Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 274

A theory of good intentions

Paul Niehaus has, and here is the abstract:

Why is other-regarding behavior so often misguided?  I study a new explanation grounded in the idea that altruists want to think they are helping.  Frictions arise because perceptions and reality can diverge ex post, especially when helping remotely (as for example with international development projects).  Among other things the model helps explain why donors have a limited interest in learning about effectiveness, why charities market based on need rather than effectiveness, and why beneficiaries may not be able to do better than to accept this situation.  For policy-makers, the model implies a generic trade-off between quantity and quality of generosity.

When in doubt, self-deception about helping is the next best thing to helping itself, and cheaper to produce.  If I recall properly, the original pointer was from Michael Clemens.

Are students nicer than pornographers and domain traders?

Maybe not.  In a new paper, “Who’s Naughty? Who’s Nice? Experiments on Whether Pro-Social Workers are Selected Out of Cutthroat Business Environments,” Mitchell Hoffman and John Morgan report:

Levitt and List (2007) conjecture that selection pressures among business people will reduce or eliminate pro-social choices. While recent work comparing students with various adult populations often fails to find that adults are less pro-social, this evidence is not necessarily at odds with the selection hypothesis, which may be most relevant for behavior in cutthroat competitive industries. To examine the selection hypothesis, we compare students with two adult populations deliberately selected from two cutthroat internet industries — domain trading and adult entertainment (pornography). Across a range of indicators, business people in these industries are more pro-social than students: they are more altruistic, trusting, trustworthy, and lying averse. They also respond differently to shame-based incentives. We offer a theory of reverse selection that can rationalize these findings.

Hat tip goes to Kevin Lewis.

Carlsen vs. Anand

They start playing Saturday, with a 12-game format.  Originally I had been picking Anand, on the grounds of superior match experience and better opening preparation.  But Carlsen’s results have simply been too strong lately, including in St. Louis.  Tarjei Svensen puts it well:

Against current @2700chess top 10 , @MagnusCarlsen has 21 wins, 53 draws and only 2 losses since Jan 2011.

Or if we judge the match by numerical rating, Carlsen again is a strong favorite.

The Chennai venue may help Anand, as Carlsen will be bringing a Norwegian chef to convert the local ingredients into…what…a $35 dollar small pizza?  Still, being surrounded by your friends, entire family, and numerous well-wishers is not always a net advantage in a competition.  Carlsen may find it easier to concentrate on the chess.  And Anand is 43 years old, which puts him as one of the oldest players in the top 100.  Carlsen is 22 and it feels like it is his time.

Here are some opinions from grandmasters, some of whom are being diplomatic.  Here Matt Wilson considers whether world champions simply got lucky.  Here are some options on how to watch the match.

Amazon markets in everything

Joyce Zhou



by George Mason University


  1 customer review


Note: This item is only available from third-party sellers (see all offers.)


Available from these sellers.


1 new from $55,000.00




Financial Analyst
Specialties: Data management, Financial Reporting; Financial Modeling; Cash flow valuation, Scenario/sensitivity analysis, and ROI, NPV, and IRR analyses; Advanced proficiency with Microsoft Office 2011, ability to quickly adapt to new database software.

The link is here, with review, a bargain I say, hire her!  And see if they will throw in free shipping…

Assorted links

1 Randall Wright has a new on-line course.

2. Cass Sunstein on Whittaker Chambers vs. Ayn Rand.

3. Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking is now out in paperback.

4. The culture that is Russia, and another nationalist angle here.

5. Does man or machine make better coffee?  Or perhaps both working together?

6. Do you believe these stories?  I believe Rachel Fong, and most of the others too.

7. New center on inequality to start, with Brad DeLong as blogger.

China fact of the day

Using survey data on the visibility of di�fferent good categories along with household budget surveys, I �find that Chinese consumers care twice as much as American consumers about the beliefs of their peer group.

Here is more, from David Jenkins.

U.S. life expectancy in perspective

From Avik Roy:

A few years back, Robert Ohsfeldt of Texas A&M and John Schneider of the University of Iowa asked the obvious question: what happens if you remove deaths from fatal injuries from the life expectancy tables? Among the 29 members of the OECD, the U.S. vaults from 19th place to…you guessed it…first. Japan, on the same adjustment, drops from first to ninth.

Here is more.  Arnold Kling comments.

Did Obama Spy on Mitt Romney?

Did Obama spy on Mitt Romney? As recently as a few weeks ago if anyone had asked me that question I would have consigned them to a right (or left) wing loony bin. Today, the only loonies are those who think the question unreasonable. Indeed, in one sense the answer is clearly yes. Do I think Obama ordered the NSA to spy on Romney for political gain? No. Some people claim that President Obama didn’t even know about the full extent of NSA spying. Indeed, I imagine that President Obama was almost as surprised as the rest of us when he first discovered that we live in a mass surveillance state in which billions of emails, phone calls, facebook metadata and other data are being collected.

The answer is yes, however, if we mean did the NSA spy on political candidates like Mitt Romney. Did Mitt Romney ever speak with Angela Merkel, whose phone the NSA bugged, or any one of the dozens of her advisers that the NSA was also bugging? Did Romney exchange emails with Mexican President Felipe Calderon? Were any of Romney’s emails, photos, texts or other metadata hoovered up by the NSA’s break-in to the Google and Yahoo communications links? Almost certainly the answer is yes.

Did the NSA use the information they gathered on Mitt Romney and other political candidates for political purposes? Probably not. Will the next president or the one after that be so virtuous so as to not use this kind of power? I have grave doubts. Men are not angels.

The Nixon administration plumbers broke into the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in order to gather information to discredit him. They busted into a single file cabinet (pictured). What a bunch of amateurs.

The NSA has broken into millions of file cabinets around the world.

Nixon resigned in disgrace. Who will pay for the NSA break-ins?

The actual arrival of autonomous vehicles: pod-like, self-driving buses

Milton Keynes, a town north of London, has announced that it will be deploying 100 driverless pods (officially known as ULTra PRT transport pods) as a public transportation system. A similar system has been running for two years at Heathrow airport. The plan is to have the system up and running by 2015, with a full rollout by 2017. The move marks the first time that self-driving vehicles will be allowed to run on public roads in that country.

The pods look like very small metro rail cars, with sliding doors for exit and entry. Passengers can call (and pay £2 per trip) for a pod using their smartphone. The pods travel using rubber wheels on a special roadway, not a track, between curbs that help in guidance. Each pod is computer driven by independent onboard systems, though humans (passengers) can take over if there is a problem. Each can hold up to two people and their luggage and travels just 12mph. Plans call for the pods to carry passengers between the downtown area, the business district and the train station.

There is more here, via Nathan Weideman.

India fact of the day

Drawn from a tweet:

At $72m, India’s mission to Mars less expensive than many NY/London apartments.

You can verify that Indian number here.  How about some Mumbai buildings while we are at it?