- “Cyclone Fani slammed into Odisha on Friday morning with the force of a major hurricane, packing 120 mile per hour winds. Trees were ripped from the ground and many coastal shacks smashed. It could have been catastrophic.
But as of early Saturday, mass casualties seemed to have been averted. While the full extent of the destruction remained unclear, only a few deaths had been reported, in what appeared to be an early-warning success story.”
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A short read from the NYT about how Odisha was rather more prepared this time around for Cyclone Fani. Makes for encouraging, happy reading!
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.. - “Perhaps the earth has life because it came from other solar systems, seeded by alien probes, and indeed that is what I would do if I were a very wealthy alien philanthropist. If you end up with 100 successfully seeded solar systems for each very advanced civilization, the resulting odds suggest that we are indeed the result of a seed.That’s partly why, to this observer, the most likely resolution of the Fermi paradox is this: The aliens have indeed arrived, through panspermia — and we are they.”
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An equally short, equally interesting take on aliens and the Fermi paradox from Tyler Cowen.
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.. - “We Are Pro-Technology, but only as a means, not an end. Technology is only as good as our understanding of it, and an incremental approach will save more lives in the near and long term while mitigating the second order consequences of an all-or-nothing approach.”
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I was sent this by Aadisht Khanna, and while I do not necessarily agree with all of it, it does raise some fairly interesting points – and the manifesto itself is certainly food for thought.
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.. - “This looks quite tough, and there’s a significant chance the company will be valued at less than the debt itself, even if there was a buyer. After all if a buyer is paying that much money, why doesn’t he just start a new airline (or acquire a significant stake in an existing airline) and take over whatever slots, planes and rights Jet had? That’s likely to be much cheaper.”
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Deepak Shenoy ponders the question of Jet Airways unusually high share price, and is unable to resolve the paradox.
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.. - “Without going too far down this rabbit hole, the following is worth noting: What sport psychologists, coaches, parents and players are prescribing as a model of mental toughness is equally likely to be the success-producing traits of highly successful and highly functional psychopaths. I have worked with a few psychopaths. I’ve seen the so-called attributes of mental toughness in them, which help deliver results on the field. I have seen how fans, friends and the media adore these people. But I have also seen what it looks like when their mental toughness is unmasked as psychopathic behaviour. They come across as being narcissistic and entirely self-serving, compulsive (and clever) liars, manipulators without any remorse and an inability to take responsibility for their errors. These are not qualities we should encourage as general conditions for performance.”
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A fascinating article in Cricinfo about mental toughness, and how it doesn’t really exist – at least, not the way you think it does.
Tag: tyler cowen
Links for 24th April, 2019
- “Really? When is the last time you ran a search with DuckDuckGo? Too often, he seems to be stretching the evidence. He argues that, given the social aspects of the workplace, “companies are actually responsible for some of our most important relationships.” But that’s a function of work — not of corporate life. People at nonprofits make friends, too. Cowen asserts in defense of Amazon, “My options as a book consumer never have been better.” He includes as evidence of a competitive book market the option (which he doesn’t condone) of “illegal downloads of free PDFs.” Jeff Bezos must rue such defenders. (Bezos founded Amazon and owns The Washington Post.)”
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Roger Lowenstein reviews Tyler Cowen’s latest book. I myself have not read it yet, but the review was interesting to me, in particular this excerpt about illegal PDF’s and how they encourage competition.
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.. - “Alwyn’s related analysis of published studies is even more striking. He shows that, in a sample of 1359 IV regressions in 31 papers published in the journals of the American Economic Association,
“… statistically significant IV results generally depend upon only one or two observations or clusters, excluded instruments often appear to be irrelevant, there is little statistical evidence that OLS is actually substantively biased, and IV confidence intervals almost always include OLS point estimates.” ”
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Econometric nerds/students only (consider yourself warned) – but IV isn’t as great as it is made out to be. Occam’s razor is massively ignored in econometrics.
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.. - “The Fiscal Affairs Department and the Institute for Capacity Development of the IMF are pleased to announce that the online course on Public Financial Management (PFM) will relaunch on May 1, 2019 and remain open year-round. In its two previous offerings, this free online course has been taken by more than 2,200 participants in 194 countries, with very high satisfaction rates. Taught by more than 15 experts of the Fiscal Affairs Department, the course is open for government officials, staff of bilateral and multilateral development agencies, civil society organizations, parliamentarians, academics and the general public. The course has been updated in 2019 to reflect the revisions brought to IMF’s PFM standards and tools and adopted in the last twelve months – namely the Public Investment Management Assessment (PIMA) framework and the Natural Resource Management pillar of the Fiscal Transparency Code (FTC).”
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You might, as a student of economics or policy making, want to consider taking this course.
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.. - “So why, then, does the government tax, under the MMT view? Two big reasons: One, taxation gets people in the country to use the government-issued currency. Because they have to pay income taxes in dollars, Americans have a reason to earn dollars, spend dollars, and otherwise use dollars as opposed to, say, bitcoins or euros. Second, taxes are one tool governments can use to control inflation. They take money out of the economy, which keeps people from bidding up prices.And why does the government issue bonds? According to MMT, government-issued bonds aren’t strictly necessary. The US government could, instead of issuing $1 in Treasury bonds for every $1 in deficit spending, just create the money directly without issuing bonds.”
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Yet another explainer of MMT – it’s counterintuitive (at least to me), and I’m still not sure it makes sense and will work – but I understand it better than I did before upon reading this article.
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.. - “This is an issue for economics too: the construction of the deflators used to turn nominal pound or dollar GDP into ‘real’ GDP, on which so much policy hangs, relies on a theory of constant, known preferences which determine the utility of consumption, and yet modern economic growth is all about creating wants for new goods and services for which preferences have to be created. So at a time of rapid innovation it is not at all clear what the deflators and ‘real’ GDP measures are measuring.”
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Diane Coyle reviews a book that helps us understand Amartya Sen’s work better. I found this excerpt above quite interesting.
Links for 3rd April, 2019
- “There is something touchingly human in the dispersal of these games—in the vision it evokes of travelers packing for long, hard journeys and remembering to take with them something to kill time, something to satisfy their impulse to play. Anthropologists often regard these old games as novelties, Crist told me, but they can narrate plenty about their era. “Games function socially as a way for people to interact with one another,” he said. “People will play games when they vaguely know each other, to get to know one another.”
Samanth Subramanian on the oldest board game known to us – dates back to around four thousand years ago. Games were, and are, a way to connect socially with people.
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.. - “But even with increasingly powerful computers and more efficient algorithms thrown at the problem, some whole numbers have stubbornly refused to yield any winning tickets. And 33 was an especially stubborn case: Until Booker found his solution, it was one of only two integers left below 100 (excluding the ones for which solutions definitely don’t exist) that still couldn’t be expressed as a sum of three cubes. With 33 out of the way, the only one left is 42.”
The rest of the article, fascinating in its own rights, contains many more excerpt-able quotes. But if you are a fan, as I am, it had to be an excerpt that ended with that sentence!
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.. - “Nine years after giving grants for youth in Uganda to start businesses, those who didn’t receive grants had caught up on income! Nevertheless, “grants had lasting impacts on assets, skilled work, and possibly child health, but had little effect on mortality, fertility, health or education.”
Honestly, there’s no particular reason why I chose to go with this quote in particular. David Evans has done yeoman service in putting together extremely brief summaries of I don’t know how many papers presented at the annual Center for the Study of African Economics (CSAE) conference.
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.. - “Take the example of San Francisco; with nicer streets, even more people might want to move there. That would push up rents by an amount roughly equal to the value created — putting the gains from the higher quality of life into the pockets of landowners. In a normal market economy, those higher rents would then induce more construction and, eventually, a corresponding decline in rents. But San Francisco is a “not in my backyard” locale where the amount of new construction just isn’t that high, for legal and regulatory reasons. Again, as both Ricardo and George realized, the incidence of the benefit falls upon the very scarce factor, namely land.”
What happens when you apply the Ricardian theory of rent to San Francisco? Tyler Cowen provides the answer. Also think about where else, besides land, this argument might apply. Cough *education* cough.
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.. - “As Ansón puts it: “In principle, because of how it started, a tapa is something that you eat with one hand, a cocktail stick, a fork, or a spoon, allowing you to hold a drink in the other. This style of eating creates a kind of harmony between solid and liquid.”
This will, if you are as big a fan of food as I am, take up a lot of your time – but also, it will be worth it. Also, if you are anything like me, it will make you want to go to Spain! A lovely, interactive website about Spanish gastronomy.
EconForEverybody 