Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 131

Assorted links

1. David Zetland’s economics of water book is now free.

2. How Ira Glass works.

3. Did Medicare Advantage get better?  And where is “the pizza belt”?  Is this the most important theory about pizza?  I agree with the claims in that article.

4. Claims about deception detection.

5. Should robots have diverse personalities?

6. Which are the most correlated web searches with hard and easy lives?

7. More on RCT debates: is there a gold standard?

The decline of the week-long vacation (America fact of the day)

Nine million Americans took a week off in July 1976, the peak month each year for summer travel. Yet in July 2014, just seven million did. Keeping in mind that 60 million more Americans have jobs today than in 1976, that adds up to a huge decline in the share of workers taking vacations.

Some rough calculations show, in fact, that about 80 percent of workers once took an annual weeklong vacation — and now, just 56 percent do.

That is from Evan Soltas, there is more here.  And Evan offers a bit more here.

How to boost voting turnout and improve the quality of local government

I did not know this idea was under consideration:

Los Angeles city leaders are considering a lottery system to reward citizens for casting a ballot in local elections, in a measure to combat low voter turnout that officials and outside observers say could be a first for any U.S. municipality.

The Los Angeles Ethics Commission voted 3-0 on Thursday to recommend that members of the City Council move forward with the lottery idea, either by putting it before voters as a local initiative or by adopting it on their own, said commission president Nathan Hochman.

The commission discussed a number of possible ways for the lottery to work, including the use of $100,000 to be split into four prizes of $25,000, or 100 pots of $1,000 for lucky voters who win the drawing, Hochman said.

The story is here, hat tip goes to long-time MR correspondent Daniel Lippman, who now is working for Politico.

File under The Polity that is California.

Neil Harbisson is a cyborg

Or should that title read “Is Neil Harbisson a cyborg?”

Protruding from the back of Harbisson’s skull is a metal antenna that allows him to convert the frequencies for color into frequencies for sound and vice versa. He was born colorblind and the appendage has essentially given him a sixth sense to make up for what his vision lacks.

…Harbisson gets visibly dizzy when his antenna is off center. Moving it slightly to the left, he closed his eyes and said, “If I do this, I feel unbalanced…it does feel like a body part, an extension of a bone or something.” Even though the antenna is metal and has no nerve endings, Harbisson says he can feel when someone touches it, the same as a natural body part.

There is more:

Moon Ribas, Harbisson’s partner, has an extension she wears on her arm that makes her body vibrate when there’s an earthquake. (She plans to one day have it implanted under her skin.) As a choreographer, Ribas takes inspiration from nature and thought the extension would enhance her creativity. It syncs with an app that collects data on earthquakes around the world to make her body vibrate when there’s seismic activity (it happens frequently enough that she vibrated once during our interview).

But the appendage cannot be submerged in water, and neither can Neil’s. They are both hoping to update their devices so that in the future they can go swimming. “Then I will be able to perceive the colors in the ocean,” Harbisson says.

There is more here, including a photo.  It is noted that security guards are sometimes unsympathetic to Harbisson, who is moving from Spain to New York, where he feels he will be seen as less unusual.

For a related pointer, I thank Samir Varma.

Sentences to ponder

“Always assume that there is one silent student in your class who is by far superior to you in head and in heart.” This is the counsel Leo Strauss, among the most consequential teachers and scholars of political philosophy in the 20th century, offered an advanced graduate student who had asked for a general rule about teaching.

In a short essay published in the early 1960s, “Liberal Education and Responsibility” (based on a public lecture he gave), Strauss elaborated on his exquisite advice. “Do not have too high an opinion of your importance,” he said, “and have the highest opinion of your duty, your responsibility.”

There is more here, by Peter Berkowitz, via Andrea Castillo.

Brad DeLong is relatively optimistic on stock returns

There are many interesting charts and graphs in the post, and he argues against a belief in mean reversion, along with a discussion of “the original Black Swan.”  It is a difficult post to excerpt, best to read and view the whole thing.

Assorted links

1. Are forward interest rates outrageously low?  Evan Soltas considers whether “secular stagnation” fits the data.

2. Pictures of Chinese acrobatics.

3. Did capital controls help during the Great Depression?

4. The real problem with Big Data?

5. The entire Loeb Classical Library is now on-line.

6. How segregated is Ferguson?  And changes in Ferguson poverty rates.

7. Some new results on whether having a daughter shifts a person’s political orientation.  And free to choose (the culture that is India)?

The Impact of Jury Race in Criminal Trials

In a great paper, The Impact of Jury Race in Criminal Trials, Shamena Anwar, Patrick Bayer and Randi Hjalmarsson exploit random variation in the jury pool to estimate the effect of race on criminal trials. The authors have data from nearly 800 trials in two Florida counties. On any given day, a jury pool is randomly drawn from a master list based on driver’s licenses. On some days, the pool of about 30 people contains some black members and on other days, purely for random reasons, it does not. The voir dire process–removals, excuses and challenges–whittles down the jury pool to 6 jury members with typically 1 alternate.

The authors have data on the race, gender, and age of each member of the jury pool as well as each member of the ultimate jury. The authors also know the race and gender of the defendant and the charges. What the authors discover is that all white juries are 16% more likely to convict black defendants than white defendants but the presence of just a single black person in the jury pool equalizes conviction rates by race. The effect is large and remarkably it occurs even when the black person is not picked for the jury. The latter may not seem possible but the authors develop an elegant model of voir dire that shows how using up a veto on a black member of the pool shifts the characteristics of remaining pool members from which the lawyers must pick; that is, a diverse jury pool can make for a more “ideologically” balanced jury even when the jury is not racially balanced.

The author’s results show not only that blacks and whites are treated differently depending on the composition of the jury pool but also that random variation in the jury pool adds to the variability of sentences holding race constant. Like is not treated as like. The results also suggest that we don’t need racial quotas to increase fairness. We can increase fairness and reduce variability in a racially neutrally way by expanding the size of juries. Six-person juries have become common because they are cheap(er) but a return to twelve person juries would reduce the variability of sentences and greatly equalize conviction rates across race.

How much does an EU cow earn?

This is an old link, from an old blog post, but I believe I missed it the first time around:

A typical cow in the European Union receives a government subsidy of $2.20 a day. The cow earns more than 1.2 billion of the world’s poorest people.

That is from Mark Perry, citing an Australian minister, via Garett Jones on Twitter.  Despite being in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis, I don’t think these subsidies have changed much in the interim.

Addendum: It may be up to $2.60 a day.

Edward Hugh on the Italian runaway train

Here is one bit:

 The combination of low inflation and low growth means that it is the evolution of nominal GDP that really matters now. Nominal GDP is non inflation corrected GDP (or GDP at current rather than constant prices). If inflation remains low or even becomes negative, then nominal GDP will hardly increase and may even continue to contract (as has happened in Japan). The result is bound to be that the gross government debt to GDP ratio rises above the 135.6% it hit in March.

One of the arguments frequently advanced about how this dynamic could be turned around would be for Italy to run a “large” primary budget surplus. Now the emphasis here is on large since the country has in fact run a primary surplus (income – expenditure before paying debt interest) since the early 1990s, but that hasn’t stopped the weight of the debt climbing and climbing.

The full post is here, scary throughout.