Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 87
November 17, 2014
Assorted links
China political surgery markets in everything
This passage is from Gao Wenqian’s Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary:
Doctors in China could not conduct major medical procedures on top leaders without the approval of the Politburo Standing Committee. Such was the long-standing rule. Thus, in 1975, Deng Ziaoping and Marshal Ye Jianying, leaders among the old CCP cadres who had generally despised the Cultural Revolution and had shown little enthusiasm for the political style of the mercurial Jiang Qing, now had to negotiate emergency surgery for Zhou Enlai with her allies Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chunqiao. For once, these tough political adversaries managed to see eye-to-eye. They all gave their consent to surgery and sent their decision to Mao, who always had the final say.
Zhou Enlai had four operations before dying of cancer. For the last two operations, however, Mao instructed the doctors to tell Zhou that in fact he was being cured and the tumors were removed. He ceased to believe that when the unbearable pain arrived.
November 16, 2014
Statistical discrimination in Israeli used car markets
Asaf Zussman has a 2013 Economic Journal paper on this topic (pdf, gated), here is the abstract:
Using a combination of randomised field experiments, follow-up telephone surveys and other data collection efforts, this article studies the extent and the sources of ethnic discrimination in the Israeli online market for used cars. We find robust evidence of discrimination against Arab buyers and sellers which, the analysis suggests, is motivated by “statistical” rather than “taste” considerations. We additionall find the Arab sellers manipulate their identity in the market by leaving the name field in their advertisements blank.
That abstract could be more informative, here are some concrete results from the paper, noting that market participants do not wish to start a transaction which will then later end up cancelled:
1. Both questionnaire answers and market behavior show discrimination towards Arabs.
2. “The overall [seller] response rate to emails is 22% higher for the Jewish than for the Arab buyer.”
3. An Arab buyer offering a car’s posted price receives the same amount of response as a Jewish buyer requesting a 5-10% discount off the posted price.
4. Based on questionnaires, unfavorable attitudes towards Arabs are positively correlated with Jewish religiosity and negatively correlated with education.
5. Jewish questionnaire responses are correlated with actual marketplace discrimination against Arab transactors. This concordance of words and action is by no means always the case in other studies of discrimination.
6. Arab buyers discriminate against sellers from their own ethnic group, although not as much as Jews discriminate against Arab sellers.
7. The share of used car advertisements without seller name is 10.8% for Jewish sellers, 29.5% for Arab sellers, and 16.7% for sellers with “shared” names.
You will find ungated versions here, and for the pointer I thank Ben Southwood.
Assorted links
1. Heat your house with someone else’s computer.
2. The depression of George Scialabba.
3. Japanese mag lev trains hit near airplane speeds.
4. I, too, am enjoying Serial.
5. When was the greatest Finnish Great Depression?
6. “Already, we are in the midst of what could be the longest streak of consecutive chocolate deficits in more than 50 years.” The link is here, I bet against us being anywhere close to peak chocolate.
The Great Autocrat Moderation, and when will it end?
We’ve now seen a good twenty-five years of autocrats backing down, ceding power, and refusing to escalate, starting around 1989 if not earlier. Arguably North Korea and Saddam Hussein have been partial exceptions, but even there North Korea has stayed in its shell and Saddam had in fact largely disarmed his WMD. We also see many autocrats — most notably those of China — who pursue remarkably sophisticated courses of action. Just think how much more deftly they handled Occupy Hong Kong than the Ferguson police dealt with their situation. Even the Iranian leaders seem quite sophisticated, even though most of us do not share their goals or endorse their means.
I call it The Great Autocrat Moderation.
If we look back in history, are autocrats generally this rational and conciliatory? I am struck reading the new Andrew Roberts biography of Napoleon how he grew drunk with success and overreached and of course eventually failed (twice). Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao are some additional obvious examples of autocrats who, in terms of procedural rationality, simply collapsed at some point and very dramatically overreached.
Of course these are tricky examples. The most famous autocrats are arguably going to be more subject to overreach, which in part drives their fame (infamy), and so if we consult our historical memories we may be selecting for overreach. Your typical earlier autocrat may have been more rational than this list of ambitious tyrants might imply. Was the typical dictator of Paraguay, historically speaking, really so irrational? Still, it does seem that autocrats have been relatively benign as of late.
So how about Putin? Is he like the autocrats of the last twenty-five years, or he is more like Napoleon and Mussolini with regard to his long-term procedural rationality?
I do not myself expect The Great Autocrat Moderation to continue for much longer. Let us not forget that some autocratic “tournaments” select for overreach, namely the autocrat had to think he could, against long odds, rise to the top and stay there.
I am indebted to a conversation with John Nye about the topics of this blog post.
The fine art of public sector budgeting (for seized assets)
D.C. police have made plans for millions of dollars in anticipated proceeds from future civil seizures of cash and property, even though federal guidelines say “agencies may not commit” to such spending in advance, documents show.
The city’s proposed budget and financial plan for fiscal 2015 includes about $2.7 million for the District police department’s “special purpose fund” through 2018. The fund covers payments for informants and rewards.
As to how the underlying incentives work, this will refresh your memory:
Civil forfeiture laws permit local and state police to take cash, cars, homes and other property from people suspected of involvement in drug trafficking or other wrongdoing without proving a crime has occurred. Police can make seizures under state or federal laws.
Since 2009, D.C. officers have made more than 12,000 seizures under city and federal laws, according to records and data obtained from the city by The Washington Post through the District’s open records law. Half of the more than $5.5 million in cash seizures were for $141 or less, with more than a thousand for less than $20. D.C. police have seized more than 1,000 cars, some for minor offenses allegedly committed by the children or friends of the vehicle owners, documents show.
When D.C. police seize cash or property under District law, the proceeds go into the city’s general fund. But proceeds of seizures made under federal law go directly to the police department through the Justice Department’s Equitable Sharing Program, which allows local departments to join with federal agencies in forfeitures and keep up to 80 percent of the proceeds.
That is all from Robert O’Harrow Jr. and Steve Rich, another installment in their pathbreaking series, scroll down to the bottom of the page for links to the rest.
November 15, 2014
Losing to Win
That is the title of a paper from Kai Steverson, who is on the job market from Princeton this year:
Abstract: We study an infinite horizon model of political competition where parties face a trade-off between winning today and winning tomorrow. Parties choose between nominating moderates, who are more viable, or partisans, who can energize the base and draw in new voters which helps win future elections. Only moderates can win in equilibrium and so the winning party fails to invest in its base and has a weaker future. Hence the longer a party is in power the more likely they are to lose, a pattern that finds strong support in the data. This dynamic also creates an electoral cycle where parties regularly take turns in power.
The paper is here (pdf), Kai’s job market paper on Tiebout competition and minorities is here (pdf), it covers how mobility can lead to a race to the bottom when it comes to protecting the rights of minority workers.
Smart phones and child injuries
Looking at your smart phone may in fact be more interesting than watching your small child, at the margin at least. It seems that some child injuries may be going up for this reason. Here is a new paper (pdf) by Craig Palsson at Yale:
From 2005 to 2012, injuries to children under fi�ve increased by 10%. Using the expansion of ATT’s 3G network, I �find that smartphone adoption has a causal impact on child injuries. This eff�ect is strongest amongst children ages 0-5, but not children ages 6-10, and in activities where parental supervision matters. I put this forward as indirect evidence that this increase is due to parents being distracted while supervising.
Here is Palsson’s other work, I hope he sends me a copy of his Haiti research once it is available.
What a non-Paretian welfare economics would have to look like
An old piece of mine from the early 1990s now seems to have come on line, the introduction to the piece is this:
Although non-Paretian approaches to welfare economics receive considerable attention outside of mainstream economics, they have not received much critical scrutiny. Non-Paretian welfare frameworks, while not necessarily wrong in their present form, are seriously incomplete. I will discuss whether a non-Paretian welfare economics can avoid collapsing into Paretianism, and still serve as a promising model for policy analysis. I warn the reader in advance that no definitive conclusions will be offered.
The pointer is from Adam Gurri, who also thanks Eric Crampton.
Tyler Cowen's Blog
- Tyler Cowen's profile
- 844 followers
