Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 461

Questions about John Cage

Wednesday will count as his 100th birthday.  Here are a few of my views:

1. Is it actually good music?

Much of it is, once you get past the gimmicks.  For direct musical listening (skip 4’33″) I recommend the piano music, most of all by Herbert Henck or David Tudor or Stephen Drury.  The important pieces have held up very well, and even the lesser pieces still are worth hearing at least once.

2. If I wish to try one important piece?

Perhaps “In a Landscape,” on this CD.

3. What if I am looking for a good sampler to reflect his diverse contributions?

Try the Barton Workshop grab bag.

4. Are you pulling my leg?

No.

5. Is aleatory music interesting?

To me, no.

Here is Wikipedia on John Cage.  Here is John Cage on a 1960 game show, being thwarted by a union dispute.  Here is good commentary on that clip.  Here is TNR commentary on that clip.  Cage was also an expert mycologist.  Here are the Italian prizes he won for mushroom identification.  Here is the iTunes prepared piano app.

Here are good quotations from John Cage.

Wisdom, folly, or sunspots?

JPMorgan Chase, though, is taking no chances. It has already created new accounts for a handful of American giants that are reserved for a new drachma in Greece or whatever currency might succeed the euro in other countries.

And:

He added: “Companies are asking some very granular questions, like ‘If a news release comes out on a Friday night announcing that Greece has pulled out of the euro, what do we do?’ In some cases, companies have contingency plans in place, such as having someone take a train to Athens with 50,000 euros to pay employees.”

And:

Bank of America Merrill Lynch has looked into filling trucks with cash and sending them over the Greek border so clients can continue to pay local employees and suppliers in the event money is unavailable.

Here is the article.

Assorted links

1. Austin Frakt replies on Medicare overhead, and here.

2. How many dogs in the world can track the scent of orca whale feces in the open water?  (And does he like to swim?)

3. On-line education is flourishing in much of Asia.

4. The meaning of homes as a Chinese savings vehicle.

5. The Forsaken Liberty Syndrome?

6. German economist Norbert Walter has passed away.

How much would a personal poverty coach help the poor?

There is a new experiment being run in Haiti:

Would a personal assistant help? An experiment here may answer that.

Half of the commune’s 10,000 households are being assigned a “household development agent” — a neighbour who will work as a health educator, vaccinator, epidemiologist, financial analyst, social worker, scheduler and advocate all at the same time. With the agent’s help, a family will assess its needs and come up with a plan to make things better.

“The idea is to forge a relationship from the get-go,” said Maryanne Sharp, an official at the World Bank, which is overseeing the $4 million project. “We want the family to say, ‘Yes, we own the plan and we will work on these objectives on this timetable.’ “

The other 5,000 households will function as a control group, continuing as they have, scrounging out a living in one of Haiti’s poorest and most isolated places.

In two years, the families will be resurveyed and their children and houses re-examined. If those with agents are doing better, then the strategy of coaching people out of poverty may be expanded to the whole country.

I would like to see a third group, which receives cash instead of the assistant or nothing.  By the way, the coaches have received extensive training:

They spent multiple week-long stays in the nearby town of Hinche learning what a vaccine does, how to calculate a dosage and how to give an injection. They learned about ways to purify water and get a micro-finance loan. They learned how to raise consciousness, even as theirs was being raised.

Still, on average they have a 9th grade education.  The coaches also receive bonuses for doing a good job, such as measured by the number of child vaccinations.  Another version of the link is here, with photos.

What is a disability?

 Swimming has 10 classifications for athletes with different physical impairments, plus three more for visual impairments and one for athletes with intellectual deficits. For that reason it is particularly prone to challenges, and swimmers say they sometimes suspect that athletes have not been classified correctly.

Three weeks before she was set to compete in the London Paralympics, Mallory Weggemann, an American swimmer who is paralyzed from the waist down, learned that officials from the International Paralympic Committee had questions about her level of ability and were requiring her to submit to reclassification in London.

And this:

The most notorious example of Paralympic classification manipulation took place at the 2000 Games in Sydney. The Spanish men’s intellectual disability basketball team was stripped of its gold medal after it emerged that many of its members were not intellectually disabled at all.

After that, mentally disabled athletes were barred from the Paralympics while officials revised the classification process; they are back again this year.

The athletes say they sympathize with the difficulties faced by the classifiers, who are forced to determine how to sort people who have several hundred different types and degrees of disability.

There is more here, interesting throughout and yet also more interesting than the article itself as well.

Welsh markets in everything

There was a time when the best you could hope for from prison food might be cold porridge.

But all that is set to change when a bizarre new restaurant opens next month – inside a Welsh prison.

The Clink Cymru, at Cardiff Prison, is the brainchild of award-winning chef Alberto Crisci, who has worked at Marco Pierre White’s Mirabelle Restaurant in Mayfair, London.

All the dishes will be cooked and served by criminals but Crisci insists it is “no gimmick”.

The story is here, hat tip goes to Yana.

Assorted links

1. More on the Harvard cheating scandal, and the cheating isn’t even the interesting part of the story.

2. Jessica Crispin talks with Claudio Magris about his new book.

3. IBM plans pocket Watson for business uses, will it be a Siri-killer?

4. Good update on driverless cars, with some new information.

Charter city watch

The case also underlined the growing status of London’s High Court as the favoured destination for the super-rich of the former Soviet Union to fight their legal battles. It is estimated that more than 60 per cent of the case load of the High Court’s commercial division now comes from Russia and eastern Europe.

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

How high are Medicare overhead costs?

Yuval Levin makes a few points of relevance:

…many of Medicare’s most significant administrative costs are just covered by other federal agencies, and so don’t appear on Medicare’s particular budget, but are still huge costs of the program. The IRS collects the taxes that fund the program; Social Security collects many of the premiums paid by beneficiaries; HHS pays for a great deal of what you would think of as basic overhead, but doesn’t put it on the Medicare program’s budget. Obviously private insurers have to pay for such things themselves. Medicare’s administration is also exempt from taxes, while insurers pay an excise tax on premiums (which is counted as overhead). And private insurers also spend a great deal of money fighting fraud, while Medicare doesn’t. That might reduce the program’s administrative costs, but it greatly increases its overall costs. Some administrative costs save money, after all: The GAO has estimated that a $1 investment in pre-payment review of claims, for instance, would save $21 in improper Medicare payments.

My original source is this Reihan Salam post.  I also would add the deadweight cost of taxation.  Arguably that does not count as a cost of “overhead,” but very often it runs 20% or more and still it is a cost.

Not From the Onion: Harvard Cheaters

The NYTimes reports that Harvard is investigating “what could be its largest cheating scandal in memory.” Attention is focused on about 125 students in one course but Harvard would not say which course. The Harvard Crimson, however, has revealed that the course is “Introduction to Congress”!

I say give the cheaters an A and fail the rest.