Water fact of the day
Tyler Cowen
It is a little known fact that the United States today uses far less water per
person, and less water in total, than we did twenty-five years ago.
That is water expert Peter Gleick, quoted in the excellent article "The Last
Drop," (not on-line), from the 23 October The New Yorker.
October 19, 2006 at 05:44 PM in Data Source | Permalink | Comments (11)
Guilt
Tyler Cowen
She gets mad at me for things she dreams I do.
That is from Justin, via Sacramento. A few weeks ago Alex and I were
discussing whether a person should feel guilty about his or her dreams. Or
should enjoying one's memories of others give grounds for jealousy? How about
building a machine which will simulate a version of you who dreams of having
enjoyed particular memories?
Frankly, I don't see any clear ground here.
October 19, 2006 at 03:59 PM in Philosophy | Permalink | Comments (9)
The best fragment I read today
Tyler Cowen
South Asians call it “the best run Indian city,”...
That is Dubai. Here is today's NYT article on the limits of tolerance in
Dubai. Here is a good Michael Davis neo-Marxist deconstruction of the place.
October 19, 2006 at 03:14 PM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (6)
Freakonomics 2.0 is out
Tyler Cowen
Yesterday I saw it in Borders. Dubner summarizes what has changed. You can
buy it here. Here is the revised edition audiobook. Or try the book in
Spanish.
October 19, 2006 at 08:56 AM in Books | Permalink | Comments (2)
Dr. Curry and the future of mankind
Tyler Cowen
Dr Curry warns...in 10,000 years time humans may have paid a genetic price for
relying on technology.
Spoiled by gadgets designed to meet their every need, they could come to
resemble domesticated animals.
Social skills, such as communicating and interacting with others, could be
lost, along with emotions such as love, sympathy, trust and respect. People
would become less able to care for others, or perform in teams.
Physically, they would start to appear more juvenile. Chins would recede, as a
result of having to chew less on processed food.
There could also be health problems caused by reliance on medicine, resulting
in weak immune systems. Preventing deaths would also help to preserve the
genetic defects that cause cancer.
Dr. Curry also claims:
Further into the future, sexual selection - being choosy about one's partner -
was likely to create more and more genetic inequality, said Dr Curry.
Only his third paragraph -- about less sociability -- fits my basic model of
future human evolution. Genetic engineering aside, won't greater choosiness
favor physically fit partners? And given the ease of birth control, I expect
that people will come to love their children more, even though they will care
less about everyone else. Who needs allies for quality child care when per
capita income is very high?
Here is the full story. Thanks to Jason Kottke for the pointer.
October 19, 2006 at 07:18 AM in Science | Permalink | Comments (26)
Finding the predictive geniuses
Tyler Cowen
James Acevedo is a "genius," though he admits no one at the elementary school
in Ridgewood, N.J., where he teaches third grade, knows it.
But the Web site where he competes nightly, PicksPal.com, was so taken by his
record at forecasting sporting events that it included him last month in a
newly compiled list of 30 super-achievers culled from about 100,000 members and
began selling their "genius picks" to the public.
The obvious critical rejoinder is that someone from the group has the lucky
touch, but only for a while.
"I go with my gut," he said. "It doesn't feel like I'm a genius."
James is reluctant to take his wisdom to Las Vegas. Here is the story, and
thanks to Robin Hanson for the pointer.
October 19, 2006 at 07:15 AM in Science | Permalink | Comments (5)
Pumping Neurons
Alex Tabarrok
So I'm in the local Best Buy and I see that the Nintendo DS has Brain Age on
display, it tests your "brain age" with a series of mental exercises. Heh, I'm
up for a workout so I run the game which does things like show you the word
blue but written in red and you are supposed to say the color (not the word).
The store is noisy, however, so the damn microphone isn't picking up my
answers. It gives me a brain age of 95! What the #$$!%!. So I run the game
again and this time I'm shouting into the machine, blue, red, no I said red
damn it, green, green, green... Well, I managed to get my brain age down some
but by now people were looking at me real funny.
Anyway, if you want to try some of these exercises you can now join an
online gym and workout at home. The Washington Post has a brief review of some
of the sites including MyBrainTrainer, Happy-Neuron and Brain Builder. Of
course, you know my recommendation for the best website to improve your brain
power.
October 19, 2006 at 07:05 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (5)
An economic agenda for the future
Tyler Cowen
I was asked by US News and World Report to write a short set of policy
proposals, and also handicap (ha!) the chances of them passing. Here is a
contrasting list from Jacob Hacker. Here is a 2004 post I wrote on the same
topic.
October 18, 2006 at 11:33 AM in Economics | Permalink | Comments (29)
Assorted links
Tyler Cowen
1. The rise of Rachel Ray.
2. Flat taxes don't much boost revenue.
3. A Lesson from Europe on Health Care; an excellent article by David Leonhardt
on what we get for our U.S. health care dollars.
October 18, 2006 at 08:17 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (18)
France fact of the day
Tyler Cowen
While falling birthrates threaten to undermine economies and social stability
across much of an aging Europe, French fertility rates are increasing. France
now has the second-highest fertility rate in Europe -- 1.94 children born per
woman, exceeded slightly by Ireland's rate of 1.99. The U.S. fertility rate is
2.01 children.
In addition to birth subsidies, cultural norms encourage women to both work and
have kids. Here is the story.
October 18, 2006 at 07:49 AM in Data Source | Permalink | Comments (18)
Sentence of wisdom
Tyler Cowen
Optimistically, we find that adjustments to imbalances in the past have
generally been smooth, even under a regime as hard as the gold standard.
Here is the full paper (non-gated here), which looks at international
adjustments throughout history. Here is a version of the slides. On the more
pessimistic side, return differentials across countries do not seem to persist.
October 18, 2006 at 06:30 AM in History | Permalink | Comments (0)
Mindless eating
Tyler Cowen
The best diet is the one you don't know you are on.
I am not surprised to read this:
When eating in group of four or eight, light eaters ate more, and heavy eaters
ate less.
Those are both from Brian Wansink's Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We
Think.
Here is a New York Times article about the book; it summarizes the book's
practical tips. Never let yourself forget how much you are eating. You might
also use smaller bowls and wrap transparent candy containers in aluminum foil.
October 18, 2006 at 05:44 AM in Books, Science | Permalink | Comments (3)
Why hasn't Mexico done better?
Tyler Cowen
After all they have NAFTA and democracy, sort of. Here are the thoughts of
Brad DeLong. I don't disagree with Brad's discussion, here are my ideas:
1. The North of Mexico would have done far better, if not for adjusting to
brutal competition from China. They are in fact coping better than most people
had expected.
2. The North has in any case done remarkably well. This implies that the main
problems are not of policy per se.
3. Mexico has had a serious internal "immigration" problem, as it tries to
digest massive migration from rural areas into urban areas. Many of these
migrants do not have the appropriate cultural capital to support Mexican
economic growth. But this problem will ease over time as the country becomes
more integrated.
4. The costs of crime and corruption are significant. These costs skyrocketed
as Mexico became a prime route for cocaine transport to the United States. Not
everything we have done for (to) Mexico has been positive.
5. Mexico will undergo a demographic transition. Rising population will soon
cease to swallow up so many of the per capita the gains from rising total
income.
6. The available data significantly understate the standard of living gains in
rural Mexico. Incomes go underreported, or unreported, and new commodities are
being introduced all the time.
7. Policy matters less than we economists like to think.
October 17, 2006 at 06:06 PM in Economics | Permalink | Comments (38)
Asking for trouble bleg
Tyler Cowen
Let's say, for purely hypothetical purposes, that the perpetually restless,
short attention span, technologically inept me wanted to make an initial foray
into computer games. Where should I start? How should I start? What mistakes
should I avoid?
I await your wisdom in the comments section. Daniel Drezner offers some
related links.
October 17, 2006 at 11:35 AM in Education | Permalink | Comments (69)
Designing a statistics regime for selfish economists
Tyler Cowen
As my colleague David Levy points out, the economics of economists is a much
neglected topic. But there is some action on the horizon:
The role that competition among scientists will have on researcher initiative
bias was discussed by Tullock (1959) who argued that competition would
counteract the version of publication bias that occurs when 20 researchers each
use different data sets to run the 14 same experiment but when only the one
significant result gets published. Tullock argued that in this case the other
19 researchers would come forward and discuss their insignificant results. The
conclusion Tullock drew from this is that publication bias is more likely to
occur in a situation where there is a single data and 20 possible explanatory
variables. In that case, there is no obvious refutation that could be
published over the false positive. The best that can be done is to publish
articles emphasizing the number of potential explanatory variables in the data
set (as in Sala-I-Martin, 1997) or the fragility of the results to alternative
specifications (as in Levine and Renelt, 1992).
That is from a new paper by Ed Glaeser, highly recommended. Hat tip to New
Economist blog.
October 17, 2006 at 07:47 AM in Economics | Permalink | Comments (3)
Does television viewing trigger autism?
Tyler Cowen
Gregg Easterbrook says yes, citing this new study. Here is part of the
abstract:
...we empirically investigate the hypothesis that early childhood television
viewing serves as such a trigger [for autism]. Using the Bureau of Labor
Statistics’ American Time Use Survey, we first establish that the amount of
television a young child watches is positively related to the amount of
precipitation in the child’s community. This suggests that, if television is a
trigger for autism, then autism should be more prevalent in communities that
receive substantial precipitation. We then look at county-level autism data
for three states – California, Oregon, and Washington – characterized by high
precipitation variability. Employing a variety of tests, we show that in each
of the three states (and across all three states when pooled) there is
substantial evidence that county autism rates are indeed positively related to
county-wide levels of precipitation. In our final set of tests we use
California and Pennsylvania data on children born between 1972 and 1989 to
show, again consistent with the television as trigger hypothesis, that county
autism rates are also positively related to the percentage of households that
subscribe to cable television. Our precipitation tests indicate that just
under forty percent of autism diagnoses in the three states studied is the
result of television watching due to precipitation, while our cable tests
indicate that approximately seventeen percent of the growth in autism in
California and Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s is due to the growth of
cable television. These findings are consistent with early childhood
television viewing being an important trigger for autism.
I am unconvinced. Precipitation, in these states, is a coastal phenomenon and
is proxying for heterogeneity in the gene pool. Perhaps the coastal areas
attract a more "autism-ready" group of individuals. In fairness to the
authors, they do try to control for income and education and population density
and diagnosis capacity, among other variables. Note two worrying features in
the results: in California precipitation is not correlated with autism rates at
all (there is a north vs. south split for rain, rather than the coast vs.
inland), and precipitation is a better predictor of autism than cable viewing
is directly.
Here is the latest autism news on the genetic front.
Addendum: Steve Levitt is also skeptical.
October 17, 2006 at 07:29 AM in Science | Permalink | Comments (29)
Incentives for Organ Donation
Alex Tabarrok
In an important editorial the Washington Post advocates giving points in the
current organ allocation system to people who have previously signed their
organ donor cards. I have long argued for such a system (see Entrepreneurial
Economics and here) and am an advisor to Lifesharers an organization that is
implementing a similar system privately.
The decision to pledge organs could be linked to the chance of receiving one:
People who check the box on the driver's-license application when they are
healthy would, if they later fell sick, get extra points in the system used to
assign their position on the transplant waiting list (other factors include how
long you have waited and how well an available organ would match your blood
type and immune system).
Thanks to Dave Undis for the pointer.
October 17, 2006 at 07:20 AM in Medicine | Permalink | Comments (16)
Economics books everyone should know
Tyler Cowen
Here is one list, taken from a poll of Carnegie-Mellon faculty. For most
readers I would scrap Becker, Heilbroner, and Duffie; of course many other
books could be added. "Paul Shiller" should be "Robert." The pointer is from
Craig Newmark.
Addendum: CrookedTimber readers offer their suggestions.
October 16, 2006 at 04:04 PM in Books | Permalink | Comments (15)
Markets in everything, canine edition
Tyler Cowen
Ice cream maker Good Humor and pet food producer Pedigree have announced plans
to produce ice cream sandwiches for dogs.
Apparently this is not a stupid pet snack. The companies said they needed a
special formula for the dairy treats, as many dogs are lactose intolerant and
cannot easily digest regular ice cream.
Here is the story, and thanks to Robert Stewart for the pointer.
October 16, 2006 at 01:53 PM in Economics | Permalink | Comments (9)
Should we diversify our charitable giving?
Tyler Cowen
Citing Steve Landsburg, Tim Harford argues:
Someone with $100 to give away and a world full of worthy causes should choose
the worthiest and write the check. We don't. Instead, we give $5 for a
LiveStrong bracelet, pledge $25 to Save the Children, another $25 to AIDS
research, and so on. But $25 is not going to find a cure for AIDS. Either
it's the best cause and deserves the entire $100, or it's not and some other
cause does. The scattershot approach simply proves that we're more interested
in feeling good than doing good.
Many people are unconvinced by this argument—which I owe to Steven
Landsburg—because they are used to diversifying their financial investments (a
bit of Google stock and a bit of Exxon, too) and varying their choices (vanilla
ice cream AND bananas). But those instincts are selfish: They are not intended
to benefit both Google and Exxon, nor both the ice-cream company and the banana
growers. With charity, the logic is different, and a truly selfless donor would
bite the bullet and put his entire donation behind one cause. That we find that
so hard to imagine is just one more indication of how hard it is for us to
think ourselves into a truly selfless view of the world.
We can think of charitable projects, at least in ex ante terms, as aligned
along a continuum of expected returns. The highest-return project is just a
wee bit better than the runner-up candidate. In that setting, it is hard, as
always, to evaluate the efficiency consequences of differing distributions of
wealth. But in a Rawlsian sense -- what would a poor person want if he did not
know which group he would end up assigned to? -- the poor would prefer that any
particular gift is diversified. Even if the dollar rate of return falls by a
small amount, the insurance value of that giving rises.
Keep in mind that a single donation is itself supporting a bundle of projects,
not a single giving opportunity. (What would a truly specialized donation look
like?)
I agree with Harford's point in a different regard. The fixed costs of
processing a donation are relatively high, if only because the charity will
send further letters asking for more money. For that reason it may be better
to focus our giving on a single charity.
October 16, 2006 at 07:48 AM in Economics | Permalink | Comments (45)
Why is Medicine so Primitive?
Alex Tabarrok
The practice of modern medicine is surprisingly primitive. My doctor only
recently started to provide printed prescriptions instead of the usual scrawl.
Incorrectly filled prescriptions can be serious and computer printed
prescriptions are an obvious response yet even today only one in four
physicians use some form of electronic health records and only one in ten
really use electronic records to follow a patient's entire history. My credit
card company knows far more about my shopping history than my physician knows
about my medical history.
Medicine is primitive in another way. The number of treatment regimes
supported only by tradition and authority is very high. Here's a recent
example:
For the past 30 years or so, doctors have routinely given pregnant women
intravenous infusions of magnesium sulfate to halt contractions that can lead
to premature labor.
...[a] team reviewed 23 clinical trials worldwide involving 2,000 women who had
received the drug to quell contractions. They found that it did not reduce
preterm labor and that more babies died when their mothers took the drug than
in a control group where the mothers had not been given it.
...Grimes and Nanda estimate that about 120,000 American women receive mag
sulfate each year for premature contractions, and they say some evidence
suggests it may be associated with 1,900 to 4,800 fetal deaths annually in the
United States.
This would be a shocker except for the fact that stories like this are common -
by some accounts a majority of medical procedures are not supported by serious
scientific evidence. Indeed, what are we to make of a profession where
evidence-based medicine is only a recent and still far from accepted movement?
Why is medicine so primitive? One reason is that medicine is the largest area
of the economy still dominated by artisanal production. I will be blunt: We
need assembly line medicine, medicine that is routinized, marked and measured.
As I have argued before I would much prefer to be diagnosed by a computerized
expert system than by a physician. The HMOs, Kaiser in particular, have done
good work on measuring the effectiveness of different procedures but much more
needs to be done to bring medicine into the twentieth century let alone the
twenty first.
October 16, 2006 at 07:20 AM in Medicine | Permalink | Comments (42)
Sweden fact of the day
Tyler Cowen
By the late 1990s the Wallenbergs controlled some 40% of the value of the
companies listed on the Swedish stock exchange.
Read more here.
October 15, 2006 at 08:33 AM in Current Affairs | Permalink | Comments (12)
The behavioral economics of pain
Tyler Cowen
Dan Ariely, behavioral economist at MIT, writes:
The physician also informs me that since my heart and lungs are not functioning
very well, they will have to perform the operation while I am in my hospital
bed and without anesthesia. This frightens me to no end. In an attempt to
comfort me, the physicians informs me that since most of the nerves in my right
arm are dead, I should not experience much pain – but he is not very
convincing, and, in fact, turns out to be so very wrong.
Continue reading "The behavioral economics of pain"
October 15, 2006 at 04:35 AM in Science | Permalink | Comments (7)
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