Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 443

Huffington Post covers Marginal Revolution University

The very good article is here, excerpt:

Cowen said the Internet has changed so many aspects of our lives, so “Why should education stay behind?

“Education is changing rapidly and we want to go to our graves feeling we were on the right side of history, so-to-speak,” he said.

Seoul food notes

There is always a pumpkin, smoked duck, or clam and noodles dish you haven’t seen before.  The way to eat well here is to seek out the small restaurants, on the edge of residential districts, with no English language signs, which appear to not rely very heavily on the division of labor and which serve not too many dishes.  Bibim bap (shaken vigorously inside a lunch box, I might add) is like a fine risotto and the quality of cabbage alone makes Seoul a world-class city.

Particular restaurant recommendations are pointless, and in any case hard to track down.  Just follow basic principles.  The street food, by the way, is only so-so.

At one restaurant, as a kind of joke, I asked “What is best?”, not even expecting my English to be understood.  The waiter became very excited and opened the menu to a page entitled “Best food,” which listed five dishes.  I ordered two of them.

I see no reason to explore upscale dining here.  For surprise and uniqueness, I am not sure the world currently offers a better dining city than Seoul.  My most expensive meals are still falling below $20, averaging $10-$12, and they are occasionally below $5.

“How capitalism can save art”

That is the new Op-Ed by Camille Paglia, excerpt:

Creativity is in fact flourishing untrammeled in the applied arts, above all industrial design. Over the past 20 years, I have noticed that the most flexible, dynamic, inquisitive minds among my students have been industrial design majors. Industrial designers are bracingly free of ideology and cant. The industrial designer is trained to be a clear-eyed observer of the commercial world—which, like it or not, is modern reality.

…Young people today are avidly immersed in this hyper-technological environment, where their primary aesthetic experiences are derived from beautifully engineered industrial design. Personalized hand-held devices are their letters, diaries, telephones and newspapers, as well as their round-the-clock conduits for music, videos and movies. But there is no spiritual dimension to an iPhone, as there is to great works of art.

Paglia’s new book is here.  For the pointer I thank Alex T.

Assorted links

1. Anti-Gangnam markets in everything.

2. Some remaining problems for self-driving cars (temporary road signs, snow, going in reverse).

3. Swedish lunch egalitarianism, and some policy lessons from Sweden.

4. Draft version of new Jeff Hummel book on war as the health of the state.

5. Monsanto seed patent case to get Supreme Court review, lots at stake here.

6. Bloggers and economists are failing on immigration.

The making of K-Pop

Standing beside me was Jon Toth, a twenty-nine-year-old white guy, a computer scientist who had driven twelve hours straight from New Mexico. Toth is a fan of Girls’ Generation, a nine-member girl group in the process of recording its American début album, with Interscope Records. At the time he stumbled across the Girls, on YouTube, Toth was an alt-rock guy; he loved Weezer. “I was definitely not the kind of guy you’d expect to get into a nine-girl Asian group,” he told me. But before long Toth was studying Korean, in order to understand the lyrics and also Korean TV shows. Then he started cooking Korean food. Eventually, he travelled all the way to Seoul, where, for the first time, he was able to see the Girls—Tiffany, Sooyoung, Jessica, Taeyeon, Sunny, Hyoyeon, Yuri, Yoona, and Seohyun—perform live. It was a life-changing experience.

“You think you love them, but then you see Tiffany point directly at you and wink, and everything else that exists in the world just disappears,” Toth wrote on Soshified, a Girls’ fan site. “You think you love them, but then you see Sooyoung look you dead in the eye and say in English, ‘Thank you for coming.’ ” Toth concluded, “I might not know how much I love these girls.”

Here is much more, interesting throughout. How about this?:

Double-fold-eyelid surgery, which makes eyes look more Western, is a popular reward for children who get good marks on school exams. The popularity of the K-pop idols has also brought Chinese, Japanese, and Singaporean “medical tourists” to Seoul to have their faces altered to look more like the Korean stars. Some hotels have partnered with hospitals so that guests can have in-house procedures; the Ritz-Carlton Seoul, for example, offers an eighty-eight-thousand-dollar “anti-aging beauty package.” Women come to have their cheekbones shaved down and undergo “double jaw surgery,” in which the upper and lower jawbones are cracked apart and repositioned, to give the whole skull a more tapered look.

For the pointer I thank Viktor.

Sentences to ponder

From Sober Look:

Starting January 1 of 2013 the top tax rate on dividends in the US will officially become the highest in the developed world. If you live in NY for example, the top rate on stock dividends will be close to 50% – which is significantly higher than France.

…According to JPMorgan, this dividend tax will reduce mature firms’ valuations by $1.5 trillion. That’s going to hit private and state pensions as well as IRA, 401K, and 529 accounts.

And JPMorgan adds:

Capitalizing this foregone capital income generates a $1.5 trillion reduction in equity market value, or about 6% of the $24 trillion value of corporate equities at the end of 2Q. Standard wealth effects suggest this will reduce consumer spending by a little over $50 billion, or about 0.5%.

A German icon moves on

After 63 semesters spanning nearly 40 years of studying, German engineer Werner Kahmann finally managed to get his university diploma. In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung he explained why it took him so long.

Here is one part of the story:

The first time Kahmann put his diploma on hold, he broke his leg playing football. The second time, it was 1984 and his daughter was born so he took time out to help raise her. “Then in 2004 when student fees were introduced, I de-matriculated again.”

In 2011, the fee system changed and Kahmann found himself with his nose in a book one again. But this time, it was for real – he earned his diploma a year later, even though the university did not even run the course anymore.

There would be downsides to being a graduate though, he said. “Paying for public transport and not getting reduced tickets for the zoo,” being two of Kahmann’s complaints.

For the pointer I thank Chris Reicher.

Assorted links

1. Conversation with Raghu Rajan.

2. Philip Glass and Beck.

3. Filipino prisoner mass dance video to South Korean Gangnam song.

4. Video demo of a 3-D printer.

5. How good is the new Chinese aircraft carrier?

6. First Luigi Zingales guest post on EconLog.

Study of investment diversification on the UC-Berkeley campus

That’s a header from the excellent Mark Thorson.  Here is an excerpt:

“Think of them as little bankers depositing money and spreading it out in different funds, and doing some management of those funds,” said Mikel Delgado, a doctoral student in psychology who heads the squirrel research team in the laboratory of UC Berkeley psychologist Lucia Jacobs.

Here is another good squirrel sentence:

“Despite her disability, she’s great at caching,” said Delgado.

And this:

…squirrels shake their heads to assess the quality of the nut, and that this “head-flicking behavior” increases when they plan to store the nut rather than eat it.

Finally, unlike many of us:

While Delgado hopes to crack the mystery of which cognitive navigation skills squirrels use to find their personal stashes, one thing’s for sure: “They’re saving for the future,” she said, “and they’re really smart about it.”

The story is here.

Shared Creation

From Joshua Gans’s Information Wants to be Shared.

Economic theory has not quite caught up with this interesting area of

shared information. I can speculate on future business models for books and

the news because they fall within baseline economic motives. But when

it comes to shared creation, nonmonetary motives loom larger and the

economist’s toolkit is harder to rely upon. Wikipedia is a prime example.

More than just a content platform, it is built on and maintained by an army of anonymous volunteers. Back in 2001, when it started, economists would

not have predicted Wikipedia’s success; nor can they really explain it now.

Other social scientists have not waited for economists to catch up. But

perhaps no person has examined the notion that broad, shared creation can

be effective more than MIT professor Eric von Hippel. One of the great

facts from his research is this: a vast number of useful innovations come

not from some scientist and engineer tinkering in a lab, but from users

solving their own problems. Examples abound, from scientific instruments,

to mountain bikes and, of course, to open source software. In some cases,

the innovations were the work of lone innovators, while for others, local

communities together produced advances. It is the latter that interests us

here.

Economists thought that Wikipedia couldn’t work because of problems of motivation but what turned out to matter most was not motivation but transaction costs. With 7 billion people and low transaction costs what other forms of shared creation become possible?