Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 49
February 1, 2015
Super Bowl art museum landscape betting lending markets in everything
Seattle Art Museum and New England’s Clark Art Institute are wagering temporary loans of major paintings based on the outcome of Super Bowl XLIX between the Seattle Seahawks and the New England Patriots. The masterpieces that have been anted up showcase the beautiful landscapes of the Northwest and the Northeast respectively.
The article is here, more here, and for the pointer I thank Chris F. Masse.
The new Econ Journal Watch
Symposium co-sponsored by the Mercatus Center:
Economists on the Welfare State and the Regulatory State: Why Don’t Any Argue in Favor of One and Against the Other?
The symposium Prologue suggests that among economists in the United States, on matters of the welfare state and the regulatory state, virtually none favors one while opposing the other. Such pattern is a common and intuitive impression, and is supported by scatterplots of survey data. But what explains the pattern? Why don’t some economists favor one and oppose the other?
Contributors address those questions:
Dean Baker:
Do Welfare State Liberals Also Love Regulation?
Andreas Bergh:
Yes, There Are Hayekian Welfare States (At Least in Theory)
Marjorie Griffin Cohen:
The Strange Career of Regulation in the Welfare State
Robert Higgs:
Two Ideological Ships Passing in the Night
Arnold Kling:
Differences in Opinion Among Economists About Government and Market Efficiency
Anthony Randazzo and Jonathan Haidt:
The Moral Narratives of Economists
Scott Sumner:
Moral Differences in Economics: Why Is the Left-Right Divide Widening?
Cass Sunstein:
Unhelpful Abstractions and the Standard View
The home page for the issue is here.
Consumer rating sentences to ponder
“Highly specific pools of reputation information will become more useful in aggregate,” said Mr. Fertik, co-author with David C. Thompson of “The Reputation Economy,” a guide to optimizing digital footprints. “If you’re a really good Uber passenger, that may be useful information for Amtrak or American Airlines. But if you add in your reputation from Airbnb plus OpenTable plus eBay, it starts to get useful globally.”
There is more here, interesting throughout. But will there be errors in these measurements? As I wrote to Ashok Rao, fresh regressions are a public good.
January 31, 2015
How Andrew Sullivan changed America
I wrote a short piece on this for Vox, here is one excerpt:
Who is the most influential public intellectual of the last 20 years?
This designation should go to someone who actually has helped change the world, rather than just changing lots of minds. It also should go to someone who has embodied key trends of the time, noting that for both standards I am focusing on the United States.
Based on those standards, I am inclined to pick Andrew Sullivan, who is most recently in the news for his announcement that he is quitting after fifteen years of blogging.
Any discussion of Sullivan’s influence must begin with gay marriage. Thirty-six states and the District of Columbia already have legalized gay marriage, representing a majority of the American population, with possibly Alabama and others to follow. A broader Supreme Court decision for nationwide legalization may be on the way. More generally, gay rights have taken a major leap forward.
…I thought long and hard before selecting Andrew for the designation of most influential public intellectual. Perhaps Paul Krugman has changed more minds, but his agenda hasn’t much changed the world; we haven’t, for instance, gone back to do a bigger fiscal stimulus. Peter Singer led large numbers of people into vegetarianism and veganism and gave those practices philosophic respectability; he is second on my list. A generation ago, I would have picked Milton Friedman, for intellectual leadership in the direction of capitalist and pro-market reforms. But that is now long ago, and the Right has produced no natural successor.
Self-recommending! And again, please note, you should not confuse the designation “most influential” with “the person who, I, the reader, would most like to see elevated in status.” That would be a fallacy of mood affiliation.
Arrived in my pile
Doug Hendrie, Amalganations: How Globalisation is Good.
Arnold Thackray, David Brock, and Rachel Jones, Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary.
Jeffrey A. Frieden, Currency Politics: The Political Economy of Exchange Rate Policy, somehow this is oddly relevant these days.
Andrew Levy, Huck Finn’s America: Mark Twain and the Era that Shape His Masterpiece, looks quite good on first glance.
Rafael Yglesias, The Wisdom of Perversity, a novel.
January 30, 2015
The new Syriza government is against all-inclusive resorts
Nonetheless it is considering tolerating them, as we are told by Air Genius Gary Leff. Here is one short bit:
The tourism minister says that even though the Greek Prime Minister is attacking all-inclusive resorts as it identifies problems with the country’s economy, it has no plans to make crackdown on these properties ‘its mission’.
How reassuring. Greece needs some Very Serious People in charge! Right now it doesn’t have them. And as you know, one thing worse than the Very Serious People is…the Not Very Serious People. I think someone told them that all-inclusive resorts might drain off domestic aggregate demand (p.s. investment matters too, including for demand).
Oh, had I mentioned that tourism provides 15% of Greek gdp? (higher by some estimates, perhaps up to 20%). I’m all for debt forgiveness in this context, but right now the Greeks need to get serious or they will tumble off the cliff and soon.
Social media, and sociability, vs. blogging
…blogging, for better or worse, is proving resistant to scale. And I think there are two reasons why.
The first is that, at this moment in the media, scale means social traffic. Links from other bloggers — the original currency of the blogosphere, and the one that drove its collaborative, conversational nature — just don’t deliver the numbers that Facebook does. But blogging is a conversation, and conversations don’t go viral. People share things their friends will understand, not things that you need to have read six other posts to understand.
Blogging encourages interjections into conversations, and it thrives off of familiarity. Social media encourages content that can travel all on its own. Alyssa Rosenberg put it well at the Washington Post. “I no longer write with the expectation that you all are going to read every post and pick up on every twist and turn in my thinking. Instead, each piece feels like it has to stand alone, with a thesis, supporting paragraphs and a clear conclusion.”
The other reason is that the bigger the site gets, and the bigger the business gets, the harder it is to retain the original voice.
That is from Ezra Klein, there is more here. (I recall Arnold Kling making a related point not too long ago, does anyone have the link?)
If you haven’t already noticed, we have no plans to chase traffic from social media, at least not by changing our basic interests and formula.
Here is another thread I found online:
“The majority of time that people are spending online is on Facebook,” said Anthony De Rosa, editor in chief of Circa, a mobile news start-up. “You have to find a way to break through or tap into all that narcissism. We are way too into ourselves.”
There is more here, from David Carr, mostly about selfie sticks and Snapchat. The human desire to be social used to be a huge cross-subsidy for music, as young people used musical taste to discover and cement social alliances. Now we don’t need music so much to do that and indeed music plays a smaller role in the lives of many young people today. This has been bad for music, although arguably good for sociability and of course good for Mark Zuckerberg.
The “problem” is that the web gives people what they want. Those who survive as bloggers will be those who do not care too much about what other people want, and who are skilled at reaping cross-subsidies.
Oxford, Cambridge, Sweden, Singapore, and Canada (from the comments)
Here’s the data on Swedes at Oxford.
The average acceptance rate for EU applicants was 9.2%. For Swedish applicants it was 3.2%.
For 2013, both Oxford and Cambridge accepted 140 students from Singapore, a country of 3.3 million citizens.
They took 26 from Canada, which has 33 million people.
That is from Chip.
Assorted links
1. Chemists find a way to unboil eggs. And the Obama administration targets occupational licensing.
2. Jodi Beggs example database for Principles of Economics course.
3. When writing about China, it is much easier to acknowledge the importance of the top one percent. A very good post, #moodaffiliation.
4. Afghan carpet weavers are putting drones on their rugs.
5. Will new technology lead to ultraropes, much longer elevator shafts, and much taller cities?
6. Why the left wing sometimes finds it hard to succeed, follow-up post here, I’m not saying you should read those through. And do more expensive placebos work better? Original paper here. And here is Ross Douthat on same.
7. People identified through credit card use alone, often as few as four transactions.
8. Interview with Charles Plosser.
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