Tyler Cowen's Blog, page 99
October 23, 2014
A Real Life Milgram Experiment
This amazing video, introduced by Philip Zimbardo, discusses a real world Milgram “experiment” in which people obeyed an authority figure to an astounding degree, even when the authority figure was just on the telephone.
The video comes from the Heroic Imagination Project which hopes to use the results of social psychology to help people to take effective action in challenging situations. More videos on obedience to authority, including from Milgram’s experiment, can be found in the resource section along with other social psychology videos and other interesting materials.
Here is one more, this time a little lighter, an experiment in which people find themselves unexpectedly married:
Where’s my flying hoverboard? (Back to the Future)
From The Daily Beast:
Greg and Jill Henderson, founders of Hendo, have developed a real hoverboard. Yes, the flying skateboard that millions of moviegoers have wished were real since Back to the Future Part II premiered back in 1989 may become the must-have Christmas gift for 2015. Using “hover engines” that create frictionless magnetic fields, the hoverboard only appears to hover an inch or two off a metallic floor. It’s not exactly ready for, or usable on, concrete but everything has to start somewhere.
There is more here. It needs something like a copper sheet below it. There are different accounts here, with varying degrees of enthusiasm or lack thereof, I found this one useful. Still, this is more progress than we were seeing a year ago.
China fact of the day
In 2002 Chinese investors spent just $2.7bn on acquisitions and greenfield projects abroad but by 2013 the total had increased 40-fold to $108bn.
From Jamil Anderlini at the FT, there is more here.
October 22, 2014
Where is the external social value for marginal book reading?
Let’s assume books — at the margin of course — bring some external social value, perhaps by stimulating ideas production or by improving the quality of voting and citizenship. If that were the case, at which margin should we look for this external benefit? I can think of a few possibilities:
1. More books should be produced. Yet this hardly seems plausible, as there are so many books produced right now and most of them are largely ignored. In any case, Amazon clearly makes a larger number of books readily accessible, although its lower prices may discourage the number of books longer run.
2. Better books should be produced. Arguably this is true by definition, but it is not a useful means of evaluating most proposed changes to the book market. That said, Amazon creates an open forum for useful reviews. That may improve long-run book quality, or at least lead to a more useful matching of readers with books.
3. Books should be cheaper and thus purchased and read more often. Maybe so, but public libraries give books away for free — great books too — and their shelves are not stripped bare. So making commercial books cheaper will get us only so far. If all books were completely free, reading would go up by only so much, because time and attention would remain scarce. In any case, with reference to the recent debates, Amazon does in fact make books cheaper.
4. Books should be more vivid in the minds of readers. People would read more if the books meant more to them and that is a more effective lever than simply making books cheaper. You will note of course that “buzz” can make books more vivid, and so Piketty’s Capital became a vivid book for a large number of people. They bought it, though most of them did not read past page 26. So even making books more vivid will not necessarily bring about the desired end of additional interested readership. That said, Amazon does create various lists to try to boost the buzz around books, and Amazon tries to raise the relative status of reading and book-buying more generally.
It is in fact not so easy to specify how we might reap significant additional social benefits from the current book market. The real externality, if there is one, lies in improving the humans not the books.
In the meantime, Amazon, in its current configuration, seems to be producing some marginal social benefits.
Venezuela estimate of the day
Venezuela loses $728MM for each 1$ the oil price drops. Assuming oil @ $104 in 2014 and $96 in 2015 Vzla’s $ deficit in 2015 will be $27.8bn
That is from Moisés Naim on Twitter. Here is more on the same topic.
Evidence from opera on the efficacy of copyright
Michela Giorcelli and Petra Moser have a new paper, the abstract is this:
This paper exploits variation in the adoption of copyright laws within Italy – as a result of Napoleon’s military campaign – to examine the effects of copyrights on creativity. To measure variation in the quantity and quality of creative output, we have collected detailed data on 2,598 operas that premiered across eight states within Italy between 1770 and 1900. These data indicate that the adoption of copyrights led to a significant increase in the number of new operas premiered per state and year. Moreover, we find that the number of high-quality operas also increased – measured both by their contemporary popularity and by the longevity of operas. By comparison, evidence for a significant effect of copyright extensions is substantially more limited. Data on composers’ places of birth indicate that the adoption of copyrights triggered a shift in patterns of composers’ migration, and helped attract a large number of new composers to states that offered copyrights.
For the pointer I thank the excellent Kevin Lewis.
October 21, 2014
Wedding ring and ceremony expenditures predict shorter marriage duration
There is a new paper from Andrew M. Francis and Hugo M. Mialon:
In this paper, we evaluate the association between wedding spending and marriage duration using data from a survey of over 3,000 ever-married persons in the United States. Controlling for a number of demographic and relationship characteristics, we find evidence that marriage duration is inversely associated with spending on the engagement ring and wedding ceremony.
What is the mechanism? Are signal-requiring and financial commitment-requiring marriages more likely to be fragile? Or, to put forward a politically incorrect interpretation, do the high expenditures indicate the wife has too much bargaining power in the relationship? That hardly seems like a plausible explanation. By the way, weddings with a large number of attendees are likely to last longer, as are weddings accompanied by honeymoons. Those correlations are easier to understand.
This piece is by a factor of more than five the most frequently downloaded SSRN paper over the last two months.
What I’ve been reading
1. Doris Kearns, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism. This Pulitzer-Prize winning book is compulsively readable and is most valuable on how the Roosevelt and Taft administrations fit together in American history. I wish it had more detail on economic issues.
2. Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution. At first I was bored but the book picks up and is then interesting throughout, most of all I enjoyed the portrait of Bill Gates. It is a good overview of how some of the main pieces of today’s information technology world fell into place, starting with the invention of the computer and running up through the end of the 1990s.
3. Russ Roberts, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness. The best and most readable introduction to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments.
4. Mark Metzler, Capital as Will and Imagination: Schumpeter’s Guide to the Postwar Japanese Miracle. More interesting on Japanese economic history, and in particular postwar economic planning, than on Schumpeter.
5. Jan Swafford, Beethoven: Anguish and Triumph. A consistently excellent and engaging treatment of a figure you cannot read too many books about. It does not seem like a book of 1000+ pages. The funny thing is, this book does not come close to exhausting Beethoven, in fact it barely scratches the surface. It’s as good as the classic Maynard Solomon biography.
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