Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 452

The new (and inaugural?) Chinese translation of Finnegans Wake

In volume one, it seems that only half the words of the original are kept.  M.A. Orthofer reports:

Beijing University teacher Liu Yiqing is quoted:

“There is still something we can improve in the way the footnotes are presented,” she says. “While putting every possible meaning in Chinese into the text, it will break the integrity of the story. We should make it a story that is also interesting for college students to read and understand.”

Also via Orthofer, here is one measure of which is the most frequently liberated book.

Sentences to ponder

Real earnings for young college grads have fallen by over 15% since 2000, or by about $10,000 in 2011 dollars

Michael Mandel’s tweet is here, and link to the underlying material is here.

Don’t be misled by claims of a “high” or “rising” college premium, that is indeed true relative to high school (or less), but many of those wages are down even more.  In absolute terms the return to college is not doing well.

Sir John Strachey’s *India: its Administration & Progress*

This is a fascinating and indeed highly readable book.  The third edition dates from 1903 but it is based on some 1884 lectures.  Here is one excerpt:

If the richer classes in China were deprived of Indian opium they would suffer as the richer classes in Europe would suffer if they were deprived of the choice vintages of Bordeaux and Burgundy, or as tobacco-smokers would suffer if not more cigars were to come from Cuba.  In such a case, in our own country, the frequenters of public-houses would be conscious of no hardship, and the vast majority of the opium-smokers of China would be equally unconscious if they received no more opium from India [TC: China itself produced a lot of opium].  If, in deference to ignorant prejudice, India should be deprived of the revenue which she now obtains from opium, an act of folly and injustice would be perpetrated as gross as any that has ever been inflicted by a foreign Government on a subject country.  India now possesses the rare fortune of obtaining from one of her most useful products a large revenue without the imposition of taxes on her own people…

Recommended, especially if you like to discover what people were really thinking at the time.

Assorted links

1. A very good post on GMO labeling.

2. Ezra Klein on makers vs. takers.

3. Nobel predictions from Thomson Reuters.

4. Enormous Roman mosaic found.

5. The future of ZMP workers?

Mexico fact(s) of the day

Today, Mexico exports more manufactured products than the rest of Latin America put together.

And this:

Partly as a result, the sum of Mexico’s imports and exports as a percentage of its gross domestic product, a strong indicator of openness, rose to 58.6 per cent in 2010. In the case of China, it was 47.9 per cent, and just 18.5 per cent in the case of Brazil. HSBC in Mexico City estimated recently that the figure for Mexico could increase to as much as 69 per cent this year.

And this:

In 2009, Mexico overtook South Korea and China to became the world’s leading producer of flatscreen television sets. The bulkier the item, the more Mexico makes sense. According to Global Trade Atlas, the country is also the leading manufacturer of two-door refrigerators.

Cars made in Mexico are now being exported to China.  Here is more (FT).

What is the smallest prime?

From Chris K. Caldwell and Yeng Xiong:

What is the first prime? It seems that the number two should be the obvious answer, and today it is, but it was not always so. There were times when and mathematicians for whom the numbers one and three were acceptable answers. To find the first prime, we must also know what the first positive integer is. Surprisingly, with the definitions used at various times throughout history, one was often not the first positive integer (some started with two, and a few with three). In this article, we survey the history of the primality of one, from the ancient Greeks to modern times. We will discuss some of the reasons definitions changed, and provide several examples. We will also discuss the last significant mathematicians to list the number one as prime.

The paper is here, hat tip goes to Natasha Plotkin.

*Joseph Anton*

There is too much detail I do not care about.  And Rushdie seems neither likable nor self-aware.

Are we still in the short run?

The excellent Eli Dourado reports:

I think there is good reason to think that the short run is over—it is short, after all.

My first bit of evidence is corporate profits. They are at an all time high, around two-and-a-half times higher in nominal terms than they were during the late 1990s, our last real boom…

If you think that unemployment is high because demand is low and therefore business isn’t profitable, you are empirically mistaken. Business is very profitable, but it has learned to get by without as much labor.

A second data point is the duration of unemployment. Around 40 percent of the unemployed have been unemployed for six months or longer. And the mean duration of unemployment is even longer, around 40 weeks, which means that the distribution has a high-duration tail…

Now, do you mean to tell me that four years into the recession, for people who have been unemployed for six months, a year, or even longer, that their wage demands are sticky? This seems implausible.

A third argument I’ve heard a lot of is that mortgage obligations have remained high—sticky contracts—while income has gone down. Garett Jones endorses this as a theory of monetary non-neutrality, and I agree. In fact, I beat him to it. But just because debt can make money non-neutral in the short run does not mean that we are still in the short run.

In fact, there is good evidence that here too we are out of the short run. Household debt service payments as a percent of disposable personal income is lower than it has been at any point in the last 15 years.

There are numerous pictures at the link.

Assorted links

1. Swabian consumer expenditures.

2. A philosophic defense of Mormonism.

3. Does a bailout lower that bank’s risk appetite?

4. The iPhone and consumer spending, some corrections.

5. More on the UK’s productivity puzzle, and Bristol currency.

Makers vs. takers

The correct point is not about slotting particular individuals into one category or the other.  Rather, on a given policy issue what is the relevant political influence of — on that issue — the makers vs. the takers?  Very often the takers are the classic better-mobilized concentrated interest groups, a’la Mancur Olson.  Consider farm policy and patents as examples but the list is long.

Many commentators are framing the matter in terms of raising or lowering the relative status of aid recipients.  So it’s the aspiring student, the virtuous retiree, and the brave veteran, rather than the irresponsible bums.  That’s a distraction (albeit a legitimate correction), as the real question is whether the political equilibrium is shifting toward takers.  That’s takers as roles in particular political struggles, not individuals with “taker” stamped on their foreheads.

Various forms of crony capitalism arguably are on the rise.  Is the political influence of the issue-specific takers, relative to the issue-specific makers, a growing problem in American politics?   What does the evidence actually suggest?

It seems Romney got a lot wrong in his remarks, but I haven’t seen many of the commentators move the ball to even that simple place on the field.