Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 111
September 29, 2014
The true competition has arrived, just ask the Thai Delicious Committee
Hopscotching the globe as Thailand’s prime minister, Yingluck Shinawatra repeatedly encountered a distressing problem: bad Thai food.
Too often, she found, the meals she sampled at Thai restaurants abroad were unworthy of the name, too bland to be called genuine Thai cooking. The problem bothered her enough to raise it at a cabinet meeting.
Her political party has since been thrown out of office, in a May military coup, but her initiative in culinary diplomacy lives on.
At a gala dinner at a ritzy Bangkok hotel on Tuesday the government will unveil its project to standardize the art of Thai food — with a robot.
Diplomats and dignitaries have been invited to witness the debut of a machine that its promoters say can scientifically evaluate Thai cuisine, telling the difference, for instance, between a properly prepared green curry with just the right mix of Thai basil, curry paste and fresh coconut cream, and a lame imitation.
Has there ever been a better committee name than this?:
The government-financed Thai Delicious Committee, which oversaw the development of the machine, describes it as “an intelligent robot that measures smell and taste in food ingredients through sensor technology in order to measure taste like a food critic.”
In a country of 67 million people, there are somewhere near the same number of strongly held opinions about Thai cooking. A heated debate here on the merits of a particular nam prik kapi, a spicy chili dip of fermented shrimp paste, lime juice and palm sugar, could easily go on for an hour without coming close to resolution.
The full story is here, excellent throughout, and for the pointer I thank Otis Reid.
If you can work from home, where should home be?
If you can work from home, where should home be? NomadList has combined data on internet speed, the cost of rental housing and food, local weather conditions including air quality and other factors to come up with an interesting list. Here’s the top ten.
The third edition of the textbook is on the way but maybe a sabbatical in Chiang Mai or Prague for the fourth edition. One advantage of Prague is that from there it’s easy to get to anywhere else in Europe, Chiang Mai is more restricted and the Philippines even more so. Either way, however, these would be good places to write about purchasing power parity, assuming it hasn’t kicked in by then.
September 28, 2014
Swiss reject single payer health care
Swiss voters on Sunday rejected a plan to ditch the country’s all-private health insurance system and create a state-run scheme, exit polls showed.
Some 64 percent of the electorate shot down a plan pushed by left-leaning parties who say the current system is busting the budgets of ordinary residents, figures from polling agency gfs.bern showed.
Going public would have been a seismic shift for a country whose health system is often hailed abroad as a model of efficiency, but is a growing source of frustration at home because of soaring costs.
“Over the past 20 years in Switzerland, health costs have grown 80 percent and insurance premiums 125 percent,” ophthalmologist Michel Matter told AFP.
There is more here, and for the pointer I thank Samir Varma.
Hong Kong’s share of Chinese gdp
That is from Ian Bremmer on Twitter.
The game-theoretic dynamic of such situations is of course not always a happy one. Pro-semi-autonomy views in Hong Kong feel desperate and are losing leverage. China feels it can play tough, because it sees it is gaining influence. And the equilibrium is…?
Chores down, child care up
There is evidence that technology has already made household chores much less time-consuming. Parents together now spend 27.6 hours a week on chores, down from 36.3 in 1965, according to data from the American Time Use Survey and Pew Research Center. Some of their new free time is being spent on their children. They spend 20.8 hours a week on child care, up from 12.7 in 1965.
That is from Claire Cain Miller, most of the piece is about the economies of paying people to ship your goods for you.
What it is like to be struck by lightning
To some survivors, these more outlandish claims only serve to reinforce the idea that their very real issues are suspect, too. “I have met people who say they have been struck three times and say the can see the future, play the piano, fuck all night long,” says Utley. “It’s all bullshit.”
Utley’s own case is not so fortunate:
After leaving the hospital, Utley spent months relearning to swallow, move his fingers, and walk. Rehab was just the first chapter of his ordeal, however. In his previous life, Utley was a successful stockbroker who often went skiing and windsurfing. Today, at 62, he lives on disability insurance in Cape Cod. “I don’t work,” he says. “I can’t work. My memory’s fried, and I don’t have energy like I used to. I aged 30 years in a second. I walk and talk and play golf—but I still fall down. I’m in pain most of the time. I can’t walk 100 yards without stopping. I look like a drunk.”
There is much more here, by Ferris Jabr, interesting throughout, hat tip goes to Vic Sarjoo.
September 27, 2014
Scott Sumner on demand-side secular stagnation
It seems to me that the Krugman/Summers view has three big problems:
1. The standard textbook model says demand shocks have cyclical effects, and that after wages and prices adjust the economy self-corrects back to the natural rate after a few years. Even if it takes 10 years, it would not explain the longer-term stagnation that they believe is occurring.
2. Krugman might respond to the first point by saying we should dump the new Keynesian model and go back to the old Keynesian unemployment equilibrium model. But even that won’t work, as the old Keynesian model used unemployment as the mechanism for the transmission of demand shocks to low output. If you showed Keynes the US unemployment data since 2009, with the unemployment rate dropping from 10% to 6.1%, he would have assumed that we had had fast growth. If you then told him RGDP growth had averaged just over 2%, he would have had no explanation. That’s a supply-side problem. And it’s even worse in Britain, where job growth has been stronger than in the US, and RGDP growth has been weaker. The eurozone also suffers from this problem.
The truth is that we have three problems:
1. A demand-side (unemployment) problem that was severe in 2009, and (in the US) has been gradually improving since.
2. Slow growth in the working-age population.
3. Supply-side problems ranging from increasing worker disability to slower productivity growth.
I agree completely, his post is here. And on labor turnover, don’t forget Alex’s earlier post here.
Arrived in my pile
Walter Mischel, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control.
Isabel Sawhill, Generation Unbound: Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage.
Eric Kaplan, Does Santa Exist?: A Philosophical Investigation, by one of the producers of The Big Bang Theory.
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