Re: Women Don't Ask
Following the analogy of price control, any evidence that the group advocating aggressive relationship bargining are the same ones who would generally benefit by such a policy? On a related note, do the strength of male/female bargining positions in a long term relationship change as male libido decreases over their 20's and 30's and female libido peaks around 35-38? (Think Battle of the Sexes over several periods...) Wild conjectures welcomed. -- John Morrow Quoting Bryan Caplan [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I just read the well-reviewed *Women Don't Ask* by Babcock and Laschever. Main thesis: Women should bargain harder. It is frankly kind of silly. The whole book makes it sound like aggressive bargaining is a strictly dominant strategy, so women will definitely be better off if they do more of it. It never considers the obvious possibility that women will price themselves out of a job. Nor does it explore the interesting possibility that one reason female employees are doing so well in spite of obvious child-related drawbacks is precisely that employers know that they are less likely to demand more money. The book also tries to get women to bargain more aggressively in relationships. I think this is another case where feminist norms are likely to function as a price control - some women will get a better deal, but a lot of others will be unable to get married because their standards are too high. -- Prof. Bryan Caplan Department of Economics George Mason University http://www.bcaplan.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] I hope this has taught you kids a lesson: kids never learn. --Chief Wiggum, *The Simpsons*
V!agra
I don't know if this is true, but I have been told the #1 shoplifted item is Preparation H and like ointments -- this seems to fit in well with the theory that people want to remain anonymous in purchasing V!agra...
Many choices
Although I would gamble Schwartz has more ideological than empirical reasons for his conclusions, is there trend data available over multiple years? I don't think a point estimate is any way to gauge something like happiness with respect to time. As for surveys, from what I know of the experimental literature, economists seem to put very little credence in surveys aside from gathering rather concrete data (e.g. demographics, independently verifiable data). My impression is that survey research is generally looked down upon -- if for no other reason than similar research in other fields is often highly contestable and unsophisticated (in both senses). Surveys also beg the question of the incentive and ability of respondents to answer in an externally valid way. Monetary incentives used to help ensure externally valid behavior seem to be a publishing requirement of modern experiments -- incentives completely lacking by nature in a survey. However, this may be completely different in particular subfields. -- John Morrow
Re: Why is a dollar today worth more than a dollar tomorrow?
I recall a Japanese econ grad student telling me that in fact real interest rates were negative for some span and people were STILL saving in the late nineties in Japan. He also blamed several bubbles at the time (notably, real estate in Japan) on this. Interesting if true... (Anyone know the details and can they justify the connection without resorting to framing biases of investors?) Following: Fred, I think you answered your own question -- even if many people would save some of their money even if the risk-free interest rate were zero, the quantity of funds demanded by borrowers at this rate would exceed the amount saved. So, a positive interest rate induces some people to defer consumption (save) and others to borrow less, until the market clears. And this would be the case even if there were no risk of nonpayment, and no inflation/deflation. By the way, there have been times and places where the measured real interest rate was essentially zero; I think this happened in Japan in the 1990s. --Robert
Re: Socialist health and starvation
I believe that even quite recently (in the last year or two) China was found to be inflating its growth estimates significantly, and I have some economically minded Indian friends who claim Indian estimates are also intentionally inflated. I believe at the collapse of the Soviet Union it was found that may growth estimates were also inflated back into the Seventies at least, so I would look towards number tampering in general as being a contributing cause. Quoting fabio guillermo rojas [EMAIL PROTECTED]: In preparing a lecture about socialist economies, I have come across the claim that socialist nations had decent life expectancies. How can that be? We know that: (a) there have been episodes of mass starvation in the largest socialist nations (USSR, China) (b) socialist nations have often engaged in destructive wars against other nations (USSR) and against their own populations (Cambodia) (c) chronic shortages of consumer goods, and in some cases, shortage of basic food stuffs (think of wheat imports to Russia and North Korea) (d) Socialist nations tend to be stressful places with mass arrests and the like I could think of a few mechanisms: socialist nations tend to invest in the kind of infra-structurers that extend life (Education, sanitation, etc.), a vibrant black market, or most likely - vital statistics from these nations are hugely misleading. Any comments? Fabio
Re: Levitt article
Along those lines, the following is a Paul Krugman article, which quite humorously recaps a similar media event about a wunderkind economist -- probably a story only economists would find funny. http://www.pkarchive.org/cranks/legend.html At 09:51 PM 8/4/2003 -0500, you wrote: The article discusses Levitt's research style: his tendency to ask odd but interesting questions and be clever enough to be able to test the hypotheses with publically available data. It also has some discussions of his career path and a little about his personal life. Fabio Thanks, Fabio. So what's so bad about that? David Well, the article's style and tone was a little odd. For example, as someone else pointed out, it seemed to imply that Steve Levitt was alone in the economic analysis of crimes and other non-market behaviors. It also has this aw-shucks attitude, depicting a wunderkind who was ignored by the profession until the profession was stunned and surprised by his wit. All in all, not the worst article ever written, combining the story of an interesting economist with some weird framing. Fabio
Re: Senators Denounce Policy Analysis Markets
I think you could get into a whole lot of trouble since for any event you predict that happens, if the common opinion is that you have somehow encouraged it, the burden of proof on the civil level will effectively be on you to show that you haven't, which of course will likely be impossible. Also, from questions I asked some of the IEM people a while back, the story goes that most futures markets require heavy regulation, and that they managed to get a no action letter from some agency that guaranteed they would not be hassled with it, since otherwise they could be. The other alternative is to put up your own money prizes for futures, so that you are giving it away creatively, but that doesn't really help with the above problem. I'm sure there must be some people on here that had a hand in the Arizona exchange, and I would be thrilled to hear the story of how they managed that. Quoting fabio guillermo rojas [EMAIL PROTECTED]: I help run a large non-profit colocation and hosting center for various groups of which an implementation of this would fit perfectly with our mission. If people are interested in trying this in a fully transparent method I am willing to provide our resources and my time to make it happen. Thanks, davidu Seriously - how hard is it to set up such a market? If indeed it can lead to better prediction of violent events, and if it is something that is relatively easy to set up, then why not? Could this be shut down by the Feds? Under what justifications? Fabio Rojas
Re: Senators Denounce Policy Analysis Markets
I've been raring to go with the pam markets for a while now -- condolences. Many people here are probably aware of it, but you can also check out (and participate in!) the Iowa Electronic Markets online at the University of Iowa, http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem/ which have a reasonable track record for political markets -- perhaps you can petition them to run a market for Arnold in CA. At 02:56 PM 7/28/2003 -0400, you wrote: FYI, our DARPA project (www.policyanalysismarket.com) has just been denounced by two senators: http://wyden.senate.gov/media/2003/07282003_terrormarket.html Robin Hanson [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://hanson.gmu.edu Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030- 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
Re: fertility and government
I'm curious if anyone is aware of an instance, where a conscious, explicit choice was made in government policy to choose higher total GDP over higher per capita GDP, or vice versa. It seems to me that most any policy restricting immigration is choosing to maximize per capita GDP over total GDP and has that more or less in mind, which also goes along the lines of the voting bodies preference of higher per capita GDP.
Re: Family Businesses and Licensing
Another interesting question might be how does the distribution of income of children of people in these professions vary conditional on whether they go into their parents line of work controlling for socioeconomic status, etc. I would gamble there are a disproportionate number of people centered around their parents profession's wage, with most coming from the lower end of the income spectrum -- in other words I am speculating that most of the additional wage from these professions comes from rote training and experience rather than other factors, although it seems also that the professions you mention all seem to also be of the very small business type, so the parents business might be an endowment much of which is only capturable if a child operates it, and as I believe small business operators are largely male (for whatever reasons, cultural or otherwise), that might explain some of the gender business, no pun intended. At 08:56 PM 7/10/2003 -0700, you wrote: In my informal experience, fathers and sons tend to work together full-time only in professions with strict licensing or training requirements. Electricians, lawyers, realtors and even CPAs - I've found more father/son teams here than in any other type of job. All of those jobs have fairly rigid prerequisites (electricians have to pass journeyman and master-level tests; lawyers have the bar and law school, etc). Why is that? Also - why is it more often father/son, and not mother/daughter or mother/son? Or father/daughter? -JP Do you Yahoo!? http://us.rd.yahoo.com/search/mailsig/*http://search.yahoo.comThe New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
Re: Do Not Call -- The newest public interest miracle?
This is precisely a thought that occurred to me as a way to prevent spam -- computers can reduce the marginal transaction cost, and liens could be put up against bandwidth providers to take care of any lag in the system. Would be spammers would sign contracts with their ISPs, and ISPs with the agencies who kept track of costs for individuals and authenticated email coming from contracted ISPs. A major problem is getting a critical mass of people to use it, so that people are not missing email from users of hold out ISPs. At 07:41 PM 7/1/2003 -0400, you wrote: On Mon, Jun 30, 2003 at 12:26:41AM -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [...] could it be done more efficiently? Probably, but I can't think of it. I can... The Do Not Call form should take a bank account number and dollar amount. Any advertiser who pre-pays the amount I specify would be allowed to call me.
Re: Libertarian Paternalist!
So for this libertarian paternalist viewpoint, is the goal of these plans to force people to do certain things, or make certain behaviors default in the sense that they are the status quo unless people voluntarily decide to do otherwise? Otherwise, I don't see how forced saving differs except in degree from the operations of the Fed or various tax provisions, or in fact wealth transfers that are otherwise market based, and I think many libertarians would object -- clarification?. Also, does anyone know of any research along the lines of changing the default behavior in an institution (not meaning psychological bias literature or survey data, but rather tweaking a scenario but not changing the info set or options available to actors and seeing different results -- I seem to remember a paper critiquing regret theory, but that is it). In other words, is there any empirical evidence in an actual institution with incentives that shows how behavior is altered by changing the default option affects behavior? At 10:17 PM 6/30/2003 +, you wrote: Who would manage these accounts? The person himself? If he is not competent enough not to save what makes you think they can invest? Now the question is how much money do you give to the basic poverty fund? If you make it to low then people will not get enough basic benefits . If you make it to high then you risk the problem of losing work incentive. Great news for me ... I'm a Libertarian Paternalist! I've long what I am, but just not the name. I ESPECIALLY like the need of humans to direct money flow into different accounts. I support many gov't individual accounts: a forced savings retirement account (SMART or whatever)--the second pillar in 3-pillar pension reform schemes like Slovakia (first pillar is poverty income to all, almost irrespective of contribution; third pillar is optional tax-advantaged savings, like IRAs). Health care catastrophic insurance would be good, too. I'd like an individual unemployment account; required to donate until it reaches enough to pay you half your last year's salary (or poverty income for year plus half the difference). I'd like automatically elligible educational tax-loans, where you pay back the loan by using some 50% of your tax payment; possibly plus a 5-10% surtax on income above poverty level. The point is to make voters have their own accounts, so they are mostly benefiting from their own money. Only then, I believe, will we be able to start making progress against the immorality of using gov't violence in order to claim other people's money. And, maybe, even start reducing that corporate welfare that sucks up so many tax resources. NOT a libertarian socialist -- a paternalist. Tom now have a new address: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The best thing to hit the internet in years - Juno SpeedBand! Surf the web up to FIVE TIMES FASTER! Only $14.95/ month - visit www.juno.com to sign up today!
Re: Charity
I would personally lean back on the monitoring problems -- for a particular save the child fund, three of my friends saved the same child, same photo, bio, everything. And I would like to say it was the Shriner's that got in trouble not so long ago for having rather lude behavior with paid tabletop dancers at one of their charity banquets, and are in trouble for mistreatment of their circus animals besides. (Needless to say, they have very high administrative costs.) At 03:44 PM 6/5/2003 -0400, you wrote: These are two separate things. We can imagine the public good of a functional Africa that will suffer from the traditional public goods problems. But, I don't think that you can say the same for the plethora of save the children type charities that assure you that a child's life will be saved for your $20/mth. The benefits from that are largely internalized -- the donor gets to feel better about himself for having saved the life, etc. The contribution to any public good is next to nil -- the continent remains disfunctional and there is still rampant starvation and war. But, the donor has personally made one person better off who wouldn't likely have been made better off absent the contribution. Don't think we can invoke public goods here.
Re: charity and time preference
Here's a quandry -- Since the more abject human misery there is, the more varied, specialized, and likely relatively cheaper (due to variety, breadth of the distribution of misery, etc) types of charity available for consumption, under what conditions are you willing to put up a side payment to increase it? In seriousness, it would seem to me that many cases of charity involve extremely high returns (above investment) in terms of future cost savings for the recipients or those sympathetic to the cause -- look to the preservation of eastern art by Western sources or disease prevention. Examples and cliches abound (Teach a man to fish... Once of prevention... and on). At 04:43 PM 6/6/2003 -0400, you wrote: On Fri, Jun 06, 2003 at 11:49:15AM -0400, Susan Hogarth wrote: Speaking as the director of a very small but very active charity, I can tell you that we tend to have *quite high* time preferences. Possibly some of that is bleedover from the personality of the founder (that would be gotta-have-it- now me:) but I honestly believe that for most small groups working in conditions where the need is always in far excess of resources available, this time preference exists. My original post was more about charitable giving targeted at human beings not animals, so I was talking about the time preferences of the end recipient rather than of the charitable organization. But since you bring it up... Do you prefer to rescue two beagles ten years from now, or one beagle today? Now I realize that your time preference for funding does not directly correspond to your time preference for the rescue of beagles, because you're competing with other charities (i.e., if you don't get the money now some other charity might get it instead). But the incentives are more straightforward for the donor. If he prefers the former he should hold on to the money and give it to a beagle rescue organization ten years from now (assuming he expects a 100% return on his ten-year investment).
