Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 429

*The Redistribution Recession*

That’s the new book by Casey Mulligan, and the subtitle is How Labor Market Distortions Contracted the Economy.  To get to the point, it’s quite good.

Maybe you’ve already read some of the other blogosphere reviews, a few of which are cited here.  Atrios calls him “the worst person in the world,” without showing he has read the book, and there is further invective from other sources.  The critics all misrepresent his arguments, and/or respond to the weakest rather than the strongest version of his arguments (“soup kitchens caused the Great Depression”).  They are not criticizing him from the vantage point of science.

The contributions of this book include:

1. Using data from seasonal cycles and seasonal changes to better understand supply-demand relationships during the Great Recession.  These sections are excellent and highly original.

2. Showing that the normal laws of supply and demand still held and that we were not living in anything resembling wrong-ways sloping AD curves.

3. Calculation of various implicit marginal tax rates during the Great Recession and showing their relevance for labor supply decisions.

By no means am I fully on board.  I believe he specifies the aggregate demand view incorrectly and significantly under-measures the impact of aggregate demand.  I don’t think the AD view has to imply sticky prices or completely inelastic labor demand, for instance, although one version of that view does (p.208).  I see Mulligan as underestimating labor supply composition effects and overestimating productivity growth during the period under consideration.  There are other points one can complain about and overall he ends up overstating the size of the effects he is measuring.

Still, there are only a few readable books which integrate actual empirical research with a look at the Great Recession.  This is by no means the whole story, but this is a book which anyone seriously interested in the topic should read.  People still will be consulting it after the invective against it has long since died away.

Markets in everything, gifts for science geeks edition

Here is one example:

9. Klein Bottle

If you want to give a mathematician something to try to wrap their head around, a Klein bottle is a good place to start. A real Klein bottle is an object with no inside and no outside that can only exist in four dimensions. These glass models exist in three, which means that unlike the real thing, they can actually hold liquid.

The difference between the models and the real thing is that by adding an extra dimension, you can make it so that the neck of the bottle doesn’t actually intersect the side of the bottle. Take a couple aspirin and try to picture that in your head.

Price: $35

There are many others here.  For the pointer I thank @induction_econ.

The Chronicle of Higher Education covers MRU

Mr. Cowen hopes the site will become a library of explanatory videos about economics, not all of which will be organized into courses. He pictures a day when professors routinely make videos to explain their latest research findings to supplement their scholarly papers. “In less than five years most papers of every note will have a five-minute video,” Mr. Cowen predicts. “People can view it, rewind, rewatch, relisten. You can show it to classes.”

Here is more (listed as gated, but it wasn’t for me).

And here is good additional Washington Post coverage.

Project Blue Sky, from Pearson

Project Blue Sky allows instructors to search, select, and seamlessly integrate Open Educational Resources with Pearson learning materials. Using text, video, simulations, Power Point and more, instructors can create the digital course materials that are just right for their courses and their students. Pearson’s Project Blue Sky is powered by Gooru Learning, a search engine for learning materials.

The site is here, press coverage is here.

Assorted links

1. Favorite books of John van Reenan.

2. An OK Cupid profilee of a rationalist.

3. Markets in everything.

4. The ongoing commercialization of Mecca.

5. The cardboard wheelchair, and did the Portuguese reach Australia in the 16th century?

6. The Goethe auction.

7. Glowing roads in the Netherlands.

How not to regulate driverless cars

One issue is that the laws are requiring licensed drivers to sit in the driving seat, eliminating one of the main advantages of the technology.  Yet there are more problems.  From Marc Scribner:

Bizarrely, Cheh’s bill also requires that autonomous vehicles operate only on alternative fuels.

And:

Another flaw in Cheh’s bill is that it would impose a special tax on drivers of autonomous vehicles. Instead of paying fuel taxes, “Owners of autonomous vehicles shall pay a vehicle-miles travelled (VMT) fee of 1.875 cents per mile.” Administrative details aside, a VMT tax would require drivers to install a recording device to be periodically audited by the government. There may be good reasons to replace fuel taxes with VMT fees, but greatly restricting the use of a potentially revolutionary new technology by singling it out for a new tax system would be a mistake.

Cheh is on the D.C. City Council.

What would it look like if we were to rewrite all of the regulations for “drivered” cars today?

Voting Schmoting

A simple observation about education reform

The Prince George’s County school board has fewer college graduates serving current terms than any other school system in the Washington region, with only two of its eight members holding a bachelor’s degree.

Here is more, and for the pointer I thank M.

The myth of the rational donor? (model this)

At first glance this may sound a little whacky, but perhaps the deeper question is why more donors are not like this?:

“I’m all mixed up between being a conservative and a liberal,” said Kurt Schoeneman, a grape grower from Northern California, who added that some of his friends thought he was “senile.” He had found himself seized by waves of enthusiasm, Mr. Schoeneman said — first for one candidate and then for the other.

“Some of these people, they just loathe Obama, and they’ll write something really nasty about him,” said Mr. Schoeneman, who has given checks to both candidates, most recently $100 to Mr. Romney in June and $100 to Mr. Obama in July. “And then something else will happen, and I’ll go give Romney some money.”

Charles Y. Chen, a salesman in Virginia, gave Mr. Romney $100 on the day of his convention speech in late August. But in September, Mr. Chen donated to Mr. Obama every few days, $50 here, $55 there. Then he switched again, giving Mr. Romney $50.

“I think the Republicans have better ideas on the economy and the Democrats have better ideas on social issues, immigrationand social justice,” Mr. Chen said in an interview. “Just like anything, both have something that they do great and something that they need to improve.”

Gretchen Davidson, a homemaker in Birmingham, a Detroit suburb, said she had gone to several events to hear different ideas and arguments. She gave $500 to Mr. Romney in early August and $1,500 to Mr. Obama in late September.

“You have friends that throw parties on each side, and honestly, I am someone in the middle that didn’t really know which way I was going,” Ms. Davidson said. “You try to sort of see what people are so excited about.”

These are not lobbyists who need to hedge their giving:

Mr. Bagchi gave $100 each to both candidates on Sept. 8, he said, because “they are doing good work for the country. And I want them to come together. So for that reason, I gave to them both.”

Mr. Bagchi said that while he usually gave equally to both candidates, he had recently responded to a particularly personal appeal from the Obama campaign.

“I have given a little more to Barack Obama because he and Michelle were celebrating their anniversary,” he said. “But on balance it was very equal.”

Very good sentences

Call this hyperscience, a claim to scientific status that conflates the PR of science with its rather more messy, complicated and less than ideal everyday realities and that takes the PR far more seriously than do its stuck-in-the-mud orthodox opponents. Beware of hyperscience. It can be a sign that something isn’t kosher.  A rule of thumb for sound inference has always been that if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck. But there’s a corollary: if it struts around the barnyard loudly protesting that it’s a duck, that it possesses the very essence of duckness, that it’s more authentically a duck than all those other orange-billed, web-footed, swimming fowl, then you’ve got a right to be suspicious: this duck may be a quack.

That is from Shapin on Velikovsky, with the link from The Browser.