Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 328

Why does South Indian food taste better when you eat it with your fingers?

I can think of three reasons.

First, there is a placebo effect.  For the Westerner/outsider, eating with your fingers seems exotic.  For (many, not all) South Asians, eating with your fingers brings back memories of family and comfort foods.

Second, your fingers are highly versatile and they are often the best implements for consuming these foods and blending together spices, condiments, and foodstuffs themselves.  There is a reason why humans evolved fingers rather than forks.

Third, and how shall I put this?  A lot of South Indian food is vegetarian and eating with your fingers adds flavors of…meat.  The fleshy sort.

Eating a dosa with fork and knife is a very different experience, for Tamil food on the palm leaf all the more so.

*Revolutionary Iran*

The author is Michael Axworthy and the subtitle is History of the Islamic Republic.  It is already out in the UK.  This is one of the few must-read books of this year (How Asia Works and China’s War With Japan are the other two, plus Knausgaard), excellent and insightful from beginning to end.

Penn State uses the stick to enforce medical exams

By November, faculty and their spouses or domestic partners covered by university health care must complete an online wellness profile and physical exam. They’re also required to complete a more invasive biometric screening, including a “full lipid profile” and glucose, body mass index and waist circumference measurements. (Mobile units from the university’s insurance company, Highmark, will visit campuses to perform these screenings.)

Employees and their beneficiaries who don’t meet those requirements must pay the monthly insurance surcharge [$100] beginning in January.

And if you don’t trust the employer, they have reassured us:

“It is important to note that screening results are confidential and will not be used to remove or reduce health care benefits, nor raise an individual’s health care premium,” a university announcement reads. “The results only are for individual health awareness, illness prevention and wellness promotion.”

The full story is here.

Assorted links

1. A theory of Spain’s political class.

2. When have econ blogs changed people’s (i.e., Noah’s) minds?

3. When will the sun set over the British empire? (Debraj Ray is blogging, in this case with some help from Peter Hammond.)

4. Changing a flat while driving on two wheels.

5. The culture that is Japan (baseball).

Eminent domain and the decline of Detroit

Ilya Somin reports:

Detroit’s sixty year decline, culminating in its recent bankruptcy, has many causes. But one that should not be ignored is the city’s extensive use of eminent domain to transfer property to politically influential private interests. For many years, Detroit aggressively used eminent domain to promote “economic development” and “urban renewal.” The most notorious example was the 1981 Poletown case, in which some 4000 people lost their homes, and numerous businesses were forced to move in order to make way for a General Motors factory. As I explained in this article, the Poletown takings – like many other similar condemnations – ended up destroying far more development than they ever created. In his prescient dissent in Poletown, Michigan Supreme Court Justice James Ryan warned that there was no real reason to expect that the project would produce the growth promised by GM and noted that Detroit and the court had “subordinated a constitutional right to private corporate interests.”

Here is a bit more.

Legal guardianship for individuals with disabilities

On the basis of what I can glean from this article, I vote for Jenny:

The details of Jenny Hatch’s life have come under scrutiny in a complicated guardianship case that is pitting her wishes against those of her parents and testing the rights of adults with disabilities to choose how they live. The 29-year-old wants to move in with friends and continue the life she had, working at a thrift shop and riding her bike everywhere. Her parents want her to remain in a group home, supervised and protected.

This is a much-neglected issue, and not just for Down Syndrome individuals.  At a time when Edward Snowden, drones, and Gitmo are leading many people to reexamine many civil liberties issues, this one ought to be put on the table as well.  It needs its Radley Balko.  Ask yourself a simple question: if you don’t require guardianship, and yet have been placed under the legal guardianship of another, practically speaking how strong are your rights?  What chances of amendment or redress do you really have and in the meantime how can you represent yourself?

By the way, the article presents this anecdote:

“Given the chance to change anything about her life, ‘[Jenny] stated, ‘America, I would lower taxes,’ ” reads a psychological evaluation filed with the court.

And her media interview?:

The conversation was brief and, for the most part, Hatch’s voice remained steady and soft. She smiled frequently. Then Martinis asked what, if anything, she wanted people to know about her.

“I make my own decisions,” she said in a stern voice. “Not you.”

The article is interesting throughout.

Further assorted links

1. China food, toilet, and ice comparison of the day.

2. Korean-language summary of my Edinburgh forum on the global economy with Paul Krugman (originally billed as a debate, but that’s not how it turned out and overall we agreed more than we disagreed, at least given the topics that were covered.  Here is the English-language Doosan press release.)

3. Ed Glaeser did an April EconTalk on urban failure and on Detroit in particular.

4. What does the China interest rate liberalization mean?

Sentence of the Day

By the fall of 2009, toward the end of Barack Obama’s first year as president, the Air Force was training more drone-joystick pilots than airplane-cockpit pilots.

From Fred Kaplan’s The World as Free-Fire Zone.

Larry Summers vs. Janet Yellen

Read Paul Krugman, Scott Sumner, Ezra Klein, and others on this.  My thinking is simple.  Public choice considerations constrain a looser monetary policy with either candidate.  Otherwise, it is easier for me to imagine Summers having credibility with a Republican administration, and having a real voice, relative to Yellen.  He simply has more right-wing street cred, keeping in mind that Yellen is a former Professor from Berkeley who has never really taken heat from the left, unlike Summers.  I think that overall the voice of the Fed within government is a clear positive.  The chance of a Republican administration, come the next election, is probably at least forty percent.  Thus I would prefer Summers.

Where is income mobility high and low?

Climbing the income ladder occurs less often in the Southeast and industrial Midwest, the data shows, with the odds notably low in Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Columbus. By contrast, some of the highest rates occur in the Northeast, Great Plains and West, including in New York, Boston, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Seattle and large swaths of California and Minnesota.

Check out the map at the NYT link.  Based on eyeballing, western North Dakota seems to do best and northwestern Mississippi seems to do worst.

This is based on work by Raj Chetty, Patrick Kline, and Emmanuel Saez, and the other results are quite interesting:

The researchers concluded that larger tax credits for the poor and higher taxes on the affluent seemed to improve income mobility only slightly. The economists also found only modest or no correlation between mobility and the number of local colleges and their tuition rates or between mobility and the amount of extreme wealth in a region.

But the researchers identified four broad factors that appeared to affect income mobility, including the size and dispersion of the local middle class. All else being equal, upward mobility tended to be higher in metropolitan areas where poor families were more dispersed among mixed-income neighborhoods.

Income mobility was also higher in areas with more two-parent households, better elementary schools and high schools, and more civic engagement, including membership in religious and community groups.

Regions with larger black populations had lower upward-mobility rates. But the researchers’ analysis suggested that this was not primarily because of their race. Both white and black residents of Atlanta have low upward mobility, for instance.

Of course that is all correlation and not causation per se.  The Google link to the original research ought to be here, but right now the available links are down, perhaps soon they will come back up again.