Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 335
July 10, 2013
The faculty are unhappy
Here is one recent report of falling salaries in public institutions, and, on the bright side, universities are having trouble filling some of those slots:
Public university professors don’t enter the profession to get rich. But some faculty are having trouble paying bills, and have even qualified for foods stamps, Olson said. “For somebody to go five to seven years beyond college to obtain a Ph.D. degree and to realize that you are in need of federal assistance to make ends meet — and that’s for a tenure-track position –” is devastating.
Adding what some view as insult to injury, a recently published database of public employee salaries shows that some professors earn less than their colleagues at local high schools without doctorates.
Yet how would they feel about actual poor people? The article focuses on University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point, and serves up the following numbers:
Faculty salaries averaged $67,000 for full professors; $57,100 for associate professors; and $51,900 for assistant professors during the 2012-13 academic year.
The full article is here. It remains the case that numerous public universities are falling pretty far behind the curve.
The evolution of dining in France
The French are known to prize good food. But almost a third of all restaurants serve dishes prepared largely or entirely elsewhere, says Synhorcat, a big group of hotel- and restaurant-owners. Xavier Denamur, a restaurateur and campaigner for openness who showers details on diners in his own establishments, says the proportion is far greater. Improbably long menus at small eateries are one giveaway.
The rising cost of raw materials and staff has put cooking from scratch beyond the reach of many restaurants. It is cheaper to buy frozen ingredients and ready-made dishes from industrial producers such as Métro, Brake or Davigel. Falling purchasing power adds to the pressure. More workers now bring sandwiches to the office, like the English they used to pity. Mobile vans peddling snacks are increasingly common. When people do eat in restaurants, they are often counting every cent.
Different studies produce different figures but all point to problems for restaurateurs. Synhorcat says that restaurant turnover fell by 5.5% in the year to March. According to Gira Conseil, a consultancy, almost three-quarters of all meals eaten outside the home are now in “super-cheap” establishments charging less than €10 ($13) a head, and fast food accounts for 54% of restaurant sales. The NPD Group, another consultancy, worries that the downturn is beginning to affect parts of the country that once seemed resistant, such as the south. Even fast-food joints, until recently growing rapidly, are beginning to feel the pinch.
That is from The Economist, here is more. The Washington Post has coverage too.
July 9, 2013
Surgery price wars in Oklahoma City?
I don’t have deep background knowledge on this particular hospital, but here is a new and interesting article:
An Oklahoma City surgery center is offering a new kind of price transparency, posting guaranteed all-inclusive surgery prices online. The move is revolutionizing medical billing in Oklahoma and around the world.
Dr. Keith Smith and Dr. Steven Lantier launched Surgery Center of Oklahoma 15 years ago, founded on the simple principle of price honesty.
“What we’ve discovered is health care really doesn’t cost that much,” Dr. Smith said. “What people are being charged for is another matter altogether.”
Surgery Center of Oklahoma started posting their prices online about four years ago.
Click here to see the online prices at Surgery Center of Oklahoma.
The prices are all-inclusive quotes and they are guaranteed.
“When we first started we thought we were about half the price of the hospitals,” Dr. Lantier remembers. “Then we found out we’re less than half price. Then we find out we’re a sixth to an eighth of what their prices are. I can’t believe the average person can afford health care at these prices.”
Their goal was to start a price war and they did.
Their first out-of-town patients came from Canada; soon everyday Americans caught on.
Here is a bit more:
Dr. Smith said federal Medicare regulation would not allow for their online price menu.
They have avoided government regulation and control in that area by choosing not to accept Medicaid or Medicare payments.
I would like to know more about this example (maybe Cherokee Gothic can go buy something there), but the article is here and some further coverage is here. For the pointer I thank Jake Seliger and also Craig Fratrik and Timothy Miano.
Vikram Seth was once a graduate student in economics at Stanford
That was in the heyday of the game theory years at that school. Then he became a famous author. And now:
But an author like Seth who commands million dollar advances and who took eight years to write the voluminous A Suitable Boy, works on his own terms. He does not share his manuscripts with anyone until he is ready and will not be bullied by publishers, having once said, not entirely in jest, it was his job to get the money out of publishers and it was the publishers’ job to get the book out of him.
Penguin Random House has in turned asked for its $1.7 million advance back, as they are still awaiting his delivery of a sequel A Suitable Girl. The story is here, and for the pointer I thank Yogesh. Seth never finished his doctorate at Stanford but A Suitable Boy is one of my favorite modern novels.
Assorted links
1. U.S. productivity growth, back to (slow) form.
3. I would dispute some of the comparisons and reasoning in this post, but still it is an interesting look at whether increased immigration has led to less economic freedom.
4. Reihan on how ACA is evolving, some say unraveling.
5. What is in Prince’s fridge?, and we need the future now.
6. The podcast feed for Tim Harford’s new Pop-Up Ideas series.
7. Grave sites of famous economists, a list.
8. Is the logic of comparative advantage overrated?
The Cashless Society
I send my kids their weekly allowance ($5-$10) to a bank account via PayPal. The bank account links to a debit card which the kids use to make purchases from Amazon and Steam.
July 8, 2013
China estimate of the day
A government policy to promote coal use in Northern China has cut the life expectancy of some 500 million people by more than five years, on average.
That comes from a big new study in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, which used a quasi-natural experiment to quantify the health effects of air pollution from coal use.
From Brad Plumer, here is more.
Very good sentences
It is perhaps no accident that the ardour for liberty is no longer expressed through political channels. Its main outlets are morally ambiguous figures such as Mr Snowden and Bradley Manning, the US soldier who gave classified documents to WikiLeaks. Technology will pose new challenges for all states. We are not in a world of John le Carré’s spies but one resembling CIA TV series Person of Interest, where states claim power over us ostensibly to prevent us coming to harm. But we cannot navigate this terrain by reinstating a form of moral hegemony where the rights of Americans count more; and the rest of the world be damned.
That is from Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the FT, the whole thing is excellent but the first two sentences cited above are the most striking of them all.
The prisoners’ dilemma with actual prisoners
This is from a new research paper by Menusch Khadjavi and Andreas Lange:
We compare female inmates and students in a simultaneous and a sequential Prisoner’s Dilemma. In the simultaneous Prisoner’s Dilemma, the cooperation rate among inmates exceeds the rate of cooperating students. Relative to the simultaneous dilemma, cooperation among first-movers in the sequential Prisoner’s Dilemma increases for students, but not for inmates. Students and inmates behave identically as second movers. Hence, we find a similar and significant fraction of inmates and students to hold social preferences….
The blog post and link to research is here, hat tip goes to @Noahpinion.
Tyler Cowen's Blog
- Tyler Cowen's profile
- 844 followers
