Tag: inequality

Microeconomics and Credit Card Reward Points

A lovely little article in the New York Times is worth a ponder, especially if you are a student of microeconomics:

There’s an undeniable feeling of excitement when you turn your daily credit card swipes at Starbucks into first-class airfare or a weekend jaunt to Costa Rica. Thanks to mobile banking and the ease of autopay, you can scrupulously avoid any additional costs by paying your monthly bill in full. Free flights and exclusive discounts abound.
Something for nothing, right?
Not exactly nothing. Credit card perks for educated, usually urban professionals are being subsidized by people who have less. In other words, when you book a hotel room or enjoy entry to an airport lounge at no cost, poor consumers are ultimately footing the bill.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/04/opinion/credit-card-rewards-points-poor-interchange-fees.html

As you probably already know, one can “earn” reward points for spends on your credit card. You can then use these points to buy stuff, or earn cashbacks on these points, or spend them at partner stores. And there are other perks and benefits too. If you’ve travelled through an Indian airport, you might have seen the crowd waiting to get into an airport lounge – more often than not, access is tied to the kind of credit card you have in your wallet.

But remember, there is no such thing as a free lunch. You may not be paying for these perks as a credit card holder, but one of the first lessons of economics is that somebody, somewhere, is paying for it. So who is paying, in this case? As the last sentence in the excerpt makes clear, according to the article, that someone is the group of poor consumers.

Some background, based partially on the article in question, and partially on my own understanding of this space:

  1. Richer consumers are likely to spend more, but tend to not revolve much, if at all. To this group of consumers, a credit card is a way to get a (up to) 45 day interest free loan, with the added bonus of these reward points to boot. Remember, incentives matter – and these reward points are the carrot that is offered to people in order to get them to sign up.
  2. Dangling these reward points as a carrot makes business sense, for that allows a credit card company to sign up folks who will spend more via these credit cards. Credit card companies make money when people “revolve” – that is, when they spend using their credit cards, but do not pay up the entirety of their credit card bill on time. How much money do these companies make? Here, take a look.
  3. So consumers who take a credit card, spend a lot on it, and pay back the entirety of their credit card bill – these kinds of customers are actually a loss-making proposition for the credit card company.
  4. Consumers who spend a fair bit, find themselves unable to repay the entirety on time, and end up paying over months (if not years) – these customers are where the credit card companies earn their bread and butter (and jam and peanut butter, while they’re at it).
  5. Consumers who borrow a lot using their credit cards, and default on these loans – these are the very worst type of consumers for credit card companies. Risk departments in such firms exist to predict which consumers should be denied access to credit cards, and which of the existing customers are likely to default on their credit card loans.
  6. But broadly speaking, the NY Times article says that it is pt. 4 consumers (and pt. 5 consumers) who end up paying for the freebies that pt. 3 consumers enjoy. (but also see below, after this section)
  7. In addition, another way to make money for these credit card companies is to charge higher credit card processing charges to all consumers. This fee changes from country to country, but as a thumb-rule, assume it to be around 1-2% of each transaction. That’s not an exact estimate, but good enough for us over here. Rewards to specific folks, to be offset by diffusing the costs of offering these rewards across a much wider group, in other words. And note that merchants (who are charged these fees) will usually pass these fees on to the consumers. See here, for example.
  8. A 1-2% increase in price may not be the end of the world if your income is high enough – it is an inconvenience, not a crisis. But for low income earners, already on a tight budget, this price increase across all transactions can bite a fair bit.
  9. An out and out free market economist might say that this is fine, the market will work itself out. That is, if this 1-2% charge is an act of rent collection, new entrants in such a market will end up charging lower to no fees, and incumbents will be forced to respond by lowering their own fees. That’s econ 101, but life is more complicated than that.
  10. And that is a good first-pass answer, but as many people will tell you, markets don’t always work as designed or intended. Incumbents will go out of their way to prevent new entrants (through lobbying, through pricing, through R&D, and through a dozen different ways), which is why regulation is important.
  11. But will regulators do what they’re supposed to? What are their incentives? How can we make sure that regulation will be balanced between the interests of the incumbents, the new entrants, the potential entrants, and the customers? Hello, industrial organization, and hello, public choice.
  12. What is the role for government in all of this? In terms of participation (think UPI, for example, but note that this is a complicated story in its own right), in terms of regulation (both from a domestic and international financial markets perspective) and in terms of oversight?

All these points (and I hope you come up with more) are worth thinking about as a student. Remember, these points aren’t proven facts – they are a summary in part of the article an in part of my own reflections for having read the article. Discussions such as these are a great way to outline a research agenda – but that is when the job of a researcher begins. Can we convert these points into testable hypotheses? Can we get data to prove/disprove these hypotheses? Can that data then be used to reach a definitive conclusion? Can that conclusion be used to formulate policy, or start a business?

In terms of research about this topic, sample this from the conclusion of a paper on the topic: “While credit card rewards are often framed as a “reverse Robin Hood” mechanism in which the poor subsidize the rich, our results show that this explanation is at best incomplete.”

But also from the very last paragraph of the same paper:

We conclude by documenting that the costs and benefits of credit card rewards are unequally distributed across geographies in the United States. Credit card rewards transfer income from less to more educated, from poorer to richer, and from high- to low minority areas, thereby widening existing spatial disparities.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/feds/files/2023007pap.pdf

And here’s the link to a directive from the RBI about the issuance of and conduct regarding credit and debit cards in India.

Homework: who (ultimately) pays for CRED from a distributional perspective? Whatever your answer, explain your reasoning, and either provide data to back up your arguments, or explain what kind of data you would need to research this question further.

Try discussing this question with your friends and your professors (including ChatGPT, and yes, you should be thinking of it as one of your professors) – it will be a great way to learn the nuances of microeconomics!

My thanks to Mihir Mahajan for suggesting this topic.

Why is it bad to be rich? Final take (for now)

Third blog post and counting in response to one simple question!

But as the title suggests, this will be the last one, I promise. Mostly.

But this last one, it is my favorite of the three, Here we go:

Have you heard of the European Super League?

The European Super League (ESL), officially The Super League, was a proposed seasonal club football competition that initially would have been contested by twenty European football clubs, twelve of them being the competition’s founding members. It was organised by the European Super League Company, S.L., a commercial enterprise created to rival the UEFA Champions League, Europe’s premier club football tournament organised by UEFA.
The announcement of the European Super League in April 2021 received wide opposition from fans, players, managers, politicians, and other clubs in England, which with six teams was the most represented country in the project. It also received opposition from UEFA, FIFA, and some national governments. Much of the criticism against the ESL was due to concerns about elitism and the lack of competitiveness within the competition, as it would have consisted of only high-ranking teams from a few European countries

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Super_League

There were many reasons to oppose the ESL, and I should at the outset make my own opinion clear – I abhor the idea. But the main reason to oppose it? The structure, or the format of the competition:

Inspired by European basketball’s EuroLeague, the proposed competition was to feature twenty clubs who would take part in matches against each other; fifteen of these would be permanent members, dubbed “founding clubs”, who would govern the competition’s operation, while five places would be given to clubs through a qualifying mechanism focused on the teams who performed best in their country’s most recent domestic season. Each year, the competition would see the teams split into two groups of ten, playing home-and-away in a double round-robin format for 18 group matches per team, with fixtures set to take place midweek to avoid disrupting the clubs’ involvement in their domestic leagues. At the end of these group matches, the top three of each group would qualify for the quarter-finals, while the teams finishing fourth and fifth from each group would compete in two-legged play-offs to decide the last two quarter-finalists. The remainder of the competition would take place in a four-week span at the end of the season, with the quarter-finals and semi-finals featuring two-legged ties, while the final would be contested as a single fixture at a neutral venue.Each season of the competition would feature 197 matches (180 in the group stage and 17 in the knockout stage)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Super_League (emphasis added)

A while ago, Tyler Cowen spoke with Luigi Zingales for a Conversations with Tyler episode. A truly wonderful episode, full of enjoyable insight, but this in particular really stuck with me:

I don’t understand why in the United States the only thing that is really noncompetitive is sports. In Europe, the only thing that is really competitive is sports. In Italy, soccer you are the first division, second division, you are promoted or demoted, according to performance. You don’t buy your way into the NFL or the Major League, et cetera.
Here, you buy the franchise, and once you’re in, no matter how incompetent you are, you stay there, which is completely un‑American.

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/luigi-zingales/

The next three words in the transcript are, and I quote “laughter and applause”, but this is no laughing matter. Luigi Zingales is completely right, and is speaking about a ridiculously powerful idea: skin in the game.

The reason every single football fan I know, without exception, was completely set against the ESL is because it took away skin in the game. The top fifteen clubs would never be demoted from the league.

There was no fear of failure, and without fear of failure – without skin in the game – you can’t make the jump.

The way to make society more equal is by forcing (through skin in the game) the rich to be subjected to the risk of exiting from the one percent

https://medium.com/incerto/inequality-and-skin-in-the-game-d8f00bc0cb46

You really should read the whole post on Medium (and then the entire book, and both at least twice, preferably once more, just to be sure), but think about what Nassim Nicholas Taleb is saying in that quote. Inequality, he says elsewhere in the post, is a zero-sum game. In countries such as the US, he says, the act of wealth creation is also an act of destruction (he means it in a Schumpeterian sense).

And that’s what Zingales is getting at when he says that sports in America is, well, un-American. The leagues there have no skin in the game, because no matter how incompetent you are, you never get demoted from the league. There is no creative destruction in American sports leagues.

And that was the problem with the ESL. There would have been no skin in the game, and that doesn’t sit well with us. The best team in the leagues as they are structured today begins with a clean slate next year, and while the probability that it will be demoted the next year is very low, it isn’t zero. Every team in, say, the English Premier League has skin in the game in this sense. And it really and truly matters.

And so my final answer to Navin’s question isn’t really my own, it is a quote from Taleb:

What people resent –or should resent –is the person at the top who has no skin in the game, that is, because he doesn’t bear his allotted risk, is immune to the possibility of falling from his pedestal, exiting the income or wealth bracket, and getting to the soup kitchen.

Inequality itself isn’t bad. Inequality in a rigged game, where there is no skin in the game? In that case, it is really and truly bad to be rich.

Please, do read Skin in the Game.

More Than An Inconvenient Iota of Truth

Regular people everywhere are being deprived of purchasing power — and tricked by chauvinists and opportunists into believing that their interests are fundamentally at odds. A global conflict between economic classes within countries is being misinterpreted as a series of conflicts between countries with competing interests.

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/book-review-trade-wars-are-class?s=r

An extract twice removed, as it were, for Noah Smith extracted this bit in his excellent review of a book called Trade Wars are Class Wars, by Michael Pettis and Matthew C. Klein. I have not read it yet, but it has shot to the top of my reading list.

Any student who has attended a class in which I have taught aspects of international trade will tell you that I bore them to death with one particular theme: that the textbook study of international trade doesn’t adequately cover (in my opinion) the study of inequality.

Now that might sound weird if you are a student new to the study of international trade. What on earth, you might think, does inequality have to do with international trade?

Well, here’s the thesis put forward in the book, via Noah:

Trade Wars are Class Wars offers a provocative thesis — that what looks like economic competition between nations is actually just a manifestation of economic competition between classes within those nations.

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/book-review-trade-wars-are-class?s=r

Again, I haven’t read the book, but this is slightly confusing to me. I have always thought of the causality running the other way around: increased competition between nations has exacerbated economic competition (and therefore inequality) within nations. It would seem that the authors think of it differently. Excellent, more things to ponder upon!

Why do I think that international trade is one causal factor where inequality is concerned? Let’s begin with an excellent article published by The Economist a few years ago:

In rich countries, skilled workers are abundant by international standards and unskilled workers are scarce. As globalisation has advanced, college-educated workers have enjoyed faster wage gains than their less educated countrymen, many of whom have suffered stagnant real earnings. On the face of it, this wage pattern is consistent with the Stolper-Samuelson theorem. Globalisation has hurt the scarce “factor” (unskilled labour) and helped the abundant one.

https://www.economist.com/schools-brief/2016/08/06/an-inconvenient-iota-of-truth

Please, pretty please with a cherry on top, read the whole thing, especially if you have studied the Stolper Samuelson theorem. This article remains the best explainer that I have come across.

But what is being said here should be at least somewhat surprising to a student just beginning to study international trade. Trade, it would seem, may well be welfare enhancing, but it does not affect everybody a) equally and b) not necessarily positively! But, you might think as an Indian student, this might imply that unskilled labor in India might benefit from international trade.

Remember, one thing a good student of economics always bears in mind is a specific question: relative to what? That is, unskilled labor in India might well benefit from international trade, but relative to what? And the answer turns out to be, well, an unexpected one:

But look closer and puzzles remain. The theorem is unable to explain why skilled workers have prospered even in developing countries, where they are not abundant.

https://www.economist.com/schools-brief/2016/08/06/an-inconvenient-iota-of-truth

What might explain this?

Enter Professors Maskin and Kremer:

Nineteenth-century economist David Ricardo’s theory of comparative advantage predicts that China’s poorest workers should benefit most from the growth in trade. Before globalization, that country had a huge supply of unskilled workers and relatively few high-skill workers, who were thus in high demand; the situation was just the opposite in the United States. When two such countries begin to trade, the theory states, the less-developed nation has the advantage in producing relatively low-tech products—so demand and income for under-educated workers should shoot up, while their high-skill countrymen suffer. Thus, the theory predicts, globalization should lower inequality in the developing world.
Instead, as Gates professor of developing societies Michael Kremer explains, in much of the developing world, “The empirical evidence is not really consistent with the idea that trade is reducing inequality.” He and Adams University Professor Eric Maskin, a 2007 Nobel laureate in economics, have therefore proposed a new model to help explain the discrepancy between traditional theory and current reality. The key, they say, lies in a more nuanced understanding of how global production cycles sort workers into different jobs.

https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2015/03/how-globalization-begets-inequality

Here’s one way to understand their model. Note, before you proceed to read, that this is my explanation of their model, and I have simplified it a bit. I’ll add more nuance in as we go along:

Think of two countries, and two types of workers in both countries. Let’s say country 1 has Type A and Type B workers, and Country 2 has Type A1 and Type B2 workers. A and A1 are skilled workers, and B and B2 are unskilled workers. Maskin and Kremer make the point that international trade and the advent of modern globalization has resulted in skilled workers across countries “matching” with each other. As a result, their incomes go up, relative to unskilled workers in their own countries. So while the Stolper Samuelson theorem may be unable to explain why skilled workers have prospered even in developing countries, we now have a plausible answer to the question.

As an illustrative example, consider the fact that I joined a multinational firm called Genpact straight out of college.

And of course, one can think of many countries, not just two, and one can imagine a spectrum of skill sets across workers, rather than a binary framing. The point still holds!

And to complicate the matter further still, there may well be explicit/implicit choices made by policymakers in their own countries.

Back in the good old days, FT Alphaville used to be a free blog. And about seven years ago or so, it carried an excellent, excellent post written by Isabella Kaminska. The title of the (two-part) post was “What Are Chinese Capital Controls, Really?”. The post is a must-read for any student of international trade, but this excerpt is especially relevant for us today:

What those who accused China of using its exchange rate to gain advantage probably misunderstood was that it wasn’t the currency which was being undervalued, it was the people.
…
…
There are several other reasons why China should leave its currency unchanged. Contrary to widespread perception, China does not compete on the basis of an undervalued currency. It competes mainly in terms of labour costs, technology, quality control, infrastructure and an unwavering commitment to reform.

https://www.ft.com/content/d11a4c5e-d5fb-32f4-a606-e64d1483cea1 (Emphasis Added)

“It competes mainly in terms of labor costs” is a dry, academic way to put it. Elsewhere in this post, Isabella puts it much more plainly, when she says that it sucked to be a Chinese worker. And it did! Not just because of low labor costs, but because of a whole host of other reasons that should excite students of macroeconomics. Read the whole thing to get a richer understanding of how China has gone about doing what it has. As I always say to folks in my classes who wish we “grew like China”: be careful what you wish for!

You might also want to take a look at David Autor’s work on The China Shock. A good place to begin would be Russ Roberts’ podcast with David Autor, and for those who are interested, there’s a follow-up symposium about this episode as well. The point I’m making is that where trade between China and the USA is concerned, it would seem that inequality has gone up in both countries, but for different reasons.

This applies to international trade in general, of course – I’ve used China and US as examples because we are more familiar with them.

So, to return to the original question: are trade wars class wars? And more importantly, are class wars causing trade wars, or is it the other way around?

And so here we get to the book’s primary thesis. The authors only return to it in the conclusion, having reached it by a circuitous route that took them through history, data, theory, and more history.
The conclusion they ultimately draw is more nuanced than the one initially promised (and that’s a good thing, since nuance is good). In Klein and Pettis’ telling, global imbalances feed inequality in the U.S., but the fundamental cause isn’t inequality.

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/book-review-trade-wars-are-class?s=r

Yup, that I completely agree with, and “get”. But it doesn’t solve the original problem of course, it only helps us understand that it exists: trade does seem to exacerbate inequality.

How we should think of this problem, how we might resolve it, and with what consequences, is likely to be fertile ground for economic research in the years to come. If you are a student wondering about how to go about picking a topic to work on, well, please do consider this one! And a good place to begin would be Noah’s post, (and the book itself sounds like a must read too).

Bonus material alert: I simply had to share this extract from Noah’s blog, written by Paul Krugman. If you have recently studied macro, you can thank me later for bringing this to your attention:

[E]conomic explanations…have to [describe] how the actions of individuals…add up to interesting behavior at the aggregate level.
And the key point is that individuals in general neither know nor care about aggregate accounting identities…. [I]f you want to claim that a rise in savings translates directly into a fall in the trade deficit, without any depreciation of the currency, you have to tell me how that rise in savings induces domestic consumers to buy fewer foreign goods, or foreign consumers to buy more domestic goods. Don’t tell me about how the identity must hold, tell me about the mechanism that induces the individual decisions that make it hold…. [O]nce you do that, you realize that something else has to be happening — a slump in the economy, a depreciation of the real exchange rate, it depends on the circumstances, but it can’t be immaculate, with nothing moving to enforce the identity….
Accounting identities… inform your stories about how people behave, [they do] not act as a substitute for behavioral analysis.

https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/16/mistaken-identities-wonkish/?pagewanted=all

Etc: Inequality, Gigerenzer, solstices, technology today, and Sir Abed

Five links that I read about recently that I figured you might enjoy reading too.

  1. “A decade ago, the writer Deborah Solomon asked Donald Trump what he thought of the idea that “all men are created equal.” “It’s not true,” Trump reportedly said. “Some people are born very smart. Some people are born not so smart. Some people are born very beautiful, and some people are not, so you can’t say they’re all created equal.” Trump acknowledged that everyone is entitled to equal treatment under the law but concluded that “All men are created equal” is “a very confusing phrase to a lot of people.” More than twenty per cent of Americans, according to a 2015 poll, agree: they believe that the statement “All men are created equal” is false.”
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    The New Yorker on inequality. I learnt about luck egalitarianism by reading this article, but it is a good overview of the topic more generally.
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  2. “There is a low-tech way design your portfolio. It’s simply called 1/N formula or equality heuristics. Simple divide your funds equally across funds. It sounds too simplistic for the complex world of finance, and unlikely to impress any investor from whom you are raising funds (unlikely to impress you if someone is asking for your money, saying 1/N is their portfolio allocation strategy). ”
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    A nice profile from Founding Fuel of Gigerenzer’s work, ideas and productivity.
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  3. “I’m informed, however, that this 20 minute error in the Hindu solar calendar is deliberate, and that this has been put in place for astrological reasons. Apparently, astrology follows a 26400 year cycle, and for that to bear out accurately, our solar calendar needs to have a 20 minute per year error! So for the last 1700 or so years, we have been using a calendar that is accurate for astrological calculations but not to seasons! Thankfully, the lunar calendar, which has been calibrated to the movement of stars, captures seasons more accurately!”
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    The catchily titled Noenthuda blog explains more about Makar Sankranti and the summer solstice.
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  4. “…few companies are pure “tech” companies seeking to disrupt the dominant cloud and mobile players; rather, they take their presence as an assumption, and seek to transform society in ways that were previously impossible when computing was a destination, not a given. That is exactly what happened with the automobile: its existence stopped being interesting in its own right, while the implications of its existence changed everything.”
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    Contextualizing technology today, by Stratechery.
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  5. “The idea is to give an extremely poor family an asset — say a cow or a goat or bees — that can increase its income over time. BRAC is hardly the first group to use this model; another prominent one is Heifer International. But BRAC combines the donation with a mix of services that has proved highly effective — including training and coaching on how to use the asset, cash grants to tide the family over while getting a new enterprise started, and help with health care and education.”
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    As the title of the blog post says, a profile of the most influential poverty fighter you’ve never heard of. Education matters!

Links for 7th June, 2019

  1. “In 1982, Deming’s book Quality, Productivity, and Competitive Position was published by the MIT Center for Advanced Engineering, and was renamed Out of the Crisis in 1986. In it, he offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management’s failure to plan for the future brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but also by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved products and services. “Long-term commitment to new learning and new philosophy is required of any management that seeks transformation. The timid and the fainthearted, and the people that expect quick results, are doomed to disappointment.””
    I cam across this link via Amit Paranjape on Twitter. I was familiar with Deming’s role in Japan, but hadn’t read the book referenced here, in this excerpt. Duly added to the list.
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  2. “While the Constitution provides for setting up of SFCs at regular intervals, this has
    not been adhered to by the states. The paper reviews the reports of the latest SFCs of 25 states in India. This involves examining the status of constitution of SFCs, their functioning and the approach adopted by them in carrying out their task and the principles adopted by them in allocating resources to local governments both vertically and horizontally. It also quantifies the devolution recommended by the SFCs in order to get a comparative picture of funds devolved by them across states. It is observed that there is huge variation in the recommended per capita devolution across States. We do not find any relation between the recommended per capita devolution and per capita income of States, but per capita devolution is in general very low across states in India. Is it that the state governments arbitrarily reject the recommendations or are the SFCs themselves to be blamed for non-acceptance of their recommendations? The paper also examines the quality of SFC
    reports from the point of view of their implementability and finds that at times state governments are constrained to implement these recommendations on the grounds of poor quality of SFC reports.”
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    Financial decentralization (well, decentralization in general) has never really worked in India. Financial decentralization in particular is an important, under-rated topic in economics. This paper is not a good place to learn about these topics, but it is good analysis of how State Financial Commissions haven’t really worked at all in India.
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  3. “What is Luminary’s problem? The answer is that their strategy is not well thought out. They give all of the appearances of starting with the notion ‘Netflix for Podcasts’ and then jumping to the later Netflix model to start that (where Netflix spends $$ on its own content) rather than where Netflix started which was streaming older ad-free content.Where should they have started? They should have started with an idea — “we are going to bring expensive to produce audio content to the Internet” — and then asked who their customers would be, what technology choices they would make, what is the core of their business and who precisely will they compete against?”
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    Worth reading for three reasons. One, it helps you understand what podcasts really are, and how they started. Second, because this article helps you understand how to evaluate business models. Third, because Joshua Gans is worth following in any case.
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  4. “This very short sketch of the well-known effects of the first globalization allows us to remind ourselves of both its positive and negative sides: huge technological progress as against exploitation, increased incomes for many vs. grinding poverty and exclusion for others, European mastery of the world vs. a colonial status of Africa and much of Asia.In what ways should it inform our thinking about the current globalization?”
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    An important question to ask, and one that is succinctly answered in this op-ed. A good article to read to get a sense of global economic history, and what inequality means in that context.
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  5. “I haven’t studied philosophy, but from the outside it mostly seems to revolve around three basic issues:Reality (ontology)

    Values (ethics and aesthetics)

    Knowledge (epistemology)

    Here are three basic questions, one from each field:

    A. Why is there something rather than nothing?

    B. Is it better that there is something rather than nothing?

    C. Can we answer questions and ? If so, how?”
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    A lovely, and slightly unusual post from Scott Sumner – he does return to typical topics towards the end. But enjoyable, to help you understand how to think about philosophy, economics and therefore monetary theory. And try coming up with your “three questions”!

Links for 25th March, 2019

  1. “The researchers discovered that commonly visited places, like coffee shops, can be within a few feet of each other but they can each primarily have visitors from completely different income brackets. This indicates that economic inequality isn’t just present at the neighborhood level, but it can also show up among the places people visit as part of their daily routines. It suggests that income inequality might impact not just where people live, but also where they go. ”
    A great article to help you think through the following: inequality, how to measure it, how to measure it using modern methods, what is the difference between class inequality and income inequality, sampling, the limitations of sampling, the Data For Good initiative, 100 Resilient Cities and the SmartCitiesDive program.
  2. “An experiment that the researchers arranged hinted at a possible explanation of the correlation they found. They asked participants to picture and describe what it would be like to have a certain amount of daily free time, and then report how they’d feel about that allotment. “What we find is that having too little time makes people feel stressed, and maybe that’s obvious,” says Holmes. “But interestingly, that effect goes away—the role of stress goes away—once you approach the optimal point.” After that point, Holmes says, the subjects started to say they felt less productive overall, which could explain why having a lot of free time can feel like having too much free time.”
    One of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes strips has the quote “there never is enough time to do all the nothing you want to”, or words to that effect. This article tells you that having more than 2.5 hours of “nothing” time may well be too much.
  3. “While India has 70-odd companies that are rated highest quality, only two companies in the US enjoy this distinction. No company in Germany and UK enjoys AAA rating. Among emerging countries, China has only 14 AAA-rated entities. This implies a gulf between credit standards in India and elsewhere. The exacting standards observed in other countries are missing among domestic agencies.”
    Via Gulzar Natarajan, this article points out a disturbing statistic – Indian firms might well be given ratings that don’t really indicate their reliability. Rating agencies the world over took a hit to their reputation post the 2008 crisis, but this story seems to be unique to India. The article does have some caveats, but I’d say the news is, even so, worrying.
  4. “We employ Comin et al.’s (2010) data on ancient and early modern levels of technology adoption in a spatial econometric analysis. Historical levels of technology adoption in a (present-day) country are related to its lagged level as well as those of its neighbors. We allow the spatial effects to differ depending on whether they diffuse East-West or North-South. Consistent with the continental orientation hypothesis, East-West spatial effects are generally positive and stronger than those running North-South.”
    Are you familiar with vertical vs horizontal business models? Apple is vertical (controls everything, end-to-end) and Netflix is horizontal (needs to be available across multiple verticals to succeed). I was strongly reminded of that when I read this.
  5. “He is maddening in ways they never anticipated, along vectors they’ve never seen; he is a tireless innovator in the craft of mass irritation. He can cause fans to go absolutely nuts whether he wins or loses. McEnroe himself has spent a good chunk of the past five years complaining about Kyrgios, and McEnroe is probably the greatest tennis player of all time at driving people wild. Being found intensely annoying by John McEnroe is a high honor for any exasperating person. It’s like Beethoven humming your melody.”
    In which Brian Philips makes the case for the upside to Kyrgios being, well, Kyrgios. The interesting question is where else might such a contrarian philosophy work, and why?

Links for 19th March, 2019

  1. “Why do two people need a scrap of paper except to reassure them there’s concrete proof of their relationship?”
    … is a question worth asking in many respects, not just relationships. But some articles don’t really need to be subjected to analysis. A truly beautiful read, by Priya Ramani.
  2. “The episode is symptomatic of a fundamental European problem: unlike in China, macroeconomic policy, industrial policy and foreign and security policy are run independently of each other. The Huawei 5G bid shows that the EU is not well prepared to deal with a connection between security and industrial policy. Nor have the Europeans paid much attention to the impact of their fiscal rules — not least on defence and security policies. China, by contrast, has an integrated approach to economic and foreign policy.”
    Wolfgang Manchau on China and Germany, and who will have the upper hand going forward. Also an interesting way to think about what works better – top down approaches, or decentralized decision making. I usually find myself in favor of decentralization, but this article made me think about that a bit.
  3. “Second, growth in India has been unequalising because the top 10 per cent have benefitted disproportionally more from it than the bottom 90. In addition, growth has been unequalising across regions and ethnicities. In these circumstances, arguments for direct transfers are in vogue to compensate for this failure, not to address it.”
    Rathin Roy in an excellent article explains why we spend far too little on far too many things (and when I say we, I mean the government). Two things: this, theory suggests, is inevitable. Two, the column doesn’t mention – probably because of lack of space – the political compulsions that make this all but inevitable. But it is a great read!
  4. “Economists and commentators who have written on UBI for India have made the case for doing away with many subsidies and exemptions. The problem is that doing so may not be politically feasible. How does any politician sell the taking away of food subsidies to the masses of the country? Or how does any politician justify the introduction of tax on agricultural income or the introduction of estate duty or doing away of subsidies on urea and other fertilizers?”
    And while on that topic, Vivek Kaul in ThinkPragati reviews a book about Universal Basic Income by Guy Standing. I have not read the book, but the quote above jumped out at me. In my opinion, the problem with implementing UBI in India is not an economic one, but a political one.
  5. “Olive trees follow a pattern known as alternate bearing, with bad years routinely followed by good. This year, the EU expects Europe’s overall olive basket to be saved by a surge from its biggest producer, Spain.A trend there towards super intensive plantations may partly mitigate climate change impacts, according to Valentini – but at a cost to traditional farming and biodiversity. Fast-growing, high-density olive plantations might be more drought-resistant but water resources could also be limited by these plantations, he said”
    Will future generations understand the phrase “like taking coals to Newcastle”? Italy – and I cannot believe I am typing this out – will import olives this year. Whatever will the next Mario Puzo do?