Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 108
October 5, 2014
Which famous Chinese leader said this in 1943?
[China] must adopt a planned economy and social legislation to secure the livelihood and survival of every citizen, and it is imperative that we eventually accomplish the objective of “transforming [all] capital into state capital [nationalization of capital], and transforming [all] enjoyment into enjoyment of the masses.”
The answer is here.
That is from Morris L. Bian, The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China: The Dynamics of Institutional Change, p.205. This book is useful for showing early Chinese moves in the direction of state planning and state-owned enterprises.
Alcohol inequality
I double-checked these figures with [Philip] Cook, just to make sure I wasn’t reading them wrong. “I agree that it’s hard to imagine consuming 10 drinks a day,” he told me. But, “there are a remarkable number of people who drink a couple of six packs a day, or a pint of whiskey.”
As Cook notes in his book, the top 10 percent of drinkers account for well over half of the alcohol consumed in any given year. On the other hand, people in the bottom three deciles don’t drink at all, and even the median consumption among those who do drink is just three beverages per week.
The piece, by Christopher Ingraham, is interesting throughout. Here is my earlier post on “The culture of guns, the culture of alcohol”, one of my favorites.
October 4, 2014
Are surprises a good way of rewarding children?
Neil Parmar has a good recent piece on the best ways to bribe your children. Here is one of his points:
In addition to spelling out expectations and agreeing on rewards for specific achievements, surprise them once a while with a special reward for good behavior on a continuing basis. Research on how the brain works shows that children react well to surprises.
An unexpected trip to the aquarium, a local museum or another special experience “can be very motivating to a child,” says Srini Pillay, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief executive of NeuroBusiness Group, which uses brain science to help children and adults overcome psychological obstacles.
Science has shown that unexpected rewards, especially for younger children, can encourage them to make certain behaviors into a lifestyle. Sometimes when Brett Arrington, who owns a consulting firm, is shopping with his 6- and 9-year-old boys he purchases a toy they really want. Mr. Arrington waits until the boys have been especially helpful—by cleaning up someone else’s mess, for example—then he surprises them with the toy. It “works well because it’s not a promise and can happen whenever and for whatever,” says Mr. Arrington.
The full article is here. It also suggests letting your children choose the reward and “matching gifts,” where you match their contribution toward some good or service, especially as your children grow older and develop some earning capacity.
The pooling equilibrium
During the Nazi occupation of Paris:
Germans spent a good deal of their free time in the bathhouses and swimming pools of Paris for the same reason: “In a swimsuit, no one could tell the difference between a German and a Frenchman.”
That is from the new and excellent When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944, by Ronald C. Rosbottom.
Assorted links
2. Is there a cancer-detecting yogurt?
3. Correction of numbers on women in the top one percent.
4. Was there a great light bulb conspiracy?
5. The Slovakian flying car? (Can’t you in fact just drive a plane? Why don’t we call it a “driving plane”? Or would that demystify the idea too much?)
The cryonics culture that is China
A US-based cryonics company that stores people’s bodies at ultra-low temperatures in the hope that one day technology will be able to bring them back to life says it has attracted customers from China.
The Alcor Life Extension Foundation, in Arizona, said it had held discussions about setting up a team in China.
Another firm, the Cryonics Institute in the state of Michigan, said it had held similar discussions about operating in China.
Observers said the interest from wealthy Chinese may be because they are worried about bans on burial in favour of cremation in many places.
Traditional Chinese culture rules that the body must be intact to prepare for the afterlife.
Professor Huang Wei , a historian at Sichuan University in Chengdu , said: “Chinese people have always been interested in body preservation and life extension. Cryonics is a new option from the West which will certainly interest those who can afford it.”
There is more here, via the excellent Mark Thorson.
October 3, 2014
Further proof that on-line education works (MOOCs for marmosets)
Wild marmosets in the Brazilian forest can learn quite successfully from video demonstrations featuring other marmosets, Austrian scientists have reported, showing not only that marmosets are even better learners than previously known, but that video can be used successfully in experiments in the wild.
Tina Gunhold, a cognitive biologist at the University of Vienna, had worked with a population of marmoset monkeys in a bit of Brazilian forest before this particular experiment.
The forest is not wilderness. It lies near some apartment complexes, and the marmosets are somewhat used to human beings. But the monkeys are wild, and each extended family group has its own foraging territory.
Dr. Gunhold and her colleagues reported in the journal Biology Letters this month that they had tested 12 family groups, setting up a series of video monitors, each with a kind of complicated box that they called an “artificial fruit.”
All the boxes contained food. Six of the monitors showed just an unchanging image of a marmoset near a similar box. Three of them showed a marmoset opening the box by pulling a drawer, and three others a marmoset lifting a lid to get at the food.
Marmosets are very territorial and would not tolerate a strange individual on their turf, but the image of a strange marmoset on video didn’t seem to bother them.
Individual marmosets “differed in their reactions to the video,” Dr. Gunhold said. “Some were more shy, some more bold. The younger ones were more attracted to the video, perhaps because of greater curiosity.”
But, she said, the ones that watched the demonstrations were much better at getting the box open than the ones that had the placebo monitor, and they also tended to use the specific skill demonstrated, pulling the drawer open or lifting the lid.
There is more here (including video!), and for the pointer I thank Philip Wallach.
For its age structure, France should be more productive than it is
dvollrath writes:
Jim Feyrer has a paper from a few years back that looks precisely at the relationship of age structure and measures of productivity. What he finds is that the most productive group of workers are those aged 40-49. An 1% increase in the number of those workers (holding other age groups constant) is associated with about a 0.2% increase in productivity. Ages 50-plus imply lower productivity, but the statistical significance is low. Ages under 39, though, are significantly negative for productivity. Jim uses these relationships to partly explain the productivity slowdown in the US during the 1970s, when the Baby Boomers were filling up the labor force and were still under 40, meaning they were relatively low productivity.
But the results speak to this French question that Scott poses as well. By employing so few under 39-year-olds, France is essentially only using the very high productivity workers in the economy. Thus their GDP per hour is likely inflated by that fact, and their workers are not necessarily just as productive as those in the U.S. What you’d want is some kind of equivalent measure for the U.S. to make this concrete. What is the age-structure-adjusted GDP per hour worked in the U.S. and France? Based on Jim’s results, the U.S. would be ahead in that comparison.
This is related to the well-known result in labor economics that wages rise with labor market experience, but at a decreasing rate. That is, people’s wages always tend to rise with experience, but once you hit about 25-30 years of experience (meaning you are somewhere between 40-55 most likely, the increase gets close to zero. You can see a bunch of these wage/experience relationships in a paper by Lagakos, Moll, Porzio, and Qian, who compare the relationship across countries. One of the features of the data is that in rich countries (like France and the U.S.) the wage/experience relationship is really, really steep when experience is below 10 years. In other words, wages are particularly low for people who have little labor market experience, like young workers aged 18-25.
The post is an interesting look at productivity comparisons more generally, and for the pointer I thank David Levey.
Tokyo and the Bullet Train
Lots of interesting material in this piece on Japan’s bullet trains and how they have shaped the economic geography of Japan:
Meanwhile, the bullet train has sucked the country’s workforce into Tokyo, rendering an increasingly huge part of the country little more than a bedroom community for the capital. One reason for this is a quirk of Japan’s famously paternalistic corporations: namely, employers pay their workers’ commuting costs. Tax authorities don’t consider it income if it’s less than ¥100,000 a month – so Shinkansen commutes of up to two hours don’t sound so bad. New housing subdivisions filled with Tokyo salarymen subsequently sprang up along the Nagano Shinkansen route and established Shinkansen lines, bringing more people from further away into the capital.
The Shinkansen’s focus on Tokyo, and the subsequent emphasis on profitability over service, has also accelerated flight from the countryside. It’s often easier to get from a regional capital to Tokyo than to the nearest neighbouring city. Except for sections of the Tohoku Shinkansen, which serves northeastern Japan, local train lines don’t always accommodate Shinkansen rolling stock, so there are often no direct transfer points between local lines and Shinkansen lines. The Tokaido Shinkansen alone now operates 323 trains a day, taking 140 million fares a year, dwarfing local lines. This has had a crucial effect on the physical shape of the city. As a result of this funnelling, Tokyo is becoming even denser and more vertical – not just upward, but downward. With more Shinkansen passengers coming into the capital, JR East has to dig ever deeper under Tokyo Station to create more platforms.
Hat tip: John Welborn.
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