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June 30, 2006
What is the optimal country size?
As a senior in college I put the language and ethnic data from the CIA Fact book to examine if there was a relationship between ethnic homogeneity and economic performance. National ethnic infighting is bad for growth, so I wondered if that was showing up in the economic statistics. While most multi-ethnic countries are basket cases, but so are many single ethnic ones so I needed to disentangle the two. Japan is an almost ethnically and linguistically homogeneous and rich, while the US is heterogeneous and rich. Haiti is homogeneous and poor, and Russia is heterogeneous and poor.
Unfortunately, I didn't have access to time series data on homogeneity, so I had to look at current per-capita income versus homogeneity coefficients (measured with herfendal index). I didn't find any association.
A new paper at the NBER has found what I could not.They tackled the problem in a different way. They measure the extent to which a state is artificial. A state is artificial if political boundires don't coincide with the actual distribution of ethnic borders. They use two measures of this:
One is relatively simple and captures whether or not an ethnic group is "cut" by a political border line......a second measure, based upon the assumption that if a land
border is close to a straight line it is more likely to be drawn arti ficially i.e. by former colonizers; if it is relatively squiggly it is more likely to represent either geographic features (rivers, mountains etc.) and/or represent divisions carved out in time to separate different people. This second measure probably come closer to capturing instances in which lines drawn at former colonizerstables
have stuck to the ground.
They talk about looking at island nations as a control, which is interesting. This allows them to calculate a baseline of natural with which to measure the artificiality of drawn borders. They could have also used water borders to further calibrate what is a natural level of disorder in a boundary, and what was likely drawn by a dead white guy with a ruler. They don't just try to use economic variables.
We consider three groups of variables as left hand side variables. (See Table 3 for variable definitions and sources). First, the variables that measures economic or economic policy success: (log of) per capita income in 2002; an index of economic freedom in 2005 that measures adherence to a free market economic system; and an alternative index of economic freedom averaged over 1970-2002.12 Second, we look at politico-institutional variables: voice and accountability (which measure checks on power), political stability and violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and corruption. Third, we use quality of life and public goods delivery-related measures: infant mortality in 2001, literacy rate averaged over the period 1995 2002; measles immunization rate in 2002; immunization rate against DPT in 2002, percent of population with access to clean water, in 2000.
They find that for just about every variable of interest they have a significant impact:
Of the 28 coefficients in the first two columns, 20 are
statistically signi fficant (5 per cent or better) and there are borderline (p value 0.10 or better). Our two measures are not highly correlated with each other and in fact as discussed above, they capture different aspects of the nature of borders. For this reason there is no reason why they could not be used in the same regressions. In the third column, we use them both. IN all regressions at least one is signi cant at the 5 per cent level or better and in almost all regressions they are either both statistically signiffi cant at the 5% level or one is and the other is borderline.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:17 PM | Comments (0)
June 29, 2006
Should we bring back Corporal Punishment?
Stumbling and Mumbling suggests that we should after a proposal to reintroduce it to the UK. I'm not sure if doing so would be legal in the US because of the eight amendment, but perhaps it is worth considering. As a punishment, it fulfills the publics desire for retribution, but it is also cheap (it costs 32k to put someone in jail for a year in NY state). It could be perfect for first time offenders. One of the serious concerns of criminal punishment is that by putting young perps with hardened felons they learn the skills and social norms of criminals. They then have a harder time merging into society. So form first time offenders in crimes with low recidivism rates we could make criminals restitute their victims, and punish them wish a caning or pillory.
Maybe this isn't even cruel. Perhaps it is cruel to take a man who screwed up once (even if badly) and condemn him to a spell in jail after which he'll likely never work again in a decent job. Maybe he'd choose a canning and fine over the jail spell. And if he chose it would it be cruel?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:23 AM | Comments (0)
June 28, 2006
Why are Americans fatter than Europeans?
Is it because we are happier (more of us on antidepressants), live more comfortably (air conditioning) and we smoke less...
From Bloomberg...Obesity May Be Blamed on Medicine, Air Conditioning, Study Says
2006-06-27 00:04 (New York)
By Ryan Flinn
June 27 (Bloomberg) -- The growing problem of obesity in the
past three decades could be attributed to an increase in anti-
depressants, air conditioning and the declining number of
smokers, according to a study.
These factors are among 10 listed by researchers who want
the public and other academics to examine reasons for the rapid
surge in obesity since 1970. They said too much attention has
been paid to the ``Big Two'' -- food-marketing practices and a
decline in physical activity.
``What we refer to as the `Big Two' are not the overall
major causes of obesity, and certainly are not the sole causes,''
said one of the study's authors, David Allison, from the
University of Alabama at Birmingham. ``There are multiple other
causes likely to be important.''
The report, published today in the International Journal of
Obesity, cited a study that found no association between obesity
and proximity to fast-food restaurants in more than 7,000
children. The report also said Pathways, a large childhood
obesity prevention program that emphasizes physical education
classes, had no effect on body mass index rates, a method for
measuring size.
Allison said another factor that merits attention includes
the increase of psychotropic medications such as anti-psychotics,
anti-depressants and mood stabilizers, as well as contraceptives
and antihistamines, all of which can cause weight gain.
Air Conditioning
An increase in air conditioning also could be an important
aspect to the increase in obesity. Mammals burn energy keeping
their bodies within a certain temperature range, so the more we
live and work in temperature-regulated environments, the less
likely we are to expend energy. People also eat less when they
are too warm.
``Yesterday in Alabama, it was 100 degrees,'' Allison said
last week in an interview. ``If you were here in 1960, with no
air conditioning in a car or restaurant, you probably wouldn't
want to go to the all-you-can-eat buffet.''
Other causes listed in the report include adults getting
less sleep, mothers giving birth later in life and an increase of
endocrine disruptors, or industrially produced materials such as
PCBs, DDT, and other pesticides, in the environment.
Further research shows smokers weigh less than non-smokers,
and that people who quit smoking gain weight. Not that the
Allison thinks people should take up smoking, quit their
medications, or spend their summers sweating.
``I haven't made any personal changes,'' he said. ``This
isn't the kind of paper where I would say the public should run
out and take personal action.''
Allison's goal is to generate additional research in these
areas and prompt people to question decisions to spend tax money
on public policy programs to reduce obesity without solid
evidence.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:20 PM | Comments (1)
June 27, 2006
Wow
On Sunday the BlueEyedGirl became Mrs. OneEyedMan.
She was beautiful and happier than I'd ever seen her. I was euphoric, and was so busy greeting, dancing, and talking that I had neither the time nor the interest to eat much. The music, the dancing, the service and the food were amazing and beyond expectations. Our parents were perfect. Our families were great, revelrous, passionate, and joyous. Our friends toasted, roasted and cheered us, vivacious, loving, and simply happy for us.
At 5:30 PM the kids and the older folks headed home. My mother took the gifts, flowers, and cake-top home, leaving us free for a bit more partying. We and our friends walked through the sea port to a bar as tourists marveled and took pictures at the army in semi-formal dress lead by their queen in white. We partied at a bar for another few hours, toasting, cheering, eating, and telling stories. Then we hopped in a taxi to our hotel to spend an evening and a day luxuriating.
To everyone that helped and attended thanks for making it the best day of my life.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 9:21 AM | Comments (1)
June 22, 2006
What to bring back
SF Gate has an interesting bit on what you can (and should) bring home with you and what stuff the FDA and USDA will keep you from bringing in.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:09 AM | Comments (0)
June 21, 2006
I'm a free rider
I like to go to the movies. The blue eyed girl and I don't agree on that many movies, so I don't see as many as I used to, but I happily shell out my $10 for my 2 hours of a movie in ice-box cold darkness.
But I, like many movie goers, hate the commercials and expensive food that make movie going less fun than I remember it being as a little kid. But it turns out that this is an absolutely critical part of the the movie theater business model. If we average the cost of showing the movie across all tickets we see that:
$3.62 of your movie ticket goes to the movie industry. (film rental and advertising costs)
$1.27 goes to theater rent (more in NY, that's probably most of the difference in ticket price)
$3.90 cover general and administrative expenses plus depreciation
Add that up and you see that it is far more than the $6.80 average national ticket price.
The revenue from in theater advertising and from marked up concessions is what keeps these theaters afloat. So in a sense, by closing my eyes for the advertisements s and buying my candy at the drug store, I free ride on those with different taste. But as long as I don't go to sold out shows, the opposite is also true. By increasing the base of ticket sales, I actually hold down the costs that must be assigned to the popcorn eaters, and so I allow lower ticket prices for them. They win and so do I.
This is much like my dad's argument about all those other countries that buy American drugs for less than we can buy them here. Yes we subsidize them. But by increasing the economies of scale and allowing some profit to tickle in, they actually hold down costs for American drug buyers and expand our medical choices.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:38 PM | Comments (0)
June 20, 2006
The vacation / income tradeoff
The chart below looks at several industrialized countries and measures their hours worked over time as well as their current productivity levels. This is a stupid chart, because it seduces us with a false or at least unsupported conclusion, that work you can work less and produce more because you'll be better rested. Charts like this one are often used to dismiss the economic success of America, with the argument that we don't have the most productive workforce in the world*.
We know that countries vary in non-economic barriers to job creation. Between minimum wages rules, strict labor laws, mandatory vacation (see the next chart) and employer paid taxes, the the true minimum productivity of any employee before it becomes economical to employ them on the margin can vary a great deal between economies. That directly causes much of the variation in average productivity we see in this chart. If you don't produce enough to pay for a state mandated good job (the only legal kind) you just get to be unemployed and then you don't count in the numerator (aggregate output) or the denominator (total hours worked).
Now Norway, which tops the productivity chart also has lower unemployment than the us, but Norway's workforce participation rate is a percent lower than that of the US. So they might actually be more productive than the US is, but not by as much as this chart suggests. Especially when you consider vacation.
Then take a look at this chart, which examines vacation time in the same countries. Notice that in each case the average vacation is significantly above the legal minimum. In the case of Norway, despite a four week minimum, the average is six and a half weeks.
Consider what this does to the employee's decision making. I know that I have to pay a princely sum to get others to do my chores, so instead I spend my vacation doing things like painting my home. I read a great example of this in action but can't seem to find it. The vacation becomes a way of compensating employees without paying taxes on that compensation.
So I guess it all comes down to what you mean by productivity. If you mean what would the economy's economic output be if you increased labor by one, then perhaps this chart is of some value. On the other hand, if what you really care is who has the better capital and labor stocks then in modeling the labor force you have to control for the effects of work force participation, and total hours worked or all you are measuring is the productivity of the last employee that is legal to employ.
The charts in this entry come from an article in Foreign Policy "The Influential Tourist"
Posted by OneEyedMan at 3:21 PM | Comments (0)
June 19, 2006
Are Syrian nationalists changing Wikipedia entries?
Today I was playing a little game I invented called Dilettante. Dilettante is played using Wikipedia, and you start by going to a random article on the site. Then you read the article, and try to find a link that goes to something that interests you. Then, without going revisiting any old page, you leap from page to page, reading articles that interest you until you run out of time or can't visit any new pages of interest.
So, as I was saying, I'm playing Dilettante and I get to the General Electric page. Then I notice this line in the middle "Between 1927 and 1935, 52 different inventions in electricity were introduced to the company by Hassan Kamel Al-Sabbah. " GE is one of the world's biggest companies any way you measure it, and here is 1% of the article's words devoted to an engineer of minor historical significance. That's weird.
Last year a high profile comparison came out between Britannica and Wikipedia, finding Britannica only slightly more accurate. Britannica responded to the Nature article, essentially saying that many of the things that appeared to be factual errors in Britannica were in fact differences of opinion among experts.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:47 PM | Comments (0)
June 15, 2006
Eat your own dog food
Paul Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb in 1968. He essentialy predicted that the population explosion of the 20th century would result in massive resource overconsumption. As a result, he predicted that massive famine and social colapse would spread globally. He opens the book saying, "I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time." Yet he has a daughter, who Lisa Marie Ehrlich, who judging from the date of her PhD, must have been born right about the same time as his wife was pregnant with their her child.
I mean, I know that everyone is a hypocrite, but come on, predicting worldwide famine, becoming famous for it, making it the center of your public life and having a kid anyway?
Wow, that's hard to imagine.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 11:44 AM | Comments (0)
June 14, 2006
Flag Day
Today is flag day. It honors the anniversary of the the adoption of the flag of the United States, which happened, by resolution of the Second Continental Congress, on June 14, 1777.
Few nations have a dedicated flag production capacity, with fabric printers doing the work part-time as needed. However, the difficulty in sewing on 50 stars on the US flag has ensured such capacity exists in the US.
63% of those surveyed said the U.S. Constitution "should not be amended to prohibit burning or desecrating the American flag". However, among likely voters only 39% do not support flag burning amendments. Although flag burning is legal, only 33% of those surveyed answered correctly that it was legal to do so.
Interestingly, a man was arrested in April for burning a Mexican flag at a rally where US flags were also burned but no one was arrested for that.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:43 PM | Comments (0)
June 13, 2006
Tablet PC
I've been thinking about getting a tablet PC for when I start school. I like the Levano x41 Tablet PC. It weighs in at weighs about 4 pounds with the big battery, and P4 1.60GHz with 512 memory and 60 gigs of hard drive space. PC Mag made it their editors choice in a tablet. Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions about buying and using a tablet PC?
You can see a video review here.
The next model is the X61, which was supposed to be out in April but isn't.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:52 PM | Comments (0)
June 12, 2006
A snapshot of a bad company
Imagine if you could read the cuneiform tablets of Sodom and Gamorah from before their destruction. Or could hear radio communications from the Khmer Rouge before and during their genocidal terror. You might get insight into the nature of evil. Why do good men do nothing? Why does it grow? What are its weaknesses?
Here we can have a taste of that on a different scale. A much lesser evil, but documented in much greater detail. It seems that the people at InBoxer, manufacturers of corporate internal spyware tool, have the entire Enron email database loaded into their software, so you can see how their tool would have helped you to find some of the rotten apples in that barrel.
IT looks like an interesting idea, but judging from the demo, the UI is horrible. Like many badly design web-applications it combines flaws (and some strengths) of web sites and offline applications.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:15 PM | Comments (0)
How are they getting these drugs anyway?
Boing Boing turned me on to an article from the Washington Post. There seems to be worry of a rush of "smart drug" abuse after a survey from the University of Delaware.
Something caught my eye.
Almost 90 percent reported at least occasional use of "smart pills" at crunch times such as final exams, including Adderall, Ritalin, Strattera and others. Of those, three-quarters did not have a legitimate prescription, obtaining the pills from friends."
That suggests that 22% of University of Delaware students are on ADD drugs.
Doesn't that sound awfully high? We've all heard stories about Ritalin abuse. Wikipedia said that "...the number of children in America taking Ritalin is estimated at one to two percent". Since it is by far most commonly prescribed drug to treat ADHD, one imagines that the others don't make up another 20%.
So at least one thing in here is wrong. Probably everything.
I also noticed something about the end of the article. Eric R. Kandel winner of the the 2000 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work of the biology of memory, has found drugs that improves memory in mice by "20 percent to 50 percent". I wonder what that means. Does that mean that you can memorize 20 to 50 longer mazes? Because, to me remembering a 20-50% longer puzzle isn't just 20-50% harder, it is one, maybe two orders of magnitude harder. Take memorizing a phone number as someone dictates it to you without a pen is difficult, but most people can retain it, at least briefly. Fifty percent more, at 15 digits starts to get very hard.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 1:46 PM | Comments (2)
June 9, 2006
Two 'The Onion' articles perfect capture the Blue eyed lady's friends
Two Hipsters Angrily Call Each Other 'Hipster'
and
Goddamn Findings Fail To Support Researcher's Hypothesis
Posted by OneEyedMan at 10:13 AM | Comments (0)
June 8, 2006
Maybe it is just the hair but...
Did you notice that Abu Musab al-Zarqaw, head of Al Queda in Iraq and killed by US forces yesterday, looks just like Pavarotti?
Oh, and did you notice that Daniel Vosovic of project runway fame looks just like Marten Reed of Questionable content?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:22 PM | Comments (0)
This is what an un-nuetral net looks like...
Ad rants tipped me off that that the Cox cable company appears to be blocking their broadband subscribers from reaching Craig´s list. The speculation is that because they also own a personal listing service, they want to encourage consumers to use Cox resources instead.
If this is true, it is the first net neutrality violation I´ve heard about, at least if you don´t count bandwidth motivated restrictions like Verizon DSL blocking port 80.
Why would anyone want to keep Cox as their ISP given better behaved alternatives exists?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 12:09 PM | Comments (0)
June 7, 2006
Sure, hindsight is 20-20
Is it possible that if D-Day happened a year earlier that there would have been no Yalta Conference, communism would have been much weaker, and two million fewer Jewish lives would have been lost to the holocaust?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:37 PM | Comments (0)
June 6, 2006
Why not allow big love?
Given that homosexuals are usually estimate at 5%-10% of the population, I was interested to learn that "probably less than 3 percent of men in Egypt had more than one wife"
If on average those that do have three wives (a maximum of four is permitted by Islamic law if the man can support and love them), we are talking about a small net effect on gender imbalances. In fact, when I discussed it before in the context of jail and homosexuality, I showed that there already was a serious imbalance of marriageable women to men, of at least 5%, so that 6% of women might end up in polygamous relationships would merely bring the genders back into balance.
Marginal revolution discusses feels that polygamy would hurt capital formation. On the other hand, others have argued that it is also better for single women, who get a larger pool of good mates.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 6:12 PM | Comments (0)
June 5, 2006
Remind me again why state ID makes sense?
I've had some business at the DMV, and they want me to get my Social Security Card before they will help me. I wasn't sure if I had one, because my mother was out of town and if she had it then it was buried in a pile of old documents. But there is an SSA office across the street from my office, so I thought this would be easy.
The SSA wants the following to establish identity:
U.S driver's license
U.S State-issued non-driver identity card
U.S passport
Military ID
Employee ID Card
Medical Records
School ID cards
What do you notice about that list?
They fall into two categories, things that already require a social security card to get (U.S driver's license or non-driver id), or stuff that doesn't require that actually prove who you are (school's and hospitals don't really check ID, you just need to fill out the forms. The passport seems superficially to be in the requires SSN category because they want you to use a license to get one, but it turns out that some testifying that you are who you say you are is good enough.
What is the point of all this? To make it harder for criminals to get fake identities? In the end, serious criminals can have the time and motivation to get a birth certificate of someone who died young, then get a fake passport with an accomplice. They can then get a fake passport, using it to get a fake SS card, and finally get a fake drivers license. Then they have an entirely fake identity. This near pointless security measure is a serious burden to the citizen who's life passions burn down in a fire.
What's the alternative?
The answer is to trust any one piece of ID less, and require more of them. The idea of a monolithic piece of ID like the drivers license encourages the false sense of security that you have positively identified an individual.
A few weeks ago my brother and I were returning from a trip to Canada. We look similar, despite having different haircuts and being a few years apart. We went through customs together and the agent had so much difficulty telling us apart that he forgot to ask us any questions about our visit. I ask you, in a world where that happens, does it really make sense to take a drivers license or passport seriously as a dispositive form of ID? And if we can't use licenses and passports that way, why bother making it as difficult as we do to get one?
Posted by OneEyedMan at 4:02 PM | Comments (0)
June 1, 2006
What should I major in?
You might be interested to know that economics is the only undergraduate major associated with higher earnings after becoming a lawyer. Now is this because the smarter or more ambitious people who become lawyers major in economics or because it actually ads to human capital?
They also foun that an MBA and a PhD also ads to earning power, so maybe it is time to consider Vanderbilt’s PhD Program in Law & Economics or the Levy Fellowship at George Mason.
Posted by OneEyedMan at 5:45 PM | Comments (0)