Tryan02

Today, nearly 40 percent of auto jobs on the continent are in Mexico.

There is more here, from Brad Plumer, interesting throughout.

Tyrone, my evil twin brother, was in town visiting the other day, after a long absence.  He was upset that I gave so little space to the recent machinations in Washington, and that I assigned the events so little importance, so he asked if he could offer his own coverage in a guest post.  Since Tyrone is occasionally a lunch guest of ours, against my better judgment I said yes, so here is my dictation of his midnight sermon:

Tyrone:  I read what a strategic disaster the fracas has been for the Republican Party and for the Tea Party movement in particular, but I don’t see it.  Where I grew up, this counts as a successful stare-down.  Most of the time, the pit bull does not in fact lunge for your throat, but it is hardly a mistake for him to snarl, even if that raises his borrowing rates.

Look where we stand.  In real terms government spending has been falling.  Sequestration appears to be permanent, or it will be negotiated away by Republicans in return for preferred changes in tax and spending policy.  Leading Democratic intellectuals are talking about future fiscal bargains with no new taxes.  The American public polls as increasingly conservative.

With this sequence of events, combined with 2011, the Republicans convinced some of their opponents that they are crazy and irresponsible, without actually being crazy (though they were irresponsible, but that is the whole point).  I peaked once into Tyler’s Twitter feed, and I found several accomplished Democratic economists — yes brilliant economists, as all economists are — suggesting that any day now markets are going to notice the truly crazy character of the Republican House and price that into interest rates and stocks.  Oh what a tale!  (A more accurate reading of the more radical Republicans would in fact be more cynical and ordinary than most of the pablum served up by their critics.)  Imagine that you control only the House and can manage to convince your opponents that you are stronger and more dedicated to your cause than in fact you are.  Only the truly strong and dedicated can pull such a caper off!

Someday, if the Democrats wanted to raise the exemption level for the payroll tax, and pull in a lot of new revenue, what kind of opposition could they expect?  Probably they will shy away from that battle altogether, for fear of another Ted Cruz filibuster.

Yes, Virginia (literally), protecting the brand does sometimes mean going down with the ship.

In the longer run the Republicans will have changed the Doug Overton window on most of these issues.  (Tyler interjects: My apologies loyal MR readers, Tyrone has no Ph.d., not even a Masters, and thus he misuses terminology as would a mere child.)  Even if most Americans do not agree, it is now considered common to believe and to argue publicly that Obamacare represents the end of freedom in our time.  If Obamacare turns out to fail in the eyes of the public, that condemnatory view is being held in the back of people’s minds, whether they admit it or not, whether they agree or not.  They will start to agree more and more, the less generous their Medicare benefits look as time passes.  The future counterrevolution in redistribution is going to have to come from somewhere and it is a major victory to cement the word “Obamacare” as a hypostatized “thingie” in people’s minds, for future reference.

The Republican tactics understand the importance of skewed pay-offs.  In an age of political gridlock, the goal is not to maximize the expected value of your image, any more than you would do the same on a date.  Rather the goal is to maximize the chances of moving your agenda forward, conditional on the existence of world-states where that might be possible.  The harder it is to pull off change, the stupider your strategy will look in most world-states, but hey that is the price of admission to this game.  Capital is to be periodically run down, and if in politics, as in management more generally, if you always look good you are doing something badly wrong.

Another fallacy is that no DC crisis would have focused more attention on the failings of the Obamacare exchanges in a useful manner.  People, that is small potatoes.  No one is going to repeal or even modify ACA because of a few weeks’ bad publicity at the opening.  (Recall the Medicare prescription drug bill, which took weeks to get off the ground but now is beloved and is part of the permanent furniture of the universe, like Supersymmetry or quantum gravity.)  If Obamacare is really going to do poorly, it is better if we build up high or least modest expectations for it.  Imagine the Christmas present of learning you don’t really have insurance coverage after all.  Or the New Year’s resolution that after you have been billed three times for the same policy, you vow to pay for only one of them and live with the bad credit rating until it gets straightened out.  How about extreme adverse selection into the exchanges, resulting in 50-100% premium hikes in the first year of operations?  (The lower premia are now, the better!  Bread, peace, land!  Ach du grüne Neune!)  That’s what will get further traction for the Tea Party on Obamacare, not a bunch of bad reviews on opening day, as if the policy were no more than a mid-tier Jennifer Aniston movie (I can no longer refer to Sandra Bullock in this context), to be swatted down by mild tut-tuts of disapproval and inconvenience.

The very best victories are often described as ignominious retreats.

Tyler again: Readers, I am sorry to subject you to such rants.  But Tyrone insisted.  In fact he threatened that, if I did not comply with his request, he would write a lengthy review of Average is Over, for which outlet I am not sure, perhaps an average outlet.  He threatened to shutter our common household.  He prophesied that cats would lie down with dogs.  He even threatened to default on our joint credit card bill, ruining my credit rating forever.  And people, you now all know just how powerful such threats can be.

Since the mid nineties I have been looking for a bibimbap that would stand above all others.  A year ago I found it in Seoul, and yesterday I retraced my steps and visited again.

As I entered, the woman in charge appeared to recognize me and gave me a stoic look of “Oh, you again.”

This is vegetarian bibimbap, with egg, and you need to shake your lunch box many times.  She will do it for you.  They also serve a superb bean sprout and seaweed and rice noodle soup, and if that description doesn’t excite you, you need to get to Korea as soon as possible.

As a sideline, they sell Korean antique furniture out of the side room.

It is very close to Changdeokgung palace area, up the nearby street (first pass the Hyundai Cultural Center) with lots of shops and restaurants and old Korean roofs.  French people walk there.  I was told by another customer that the address was Jongro Gaedong 44, but on the other side of the street I saw the numbers 91 and 93, in any case this building is just short of The Cup Story and Uncle’s Bob stores.  (02) 744-8130 and 010-9942-9967 are given on the business card.

It is worth visiting Seoul to eat this woman’s food.

And after you finish, it is about a ten minute walk to the Institute of Traditional Korean Food, where they have an excellent rice cake museum.

1. Scott Sumner on British austerity.

2. Does exposure to economics make students more like economic maximizers?

3. How easily can a paper’s forthcoming citation history be predicted?

4. The shutdown-induced Straussian weather service.

5. David Bernstein’s observations on American Jewish life.

6. Great Courses with Daniel Drezner, “Foundations of Economic Prosperity.”

Richmond, California has developed a new trick, achieving an effect similar to principal reduction:

Richmond condemns mortgages on homes that are now worth far less than what the borrower owes. The note holders — investors such as pension funds and mutual funds – are forced to settle for the current fair market value. The city pays for this with cash from a new set of investors, who now own the mortgage. The new price is set by the current market, and the homeowner settles into a more manageable loan.

From Lydia DePillis at Wonkbook, the full story is here.  This part is interesting too:

Richmond couldn’t get insurance to shield it from a crushing judgment — if it lost its bid to spare struggling homeowners, the city could find itself underwater.

In the backlash to the plan, the market boycotted the city’s most recent bond issuance, forcing it to withdraw the $34 million offer, which was supposed to refinance earlier debt.

Richmond’s leaders stared hard at the threats. In the end, it seemed to only harden their resolve.

The seizures have not yet happened, but are pending, and it is expected that Richmond will need to defend itself in court.

NEW DELHI—Indians have a new choice when they go to the polls: None of the above.

On Friday, the Supreme Court said voters in the world’s largest democracy have the right to disapprove all candidates on the ballot, a step that could put pressure on parties to field better-qualified politicians.

“This judgment allows people to send a clear message to political parties,” said Mahi Pal Singh, national secretary of the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, which had petitioned the court for the change.

Activists said they hope the court’s ruling—ahead of five state elections this year and national polls due by the end of May—is a first step toward the establishment of a broader “right to reject.”

Excellent news. Bear in mind:

Nearly a third of the members of the lower house of Parliament are facing criminal charges, according to the Association for Democratic Reforms, a New Delhi-based advocacy group for transparency in governance.

Even if that were not the case, however, one of the problems of democracy is that there is too little feedback and information transmission, due both to rational ignorance and the bundle nature of politics. Allowing for “none of the above” provides, not a panacea, but a little bit more feedback. Many people vote but have to hold their noses to do so. Many others don’t vote but do they not vote because they are satisfied or dissatisfied? None of the above gives the dissatisfied a chance to reveal their views and in so doing it may encourage more and better candidates.

At present, voting none of the above is just informational, i.e. none of the above is never “elected” even if it gets a majority, although the option to vote NOTA may change the outcome of the election. In the future a NOTA majority might signal a new election.

India is the world’s largest democracy. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Hat tip: Reuben Abraham

A new system called Sedasys, made by Johnson & Johnson, JNJ -1.31% would automate the sedation of many patients undergoing colon-cancer screenings called colonoscopies. That could take anesthesiologists out of the room, eliminating a big source of income for the doctors. More than $1 billion is spent each year sedating patients undergoing otherwise painful colonoscopies, according to a RAND Corp. study that J&J sponsored.

J&J hopes the potential savings from using Sedasys will appeal to hospitals and clinics and drive machine sales, which are set to begin early next year. Sedasys “is a great way to improve care and reduce costs,” J&J CEO Alex Gorsky said in an interview.

Anesthesiologists’ services usually cost more than the $200 to $400 generally charged by physicians performing the actual colon-cancer screenings, says health-plan CDPHP in New York state. An anesthesiologist’s involvement typically adds $600 to $2,000 to the procedure’s cost, according to a research letter published online by JAMA Internal Medicine in July.

By contrast, Sedasys would cost about $150 a procedure, according to people familiar with J&J’s pricing plans. Hospitals and clinics won’t buy the machines, instead paying a fee each time they use the device, these people say. The $150 would cover maintenance and all the costs of performing the procedure except the sedating drug used, which would add a few dollars, one of the people says.

Here is more.  As you might expect, anesthesiologists are convinced this is a bad idea.

Also known as “markets in everything”:

Wealthy Chinese are hiring American women to serve as surrogates for their children, creating a small but growing business in $120,000 “designer” American babies for China’s elite.

Surrogacy agencies in China and the United States are catering to wealthy Chinese who want a baby outside the country’s restrictive family planning policies, who are unable to conceive themselves, or who are seeking U.S. citizenship for their children.

Emigration as a family is another draw – U.S. citizens may apply for Green Cards for their parents when they turn 21.

The story is here, and for the pointer I thank Fred Smalkin.

It is fairly pathetic that they may not be up and running in proper form by October 1, but it is not the main issue either.  Dan Diamond has some good remarks, here are two excerpts:

Overwhelmingly, the Americans who will be shopping through the exchanges this fall are the ones who have pined for this moment for months, if not years: The chronically ill who wanted coverage but couldn’t get it, or the low-income Americans who couldn’t afford it. They likely won’t be deterred by a few software glitches.

That is a very good point, though I wonder if it will contribute to insurance company enthusiasm in the early stages of actual implementation.  Dan also notes:

There already were a mix of offline ways to purchase coverage through the exchanges, whether through call centers or in person; the AP notes that 30% of applicants were expected to use paper.

But software delays may spur additional solutions, too. Oregon, for example, will rely on insurance brokers to help state residents obtain coverage until the state’s exchange website is ready to go.

And an enormous number of stakeholders want the exchanges to be successful, from insurers that are hoping to see new business to hospitals that want to lower their uncompensated care costs. Basically, CMS can raise a virtual volunteer army if necessary.

Meanwhile, the enrollment period runs through March 31. There’s no “early bird special” as Dave Morgan, a California employee benefits adviser, pointed out on Twitter; premium prices for 2014 will be the same whether you’re purchasing coverage on Oct. 1 or Dec. 15.

Dan adds, however:

All bets are off if the software problem isn’t fixed in a few days or weeks. The exchanges were touted with the promise that they’d be like Orbitz or Amazon, just for buying health coverage.

So I still say all bets are off.

Coming from other directions, Timothy Taylor offers some useful perspectives on ACA, which now it seems will cover only about 40% of the previously uninsured.

George J. Borjas and Kirk B. Doran find that the productivity of mathematicians who win the Fields Medal, the mathematics “Nobel” awarded to mathematicians under the age of 40, declines after they win. Borjas and Doran look at productivity on a number of margins including papers, citations, and graduate students mentored. At right is a graph of average number of papers compared to a contender group. Productivity falls by a statistically significant ~1 paper per year (in the regression that I think the strongest, in a few variants the decline is a bit more.)

Not all of the decline is due to resting on laurels. Borjas and Doran also find that mathematicians who win the Fields tend to branch out into other areas and this branching out requires them to learn new material which takes time. Steve Smale did work in economics and biology, for example, Rene Thom developed catastrophe theory and David Mumford works in vision and pattern theory. Exploring new topics can also lead to breakthroughs so branching out is not necessarily a negative effect. Borjas and Doran estimate that about half of the productivity effect is resting on laurels and half greater exploration.

(FYI, Borjas and Doran speak of prizes but I prefer to call them awards because awards such as the Fields or Clark Medal are quite different from prizes for purpose, such as the XPrizes, the H Prize or the historically important Orteig Prize, that I discuss in Launching as alternatives to patents.)

Winning the Fields is presumably good for the winner but even taking into account the enhanced incentive to explore it’s not obviously good for mathematics. The explicit purpose of the Fields was to increase not decrease achievement. What can be done?

The Fields Medal may be too important for its own good. In economics the closest thing to the Fields is the John Bates Clark award, given to that American economist under the age of 40 judged to have made the most significant contributions. Chan et al. (2013) find that recipients of the Clark award increase their productivity after winning. But the Clark award is widely seen as a future portent of the Nobel, thus it may have a more stimulative effect as the winner realizes that the next big award is within reach (see the final sentence). In a tournament, it’s important to tier the awards for multiple levels of ability.

In thinking about whether awards increase or decrease productivity on net. the precise counter-factual is important. Let us accept as Truth that winners of the Fields Medal decrease in productivity, even so that doesn’t mean that eliminating the Fields Medal would increase productivity let alone that eliminating all awards would increase productivity (remember, the productivity of the contenders may be more important than the productivity of the winners). Perhaps the most justifiable policy recommendation is that one shouldn’t give awards to young people, a Fields Medal for lifetime achievement, much as the economics Nobel is given, might encourage more achievement.

Paul Samuelson wrote of Chasing the Bitch Goddess of Success:

Scientists are as avaricious and competitive as Smithian businessmen. The coin they seek is not apples, nuts, and yachts; nor is it the coin itself, or power as that term is ordinarily used. Scholars seek fame.

But, paraphrasing Tyler, what price early fame?

That’s the new paper by Elsby, Jobijn, and Sahin, presented at Brookings earlier in the week.  It’s less pathbreaking than some people are suggesting, but it is absolutely on the mark.  The main finding of significance is that competition from cheap imports is a major source driving wage declines in the United States and shifting income toward owners of capital.  The full abstract is here, with other points of note:

Over the past quarter century, labor’s share of income in the United States has trended downwards, reaching its lowest level in the postwar period after the Great Recession. Detailed examination of the magnitude, determinants and implications of this decline delivers five conclusions. First, around one third of the decline in the published labor share is an artifact of a progressive understatement of the labor income of the self-employed underlying the headline measure. Second, movements in labor’s share are not a feature solely of recent U.S. history: The relative stability of the aggregate labor share prior to the 1980s in fact veiled substantial, though offsetting, movements in labor shares within industries. By contrast, the recent decline has been dominated by trade and manufacturing sectors. Third, U.S. data provide limited support for neoclassical explanations based on the substitution of capital for (unskilled) labor to exploit technical change embodied in new capital goods. Fourth, institutional explanations based on the decline in unionization also receive weak support. Finally, we provide evidence that highlights the offshoring of the labor-intensive component of the U.S. supply chain as a leading potential explanation of the decline in the U.S. labor share over the past 25 years.

As I reported two weeks ago, Autor, Dorn, and Hanson already found similar results.

There is an entire chapter in Average is Over suggesting that trade effects on U.S. wages, in the negative direction, are stronger than many economists think, through factor price arbitrage, and that the topic deserves further investigation.  But it turns out my discussion did not go far enough in the direction of attributing observed wage changes to trade, and because of this paper, and because of Autor, Dorn, and Hanson, I hereby revise my views accordingly.

Please note of course that this trade is still output-expanding and welfare-improving by traditional criteria, at the global scale.  It simply has within-nation distribution effects which not everyone likes, though global inequality falls.

Arnold Kling, Michael Mandel, and Rob Atkinson, among others, have been ahead of the consensus on this question.

And so does my hat!

Much has already been written about the economic implications of yesterday’s pedal to the metal decision by the Fed: The Fed’s open market committee will continue to pump money into the economy, contrary to expectations that an improving economy would lead the Fed to slow the pace of its bond purchases.  Leaving the economics to others, I offer just a few quick thoughts on the political implications of the surprising (for many) decision.

First, I was struck (though hardly surprised) by Chairman Ben Bernanke’s response to a reporter’s question about the potential impact on the Fed of the political contest over Bernanke’s successor.

CHAIRMAN BERNANKE: “I think the Federal Reserve has strong institutional credibility, and it is a strong institution, highly competent institution, and it’s independent, it’s nonpartisan, and I am not particularly concerned about the political environment for the Federal Reserve. I think the Fed will be—continue to be an important institution in the United States and that it will maintain its independence going forward.”

Second, the Fed’s decision to keep QE3 in place potentially grants more leeway to Bernanke’s successor  (presumably Janet Yellen). This assumes that the Fed will continue to hold off trimming its bond purchases until after the Senate confirms Bernanke’s successor.  The sooner the Fed begins its exit, the less the discretion of the incoming chair.  Hard to know of course whether the Fed intentionally held off in anticipation of the change in leadership or whether this is just an unintended consequence of keeping the Fed’s punch bowl filled to the rim.   Either way, the timing of the taper will no doubt take center stage when the Senate Banking panel begins confirmation hearings for Bernanke’s successor.

Finally, I am reminded of something Bernanke said a year ago at his September 2012 press conference when the Fed formally launched a third round of quantitative easing.  Bernanke noted that the consensus on the committee was so broad that “even as personnel changes going forward, this will be seen as the appropriate approach and we will have created a reserve of credibility we can use in subsequent episodes.”   The difficulty the Fed has had in communicating its policy intentions since last spring complicates the Fed’s ability to build a “reserve of credibility.”  And as hard as the Fed seems to be trying to get monetary policy right, partisan politics in Washington (particularly within the House GOP conference) continues to confound the Fed’s progress.  The Fed will likely continue to face both of these challenges—communications and fiscal headwinds—for some time.  Hope I don’t lose the hat in the wind.

Persons per family household:

1990: 3.22

2000: 3.24

2010: 3.24

Not so much change, and if you look you will see there is also not so much change for non-family households.  The Census pdf is here.  I have covered this ground before, but the myth of “changing household size means economic progress has been just fine” dies hard.

By the way, the average number of people in a household categorized as “living alone” has remained strictly constant at one.

All of this is referring back to yesterday’s discussion, and I thank Paul for the reminder.  Also from the MR comments, Ricardo writes:

A few months ago, I wrote a couple pieces arguing that if Ted Cruz has presidential ambitions, he was doing himself no favors by taking on fellow Republicans.  I got a little pushback too.  So I thought this story was worth noting:

The staffer, whom two GOP sources identified as working for Representative John Culberson of Texas, went on to decry Cruz for holding events in Culberson’s district and telling his constituents that defunding Obamacare would be “easy”…

…A significant number in the room of about one hundred people applauded the woman’s remarks, but several GOP aides said it was not a standing ovation or an overwhelmingly positive response…

…On the other hand, it’s fair to say the staffer’s anger at Cruz carries a fairly broad base among House Republicans, many of whom view his Obamacare push as self-destructive to the party.

Just another data point.  We’ll see how relevant this becomes if Cruz runs in 2016.

Throughout the 1970s and most of the 1980s, the so-called “right wing” was right about virtually everything on the economic front.  Most of all communism, but also inflation, taxes, (most of) deregulation, labor unions, and much more, noting that a big chunk of the right wing blew it on race and some other social issues.  The Friedmanite wing of the right nailed it on floating exchange rates.

Arguably the “rightness of the right” peaks around 1989, with the collapse of communism.  After that, the right wing starts to lose its way.

Up through that time, market-oriented economists have more interesting research, more innovative journals, and much else to their credit, culminating in the persona and career of Milton Friedman.

I’ve never heard tales of Paul Samuelson’s MIT colleagues mocking him for his pronouncements on Soviet economic growth.  I suspect they didn’t.

Starting in the early 1990s, the left wing is better equipped, more scholarly, and also more fun to read.  (What exactly turned them around?)  In the 1990s, the Quarterly Journal of Economics is suddenly more interesting and ultimately more influential than the Journal of Political Economy, even though the latter retained a higher academic ranking.  The right loses track of what its issues ought to be.  There is no real heir to the legacy of Milton Friedman.

The relative rise of the Left peaks in 2009, with the passage of Obamacare and the stimulus.  From that point on, the left wing, for better or worse, is a fundamentally conservative force in the intellectual arena.  It becomes reactive and loses some of its previous creativity.

Over those years, right wing thought, on the whole, became worse and more predictable and also less interesting.  But excess predictability now has infected the left wing also.  Attacking stupid ideas put forward by Republicans, whether or not you think that is desirable or necessary, has become their lazy man’s way forward and it is sapping their faculties.

Yet I am not pessimistic about discourse.  Our time is a wonderful era for independent thinkers, and many of them are bloggers, too.  It’s as if we have created a new political spectrum in a very small sliver of the world, a perhaps inconsequential eddy in a much larger and often unpleasant vortex.

From Great Britain:

A bedtime story used to be a way for children and parents to bond at the end of the day, but the tradition has undergone a dramatic decline in a single generation.

A poll of 2,000 mothers with children aged 0-7 years, carried out by the clothing and homeware retailer Littlewoods, highlighted the extent of the change. Only 64% of respondents said they read their children bedtime stories, even though 91% were themselves read bedtime stories when young.

The survey also found that in previous generations, parents who read bedtime stories did so more regularly than their modern counterparts. Only 13% of respondents read a story to their children every night, but 75% recall being read to every night when they were kids. On average, today’s parents read bedtime stories to their children three times a week.

The findings are all the more surprising since 87% of those polled believe that bedtime reading is vital to children’s education and development.

The poll discovered that 9% feel “too stressed” to read bedtime stories; 13% admit that they haven’t enough time.

There is more here.

The short story, niche artifact of M.F.A. culture, is in transition. Carver-Lish minimalism is out; eccentric and peculiar are in… more»

So a quick addendum to some earlier discussions about the role The Monkey Cage can play in the future in terms of providing news about events and developments in the discipline. For now, we are being encouraged to continue doing this, which is kind of turn-about from what we originally reported. So for those of you who lamented the loss of this feature at The Monkey Cage, hopefully this will be a welcome development. We’ll have to feel our way through it, but for now you can still expect to be able to see some of these announcements and discussion at The Monkey Cage after our move to the Post.

Still, I wanted to issue one of my occasional calls for contributors to our Election Reports series before the move. The goal of this series is to give social scientists with an indepth knowledge of particular elections a chance to write something about those elections that is more than just a quote in a newspaper article but appears more quickly than the 1-3 years it often takes for an academic article to be published. The larger goal was to try to train journalists to know that they could come to The Monkey Cage in the immediate aftermath of elections for research-informed commentary on elections. My other hope was that these reports could serve as a good source of information for people trying to code recent elections as part of more broadly comparative work (or simply to quickly bring themselves up to date on the politics in a country about which they did not already know much).

By now we’ve had quite a lot of reports appear in the series, and I’ve been very pleased with the overall quality. However, this whole enterprise depends on people volunteering to write these reports (although we now also have a nice pipeline from people writing “Notes on Recent Elections” at Electoral Studies). So with that in mind, here’s a list of upcoming elections through the end of the year. If you are interested in writing a report on any of these, please drop me a line directly at joshua dot tucker at nyu dot edu:

• Rwanda Parliamentary September 16, 2013


• Germany Parliamentary September 22, 2013


• Switzerland Referendum September 22, 2013


• Guinea Legislative September 24, 2013


• Austria Legislative September 29, 2013


• Cameroon Legislative September 30, 2013


• Ireland Referendum October 4, 2013


• Ethiopia Presidential October 8, 2013


• Azerbaijan Presidential October 9, 2013


• Yemen Referendum October 15, 2013


• Luxembourg Parliamentary (Moved up) October 20, 2013


• Madagascar Presidential First Round (Tentative) October 25, 2013


• Czech Republic Parliamentary October 25, 2013


• Georgia Presidential October 27, 2013


• Argentina Legislative October 27, 2013


• Tajikistan Presidential November 6, 2013


• Chile Presidential First Round November 17, 2013


• Chile Legislative November 17, 2013


• Nepal Legislative (Tentative) November 19, 2013


• Mauritania Parliamentary First Round November 23, 2013


• Honduras Presidential November 24, 2013


• Honduras Legislative November 24, 2013


• Switzerland Referendum November 24, 2013


• Mauritania Parliamentary Second Round December 7, 2013


• Chile Presidential Second Round December 15, 2013


• Turkmenistan Parliamentary December 15, 2013


• Madagascar Presidential Second Round (Tentative) December 20, 2013


• Madagascar Parliamentary (Tentative) December 20, 2013

That is a new paper by Casey Mulligan, here is the abstract:

The Affordable Care Act includes four significant, permanent, implicit unemployment assistance programs, plus various implicit subsidies for underemployment. Every sector of the economy, and about half of nonelderly adults, is directly affected by at least one of those provisions. This paper calculates the ACA’s impact on the average reward to working among nonelderly household heads and spouses. The law increases marginal tax rates by an average of five percentage points (of employee compensation), on top of the marginal tax rates that were already present before the it went into effect. The ACA’s addition to labor tax wedges is roughly equivalent to doubling both employer and employee payroll tax rates for half of the population.

Mulligan summarizes the paper here, with further detail.  In another new paper, Mulligan compares ACA with Romneycase.

The Dubai market just crashed seven percent, image here.  Here is a longer story.  The Saudi market is falling too; in theory that market is soon opening up to foreign investors.  There are rumors that the Saudis are offering the Russians goodies to back away from supporting Assad.

The price of oil is going up.

Shakespeare on the couch. Did Hamlet – his desire, guilt, shame, need for love – inspire Freud to invent psychoanalysis?… more»

The typical protectionist measure is a limit on imports such as a tariff or a quota. Restrictions on exports are less common and less discussed but proposals to restrict the exports of natural gas have been in the news recently so perhaps a quick refresher on the protectionism of export restriction is in order. Restrictions on imports harm domestic demanders and benefit domestic suppliers but the harm is greater than the benefit so restrictions on imports create a net social loss. The basic result on export restrictions is similar, export restrictions benefit domestic demanders and harm domestic suppliers but the harm is greater than the benefit so restrictions on exports create a net social loss. The figure gives the analysis. As with import restrictions, the arguments for export restrictions soon turn to spillovers, networks effects, and other second round arguments. Without dismissing these in any particular case, the basic analysis suggest we should be wary of such arguments–the transfer always creates political opposition and any second round gains would have to be larger than the first round net benefits.

Addendum: Matt Yglesias comments. In brief he argues for the tax on Georgist grounds. Just because natural gas comes from land, however, doesn’t make a tax on natural gas equivalent to a tax on land. It’s the value of unimproved land that should be taxed not the value of the improvements, namely the extraction of the gas.

The poet A.K. Ramanujan wasn’t fond of systems of thought. His work speaks to the intellectual value of ambivalence… more»

Specifically, he [Frank L. Samson] found, in a survey of white California adults, they generally favor admissions policies that place a high priority on high school grade-point averages and standardized test scores. But when these white people are focused on the success of Asian-American students, their views change.

The white adults in the survey were also divided into two groups. Half were simply asked to assign the importance they thought various criteria should have in the admissions system of the University of California. The other half received a different prompt, one that noted that Asian Americans make up more than twice as many undergraduates proportionally in the UC system as they do in the population of the state.

When informed of that fact, the white adults favor a reduced role for grade and test scores in admissions — apparently based on high achievement levels by Asian-American applicants. (Nationally, Asian average total scores on the three parts of the SAT best white average scores by 1,641 to 1,578 this year.)

When asked about leadership as an admissions criterion, white ranking of the measure went up in importance when respondents were informed of the Asian success in University of California admissions.

There is more here.  The jstor link to the research is here.

The multiple layers of deceit in this Shakespearean story are becoming increasingly strange:

Norwegian prime minister defends cab stunt as it emerges passengers were paid

An audacious election stunt where Norway’s Prime Minister worked undercover as a cab driver has backfired after it emerged that five of his passengers had been vetted and paid.

Here is more, via Yannikouts.