Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 161

The Great Reset, sentences to ponder

One in five people in their 20s and early 30s is currently living with his or her parents. And 60 percent of all young adults receive financial support from them. That’s a significant increase from a generation ago, when only one in 10 young adults moved back home and few received financial support.

That is from Adam Davidson, interesting throughout.

Montreal bleg

Where should I eat there?  And what is the best place for vegetarian or Indian food?  I thank you all in advance for whatever aid you can offer.

Words that men are most likely to recognize over women

codec (88, 48)
solenoid (87, 54)
golem (89, 56)
mach (93, 63)
humvee (88, 58)
claymore (87, 589
scimitar (86, 58)
kevlar (93, 65)
paladin (93, 66)
bolshevism (85, 60)
biped (86, 61)
dreadnought (90, 66)

That is from Christina Sterbenz.  Here are the words women are most likely to recognize over men:

taffeta (48, 87)
tresses (61, 93)
bottlebrush (58, 89)
flouncy (55, 86)
mascarpone (60, 90)
decoupage (56, 86)
progesterone (63, 92)
wisteria (61, 89)
taupe (66, 93)
flouncing (67, 94)
peony (70, 96)
bodice (71, 96)

…The male words tend to center on transportation, weapons, and science, while the female words mostly relate to fashion, art, and flowers.

The article is here, hat tip Yana.

Assorted links

1. Does engaged time affect brand recall?

2. How and where to eat in Saigon, a fairly definitive treatment.

3. Fish-eating spiders.  And Paul Romer on Mark Kleiman and crime.

4. Do young workers hate their jobs?

5. Rob Stavins on CO2 emissions, and here is the Gayer and Viscusi paper he cites.

6. “Vessyl automatically knows and tracks what you are drinking in real-time.”

7. Clayton Christensen responds to Jill Lepore.

8. This Krugman post cries out for the two words “gravity equation.”  Here is an MRU video on the gravity equation and the cost of trade.

Even professional Swiss hermits must have good people skills

In Average is Over I wrote that future jobs will require good “people skills” all the more.  There is a new example of this from Solothurn, Switzerland, where the town is searching for a full-time hermit, to live of course in their hermitage.  But now Solothurn has updated the job description:

Solothurn has updated the job description. “Along with acting as caretaker and sacristan, responsibilities include interaction with the many visitors,” the ad warns potential applicants.

“There’s a bit of a discrepancy between the job title of hermit and the fact he or she has to deal with throngs of visitors,” says Sergio Wyniger, the head of Solothurn’s city council. So far, the city has received 119 applications and expects to make a decision by next week.

The job of a hermit isn’t what it used to be. Tourists can easily reach once-secluded spots and modern technology makes it harder to escape friends and relatives—or strangers looking for advice on how to navigate life’s challenges. Today, many hermits live in city apartments or suburban row houses, often relying on the Internet to make a living or order groceries.

…On top of keeping the gorge and adjacent chapels clean and tidy, the new hermit will have to help out with weddings and baptisms and dole out counsel for visitors suffering heartbreak or family trouble. In return, the city council will pay him or her 1,000 Swiss francs ($1,115) a month, along with free lodging in the wood-shingled hermitage. The hermit works for and is paid by the city of Solothurn.

Perhaps someone should write a book on how the institution of hermit is evolving:

“Hermits usually have a mobile phone, because they can switch it off for prayers,” says Mr. Turina, who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Catholic hermits in Italy.

The article is here.

Alan Macfarlane’s *Invention of the Modern World*

An excellent new book drawn from some 2011 lectures he gave in China.  Macfarlane of course is a highly esteemed historian who has made critical breakthroughs in understanding the medieval roots of later English success, but he also has written extensively on Nepal, Japan, and China, including from anthropological perspectives. His status is high, and his works are generally quite readable, but somehow he has missed out on the recent interest in popular yet serious non-fiction books.

This work is not written as a book (thank goodness), it is more as if he is simply sitting down and telling you what you want to know.  He runs through all of the different factors that helped motivate the Industrial Revolution and the British breakthrough.  Here is one excerpt:

England was part of one of the most war-like civilizations in history.  The constant warfare in Europe was different from the long periods of peace in Japan or China.  The constant recurrent strife led to rapid technological and scientific evolution through a process of Darwinian selectionary  pressures — the survival of the “fittest.”  Guns, boats, navigation, knowledge of physics and chemistry, all rapidly improved.  The ships which crushed the Chinese in the Opium Wars in the nineteenth century were enormously different from the primitive medieval boats which would have been no match for a Chinese armada in the fourteenth century.  So England benefited from the positive effects — but others paid the cost.  Thus, at the battle of Omdurman, the British had six Maxim guns.  The result was 28 British dead, and eleven thousand of their enemies were slaughtered.

…So we need to understand that central imperial phase — the worst of all Empires, except perhaps the rest which were even worse.  The cost in terms of lives destroyed in slavery, opium and conquest is unbearable.  Yet it was also the context which allowed the most massive material and economic transformation in human history since the discovery of agriculture to occur, namely the Industrial Revolution.

His discussion of the importance of the legal system is also very good.  You can buy the book here.

Do I feel lucky markets in everything?

Here is a new paper by Christin, Egelman, Vidas, and Grossklags, entitled “It’s All About the Benjamins”:

We examine the cost for an attacker to pay users to execute arbitrary code—potentially malware. We asked users at home to download and run an executable we wrote without being told what it did and without any way of knowing it was harmless. Each week, we increased the payment amount. Our goal was to examine whether users would ignore common security advice—not to run untrusted executables—if there was a direct incentive, and how much this incentive would need to be. We observed that for payments as low as $0.01, 22% of the people who viewed the task ultimately ran our executable. Once increased to $1.00, this proportion increased to 43%. We show that as the price increased, more and more users who understood the risks ultimately ran the code. We conclude that users are generally unopposed to running programs of unknown provenance, so long as their incentives exceed their inconvenience.

The article is here (pdf), for the pointer I thank Bruce Schnier.

Prophets of the Marginal Revolution (a recurring series)

“Los Angeles on cusp of becoming ‘major’ walkable city, study says.”

Despite its long love affair with the car, Los Angeles is on the cusp of becoming a “major” walkable urban area. And doing so could do wonders for its real estate market, at least in spots.

That’s the gist of a new report released Tuesday by SmartGrowth America and George Washington University, which measured the number of walkable urban neighborhoods in 30 big metro areas and looked at the potential to develop more.

The original MR post was here, and for the pointer I thank…Alex.

Supreme Court Limits Software Patents (Reasonably)

In Ill-Conceived, Even If Competently Administered: Software Patents, Litigation, and Innovation Shawn Miller and I recounted the logic by which software patents had gotten out of control.

The subject matter of a patent is supposed to be a process, a machine, a manufacture, a composition of matter, or a design. Patents are supposed to protect inventions, not ideas. A pharmaceutical patent, for example, protects a specific set of closely related chemical structures, but you cannot patent a particular means of curing cancer as “any means by which cancer is cured” and thereby exclude every other means of curing cancer. In theory, the same rules apply to software, but in practice the courts have allowed software patents to be much broader and much more abstract than in other areas.

…Consider U.S. Patent #5,930,474 (Dunworth, Veenstra, and Nagelkirk 1999). The patent’s primary claim is simply “A system which associates on line information with geographic areas.” The patent gives this example of what they intend to patent: “[I]f a user is interested in finding an out-of-print book, or a good price on his favorite bottle of wine, but does not want to travel outside of the Los Angeles area to acquire these goods, then the user can simply designate the Los Angeles area as a geographic location for which a topical search is to be performed” (ibid.). In any ordinary reading the patentee has a patent on an abstract idea, thus gaining the right to exclude others from using such an idea. In any other area of patent law, this type of patent would not be allowed. It is allowed for software, however, because software patents such as this one go on to detail the means of implementing such a function. Namely,

A…system comprising: a computer network wherein a plurality of computers have access to said computer network; and an organizer executing in said computer network, wherein said organizer is configured to receive search requests from any one of said plurality of computers, said organizer comprising: a database of information organized into a hierarchy of geographical areas wherein entries corresponding to each one of said hierarchy of geographical areas is further organized into topics…. (ibid.)

In other words, the means of the patent is the Internet. By merely adding some entirely nugatory terms such as computer, database, and display—nugatory because any modern method would use these devices—the patentee has turned an unpatentable idea into a patentable, and potentially very profitable, method.

The Supreme Court has today in ALICE v. CLS decisively rejected this process:

…the mere recitation of a generic computer cannot transform a patent-ineligible abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention. Stating an abstract idea “while adding the words ‘apply it’” is not enough for patent eligibility. Mayo, supra, at ___ (slip op., at 3). Nor is limiting the use of an abstract idea “‘to a particular technological environment.’” Bilski, supra, at 610–611. Stating an abstract idea while adding the words “apply it with a computer” simply combines those two steps, with the same deficient result. Thus, if a patent’s recitation of a computer amounts to a mere instruction to “implemen[t]” an abstract idea “on . . . a computer,” Mayo, supra, at ___ (slip op., at 16), that addition cannot impart patent eligibility.

I see this ruling as a big win for Mark Lemley who focused on the functional claiming issues of software patents and also as a loss in prestige for the Federal Circuit. It’s evident that the Supreme Court thinks, as Dourado and I argued, that the Federal Circuit has become ideologically captured by the patent bar and in a series of cases the SC has imposed its less parochial view and reasserted its dominance over patent law.

Assorted links

1. Why do we see all-you-can eat sushi restaurants?

2. James Buchanan as teacher and mentor.

3. 24 lingering questions from the NBA Finals (in which Bill Simmons refers to Marcin Gortat as an “elite free agent”).

4. Some summer camps ban all talk of physical appearances.

5. The attack on food freedom (pdf, from IJ).

6. What drove the UK recovery?  And here is Jonathan Portes on UK recovery.