branch not by Congress - thus I think things could have been quite
different
orientation. Thus, as we become wealthier as a society, we are more able
to support children who pursue such uselss topics at the graduate
level.
Why, this could mean that the wealthy feel some sort of urge to preserve
civilization!
Michael
You are a very deluded person if you think
Talking about game theory movies - does anyone remember if the
game depicted in Beuatiful Mind accurately capture the Nash eq?
Fabio
David Fincher's new movie *Panic Room* may be the finest artistic
expression of game theory around. Beautiful illustrations of commitment
problems, subgame
Why do older executives desire MBA's or B-school Ph.D.'s? They don't
need to signal brains because they have a track record, and they
won't learn much useful stuff. It can't terribly useful credential
when you are in mid or late career. Any takes? or is this just
consumption on the part of
Hypothesis: John McCain. Campaing reform has been a favorite to talk
about but not to pass for many years. I think that when you had
a charismatic cadidate adopt an issue, it can really change things.
I bet a lot of congressmen saw little John McCains in their night mares
if they opposed campign
Maybe the real puzzle is under what conditions do people maximize
rank or total stuff. F
It doesn't have to be complicated, but it does have to be specific.
A business trying to maximize market share is pretty specific, though
with multiple product lines and sets of consumers there remains
This week's Economist magazine reported an experiment where subjects
could pay to decrease the income of other subjects in the experiment,
which they did with some frequency, although it didn't increase their
income from the experiment. The article's author suggest that this
was evidence for
I understand that some toll roads charge more during rush hour.
It's not as sensitive a mechanism as Fred suggested, but it's
not bad. Fabio
I was looking for, but such a system would be hard to implement. Can you
think of an existing analogous system in a similar market?
Would there be a
be informative for decisions. Anyone want to give odds that I'll be
able to keep the term meaning what I want it to mean? :-)
According to Stigler (the statistician, not the economist) almost
every named scientific term is in error. So I'd say the odds
are huge that your name will be
Actually, I've dealt with this situation and it's quite different than
the drink at a bar. When you hire a (decent) carpenter, they will
tell you what additional labor cost, should it be required. A reputable
contractor will have this written out before hand, and you will
have signed an
Are you sure this is what happened? I'd guess that the woman
expected a range of price, and was shocked when when she found
out the drink was $13.
(1) Where else do people buy things without knowing the price first?
(I've been thinking and have been unable to come up with any examples.)
When faxes were invented, people got pissed off when their valuable fax
line was used by unsolicited advertisements. Thus, in many places fax spam
is now a legal offense punishable by a large fine for each unwanted faxed
message.
Ie, the conflict was resolvd simply by having the practice
You are misinterpreting the function of these little issues.
Little issues don't build up. Little issues tend to be signals to
certain constituencies. For example, nobody has ever lost the vote due to
rap music, but Clinton in 1992 signalled to many in the democratic party
that he wouldn't be
Build-up has two meanings in this context. 1)Politicians could
send a series of signals to win small groups of voters. 2) Politicians
could send a series of signals to large group of voters who need
repeated re-assurances that the politician really means what he
says. Ie, build up of votes vs.
I think the median voter has the following preferences concerning
adoption: same race parents parents different race no adoption.
Bryan's point is that adoption workers seem to prefer:
same race parents no adoption parents different race.
The MVT would predict otherwise. I claim that
fabio guillermo rojas wrote:
I don't think you should focus so much on the median voter theorem.
The logic of median voter theorems is that politicians offer
policies that closely resemble the median voter's desires. This assumes
that politicians have direct influence over
Why is local news done by television stations when most other
local programming (soap operas, game shows, talk shows) is contracted
out? Or to phrase the question differently: why do local tv stations
do *any* of their programming?
Fabio
Don't you think there is a difference between efficiency in the
intellectual arena and truth? I think that intellectual
institutions are fairly good at allocating resources to
efficiently produce normal science - ie, science that
refines and explores a given view of the world.
Truth may require
Mike Kinsey on Slate notes that KMart employees are now allowed to
haggle over prices. He notes that with the Internet, merchants
can instantaneously raise or lower prices to meet demand instead of
industrial revolution style fixed prices.
I've posted once or twice about haggling and standard
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