Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 24
March 23, 2015
Breast milk markets in everything sentences to ponder
When Medolac Laboratories, a competitor of Prolacta, said last year that it wanted to buy milk from women in Detroit, it was accused of profiting at the expense of black women.
“We are deeply concerned that women will be coerced into diverting milk that they would otherwise feed their own babies,” the Black Mothers’ Breastfeeding Association wrote in an open letter in January. Medolac, which said it was working with the Clinton Foundation and wanted to encourage breast-feeding by making it financially attractive, abandoned its plan.
The article, by Andrew Pollack, is interesting throughout. And here is Wikipedia on the history of wet nurses.
For the pointer I thank Pam R.
Monday assorted links
1. Interview with the NYU professor banned from UAE: “But once the decision was made and the university is up and running, the position of myself and others is that NYU has responsibilities there and one of the responsibilities is to try to generate solutions to the terrible situation that migrant workers labor under in that country. Otherwise, what are we doing there?”
2. Against trolleyism in philosophy.
3. The behavioral economics of how restaurants can try to trick you.
4. Pierre Boulez at age 90. And the musicians on Boulez.
5. Lead prosecutor apologizes for sending man to death row. And good vs. bad deflation.
6. Chris Rufer on corporate welfare and cronyism.
Tradeable Pollution Permits
The latest release of our principles of economics class covers Externalities, Costs and Profit Maximization, Competition and the Invisible Hand, and Monopoly.
I am especially fond of our video, Trading Pollution, which explains the economics of tradeable pollution permits. Tyler and I worked with the incredibly talented team at Tilapia Film for a long time on a montage involving jigsaw puzzle pieces that’s near the middle of the video. The montage is only a few seconds long but I think it’s a beautiful way of illustrating how the price system draws upon information that is dispersed across many minds. There is a lot of deep economics behind the visual metaphors.
Addendum: For those of you using our textbook, this video and others are available directly from the textbook (using QR codes) and also available with assessment in our course management system, Launchpad.
The economics of busking
Mark Sandusky has a good article on that topic, here is one excerpt:
Time your busks wisely! Profits can vary widely from day to day, hour to hour. Our low for a Friday night was $98 for two hours of performance. Our high for two hours of performance on a Monday afternoon was $3. This was also our low, because we never busked on another Monday afternoon. We made the most money in between 5pm and 10pm, on evenings before weekends or holidays. Our understanding is that money drops best when people are feeling tipsy, but before they’re actually drunk.
The piece serves up other points of interest.
March 22, 2015
How nepotistic are we?
In just about every field I looked at, having a successful parent makes you way more likely to be a big success, but the advantage is much smaller than it is at the top of politics.
Using the same methodology, I estimate that the son of an N.B.A. player has about a one in 45 chance of becoming an N.B.A. player. Since there are far more N.B.A. slots than Senate slots, this is only about an 800-fold edge.
Think about the N.B.A. further. The skills necessary to be a basketball player, especially height, are highly hereditary. But the N.B.A. is a meritocracy, with your performance easy to evaluate. If you do not play well, you will be cut, even if the team is the New York Knicks and your name is Patrick Ewing Jr. Father-son correlation in the N.B.A. is only one-eleventh as high as it is in the Senate.
Emphasis added by me. And this:
An American male is 4,582 times more likely to become an Army general if his father was one; 1,895 times more likely to become a famous C.E.O.; 1,639 times more likely to win a Pulitzer Prize; 1,497 times more likely to win a Grammy; and 1,361 times more likely to win an Academy Award. Those are pretty decent odds, but they do not come close to the 8,500 times more likely a senator’s son is to find himself chatting with John McCain or Dianne Feinstein in the Senate cloakroom.
That is all from Seth Stephens-Davidowitz.
Singapore (Lee Kuan Yew) on Marginal Revolution
Our previous blog entries on Singapore are here, there are many dozens of them. And yet Singapore is about the size of Fairfax County.
For the last fifty years, Singapore has been one of the truly special places in the world and a large part of that credit has to go to Lee Kuan Yew.
Here are previous MR entries on “China fact of the day.” Again, there are many dozens, and a lot of the credit there too should go to Lee, who provided the model and inspiration for China’s reforms.
“There are dozens of such analogies between the Maori and the Welsh…”
Daniel Davies reviews New Zealand. Here is one excerpt:
The key to understanding the economy of New Zealand is that it’s an industry cluster, and the industry in question is agriculture. Or, and this might be a bit more controversial, the industry in question is agriculture marketing, the most perfect example of which being the way in which the Chinese gooseberry was renamed the “kiwifruit” and production ramped up exponentially to meet US and European demand. At some point, if they can transport them without bruising, I’d guess that they’ll have a go at doing the same thing with the Feijoa, a kind of South American guava that’s very popular domestically. Marketing isn’t looked down on as a frivolous activity for people not clever enough to do science in New Zealand, as far as I can see – farmers, if they want to enjoy middle-class incomes, have to be very aware about the difference between the stuff that comes out of the ground or off the animal, and the sort of thing that people want to see in their shops.
I liked this bit (among many others) too:
One of the things that originally got me interested in the subject of economics was asking the question “How come they’re able to send lamb and butter all the way from New Zealand and still sell it cheaper than Wales?”, and never being very satisfied with the answer.
The discussion is interesting throughout.
March 21, 2015
Why is subtitling and closed captioning so bad?
Why is the (global) state of subtitling and closed captioning so bad?
a/ Subtitling and closed captioning are extremely efficient ways of learning new languages, for example for immigrants wanting to learn the language of their new country.
b/ Furthermore video is now offered on phones, tablets, laptops, desktops, televisions… but very frequently these videos cannot be played with sound on (a phone on public transport, a laptop in public places, televisions in busy places like bars or shops,…).
c/ And most importantly of all, it is crucial for the deaf and hard of hearing.
So why is it so disappointingly bad? Is it just the price (lots of manual work still, despite assistive speech-to-text technologies)? Or don’t producers care?
UberAlex responded:
It’s interesting to look at the fan-sub community, where they can be a labour of love. They are often considered far superior translations to the official ones. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fansub
Conventional wisdom, from me, on the Israeli election
Corey Robin has a useful survey of responses from the Left, some of which include repudiations of Zionism, in addition to claims that the current Israeli policies simply have to unravel, to the detriment of virtually everybody. Think of the latter as a prediction of comeuppance, much like how inequality critics sometimes predict eventual doom for the wealthy if they do not redistribute their wealth.
From a separate direction, economist Glen Weyl explains on Facebook why he is now supporting the BDS movement.
I’m not interested in debating the normative side of the election, or various peace plans, right now. What I find striking is how unready many critics are to confront what has happened, not just in the “Plan B” sense but also rhetorically. The possibility that civil rights progress, peace progress, and self-governance and democratic progress simply have stopped, and won’t be back any time soon, is before us. If anything, matters might become worse yet, especially once you contemplate Gaza. Yet Western commentators don’t know where to turn, because the prevailing progressive narrative is one, not surprisingly, of progress. The common progressive remedy is one of moral exhortation, but at this point it doesn’t seem like another lecture to Israeli voters is going to do the trick.
Such stagnation and possibly retrogression in outcomes is hardly novel at the global level, and even within Israel/Palestine proper it’s far from clear there has been much actual news from the Israeli election (i.e., the two-state solution has been failing for some while now). Still, Israel attracts enough attention, and loyalty, that this is producing an intellectual crisis for many. Some people feel they have been made fools of, and they are no longer happy playing along with the fantasy of an eventual peace deal based on ideals of democracy and rule of law. They wish to recast their mood affiliations, but where really to turn?
By the way, the world has been getting more violent since 2007.
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