Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 399

Dinner with Fuchsia Dunlop

I am pleased to have shared a meal at A&J Manchurian restaurant, in Rockville with the charming Fuchsia Dunlop.  You may recall that Fuchsia has written what I consider to be the very best Chinese cookbooks in English and indeed some of my favorite books of all time.  She was in town to speak at Georgetown University and to promote her new book Every Grain of Rice: Simple Chinese Home Cooking.

Here were a few topics of conversation and related points:

1. To what extent did excellent Chinese food, in China, go underground during the 1960s and 70s, or to what extent did those traditions need to be reconstructed?

2. Why is there good Chinese food in Panama and Tanzania (my claim not hers), but not in most of Europe, least of all Italy?  Why does Latin America have so little good Chinese food?

3. Should the advanced state of Chinese food in the 18th century, relative to European food, cause economists — including Adam Smith– to revise upward their estimates of Chinese standards of living?

4. Her books are effectively written, in part, because the points are continually reduced to their simplest elements, yet those simple bits are woven together to construct and reveal multiple layers of complexity.

5. The Chinese servers seemed unsurprised by her effortless fluency in Mandarin.

6. When speaking in the United States she is often taken to some local’s idea of a good Chinese restaurant.  A&J was her proposal.  She was surprised that northern Virginia has restaurants which are exclusively or in significant part Peruvian-Chinese, Indo-Chinese, and Korean-Chinese.

7. To what extent do we live in an unusual temporary bubble of easy foreign access to China?

8. I consider her Hunan book to be her most significant and original achievement, but Every Grain of Rice is the most useful single all-purpose Chinese cookbook she has written.  It is especially good on the vegetarian side.

9. Each of us wished to defer dictatorial ordering rights to the other.

10. At what age do people learn or discover the determination to carve out a life of (relative) freedom for themselves?  To what extent is their ability to achieve such a life the result of luck or of skill?

11. The cucumber salad in hot garlic sauce was very good.  No cookies.

And first they came for the law professors…

Last week, it was reported that law school applications were on pace to hit a 30-year low, a dramatic turn of events that could leave campuses with about 24 percent fewer students than in 2010. Young adults, it seems, have fully absorbed the wretched state of the legal job market.

The link is here, and there is more from Megan here.

Beware most measures of government consumption

Garett Jones reports:

Here’s one big area where I think we should change what we call one type of government spending: Medicare and Medicaid.  Currently, these types of spending are counted as transfer payments (BEA PDF here) and so when we measure GDP they show up in C, consumer purchases.  I think they should show up in G, government purchases.  These medical purchases are so tightly controlled by the government that doctors–oops, “medical service providers”–have become and should be considered government contractors just like defense contractors or construction firms.

Sometimes you hear or read talk of “government consumption plunging,” but sometimes what is happening is that health care expenditures are crowding out other programs, which is not exactly the same thing as fiscal consolidation.

The economics of Lego (investment markets in everything)

Here is one excerpt from a lengthy and data-intensive post, which likely offers more than you ever would wish to know:

The internet can be blamed for the size and scope of the secondary LEGO market. On the website, BrickLink, you can find almost any set that LEGO has ever produced. In addition, the site keeps records of trends in the market and value of individual pieces. This site is invaluable to a LEGO collector and has given many the ability to grow their collections. Before the advent of this site and sites like eBay, collecting LEGO required going to garage sales. There are now whole sites dedicated to buying LEGO as an investment, but that is a topic for another article.

This creation and expansion of the secondary market in conjunction with LEGO now marketing some of their products to an older audience has made the prices of some old sets increase exponentially.  On the extreme range, there is the UCS Millennium Falcon that is selling new for upwards of $2,000 (and close to $1,500 USED!). It sold for $500 new in 2007. Even non-licensed sets can run a premium, such as the Cafe Corner that was one of the original modular buildings. It was $150 new and now it can sell for over $1,000.

For pointers I thank Michael Rosenwald and Kevin Won.

Assorted links

1. Markets in everything (whale vomit).

2. North Carolina’s new bookkeeper.

3. Canadian questions about penny death.

4. Should you swing at the first pitch?

5. Career development webcasts for graduate students, from IHS.

6. Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen on China.

7. The culture that is Japan, and another tale here.

Very Fast Insider Trading

On January 31, 2013, approximately 400 milliseconds before the official release of the EIA Natural Gas Report, trading activity exploded in Natural Gas Futures and ETFs such as UGZ, UNG and BOIL. Now that the Feds have stated (as claimed by a recent WSJ article) that they don’t think there is merit in prosecuting people who get news information earlier than others by milliseconds, is it any wonder?

More here. Previous MR posts on high frequency trading.

Questions that are rarely asked

If the multiplier is 1.4, recovery should have been accelerating pretty rapidly, right? Right? Bueller?

That is me on Twitter.  I am not sure what is the right way to think about the appropriate counterfactual here, but the explanation of “growth has not much accelerated because some other pending catastrophe was in the works” does not seem correct to me.

You can cite various reasons for economic slowness (“they cut state and local spending,” etc.), but the point of course is to explain the second derivative and then make that consistent with a multiplier estimate.  Or is it that government spending is supposed to have a higher multiplier than private economic activity?  Bueller?

Will marathon viewing become the TV norm?

On Friday, Netflix will release a drama expressly designed to be consumed in one sitting: “House of Cards,” a political thriller starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright. Rather than introducing one episode a week, as distributors have done since the days of black-and-white TVs, all 13 episodes will be streamed at the same time. “Our goal is to shut down a portion of America for a whole day,” the producer Beau Willimon said with a laugh.

“House of Cards,” which is the first show made specifically for Netflix, dispenses with some of the traditions that are so common on network TV, like flashbacks. There is less reason to remind viewers what happened in previous episodes, the producers say, because so many viewers will have just seen it. And if they don’t remember, Google is just a click away.

The story is here.  You can buy an entire book at once, as serialization — while not dead — has ceased to be the norm for long novels.  At MOMA they do not run an art exhibit by putting up one new van Gogh painting each day.  Coursera, you will note, still uses a kind of serialization model for its classes rather than putting up all the lectures at once; presumably it wishes to synchronize student participation plus it often delivers the content in real time.  Sushi is served sequentially, even though several cold courses presumably could be carried over at once.  Still, a plate in an omakase experience typically has more than one piece of fish.

For TV I do not think upfront bingeing can become the norm.  The model of “I don’t really care about this, but I have nothing much to talk to you about, so let’s sit together and drop commentary on some semi-randomly chosen TV show” seems to work less well when the natural unit of the show is thirteen episodes and you are expected to show dedication.

Ad-financed shows — still a clear majority of viewing — may prefer to have impressions from the ads spread out over weeks and months rather than concentrated in one long marathon sitting.  Furthermore the show itself relies more heavily on an effective and immediate burst of concentrated marketing, with little room to build word of mouth and roll out a campaign with stages.  That intense publicity can be achieved the first time this model is tried, as everyone will write about the novelty, but it will be harder to summon up interest for successive experiments in this format.

I do not myself enjoy the marathon approach to TV shows, as I prefer to ponder the episodes over weeks, months, or years.  I rebel against watching even two episodes in a row, no matter how much I enjoy the program.  Nonetheless I hope this model succeeds, as I have the self-control to watch only one episode a week or at some otherwise chosen regular pace.

*Shylock on Trial: The Appellate Briefs*

That is the new eBook by Richard Posner and Charles Fried, and I just bought my copy and expect I will be adding it to my Law and Literature syllabus.  The book’s home page is here.

A longer book, edited by Bradin Cormack, Marthua Nussbaum, and Richard Strier will be coming out as well, Shakespeare and the Law, containing this piece among others.

Assorted links

1. Were some of those massive early American mounds built in only ninety days?

2. David Brooks on immigration.

3. I loved the movie, but Jed Perl is right about Ai WeiWei as an artist.

4. Thomas Edsall on the hidden prosperity of the poor.

5. The Romanian campaign to attract British immigrants, with more here.

6. Reddit thread on automation and driverless cars.