1. Can we ever do better than the toilet?
3. Ezra Klein post on the platinum coin.
6. David Brooks reviews Jared Diamond.
7. The nature of Japanese fiscal stimulus.
As recommended by the excellent Kevin Lewis, find them here, a round-up of recent research.
For the pointer I thank Rob Raffety.
The Quality Cafe doesn’t even function as a real diner anymore. It stopped serving meals in 2006, but it’s been doing pretty well for itself as a film location over the past few decades … So now you know: If you ever get the feeling that all the diners used in Hollywood movies look the same, that’s because they probably are.
There is more here. And from elsewhere, here is a market in a feline lap surrogate. And here is how to keep your kid’s gaming down.
Call this optimistic or pessimistic, either way:
“In Japan, no civilian is allowed to have a gun,” he stated simply. “In order to prevent atrocious crimes using firearms, possession of small arms was banned in 1965, with strict penalties for violations of the law. As time has gone on the penalties have increased and every year we try to drive down the number of people owning guns.”
Japan does allow the possession of hunting rifles and air guns (for sporting use), but the restrictions and checks are extremely strict.
And there is this:
Under current laws, if a low-level yakuza is caught with a gun and bullets that match, he’ll be charged with aggravated possession of firearms and will then face an average seven-year prison term. Simply firing a gun carries a penalty of three years to life. And for the “accomplice” reasons above, a yakuza boss may decide a death sentence is more appropriate if his thug miraculously gets released on bail before going to jail.
One mid-level yakuza boss told me, “Having a gun now is like having a time bomb. Do you think any sane person wants to keep one around the house?”
The police are not given a free hand in using guns either. Internal controls make it very difficult for a gun or even a single bullet to fall into the hands of criminals.
“When we go to the firing range, we get an allotted number of bullets, Detective X said. “When we’re done firing, we collect the shells and return the gun. If one shell is missing, the police station goes into a panic.”
The full story is here, courtesy of the ever-excellent Wonkbook.
I read them a while ago, and both were excellent (and short!):
Enrique Vila-Matas, Bartleby & Co.
and
Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star.
1. There is no great stagnation, toddler edition.
2. Michael Gibson is now blogging at Forbes, including on education and tech stagnation.
3. By Philip Wallach, what really to do about the debt ceiling.
4. Wade Davis reviews Jared Diamond.
6. Long and very good Economist piece on whether there is a great stagnation in technology.
7. Jim Manzi on lead and crime.
Most of all I thought of him as a moralist and one of our best moralists. I don’t mean an ethical philosopher (though he did that too), but a personal moralist and a judge of all that was around him. His advocacy of a 100% inheritance tax is essential to understanding the man, as was his dislike of northeastern elites, a category to which he was never quite sure if I belonged. He was a dedicated romantic who, after an intellectually traumatic encounter with Frank Knight, was looking for new, non-religious foundations for some rather old-fashioned views, often of a regional nature (Buchanan was from Tennessee). He remains one of the least well understood and least accessible economics Nobel Laureates, and I don’t foresee that changing anytime soon.
Woe to the man caught shirking by Buchanan. He was up every day, working at 6 a.m., and expected not much less from others.
He was not always easy to have as a colleague. He created a world around himself, intellectually, socially, and otherwise, and he lived in no other world but his own.
Betty Tillman was an essential ingredient behind his success, and over the years I grew to understand her managerial and advisory talent for Jim and for the Public Choice Center more generally.
His Better than Plowing is one of the underrated autobiographies of economics.
He favored titles with alliteration, such as The Calculus of Consent, The Limits of Liberty, and The Reason of Rules, three of his best books.
Jim was a splendid manager of collaborations and brought out in the best in Gordon Tullock, Geoff Brennan, Dick Wagner, Yong Yoon, and others. Institution-building was another important part of his legacy. Not just the Center for Study of Public Choice, but also Mont Pelerin, Atlas, Liberty Fund, and the Institute for Humane Studies were all important to him, among other groups.
Some of his key phrases were:
“the relatively absolute absolutes” (don’t ask)
“Don’t get it right, get it written”
and, most of all:
“Onward and upward”
He made us all better and I will always miss him.
From Barry Eichengreen, Donghyun Park, and Kwanho Shin:
We analyze the incidence and correlates of growth slowdowns in fast-growing middle-income countries, extending the analysis of an earlier paper (Eichengreen, Park and Shin 2012). We continue to find dispersion in the per capita income at which slowdowns occur. But in contrast to our earlier analysis which pointed to the existence of a single mode at which slowdowns occur in the neighborhood of $15,000-$16,000 2005 purchasing power parity dollars, new data point to two modes, one in the $10,000-$11,000 range and another at $15,000-$16,0000. A number of countries appear to have experienced two slowdowns, consistent with the existence of multiple modes. We conclude that high growth in middle-income countries may decelerate in steps rather than at a single point in time. This implies that a larger group of countries is at risk of a growth slowdown and that middle-income countries may find themselves slowing down at lower income levels than implied by our earlier estimates. We also find that slowdowns are less likely in countries where the population has a relatively high level of secondary and tertiary education and where high-technology products account for a relatively large share of exports, consistent with our earlier emphasis of the importance of moving up the technology ladder in order to avoid the middle-income trap.
The NBER version is here, does anyone know of an ungated version?
In the tiny tortillerias of this city, people complain ceaselessly about the high price of corn. Just three years ago, one quetzal — about 15 cents — bought eight tortillas; today it buys only four. And eggs have tripled in price because chickens eat corn feed.
…In a country where most families must spend about two thirds of their income on food, “the average Guatemalan is now hungrier because of biofuel development,” said Katja Winkler, a researcher at Idear, a Guatemalan nonprofit organization that studies rural issues. Roughly 50 percent of the nation’s children are chronically malnourished, the fourth-highest rate in the world, according to the United Nations.
1. Upstart.com, venture investing in human capital.
2. This American Life covers Honduran charter cities.
3. Where does the stochastic discount factor come from?
4. Life of Pi is a global hit.
5. How to pick a husband if you want kids.
6. Panagariya defends Indian cash transfers.
Here a number of appreciations and memories of Jim Buchanan. Steve Horwitz has a good, concise summary of some of his intellectual contributions:
Buchanan’s work changed political economy in fundamental ways. Thanks to him and his colleagues, three things are true: No one who wishes to talk responsibly about politics can be ignorant of public choice theory. No one should ever invoke the language of market failure (including externalities) without having digested his work on government failure. And people who run around talking about the constitution better be able to understand something of his contributions to constitutional political economy.
I agree entirely with Robert Higg’s portrait:
I first encountered Jim when he came to Johns Hopkins to present a seminar paper while I was a graduate student there, in 1967, as I recall. He did not make a good impression on me then. His presentation, like all his work, was nontechnical, and Hopkins specialized in a much more formal, mathematical style of economic analysis. When Professor Bela Belassa asked him a technical question, Jim shrugged it off as if its answer didn’t matter much one way or the other. In the grad students’ minds, this attitude toward the very sorts of things we were agonizingly trying to master suggested that he was a lightweight. In this respect, we could scarcely have been more wrong.
Indeed, the hallmark of Buchanan’s work from beginning to end was a deep seriousness of purpose and procedure that not many economists have matched in the past century. Unlike the typical mainstream economist, Jim was never just fooling around, toying with a tweaked model or a trivial, throw-away idea. To a rare degree, he kept his eyes focused on the prize of true economic understanding.
…. He gave me a deeper understanding of the market process than anyone else had given me. He raised many worthwhile questions that I continue to ponder. He offered me a shining example of the economist as a serious thinker, not simply an idiot savant fooling with models.
The NYTimes quotes Tyler:
Over the years since Dr. Buchanan won the Nobel, much of what he predicted has played out. Government is bigger than ever. Tax revenue has fallen far short of public programs’ needs. Public and private borrowing has become a way of life. Politicians still act in their own interests while espousing the public good, and national deficits have soared into the trillions.
…In a commentary in The New York Times in March 2011, Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason, said his colleague Dr. Buchanan had accurately forecast that deficit spending for short-term gains would evolve into “a permanent disconnect” between government outlays and revenue.
“We end up institutionalizing irresponsibility in the federal government, the largest and most central institution in our society,” Dr. Cowen wrote. “As we fail to make progress on entitlement reform with each passing year, Professor Buchanan’s essentially moral critique of deficit spending looks more prophetic.”
Writing in the Wall Street Journal our colleague Don Boudreaux also points to Jim’s work on the true burden of the debt–stop the we owe it to ourselves madness! Lars Christensen looks at one of Buchanan’s many interesting ideas, the brick standard for monetary policy. Randall Holcombe remembers his teacher. The Washington Post and Bloomberg offer useful commentaries as does political scientist Tim Groseclose.
Of course you should not ignore Buchanan’s own writings which spans more than 20 volumes, 10 of which are available online. Buchanan’s classic Politics without Romance offers a short introduction as does his Nobel lecture.
Buchanan’s Nobel lecture illustrates why, even today, many other economists don’t get Buchanan. While other economists are looking for “efficiency” and “optimality” in models Buchanan had a very different concept of welfare economics.
[Buchanan]…sought to bring all available scientific analysis to bear in helping to resolve the continuing question of social order: How can we live together in peace, prosperity, and harmony, while retaining our liberties as autonomous individuals who can, and must, create our own values?
On a personal note, I was fortunate to have Buchanan both as a teacher and as a colleague. He founded the Center for Study of Public Choice that today I direct.
Buchanan wrote not for the hour or the day but for the age and his influence will continue far into the long run.
I am headed there this morning for a Liberty Fund conference. In terms of the list, I came up with a bunch rather quickly:
1. Writer: Miguel Ángel Asturias. I don’t see why he isn’t a bigger deal with U.S. readers, given that he won a Nobel Prize for literature. His Hombres de maíz is a beautiful book. There is also Francisco Goldman.
2. Blogger, tweeter, and economist: Andres Marroquin.
3. Painter: Julian Chex, from the naive school of Comalapa, and some of his relatives too. Carlos Mérida is also Guatemalan and not Mexican as many believe.
4. Movie, set in: You’ve got Predator and El Norte, for a start. As for filming, the Star Wars medal ceremony was shot in part in Tikal National Park, scroll all the way down here.
The country has some of the best textiles in the world and in great profusion. It has an important university with a superb museum. A hotel run by Frances Coppola. And much more.
The Humane Studies Fellowship is a non-residency fellowship program that awards $2,000-$15,000 per year to each participant, and provides individual advising and a support network to foster academic success.
Here is more information.
At this time last year, the price of a frozen, euthanized mouse was 45 cents.
But now, that price has nearly doubled, said Diane Johnson, executive director of Operation WildLife Inc. And the 25-year-old animal rehabilitation clinic known as OWL is “struggling” as a result.
Here is more, and for the pointer I thank Matt F.
