Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 411
December 31, 2012
Assorted links
1. Time magazine/WEF interview with me.
2. Getting physicians to wash their hands.
3. The ongoing death of retail, still underway this Christmas season.
4. The next Cass Sunstein book: Simpler: The Future of Government.
5. In spite of the cold weather, New Year’s is the deadliest day for pedestrians.
*Conscious Capitalism*
The authors are John Mackey (the John Mackey) and Raj Sisodia and the subtitle is Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business.
Of all the local businesses which I enjoy, the Vienna, VA Whole Foods is my clear favorite.
Stories to watch for in 2013
Here is a list from The Guardian. Here is an FT list. My list looks more like this:
1. Economic turnarounds in the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and possibly Pakistan and Myanmar.
2. Pressures for secession in Catalonia, and a potential crisis of the Spanish state.
3. East Asian belligerence, with more hawkish leaders in the three major countries.
4. There is actually a non-trivial chance we totally blow it on the debt ceiling.
5. The continuing rise of machine intelligence and the general recognition of such as the next major technological breakthrough.
6. Significant positive reforms in Mexico on education, foreign investment, and other matters too.
7. Political collapse in South Africa.
8. Continuation of America’s “Medicaid Wars,” over state-level coverage, combined with the actual implementation of much more of ACA. Continuing attempts in Rwanda, Mexico, and China to significantly extend health care coverage to much poorer populations.
9. The return of dysfunctional Italian politics, combined with the arrival of recession in most of the eurozone economies, including France and Germany.
10. The ongoing barbarization of North Africa, including Mali, Syria, and possibly Egypt. And whether any of these trends will spread to the Gulf states.
11. Whether China manages a speedy recovery and turnaround.
12. Watching India try to overcome its power supply problems, its educational bottlenecks, and its low agricultural productivity.
13. Seeing whether Ghana makes it to “middle income” status and how well broader parts of Africa move beyond resource-based growth.
14. Whether U.S. and also European political institutions can handle the intensely distributional nature of current fiscal questions.
Those are some of the main stories I will have my eye on, but of course I expect to be surprised. I suppose Israel and Iran should be on that list somehow, North Korea too, but I don’t find that thinking and reading about it yields much in the way of return, compared to a simple “wait and see.”
Addendum: Here is Matt’s list.
Restrictions on high skill immigration to Britain
From The Independent:
Russian-born physicist Professor Sir Andre Geim said new restrictions on non-European Union immigrants, including minimum salary requirements of at least £31,000 and tighter student visa rules, are blocking the brightest academics from working at British institutions. He told The Independent on Sunday that the restrictions would have prevented him and his team from identifying the revolutionary “super-material” graphene, which earned him the Nobel Prize in physics in 2010.
Sir Andre warned that future scientific breakthroughs at British institutions were at risk because of the tighter controls, introduced this year to bring down annual net migration from more than 200,000 to “tens of thousands”.
..Sir Andre, 54, first arrived in the UK in the early 1990s as a Russian citizen with a permit to work as a post-doctoral fellow at Nottingham University. His salary would have been around £27,000 in today’s money, meaning that he would have been barred from entry under the minimum salary requirement.
FYI, Geim is one of my favorite scientists of all time. He is the only individual to win both a Nobel prize, for graphene, and an Ig Nobel prize, for frog levitation. Awesome!
December 30, 2012
The Portuguese fiscal cliff [penhasco fiscal?]
Lisbon plans to lift income tax revenue by more than 30 per cent[this coming year], raising the effective average rate by more than a third from 9.8 to 13.2 per cent. Anyone receiving more than the minimum wage of €485 a month, including pensioners, will also pay an extraordinary tax of 3.5 per cent on their income.
We’ll see how that goes, here is the rest of the FT story. Here are some related earlier posts.
Assorted links
Profile of John Ioannidis
He is an important thinker and here is one part of the profile:
Ioannidis’s current work stems from his deep love of math and statistics. He was born in New York City to physician parents but raised in Athens, Greece, where he excelled at math from a young age. He attended the University of Athens Medical School, added a PhD in biopathology, and later trained at Harvard and Tufts and joined the National Institutes of Health, where he worked on pivotal HIV research. These days, although he often collaborates on the design of specific studies, what he mostly does is meta-research, or the study of studies. Using powerful number-crunching programs and constantly evolving algorithms, Ioannidis analyzes many trials, each with many patients. He’s working to see not so much whether one treatment works or does not work, or whether one association of a specific risk factor with one disease is true or false, but whether factors related to the research process—the number of patients tested, the criteria for including data, statistical errors in an analysis, even fraud or financial incentives—may have compromised the data and conclusions. He burst on the medical establishment radar in 2005 with a paper in PLoS Medicine asserting nothing less than: “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
Here is Alex’s earlier post on him. For the pointer I thank Mark D.
San Diego food bleg
Many economists will be converging on this city this coming week for the annual American Economics Association meetings. Please tell us where to eat!
Of Monsters and Men
My favorite album of 2012 is My Head is an Animal (MP3 album just $3.99!) by the Icelandic group Of Monsters and Men–they mine the same vein as Arcade Fire and Fleet Foxes.
Hat tip: Paul Krugman.
December 29, 2012
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