Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 25
March 21, 2015
The stagnation of Los Angeles fact of the day
There are just 6 per cent more people working in greater Los Angeles than there were 25 years ago. By contrast, the Inland Empire has nearly doubled in size. In fact, the absolute number of jobs added in the Inland Empire since 1990 is nearly double the absolute number of jobs added in greater LA. To get a sense of how wild that is, the entire workforce of the Inland Empire was only 13 per cent the size of Los Angeles’s back in 1990. Even now, there are more than three workers in Los Angeles for every one in the Inland Empire.
It’s a little hard to see given the scale of the chart, but it’s also worth noting that LA experienced a Depression-level drop in employment in the early 1990s. Between January, 1990 and November, 1993, employment in the America’s second-biggest metro area fell by nearly 11 per cent. Employment didn’t return to its previous peak until July, 1999. Talk about a lost decade! (It may help explain this.)
That is from Matthew C. Klein, there is more here, about other American cities too, possibly FT-gated but interesting throughout.
How good a marginal rebounder are you really?
Maybe this is too strange and squirrelly an example to deserve mention on MR, but I found it fascinating. It starts with this:
This year’s rebounding leaderboard, at least in terms of rebounds per game, is topped by DeAndre Jordan and Andre Drummond, who also finished 1-2 last season. In a bygone era, you’d simply say they are the league’s best rebounders at this time. Yet it might not be that way at all.
There seems to be a huge oops:
Both the Clippers and Pistons have better defensive rebound rates with their star rebounders on the bench. How is that possible?
This is a big topic, but one possible reason could be the simple fact that neither Jordan nor Drummond is particularly concerned with boxing out…Drummond blocks out on the defensive glass just 5.97 times per 100 opportunities, lowest in the league among centers with at least 500 chances.
Jordan is a little better at 9.64, but that’s still the 11th-lowest total.
In other words, what really matters is marginal rebounding prowess, adjusting for how many rebounds you take away from the other players on your team. Maybe an individual can pull in the ball more often by positioning himself to grab the low hanging fruit rebounds — often taking them from other team members — rather than boxing out the other team for the tough, contested rebounds.
Measurement really is changing the world. The article is here, by Bradford Doolittle, ESPN gated. Here is more on DeAndre Jordan, also ESPN gated. That is one media source I pay for gladly.
March 20, 2015
Alain Badiou on the French headscarf law
This is from his Polemics book:
43. In point of truth, the headscarf law expresses only one thing: fear. Westerners in general, and the French in particular, are no more than a bunch of shivering cowards. What are they afraid of? Barbarians, as usual. Barbarians both at home, the ‘suburban youths’, and abroad the ‘Islamic terrorists’. Why are they afraid? Because they are guilty, but claim to be innocent. Guilty from the 1980s onward of having renounced and tried to dismantle every politics of emancipation, every revolutionary form of reason, every true assertion of something other than what is. Guilty of clinging to their miserable privileges. Guilty of being no more than grown-up kids who play with their many purchases. Yes, indeed, ‘after a long childhood, they have been made to grow up’. They are thus afraid of whatever is a little less old than they are, such as, for example, a stubborn young lady.
44. But most of all, Westerners in general, and the French in particular, are afraid of death. They can no longer even imagine that an idea is something worth taking risks for. ‘Zero deaths’ is their most important desire. Well, they see millions of people throughout the world who have no reason to be afraid of death. And among them, many die for an idea nearly every day. For the ‘civilized’, that is a source of intimate terror.
I’ve tried a few other Badiou books, but I find this to be the one easiest to make sense of. Here is Wikipedia on Badiou. Here is a Guardian article on him.
Friday assorted links
1. AT&T charging customers not to spy on them.
2. Driverless, flying car, in the works, maybe sort of. And Jonathan Rauch on disruptive innovation and health care.
3. Possible genetic factors behind economic growth.
4. Peter Thiel’s anti-aging investments.
5. The invention of underwear with pockets, there is no great stagnation.
Claims about meritorious books which I did not finish
Richard Roberts and David Kynaston, The Lion Wakes: A Modern History of HSBC. This is an important book for the historian, but it is not written for the eye of the economist.
Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant: A Novel. It has a beautiful air of mystery and profundity, but by p.120 I still didn’t care. Some of you will like this a lot, but I put it down to pick up some other book which I will not finish.
Then it’s back to Houllebecq and The Mahabharata.
The Toronto Star covers our Scarborough outing
The article is here, by Lauren Pelley, here is one excerpt:
“It’s great news to hear,” echoed Ganesan Sugumar, CEO and director of Saravanaa Bhavan Canada, an Indian vegetarian restaurant chain. (Cowen’s tour group visited the location near McCowan Rd. and Finch Ave. East.)
“This is honestly the best cuisine, I could say, in Canada,” Sugumar added. “We have so many ethnic restaurants.”
The article also has a useful map of all the places we visited. My original blog post was here.
March 19, 2015
The present and future of marketing
There is an interview with me by Emily Hare in the latest issues of Contagious, a glossy British marketing periodical. Here is one bit:
Q: What should marketing do to ensure it lives up to its potential?
A; This is what I see happening and this may be disquieting for some of your readers. The people who are really good at marketing in this new environment are typically not formal marketers, they are not called marketing agencies, they have not studied marketing. They are people who know some areas very well and then they teach themselves a kind of marketing on the fly. A good examples if Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg is not in any formal sense a marketer, but he’s actually one of the most brilliant marketers that the world has seen in the past few decades. General principles are not that useful anymore. What is paying off is incredibly detailed, context-specific knowledge of particular areas. that’s what it takes to craft unique messages.
At all levels we’re seeing this takeover by the content people and everything is supposed to look authentic, so in a sense, authenticity is the new inauthenticity.
Marketing has never been more important, but life has never been tougher for at least some of the marketers.
I do not believe there is a version of this on line.
Matt Rognlie on Piketty, net capital returns, and housing
Brookings emails me:
Capital income is not growing unboundedly at the expense of labor, and further accumulation of capital in fact most likely means a fall in capital’s share of total income – refuting one of the main theories of economist Thomas Piketty’s popular book Capital in the 21st Century — according to a paper presented today at the Spring 2015 Conference on the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA).
Existing studies that show an increase in capital’s share of income miss the growing role of depreciation in short-lived capital, in items such as software, says MIT’s Matthew Rognlie in “Deciphering the Fall and Rise in the Net Capital Share.” Rognlie subtracts depreciation in seven large developed economies (the US, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, Italy, and Canada) to get net capital income, and finds that the only long-term rise in capital’s share of income is in housing. Capital income elsewhere in the economy has grown moderately, but it is only recovering from a large fall that lasted from 1948 through the 1970s.
Piketty’s Capital argues that the role of capital in the economy, after falling during the Depression and two world wars, is set to recover to the high levels of the 19th and early 20th centuries. According to Piketty, wealth will accumulate amid slowing economic growth to push up the capital-to-GDP ratio in the economy, which will then cause an increase in capital’s share of income — and growing inequality.
In contrast, Rognlie finds that a rising capital-to-GDP ratio is most likely to result in a fall in capital’s share of income, since the net rate of return on capital will fall by an even larger proportion than the capital-to-GDP ratio rises. Outside of housing, postwar changes in the value of the capital stock have not led to parallel changes in capital’s share of income. In fact, the value of the capital stock relative to private income reached its highs in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when capital’s share of income was near a low.
Rognlie shows that the share of net income generated by housing has risen in all seven large developed economies since data became available. “Housing’s central role in the long-term behavior of the aggregate net capital share has… not been emphasized elsewhere…Observers concerned about the distribution of income should keep an eye on housing costs,” he writes.
Brad DeLong offers comment.
Here Jim Tankersley has a superb profile of Rognlie and the story behind his comment, MR plays a role too. Recommended.
Tyler Cowen's Blog
- Tyler Cowen's profile
- 844 followers
