Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 528
March 22, 2012
Will Arab Spring lead to democracy?
A new BPEA paper by Eric Chaney (pdf) suggests maybe not:
Will the Arab Spring lead to long-lasting democratic change? To explore this question I examine the determinants of the Arab world's democratic defi cit in 2010. I find that the percent of a country's landmass that was conquered by Arab armies following the death of the prophet Muhammad statistically accounts for this defi cit. Using history as a guide, I hypothesize that this pattern reflects the long-run influence of control structures developed under Islamic empires in the pre-modern era and and that the available evidence is consistent with this interpretation. I also investigate the determinants of the recent uprisings. When taken in unison, the results cast doubt on claims that the Arab-Israeli conflict or Arab/Muslim culture are systematic obstacles to democratic change in the region and point instead to the legacy of the region's historical institutional framework.
Here is a good sentence:
…the fact that the Arab world's democratic defi cit is shared by 10 non-Arab countries that were conquered by Arab armies casts doubt on the importance of the role of Arab culture in perpetuating the democratic defi cit.
And this:
Once one accounts for the 28 countries conquered by Arab armies, the evolution of democracy in the remaining 15
Muslim-majority countries since 1960 largely mirrors that of the rest of the developing world.
International PPP for faculty salaries
Not exactly what I would have thought:
Canada comes out on top for those newly entering the academic profession, average salaries among all professors and those at the senior levels. In terms of average faculty salaries based on purchasing power, the United States ranks fifth, behind not only its northern neighbor, but also Italy, South Africa and India.
You will note however that this is not covering the extreme right hand tail of top faculty salaries in top U.S. universities, but rather a measured mean from public institutions. There is more here, hat tip goes to Jacob Levy. In percentage terms, the biggest gap between entry salaries and top salaries is found in China. There is much more data here.
Selgin reviews Bernanke on the Gold Standard
George Selgin reviews Bernanke's course at GWU. He is not happy:
Bernanke's discussion of the gold standard is perhaps the low point of a generally poor performance, consisting of little more than the usual catalog of anti-gold clichés: like most critics of the gold standard, Bernanke is evidently so convinced of its rottenness that it has never occurred to him to check whether the standard arguments against it have any merit. Thus he says, referring to an old Friedman essay, that the gold standard wastes resources. He neglects to tell his listeners (1) that for his calculations Friedman assumed 100% gold reserves, instead of the "paper thin" reserves that, according to Bernanke himself, were actually relied upon during the gold standard era; (2) that Friedman subsequently wrote an article on "The Resource Costs of Irredeemable Paper Money" in which he questioned his own, previous assumption that paper money was cheaper than gold; and (3) that the flow of resources to gold mining and processing is mainly a function of gold's relative price, and that that relative price has been higher since 1971 than it was during the classical gold standard era, thanks mainly to the heightened demand for gold as a hedge against fiat-money-based inflation. Indeed, the real price of gold is higher today than it has ever been except for a brief interval during the 1980s. So, Ben: while you chuckle about how silly it would be to embrace a monetary standard that tends to enrich foreign gold miners, perhaps you should consider how no monetary standard has done so more than the one you yourself have been managing!
Read the whole thing for more.
Claude Shannon and juggling
As he turned away from academic pursuits, Shannon also focused on inviting aspects: It was a game, a problem, a puzzle. It produced motions he considered beautiful. And it was something he simply could not master, making it all the more tantalizing. Shannon would often lament that he had small hands, and thus had great difficulty making the jump from four balls to five — a demarcation, some might argue, between a good juggler and a great juggler. Old friends — fellow jugglers from the Bell Labs days — wrote encouraging letters suggesting he was closer to five balls than he realized. It's likely Shannon never quite achieved that. Nevertheless, in the late 1970s he found himself consumed by the question of whether he could formulate a scientific theory of juggling to explain its unifying principles. Just as he had done years before — for his papers on cryptography, information, and computer chess — he delved into the history of juggling and took stock of its greatest practitioners.
That is from Jon Gertner's The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. Here is my previous post on the book, which I recommend highly.
Why Don't Women Patent?
In Why Don't Women Patent?, a recent NBER paper, Jennifer Hunt et al. present a stark fact: Only 5.5% of the holders of commercialized patents are women. One might think that this is explained by the relative lack of women with science and engineering degrees but Hunt et al. find that "women with such a degree are scarcely more likely to patent than women without." Instead, most of the difference is "accounted for by differences among those with a science or engineering degree" especially the fact that women are underrepresented in patent-intensive fields such as electrical and mechanical engineering and in development and design.
Predictably, the authors do not ask why women might self-select into non patent-intensive fields, perhaps because this would require at least a discussion of politically incorrect questions. The failure to investigate these questions leads to some dubious conclusions, notably:
Closing the [gender] gap among S&E degree holders would increase commercialized patents by 24% and GDP per capita by
2.7%.
Right; and since only 10% of construction workers are women, closing the gender gap would result in many more houses. In the case of construction, my suspicion is that gender equality would reduce not increase the amount of construction. In the case of patents, I am not sure what would happen, indeed the point is that without a much better understanding of what causes differences in patent proclivities one shouldn't jump to conclusions.
The quick jump from patents to innovation is also unwarranted–there is very little evidence that patents increase innovation. Moreover, most innovations are not patented. If we measured innovation more closely it wouldn't surprise me if women accounted for a larger share of innovation than they do of patents.
By the way, both my wife and I are working to rectifiy these statistics, she has half-a-dozen patents and I have none.
The Spanish ten-year yield
Source here, and here is the latest on Portugal, mostly bad news. German bonds are being perceived as somewhat more risky.
How to raise your child, or yourself, an atheist
That is a discussion from Justin L. Barrett's new and interesting Born Believers: The Science of Children's Religious Belief. He gives more than equal time to how to raise your child to be religious, but we're already pretty good at that. Here are his atheism tips, noting that I am excerpting and paraphrasing:
1. Have less-than-average fluency in reasoning about minds.
2. Do not have children.
3. Stay safe.
4. Get in the habit of crediting or blaming humans for whatever you can.
5. Learn to like pseudoagents (including abstractions).
6. Take time to reflect.
7. Add to these factors indoctrination of the young against religion.
The key theme of Barrett's book is HADD — Hypersensitive Agency Detection Device, and how pronounced it is in most human beings.
March 21, 2012
Markets in everything there is no great stagnation
The sOccket harnesses the kinetic (motion) energy of the soccer ball during normal game play and stores it for later power needs. After play, small electrical appliances, like an LED lamp, can be plugged into the sOccket. Learn more about our first mass-produced sOccket on our blog.
The web page, with lots of pictures, is here. It's not just free energy, one goal is to prevent so many people from dying from kerosene lamps.
For the pointer I thank Brent Depperschmidt.
The Ryan budget proposal
Ezra Klein offers some points of clarification:
Perhaps the simplest way to understand what's going on in Paul Ryan's budget, and whether it's plausible, is to look at page 13 of the Congressional Budget Office's summary of the Ryan plan (pdf). That's where the CBO lists Ryan's assumptions about how future budgets would differ under his proposal and under an alternative, high-deficit scenario. That lets us see where, exactly, Ryan's presumed savings are. And they're not, for the most part, in Medicare.
In 2030, spending on Medicare is .75 percent of GDP lower than in the alternative fiscal scenario. In fact, Ryan and the Obama administration have proposed the same rate of growth for Medicare: GDP + 0.5 percent.
It's Medicaid and other health spending, which includes the Affordable Care Act, where Ryan really brings down the hammer: That category falls by 1.25 percent of GDP. So Ryan's cuts to health care for the poor are almost twice the size of his cuts to health care for the old.
And then there's the "everything else" category, which includes defense spending, infrastructure, education and training, farm subsidies, income supports, veteran's benefits, retraining, basic research, the federal workforce and much, much more. And this category of spending falls by 2.5 percent of GDP.
Putting normative issues aside, I am predicting that something like this is what will happen, and it won't require major Republican victories. In short, those are the most vulnerable interest groups.
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