Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 593

Gas station tacos

R&R Tacqueria, 7894 Washington Blvd. (Rt.1); 410-799-0001, Elkridge, Maryland, 13 minutes north of the 495/95 intersection, look for the Shell sign.

This tacqueria is in a gas station, with two small counters and three chairs to sit on.  It is the best huarache I have eaten, ever, including in Mexico.  It is the best chile relleno I've had in the United States, ever.  They serve among the best Mexican soups I have had, ever, and I have been to Mexico almost twenty times.  I recommend the tacos al pastor as well.  At first Yana and Natasha were skeptics ("Sometimes you exaggerate about food") but now they are converts and the takeaways have vanished.  They even sell Mexican Coca-Cola and by the way the place is quite clean and nice, albeit cramped.

The highly intelligent proprietor is a former cargo pilot from Mexico City and speaks excellent English.  The restaurant is called R&R after the names of his two sons. 

For over twenty years I have sought such a place in the Washington, D.C. area and now I have one.  For over twenty years people have been asking me how can they scratch this itch and now I have an answer.  (The version of this post to appear on tylercowensethnicdiningguide.com will have photos of the food.)

Via Jodi Ettenberg, The Wall Street Journal reports on gas station tacos.

This guy is serious about competing, or the culture that is Philadelphia

"I've been at this for 47 years, and I've never seen mice used as a criminal tool"...

How so?

The owner of a suburban Philadelphia pizza shop was arraigned on Tuesday on charges he schemed to plant live mice in competing pizza parlours in hope of putting them out of business.

Nickolas Galiatsatos, owner of Nina's Bella Pizzeria in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, is accused of putting bags of mice at nearby competitors on Monday afternoon, according to Upper Darby Police Superintendent Michael Chitwood.

The owner of Verona Pizza watched Galiatsatos go into his restroom carrying a bag but emerge empty-handed, and alerted two patrol officers who were in the restaurant, Chitwood said.

The officers found a bag of mice and footprints on a toilet seat, suggesting someone had been trying to reach the ceiling tiles, he said.

For the pointer I thank Daniel Lippman.

Bleeding heart libertarians

That is the name of a new and excellent blog.  The writers include Andrew Jason Cohen, Daniel Shapiro, Jacob T. Levy, James Stacey Taylor, Jason Brennan, and Matt Zwolinski.  They are all worth reading.  Jason Brennan is perhaps not so well known in the blogosphere, but he is already one of the most important classical liberal thinkers in the world and you will be hearing more from him soon.  Here is his post on neoclassical liberalism.

Assorted links

1. Do female members of Congress work harder than the men?

2. Via Craig Newmark, data on the Duke economics Ph.d. students.

3. "The goal is free."

4. Centralized institutions and sudden change, a new paper.

5. A new Peter Chang sighting.

6. The Economist reviews TGS.  (I am pleased that TGS made the NYT bestseller list for eBooks last week at #14; thanks to all of you who bought it and recommended it!)

Markets in everything

"Easy and Affordable Portable Baptism Pools -
that are designed to take a beating as well."

The link is here and for the pointer I thank John Chilton.

File under "There is no Great Stagnation."

The male median wage picture is worse than we had thought

David Leonhardt has the scoop, here is an excerpt from the quoted Michael Greenstone:

The red line is the usual picture of median earnings for full-time men. The problem with this line is that the percentage of men working over time has been declining over time. This attrition or dropping out of the labor force is not random, though, as the decline in full-time work it is disproportionately concentrated among low-skill men. This means that the red line is being propped up by the fact that it is increasingly comprised of higher skilled men.

One sensible correction for this is to calculate the median wage for all men (not just the full-time workers). This is the blue line in the below graph.

Why is this important? The full-time sample (red line) suggests that median wages have been stagnant since 1969. The blue line or full sample of men (which accounts for reduced labor force participation) suggests that median wages have declined by 32% or $15,000 (in constant dollars). [emphasis added by TC]

Wisconsin vs. Texas, on education

This piece is marred by some unfortunate polemics, but it makes one core point very effectively:

To recap, white students in Texas perform better than white students in Wisconsin,black students in Texas perform better than black students in Wisconsin,Hispanic students in Texas perform better than Hispanic students in Wisconsin.

I can't do cut and paste on this Mac, so here is the link: http://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/...

I thank several MR readers for the pointer.

Very good sentences

One of my pet ideas is that people in DC spend way too much time gazing at surveys of the public's hazy opinions on issues and not enough time gazing at surveys of what the public thinks of different kinds of people.

That is from Matt Yglesias, there is more here.

What is the ultimate left-wing novel?

Isaac L. writes to me:

I am hoping you and your readers can help settle an issue. I am a left-leaning voter.  A conservative friend and I recently discussed Atlas Shrugged, which he said was the ultimate right-wing novel. He challenged me to point him towards a left-wing novel that does for that side of politics what Rand does for the right. I think the book needs to do two things: justify the welfare state and argue the limitations of the invisible hand. While I can think of lots of non-fiction texts, I am drawing blank on fictional offerings.

Do you or your readers have any suggestions? Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

What jumps to mind is Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, but if you read the request carefully it does not qualify.  Here is a list of thirty famous left-wing novels, heavy on the mid- to late nineteenth century.  There is Bronte, Dickens, Hugo, Sinclair, Zola, Gorky, Jack London, and Edward Bellamy.  None of these books is as analytically or philosophically comprehensive as the novels of Ayn Rand. 

I would say that the story per se is usually left-wing, in both good and bad ways.  It elevates the seen over the unseen, can easily portray a struggle for justice, focuses on the anecdote, and encourages us to judge social institutions by the intentions of the people who work in them, rather than looking at their deeper and longer-term outcomes.  Precisely because the story is itself so left-wing, there won't be a definitive example of the left-wing novel.  Story-telling encourages context-dependent thinking, although not necessarily in an accurate manner.  One notable feature of Atlas Shrugged is how frequently the story-telling stops for a long speech or an extended dialogue, in order to explain some first principles to the reader.

Canadian data on income stagnation

The median earnings of full-time Canadian workers increased by just $53 annually -- that's right, $53 annually -- between 1980 and 2005.

Here is more, or here.  This is one reason why I do not adhere to some of the progressive or "class struggle" explanations of relative stagnation in median income growth.  Canada is not ruled by the so-called Republican Right.

There is another reason I don't buy the redistributive theory: here is a chart on The Great Stagnation of Capital.

The "class struggle" hypothesis makes at least some sense for 2001-2004, when measured productivity is high but the gains do not accure to the median.  It does not make sense for the last forty years as a whole, or for the international evidence across countries.