Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 414

The story of GiveDirectly

Paul Niehaus, Michael Faye, Rohit Wanchoo, and Jeremy Shapiro came up with a radically simple plan shaped by their own academic research. They would give poor families in rural Kenya $1,000 over the course of 10 months, and let them do whatever they wanted with the money. They hoped the recipients would spend it on nutrition, health care, and education. But, theoretically, they could use it to purchase alcohol or drugs. The families would decide on their own.

…Three years later, the four economists expanded their private effort into GiveDirectly, a charity that accepts online donations from the public, as well. Ninety-two cents of every dollar donated to GiveDirectly is transferred to poor households through M-PESA, a cell phone banking service with 11,000 agents working in Kenya. GiveDirectly chooses recipients by targeting homes made of mud or thatch, as opposed to more durable materials, such as cement or iron. The typical family participating in the program lives on just 65 nominal cents-per-person-per-day. Four in ten have had a child go at least a full day without food in the last month.

Initial reports from the field are positive. According to Niehaus, GiveDirectly recipients are spending their payments mostly on food and home improvements that can vastly improve quality of life, such as installing a weatherproof tin roof. Some families have invested in profit-bearing businesses, such as chicken-rearing, agriculture, or the vending of clothes, shoes, or charcoal.

More information on GiveDirectly’s impact will be available next year, when an NIH-funded evaluation of the organization’s work is complete. Yet already, GiveDirectly is receiving rave reviews.

Here is a good deal more.  Here is one of my earlier posts on zero overhead giving.  Here is Alex’s earlier post.  Just last week I met up with one of the recipients of one of my 2007 donations and I am pleased to report he is doing extremely well as an actor and filmmaker.

Here is the site for GiveDirectly.  Here is one very positive review of the site, from GiveWell.

A Parting Thought: Market v. Political Entrepreneurship

Thanks again to Alex and Tyler for having me as a guest blogger this week. It has been a pleasure sharing thoughts with you about ideas, fashion, and politics.

My last nugget for the week is about how market and political entrepreneurs learn differently from failure. Market entrepreneurs learn from the relentless forces of profit and loss. They even host conferences and websites where they speak openly about their failures. In part because political entrepreneurs lack the same signals of profit and loss, this type of learning does not happen to the same extent in political markets. My co-author Wayne has further analysis on our blog.

What is the potential for 3-D printing?

I think 3-D printing will happen, and indeed already is happening, but I don’t see that it will bring a utopian new future.  From a recent New Scientist article (gated, related version here), here are two points:

…it’s difficult to print an object in more than one or two materials…

And:

…these combined hardware and materials issues mean that only a relatively small proportion of all people will end up printing out objects themselves.  A more likely scenario is the growth of online services like Shapeways…or perhaps neighborhood print shops.

Maybe I’m blind, but I don’t yet see this as a technological game-changer.  It seems more like a way of saving on transportation costs.  To put it another way, what’s the huge gain of making everyone a manufacturing locavore?  Perhaps there will be some new flurry of home-based innovation, based on tinkering from what these printers can drum up, but that seems to me quite speculative.

How to resolve the fiscal cliff

In my latest column, I suggest another strategy, one the current Republican Party seems quite far from:

 To see how this could work, consider this script: Let’s say the Republicans decide to largely give in to what the President Obama is proposing. There is, however, a catch: the president has to agree to raise marginal tax rates on all income classes, not just on the rich. The tax increase would be one-quarter of a percentage point, or some other arbitrary small amount, with larger increases possible for higher incomes, as has been discussed. The deal also stipulates that both the president and Congress must publicly acknowledge that current plans for government spending can’t be financed unless taxes on most or all income groups climb further yet, and by some hefty amount.

Given the slow economy, it is undesirable to reverse all or even most of the Bush tax cuts. A small but publicly trumpeted clawback of some of the cuts would send the right message to voters, while minimizing the macroeconomic fallout. The nice thing about symbols — single shots across the bow — is that they often can suffice.

If people already rationally expect these tax increases, this signal would do neither good nor harm, but perhaps such an approach would nudge political expectations closer to reality without draining the economy.

And this:

In the minds of many moderate and independent voters, the Republicans are currently identified with dysfunctional politics. But this proposal would let them take a credible stand against obstructionism. If the president didn’t like such a deal, he would be the naysayer, and the resulting publicity would shine a bright spotlight on the tax-and-spend mismatch. Suddenly, it would be the Republicans emphasizing the classic American line that “we are all in this together.”

Read the whole thing.

Markets in everything

Private investors in Switzerland, Austria and Germany are lining up to buy gold bars the size of a credit card that can easily be broken into one gram pieces and used as payment in an emergency.

The story is here and for the pointer I thank the excellent Mark Thorson.

Ideas and Political Entrepreneurs: The Case of Airline Deregulation

Following up on my post from yesterday, the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) regulated U.S. airline rates and routes from the 1930s through the 1970s. It also kept mountains of data. Aspiring Ph.D. candidates found worthy dissertation material from the agency’s files. The research lent support to an important idea—regulation was failing in this market—but no one listened to these young academic scribblers.

By the early 70s, an established academic produced a groundbreaking treatise arguing for sensible regulation. Alfred Kahn would soon make the jump from academic to regulator—of public utilities in the State of New York, not airlines.

By the mid-1970s, criticism of airline regulation had moved from academics to economists in think tanks (Brookings, AEI) and in government. At an economic conference on inflation convened by the Ford Administration, the delegates focused unexpectedly on a different idea: existing regulations were producing high prices. Yet as every economist in Washington knows, many reform ideas never become policy. Then came the political entrepreneurs.

First, Senator Ted Kennedy. An ambitious member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and chairman of the subcommittee on administrative procedure, Kennedy saw an opportunity to attack the over-regulated and under-competitive airline industry by critically examining the rules it played by.

Most judiciary subcommittee hearings were mind-numbingly boring, but airlines were sexy, and Kennedy turned the CAB hearings into high theatre, trotting out real but outrageous examples. A flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco (intrastate and thus not CAB-regulated) cost half as much as a flight from Washington to Boston (interstate and CAB-regulated). Even the dimmest reporter could connect the dots. The CAB looked bad. Kennedy looked good, as did the odds for reform.

Then the Carter Administration tapped Kahn to run the CAB. He allowed “experiments” in price flexibility (Super Saver fares). He approved new routes. Eventually, he questioned the agency’s purpose. The CAB had to go. This meant Kahn had to sell a very big idea to the madmen in authority, the decision-makers in Congress.

An accomplished economist who dabbled in theatre on the side, Kahn played his role perfectly. The former academic scribbler was funny, smart, patient and on point. He was a master communicator with press and politicians alike.

Kahn built on Kennedy, who built on the work of intellectuals in Washington’s think tanks and policy circles, who in turn built on good academic research. Importantly, he found allies across the political spectrum, from the American Conservative Union to Common Cause, from business interests to consumer groups. This odd mix prevented easy dis­missal of reform as the pet project of the left, the right, or any special interest.

With passage of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, Congress closed the CAB and left behind an unprecedented example of radical reform. A better idea had made its way from academic scribblers, through the intellectuals and on to madmen in authority, who were compelled to act. Yet so much of the story hinges on the actions of Kennedy and Kahn—two very different individuals, two very effective political entrepreneurs.

Assorted links

1. Some advances in science from this year.

2. In praise of edited volumes.

3. Mexico will be doing major educational reform.

4. Interview with me on India.

5. Robert Gordon is too pessimistic about the future (and doesn’t get driverless cars).

The FT does Lunch with Tyler Cowen

I thought John McDermott did an excellent job, here was one part I liked:

There is no doubt Cowen is ruthlessly and admirably efficient; an infovore. I suggest he’s also, however, “phenomenally smart”. “I don’t know what that means,” he says. “I mean, I can absorb a lot of information about basketball. I like basketball but I’m not like being smart about it.” And then he’s off again … “Sports is remarkably cognitive. I think it’s underrated just how smart it is. Actually, if I had more time, I would spend more time with sports. Watching it, reading about it, I think it’s oddly underrated.”

The rest of the chat covers food, economics, the future of technology, my life history, and some other matters too.  I also liked this sentence:

He looks up and breaks the news: “They don’t have any food.”

The interview took place on the hottest day in Virginia history.  And please note that when I refer to the Free Democrats of Germany, I don’t mean the party circa 2012.

In Texas, not all joint products are legal (the value of pets)

Here we go:

Last May, the Texas Banking Commission, which regulates funerals and cemeteries [does that make sense to you?], deep-sixed burials of pets in cemeteries for homo sapiens. But Texas still welcomes human burials alongside animals in pet cemeteries.

Do not underestimate the power of arbitrage:

…some Texans are also opting for their own burials–sans Bootsie—in pet cemeteries. The cost of room and board, notes the clip, beats its counterpart in people cemeteries by a mile. So why not think outside the box?

For the pointer I thank Lou Wigdor.

Assorted links

1. Update on the legal issues with driverless cars.

2. Is manioc becoming a gourmet item?

3. Private health care: lessons from Sweden.

4. Good profile of Adam Posen.

5. Arbitrage, biofuels, Canada, infinite loop, etc.

6. Donkey cheese is not yet monopolized, not even by Djokovic.