Welcome Professor Roth

Alvin Roth, one of my favorite economists, is now blogging. Welcome Dr. Roth. (hattip to MR).

I'm So Sure Batman Died

Drudge Report has in column one a story about Batman/Bruce Wayne was murdered at the end of the RIP storyline by none other than his own dad. Yeah, let that sink in - the same man we've seen murdered by Joe Freeze in Bruce's own weary memories a thousand times. Even my 7-year-old knew I was full of it when I told him I had just read Batman was killed off at the end of a story by his own father. Awesomed by Comics has read it and says the whole thing stinks. The worst part about it, to her, isn't even the stupid story, but the random European characters. What's Grant Morrison's problem? I am kind of tired of him.

Crayon Physics Deluxe

Crayon Physics Deluxe is now available (for pre-order). You can get it for $14.95 through paypal. Good luck to this guy. It sure took him a million years to get finished! (not really). I want one.

Another in the "What Did We Do To Laugh Before the Internet" series

From McSweeney. Atlas Shrugged 2.0.

"I heard the thugs in Washington were trying to take your Rearden metal at the point of a gun," she said. "Don't let them, Hank. With your advanced alloy and my high-tech railroad, we'll revitalize our country's failing infrastructure and make big, virtuous profits."

"Oh, no, I got out of that suckers' game. I now run my own hedge-fund firm, Rearden Capital Management."

"What?"

He stood and adjusted his suit jacket so that his body didn't betray his shameful weakness. He walked toward her and sat informally on the edge of her desk. "Why make a product when you can make dollars? Right this second, I'm earning millions in interest off money I don't even have."

He gestured to his floor-to-ceiling windows, a symbol of his productive ability and goodness.

"There's a whole world out there of byzantine financial products just waiting to be invented, Dagny. Let the leeches run my factories into the ground! I hope they do! I've taken out more insurance on a single Rearden Steel bond than the entire company is even worth! When my old company finally tanks, I'll make a cool $877 million."

And it only gets better.

Links

Only two links here. First, 20 stupidest GI Joe vehicles. I had several of these, as did MoLT. At the time, they were anything but stupid. H.A.V.O.C. was probably my favorite GI Joe vehicle for a good year. My favorite caption is for the Cobra Pogo Ballistic Battle Ball (#4): "Oh for crying out loud. This is going to get someone killed." I also laughed when he calls one of the Rattler's weaponry "that gay little turret." The Rattler was also a mainstay in any of my ops against MoLT.

2. Michael Cera has a new comedy/docu-drama coming out about his real-life relationship with girlfriend Charlyne Yi, who played the scene-stealing stoned girlfriend in Knocked Up. Count me there.

Heroes

The writers need to: (a) figure out who characters are and try to maintain at least some consistency and (b) make characters stop having constant psycho-existential crises. It's run its course. Move on.

Update: (c) Stop the spinning camera angle thing. Stop trying to be dramatic and simply tell their stories. Why is that so hard?

HIV Eliminated in a Decade? Probably Not

This study predicts HIV could be eliminated in a decade. Color me skeptical. Color me highly skeptical, that is. If there's anything the papers I've been reading on the impact of improvements in HIV treatment have convinced me of, it's that without a vaccine, improved treatment is going to increase HIV incidence. We're already seeing it. What many epidemiologists do not understand or at least downplay is that AIDS itself was a deterrent to the spread of infection. The fear of AIDS caused people to wear condoms and have fewer partners. One study by Andy Francis even finds AIDS caused homosexual men to switch to having sex with women because the risk of infection was so high (and so fatal) among gay males. As the drugs began to have a real impact - especially with the protease inhibitors - and AIDS mortality fell dramatically, people could remain HIV+ and not reach any stage of autoimmune failure. Maybe never - some HIV+ individuals have been on medications for over 15 years and still don't have AIDS. Recent economic studies, like Lakdawalla, Sood and Goldman articla as well as this paper by Mechoulan found that when these new breakthroughs in treatment came out, both infected and non-infected individuals responded by increasing their risk for transmission. Infected gay males who began receiving treatment, for instance, responded to treatments by more than doubling the number of sexual partners they had recently had. Mechoulan finds similar things among HIV- individuals, including finding them reducing their condom usage. The rise in HIV that is observable in the data shows this, too. Both due to increased survivorship and changing behavior due to changing prices, HIV seems to be at the least not going away, and at worst, increasing.

Hoop Dreams (4 out of 4 stars)

All this talk about Hoop Dreams persuaded my wife and me to rewatch it last night. I think it's time for you too, as well. Here's Ebert's original review of it. He later goes on to put in his top movies of the decade. I read on Wikipedia that William Gates eventually tried out for the NBA and made it, but injured himself and never played. He's now a senior pastor at a church in Cabrini-Green.

There's also an interesting article in today's paper that updates the two men's lives. They are still close.

The Violin Model

“This is the violin model: Hold power with the left hand, and play the music with your right,” David J. Rothkopf, a former Clinton official who wrote a history of the National Security Council, said on Friday, as news of Mrs. Clinton’s and Mr. Geithner’s appointments leaked. “It’s teaching us something about Obama: while he wants to bring new ideas to the game, he is working from the center space of American foreign policy."

I like this guy so far.

Nobody's Fool (3 out of 4 stars)

The missus and I watched Nobody's Fool starring Paul Newman (1994), and co-starring Melanie Griffith, Bruce Willis, Jessica Tandy, and in a bit part, Philip Seymour Hoffman. It's based on a book by Richard Russo, who also wrote Empire Falls (I think that was the name). All in all, I enjoyed the film, but not enough to want to see it again necessarily. After watching it again, I remembered that when I had seen the movie when it first came out, I had thought pretty much the same thing then. It's on hulu.

Political Prediction

I predict Austrian economics is going to become very interesting to people again over the next four years. Already, there is an enthusiasm among conservatives to return to their base and core principles. That ultimately is going to benefit Austrians, who arguably form those core principles. At its core, the Republican party is Hayek's party. When in power, it's not of course, because of the median voter theorem. But when out of power, they'll return to the Austrian water and reflect. I chalk this up to the purification that occurs when the candidate at the median is not your candidate. There's a strong temptation, if you're ideologically committed, to look the other way when your guy is in power, and to become laser-focused when he is not. That's why the last eight years were so good for Democrats, imo. They thrived during the Bush administration. His every misstep and perceived tyrannies gave them strength. He was the yellow sun to their Superman. It's funny how it works, but I think it does work that way. The median voter theorem takes the candidate away from his base, to the median in some policy space. That necessarily means he must leave his base, who is anything but median in commitment and perspective. So they are quiet or they are angry, but they are not enthusiastic whatever they are. But for the other side, it's a good thing to be out of power. It creates unity among the base. They have an enemy again, and he's not their own President (finally!). It never ends, though. If you think the median voter theorem has some deep insights in it, then it will just constantly cycle back and forth. So again, my prediction is Austrian writers will do well right now. While out of power, Republicans will start to reflect again, and that will ultimately take them back to the purists, like Hayek. It'll be the Chomsky's who suffer eventually declining sales over this new administration.

Airplane (Serious)

I make this vow to you, the inner light in my soul. I will never stop feeding you mashups like these. On this, I swear.

Can you imagine the sheer amount of effort it took to make this mashup, since you can't go 4-5 seconds in this movie without a gag or joke of some kind? He should get an editing award for this.

Thunder and Lightning

On MoLT the other day, I commented that making Hoop Dreams took real courage. Filming for five years two inner city kids seems awful risky. That's a huge investment - time and money, including the opportunity cost - and no real way of knowing how it'll turn out. Had it not turned out, we would all be ignorant of the attempt, but those close to the filmmaker would've shook their heads saying, "Told you so." Ebert reviews another similar kind of documentary experiment, and says basically the same exact thing.

This kind of film, like "Hoop Dreams," is only possible when a filmmaker stakes a bet on an unknown outcome. I won't tell you how it ends, except that Eddie Vedder does something out of the blue that is simply astonishing, and shows genuine class. Stars do nice things for people all the time, but this is something that shows thoughtfulness and insight, and with no expectation that the world would ever hear about it.

I'm very intrigued to see this film. When it comes out on DVD, I will. It's about a couple act called "Lighting and Thunder" or "Thunder and Lightning" (not sure which) who did Neil Diamond covers for decades. It seems to be a story about dreams, ambition, commitment - stories I never grow tired of.

This review also piqued my interest. Apparently the movie doesn't have a distributor, though it won the major awards at Slamdance and other film festivals. This last part about Eddie Vedder really has me curious.

Now as pathetic as all this may sound, we haven't even scratched the surface of pathetic in this movie. In fact, the pathos gets so thick, it almost becomes a redemptive experience. You think your life sucks? Try Lightning and Thunder's on for size. For instance, not long after their Eddie Vedder triumph, Claire is out gardening in her front lawn when an old lady mistakes the gas pedal for the brake and careens right into her, before smashing into their front room window. Claire is rushed to the hospital where doctors have no choice but to amputate one of her legs.

The pain stays with Claire long after she leaves the hospital, so she's put on heavy medication. And that medication, along with her increasing inactivity, leads to significant weight gain. It slowly becomes apparent that nobody wants to see a Lightning and Thunder show with a heavy-set, one-legged Thunder in a wheelchair. Even with a prosthetic leg, Thunder can't seem to win back her fans.

And as Thunder gets more and more depressed, her two teenage kids get nastier and nastier. Some of the screaming and hitting jags between Claire and her kids are extremely uncomfortable to watch. Even on Christmas morning around the tree, a family fight breaks out and someone screams "Christmas sucks!" Their home life slowly begins to resemble an early John Waters film.

To make matters worse, the 17 year old daughter announces she's pregnant, Claire accuses Mike of cheating on her since she's only got one leg, and finally, as Mike makes plans to meet his idol (Diamond's in town for a concert), he has a near-fatal heart attack and winds up with quintuple bypass surgery. And just when you thought things couldn't get any worse, they do. Song Sung Blue, indeed. Even Job would feel sorry for these people.

In the end, Eddie Vedder comes through like a prince, with a generous gift and more importantly a heartfelt recognition of musical troupers like Mike and Claire Sardina, AKA Lightning and Thunder.

Ebert reviews Twilight

Le Sigh. Soak it up people. One day, our beloved Roger Ebert will go on to that big movie house in the sky. (Thankfully, he'll have left behind 10,000 reviews, nearly all of which are wonderful to read - usually more enjoyable than the movies he's reviewing themselves). His review of the new vampire chick-flick, Twilight made me laugh several times. I loved these two paragraphs.

Edward has the ability to move as swiftly as Superman. Like him he can stop a runaway pickup with one arm. He rescues Bella twice that I remember, maybe because he truly loves her, maybe because he's saving her for later. She has questions. "How did you appear out of nowhere and stop that truck?" Well might she ask. When he finally explains that he is a vampire, he goes up from 8 to 10 on her Erotometer. Why do girls always prefer the distant, aloof, handsome, dangerous dudes instead of cheerful chaps like me?

"Twilight" will mesmerize its target audience, 16-year-old girls and their grandmothers. Their mothers know all too much about boys like this. I saw it at a sneak preview. Last time I saw a movie in that same theater, the audience welcomed it as an opportunity to catch up on gossip, texting, and laughing at private jokes. This time the audience was rapt with attention. Sometimes a soft chuckle, as when the principal Indian boy has well-developed incisors. Sometimes a soft sigh. Afterwards, I eavesdropped on some conversations. A few were saying, "He's so hot!" More floated in a sweet dreaminess. Edward seemed to stir their surrender instincts.

Mark Cuban vs the SEC

There's a really good breakdown of the SEC's case over at Professor Bainbridge's blog. He thinks they have a good case, but notes some possible strategies. The one question he has about the case was the one I had when I heard Cuban did this to save a measly $750,000.

Finally, WTF was he thinking? According to the SEC, Cuban saved a whopping $750,000. According to Wikipedia: “As of 2007, Cuban is #133 on Forbes’ “World’s Richest People” list, with a net worth of $2.8 billion.”

This wouldn’t be the first time greed made an iincredibly wealthy person do something stupid over what amounts, from their perspective to chump change. (Remember Martha Stewart, who saved $45,673 by selling her Imclone shares?)

But I really don’t understand the psychology in most of these cases. You’re rich. You can afford to take a hit.

In Cuban’s case, however, I suspect it was not greed but rather his legendary temper that did him in. The PIPE transaction Mamma.com planned would have involved the issuance of new shares at a below market price. It would have diluted the economic value and voting rights of Cuban and the other pre-PIPE investors. The complaint makes clear that Cuban was furious about the planned sale. His anger led him to a rash act, which now could result in serious civil fines. Whether the Justice Department will pursue criminal charges, as well, remains to be seen.

Nonpartisan Social Security Reform

Found this and thought I'd pass it along.

Overview

The three of us – former aides to President Clinton, Senator McCain, and President Bush – did an experiment to see if we could develop a reform plan that we could all support. The Liebman-MacGuineas-Samwick (LMS) plan demonstrates the types of compromises that can help policy makers from across the political spectrum agree on a Social Security reform plan. The plan achieves sustainable solvency through progressive changes to taxes and benefits, introduces mandatory personal accounts, and specifies important details that are often left unaddressed in other reform plans. The plan also illustrates that a compromise plan can contain sensible but politically unpopular options (such as raising retirement ages or mandating that account balances be converted to annuities upon retirement) -- options that could realistically emerge from a bipartisan negotiating process, but which are rarely contained in reform proposals put out by Democrats or Republicans alone because of the political risk they present.

Pretty cool. Of course the incentives that face lawmakers when trying to make compromises are a bit different than the ones these three economists faced in their little experiment...

Ed Gein - Serial Killer

The wikipedia entry on Ed Gein is thorough and fascinating. Reading over it, you can see the impact that Gein's killings had on popular culture. The serial killer genre begins with Psycho, which is deeply inspired by Gein's killings and his obsession with his mother. The pinnacle of the genre is Silence of the Lambs, based on Thomas Harris's book. While Hannibal Lecter is more original (though here it's said he based the character on murders he covered while a police beat reporter in the 1960s), the focus of the FBI's manhunt ("Buffalo Bill") is almost a verbatim replica of Ed Gein. For instance, Gein stated he wanted gender reassignment after his mother died. His murders involved keeping bodyparts as souvenirs, including vulvas and human skin that had been carefully removed from the cadavers and made into lampshades and masks. Gein was literally making a "woman suit," just like Buffalo Bill is doing throughout the novel and movie adaptation.

It's interesting to me because there have really been only a few high profile serial killings. One has to believe that serial killers are rare people. Humans may have great capacity for murder and torture, but oftentimes it seems both are purely done with utilitarian motives. They are done in the context of a robbery, over money, crimes of passion, for some profit motive, etc. But the serial killer is motivated by none of these things. The normal deterrences that are embedded in the mind and soul seem to not exist for this person. I've read by psychologists that family upbringing does not operate on child outcomes in a purely linear way. Rather, there is a minimum amount of care that must be required for a child. Below that, and really bad outcomes happen. Above that, and good ones happen. Going twice beyond that, though, and the improvements do not increase by two-fold. So you have to really screw up to screw them up, in other words, but if only moderately screw up, then the outcomes are thankfully much better. Because of the natural affection shared among kin, you can imagine easily why such deep levels of maltreatment are relatively rare. And with child welfare agencies being what they are in developed countries, even moreso. But in a population of 350 million, these outliers still show up in large absolute numbers, and when they do, they are entertainment. They are puzzling, rather - a curiosity. How can someone eat another person? Why would kill a string of women to collect and preserve their vulvas so he can wear them beneath his clothes? How can someone love their mother so much that they want to murder people, and that somehow in their mind helps them become their mother? It's all very strange and impossible to understand, and I think this is why the serial killer is increasingly portrayed as intelligent and calculating. Like the Zodiac murderer, for instance.

But it seems to all trace back to Gein. The Gein paradigm is the first serial killer where the pathological sickness motivating the murders is really grisly. There doesn't seem to be any hate or malice, even. It appears like utility maximizing behavior, which is what makes it the opposite of other types of murders. The Zodiac paradigm is different. There the person does seem full of rage, full of hate - brilliant, yet accusational towards society. You see this character in Se7en. Both are deeply disturbed, but the Gein paradigm is not an entertainer in the way that the Zodiac killer is.

Britney Spears

This new documentary documentary about Britney Spears appears to have her candid, without handlers, and the presentation is apparently very sad.

Head Start Saves Lives

My wife is doing some contract work for Head Start. Sometimes she comes home discouraged because the kids need so much, and she's doing so little. I tell her that she has to trust God is going to put the people in these kids' lives that they need. Then we talk about Head Start, and whether it's a good or bad program. She gets, again, discouraged because when she goes to Head Start, it's like a train wreck in slow motion. I tell her - which I think is encouraging - that she can't observe the counterfactual. Who knows how much worse off they'd be if they weren't in Head Start - if the program didn't even exist. Well, apparently if the program didn't exist, a lot of the kids who were in Head Start would be dead. This is from a relatively new paper in the Quarterly Journal of Economics by Doug Miller (UC-Davis) and Jens Ludwig (Georgetown). Here's the abstract.

We find evidence of a large negative discontinuity ... in mortality rates for children ages 5-9 from causes that could be affected by Head Start, but not for other mortality causes or birth cohorts that should not be affected by the program. We also find suggestive evidence for a positive effect of Head Start on educational attainment in both the 1990 Census, concentrated among those cohorts born late enough to have been exposed to the program, and among respondents in the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988.

Ignore the first part (though believe me, it's very cool) about regression discontinuity. Here's the takeaway. The authors have pretty reliable evidence that Head Start caused some of these kids to survive past their 9th birthday, and also to accumulate more schooling. Next time you wonder about Head Start, think of this result.

Pomeroy Joins the Summers Club

If Larry Summers becomes Secretary of the Treasury, then I get to wear my Che Guevara-styled Larry Summers shirt that I bought during the hoopla when they fired him at Harvard. So hell yeah I want him to be Secretary. Stanley Fish disagrees, pointing out that he made Cornel West leave, but is Fish trying to dissuade or persuade me? I can't tell. Cornel West stunk in The Matrix sequels! Am I right or am I right? I am right. I am also tired. I am on total fumes.

Urban Freestyling

I'm not surprised when I see these kinds of motocross innovations - only surprised that I hadn't thought people were probably doing. It's very graceful to watch this guy practically dance on the walls and climb stairs with his motocross.

New Star Trek Trailer

I wasn't a huge fan of Star Trek going up, though I remember enjoying some of them as a kid. But this reboot by JJ Abrams looks potentially exciting. If done with courage and ambition, these sci-fi and fantasy reboots can be amazing. Consider Battlestar Galactica, Marvel's The Ultimates, or Josh Whedon's run on The Astonishing X-Men. I hope we are going to adding Abrams' Star Trek to this list.

Palin Helped, not Hurt, McCain

Or so says this guy. That's my gut instinct, too. It's of course a difficult thing to prove, because we cannot observe the counterfactual, and this campaign season was full of surprises, not the least of which was the near collapse of the financial industry which destroyed what little hope the Republicans had of keeping the White House. But, my sense is that Palin nonetheless seriously energized McCain's campaign, overcame a ton of his major weaknesses (like that his base hates him), brought Christians back into this race [ed: maybe... Karl Rove pointed out that there were 3-4 million missing "observant religious" voters compared to 2004], and gave McCain a pitbull to be on the constant attack while McCain could look like a person who would rise above typical politics (even if it did play a little bit differently than that, I think that was McCain's intention). In the end, I can't imagine Palin didn't help put a lot of those 150 some odd electoral votes in the McCain corner. Just remember, though. Correlation isn't causation, and you can only find causation by having some legitimate counter-factual to compare it to. But I'm not sure what that counterfactual is for a presidential election...

New Watchmen Trailer

Inner City LIberals vs. Limousine Liberals

Best. Distinction. Ever. Hispanic Pundit writes about the Obama victory and closes by saying this:

I’ve always distinguished between inner city liberalism, which I find appealing on several grounds, and limousine liberalism which I find abhorrent on many grounds. Inner city liberalism is much more sincerely focused on problems of the poor. Concerns about jobs, equal treatment, human dignity and religion all play a role. Limousine liberalism is much more the rich mans religion: environmentalism, utopia, elitism and a general disdain for religion. Though I wouldn’t classify Obama as a complete inner city liberal - he does, after all, have alot of limousine liberalism in him - he is the closest there has ever been in the history of the presidency. So it will be interesting to see how this plays out in his politics and policies. How people view him and treat him.

I'm totally stealing this distinction. Thanks HP! You're also now on my shortlist of bloggers to read.

$600 Billion - Gulp

One of the great things about an Obama administration is that Paul Krugman can get back to writing interesting economics pieces for the popular press rather than his anti-Bush writings. Today's NYT piece is a good example of just such a piece. Using Okun's law, he estimates that we need a fiscal package of $600 billion to close the output gap. Wow.

My issue with this is that, while I agree that we're in depression economics mode, I don't understand how fiscal stimulus actually helps us. Fiscal stimulus deals with aggregate demand shocks (ie, reductions in aimed spending by consumers, firms, government and the foreign sector), and it's clear that there's been an aggregate demand shock. These falling housing prices have caused capital losses for consumers, as had the stock market crash. But the real boogeyman is the effect that falling prices had on bank solvency. It's the insolvency in lendors that has created difficulty in getting credit, and in turn started to effect the real economy and thus firm investment. And that, in turn, has fueled even more drops in spending by consumers, and in turn drops in spending by government due to falling tax revenue, and contagion effects throughout the world as trade slows down, and therefore so does exports. Giving Americans money doesn't ultimately address that insolvency, does it? Why not spend the $600 billion and go directly to the heart of the problem - either by recapitalizing banks (second best), or buying up excess inventory of houses. Even better would be to let someone else by those houses - let foreigners buy them, for instance, in exchange for US citizenship. Anything that can buoy the housing prices seems like it deals with the insolvency problems. But the drop in consumer spending? That's a consequence of insolvency, not a cause itself, so how does stimulating it not simply postpone the problem?

Awkward Guy Photos

You have the awful job of ranking these in order of preference. I don't even know where to start, they're all so delicious. I'll give it a try.

The Old-Timey Fence Embrace

The This Is Awkward For The Photographer

The Group “I Don’t Know What To Do With My Hands“

The Proof I Talk To Chicks

The Failed Setup

The We’re 2 Dudes On Vacation, But Not Gay

The Oh My God There’s So Many Chicks In This Photo I Don’t Know What To Do

The White Guy No No

The Front Hand-Cross

The I’m Not Gonna Score Tonight

Quantum of Silence Two Stars?

Lo Tov, as the Hebrew say! Roger Ebert slams the newest addition to the James Bond franchise. I loved this little paragraph a lot.

The movie opens with Bond involved in a reckless car chase on the tollway that leads through mountain tunnels from Nice through Monte Carlo ... with Bond under constant machinegun fire[. The shot] is so quickly cut and so obviously composed of incomprehensible CGI that we're essentially looking at bright colors bouncing off each other, intercut with Bond at the wheel and POV shots of approaching monster trucks. Let's all think together. When has an action hero ever, even once, been killed by machinegun fire, no matter how many hundreds of rounds? The hit men should simply reject them and say, "No can do, Boss. They never work in this kind of movie."

Part of Ebert's complaint is that the movie makes Bond an action hero, and he prefers the old Bond. I actually hate the old Bond, and loved the new direction they began in Casino Royale, so maybe I'll like this.

Obama and the War on Drugs

Reason is skeptical because they think Obama won't go far enough. But to even go anywhere in the opposite direction is a huge advance towards a more rational drug policy. I'll take what I can get. That Obama was co-sponsor on Biden's bill to eliminate the crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity is a good signal for the kind of drug czar he'll pick, and the kind of policies he'll pursue.

David Gale Obituary

This obituary about David Gale, who died earlier this year, is really nice and interesting. A lot of intellectual history related to game theory and market design is in this little piece. I read Roth and Sotomayor's book on two sided matching while I was in grad school. My dissertation was on marriage markets, and I was working all alone on it, so was reading all that I could. It's a huge literature, and I barely made a dent in it, but I did manage to read Roth and Sotomayor's book three times (it took me three times to understand it, I mean). That was the first time I heard of David Gale. The Gale and Shapley "deferred acceptance algorithm" specifically. It was really kind of a breath-taking experience for me to work through that material, and figure out the deferred acceptance model. Even though in retrospect, it's so simple and easy to understand, working through the proofs was really convincing in a way that I don't think it would be otherwise. Roth clearly sees David Gale as an intellectual father figure, and reading this obituary, I was delighted to see that Roth had actually nominated Gale and Shapley to the Nobel Committee for Economics. Once Gale died, then he can't get it posthumously, but Shapley's presumably still on the table.

Ninja Cats

Yep, and it's exactly that. My favorite part is when he tricks those stupid Siamese with the swinging light trick.

I need a functional coat

Maybe it was just an ostrich ... in a soccer uniform

Top Ten Most Irritating Phrases (cont.)

So far, this post has 150 comments. I'm just going to add a few more to the list.

11. Get a room.

12. It's all good.

#12 is annoying except when Michael Scott says it, then it's great.

Efficient Markets Hypothesis

To read maybe when I have time later. Click here.

Movie Violence and Assaults Paper

I've blogged about this paper before, but FYI for all the playaz, Dahl and Dellavigna's Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime? has been accepted for publication at the Quarterly Journal of Economics, one of our most prestigious journals (in the top 3). Here's what they find for those who don't remember from the last time I blogged about this interesting paper.

Abstract

Laboratory experiments in psychology find that media violence increases aggression in the short run. We analyze whether media violence affects violent crime in the field. We exploit variation in the violence of blockbuster movies from 1995 to 2004, and study the effect on same-day assaults. We find that violent crime decreases on days with larger theater audiences for violent movies. The effect is partly due to voluntary incapacitation: between 6PM and 12AM, a one million increase in the audience for violent movies reduces violent crime by 1.1 to 1.3 percent. After exposure to the movie, between 12AM and 6AM, violent crime is reduced by an even larger percent. This finding is explained by the self-selection of violent individuals into violent movie attendance, leading to a substitution away from more volatile activities. In particular, movie attendance appears to reduce alcohol consumption. The results emphasize that media exposure affects behavior not only via content, but also because it changes time spent in alternative activities. The substitution away from more dangerous activities in the field can explain the differences with the laboratory findings. Our estimates suggest that in the short-run violent movies deter almost 1,000 assaults on an average weekend. While our design does not allow us to estimate long-run effects, we find no evidence of medium-run effects up to three weeks after initial exposure.

So, to summarize, no it does not cause crime. It's a fairly strong paper in terms of its research design and tests, or at least looks as much. My one concern is that the NIBRS data does not include all states, and even from within states, not all jurisdictions. It specifically does not include any jurisdictions with a population greater than a million people (or at least it didn't in 2005; I haven't yet looked at the 2006 data). Does this matter? They also don't have box office data (they focus on daily ticket sales for all movies, violent and non-violent alike, from 1994-2005) by region. So in other words, they're basing this off the implicit assumption that the ticket sales are uniformly distributed, at least as far as I can tell. The people in Pokatown, Kansas (I made that place up) have the same demand for Saw as those in Nashville, TN. So I'm wondering if in the paper they really address this much at all. I mean, the NIBRS data is perfect for this kind of test. The NIBRS data has the following strengths:

1. Unlike the Uniform Crime Reports, NIBRS does not just assign one crime with one incident. UCR picks the worst crime and reports it, but NIBRS tracks all crimes associated with a single incident. So let's say that there is a bank robbery in which one of the perpetrators (let's say there's 3 perps) kills one person while one of the other perpetrators robs the bank. It's listed as a single incident, since they happened in concert, and only the murder is reported - not the robbery. This is, at least, my understanding of the "hierarchical rule". NIBRS reports: information on the offense(s) (even if there are multiple ones); information on offender(s); information on victim(s); information no property damage(s); information on arrest(s). I think it's roughly 6-7 dimensions. ... WHICH makes it a pain in the booty to work with, but nonetheless, there you go.

2. Unlike the UCR data, NIBRS records all offenses even if they don't actually turn into an arrest. So this is not just crimes, but a broad measure of violence, making it a perfect measure for severe physical violence that is believe to be the outcome of viewing media violence. Or at least the more severe forms of it. Smaller kinds of aggression that don't necessarily trigger a law enforcement visit are not recorded by NIBRS. But we may also think that those are not the ones that merit overt government regulation either.

3. The NIBRS data is going to tell you on what calendar day (e.g., January 2nd, 2004) and at what time of day (e.g., 8:00PM) that the offense occurred. UCR of course does not.

The tradeoff is that you gain such detailed information at a real cost, and that's the selection of some jurisdictions that choose not to report. The question is whether you think jurisdiction selection is going to contaminate the research design. Do you think the decision to report is correlated with the kinds of people who will or will not receive this "treatment"? Secondly, NIBRS does technically report city and state, but for some reason - probably b/c they don't have box office data at that level of disaggregation - Dahl and Dellavigna don't use it.

I am enthusiastic about this paper, but that does not mean I necessarily believe it. I read a paper the other day where a person randomly assigned expert opinions about wines to a grocery store shelf of wines and collected sales data for a summer. Those results I believe, even if I don't know if the question is of huge significance. This one, on the other hand, is plausibly of huge significance, but then I don't know if I really believe the results, per se. And that is because ideally you could be assigning the violent movie to some people but not others, observe the treated individual and the nontreated individual before the treatment, and afterwards, and then see if they went out and committed any violence. Here, the results are not quite so clean. But, it's the collection of evidence that is intriguing. Note how strong their results are, that they only show up for the hours during the movie and for a few days afterward, only for the really violent and not all the movies. It's the way this paper picks at the hypothesis, and presents a collection of results that has an intuitive explanation - the violent people went to see Saw instead of going out drinking. They are voluntarily incapacitated during Saw, and because they weren't drinking, they also don't go out afterwards and get into any fights.

It at least merits some serious, closer study. WHat's interesting is that this is the sort of thing that would never show up in a laboratory setting, but which might show up in a field setting because the field setting is going to allow for real decision-making. As they note in the paper, the lab studies are all partial equilibrium effects, but the real world is going to have something more like a general equilibrium. Anyway, check the paper out.

House

We finished House season 4 last night. Wow. I mean, wow. The entire season, from episode 1-14, was pure, unadulterated crap. And then the writers send us off with episode 15, "House's Head," and episode 16, "Wilson's Heart" - two episode that might actually be in the top 4 or 5 of the entire series. Which says alot given that the first three seasons were so brilliant. My wife started crying by the end of episode 16, and I was covered in goose bumps it was so good. So, if you're stuck in season 4, and want to give up, you should just keep pushing and know that the wait is worth it.

Blondes Raise More Money

Specifically attractive blondes, or so says a new study at Economics Letters.

Abstract

This study uses a door-to-door fund-raising field experiment to explore the returns to physical appearance on fund-raising success. Interestingly, blonde females earn more on average than brunette counterparts. However, the returns to physical appearance depend critically on the race of a potential donor.

That's by Michael Price at University of Nevada-Reno. A short and sweet paper. It's a randomized field experiment in which the randomization is both on the appearance dimension of the door-to-door fund raiser, and the recipient of the fundraiser. I think the paper is, start to finish, 3 pages long. I'm working on sending a paper to Economics Letters right now, and so may use this paper as my guide.

Ebert gives Syneddoche, New York 4 Stars

Great opening line from his review.

A lot of people these days don't even go to a movie once. There are alternatives. It doesn't have to be the movies, but we must somehow dream. If we don't "go to the movies" in any form, our minds wither and sicken.

I wonder if my tiny part of red country will get this movie anytime soon/ever?

Is Dick Cheney Unconstitutional?

Glenn Reynolds at instapundit recently published an article in the Northwestern Law Review journal asking about the constitutionality of the Vice President being involved in executive decisions. The NYT has a shortened version of it. Interestingly, Reynolds notes that the only clear purpose of the Vice President spelled out in the Constitution is the VP's role in the legislative branch. The VP is a tie breaker, and nothing else is mentioned beyond that. So the least that we have is that the VP is a part of the legislative branch, and not the executive branch. But Reynolds makes some other points that may not be as obvious. The main purpose of the VP is to serve as a "spare President" who we'll need in the event that our main President is removed for whatever reason. Just like you don't want to drive around on a spare tire, you don't want to drive around with a spare President because if the main President is removed (let's say for impeachment), then it puts at risk your spare also being removed for impeachment. You can easily see the applicability of that insight to the Bush administration. If Bush was ever at risk for impeachment, it's always seemed that it was because of joint decisions made by Bush/Cheney. Whether that perception's accurate is another matter, but that's the overall consensus among watchers as far as I can tell. So imagine if Bush were removed - what an uproar there would be to immediately have Cheney as President. Cheney's proactive involvement in the Bush administration always seemed to be because he had no Presidential ambitions himself. After 9/11, I get the sense that the White House became a warroom with Cheney and Bush in fairly deep strategic collaborations with one another. That's not obviously a bad thing, and if it was the case, was most likely due to management styles and issues related to trust and mutual respect. But, Reynolds nonetheless makes a good general argument that for the sake of transition in the event of the President deposed, you want the VP to be pristine, and clearly that is not the case with the Bush/Cheney administration where if anything, the VP is actually more worn down than the President himself.

Geez

Unemployment is at 6.5%, up from 6.1% a month ago, and at a 14-year high. If you were forecasting just based on this trajectory, you wouldn't be crazy to think it might actually reach 8% by February or March. This is definitely turning out to be worse than the 2001 recession, and likely worse than the 1992 recession. The question is whether it'll be worse than the 1982/1983 when Volcker cut the money supply to kill climbing inflation. Unemployment almost reached 10% in that one. Hopefully, it does not come to that this time.

Dying is Costly

A fascinating new paper from Anne Case, Anu Garrib, Alicia Menendez, and Analia Olgiati just popped up in my inbox. It's entitled Paying the Piper: The High Cost of Funerals in South Africa, and I fully expect to see it on Chris Blattman's blog any second now. Check out this abstract.

We analyze funeral arrangements following the deaths of 3,751 people who died between January 2003 and December 2005 in the Africa Centre Demographic Surveillance Area. We find that, on average, households spend the equivalent of a year's income for an adult's funeral, measured at median per capita African (Black) income. Approximately one-quarter of all individuals had some form of insurance, which helped surviving household members defray some fraction of funeral expenses. However, an equal fraction of households borrowed money to pay for the funeral. We develop a model, consistent with ethnographic work in this area, in which households respond to social pressure to bury their dead in a style consistent with the observed social status of the household and that of the deceased. Households that cannot afford a funeral commensurate with social expectations must borrow money to pay for the funeral. The model leads to empirical tests, and we find results consistent with our model of household decision-making.

That adds a new dimension in my own thinking about why funerals are expensive even in the United States. My grandfather died recently and we paid for the funeral. He was a military veteran and so technically the VA could've buried him for free, but for various social reasons - wanting proximity to his grave, for instance, but also wanting him buried with his family - we opted to have him buried in Mississippi which was much more expensive to do. I had it in my mind funerals were expensive because of occupational licensing and the fact that funeral homes have a quasi-monopoly over the right to bury cadavers. In that explanation, the funeral home chooses a price in equilibrium that maximizes their profits, which if they cannot price discriminate requires that they charge everyone the same price and thus the price is too high and too few bodies are buried. Maybe they're cremated instead or buried at the VA. Anyway, point being, the local funeral home probably does function in part like a monopolist, and so maybe this is true.

You could get this kind of result not just from government regulations that keep competitors out. It might also be explained by the natural economies of scale associated with funeral homes. To run a funeral home requires a big fixed cost, which is a huge plot of land to bury the bodies. Given high fixed costs and low marginal costs, a single funeralhome can provide all of the markets' burials at much lower average cost to the degree that they can bury a lot of bodies. And like the calculus my family did, even though there are thousands of funeral homes in the United States, these funeral homes are really not direct competitors for one another since the demand for a burial is closely tied to family's accessibility, and that means the market may really only be a small town or city. And in a small town, you can imagine the funeral home operating as a monopolist because of the cost advantage they'd have due to the economies of scale. I suspect, actually, that this is exactly part of the story for funeral home firm structure.

But those supply stories, as probably useful as they are, maybe don't really get at the demand side for burials, and I think this is the first paper I've seen that does. People bury a certain way based on social norms, and those norms are based on some kind of "modal burial" to which others appeal. This therefore means a certain kind of burial will be more common over others, and probably decreases the price elasticity of demand for burials so that funeral homes can charge even higher prices since for the monopolist, the price markup over marginal cost is directly proportional to how elastic demand is. This is of course just focused on South Africa, but at least as I think it out loud, I can see why it might be actually a more general phenomenon.

Craigslist to Ban Prostitution Ads

The Internet has been good for the prostitution business. It's driven women in droves from streets and college dorms into the market for commercial sex work where because of the Internet they can sell commercial sex while simultaneously reducing the chances they're killed or arrested - all thanks to the Internet. One thing that is gong to be different going forward is the particular websites where men meet these women. Craigslist looks like it's going to be effectively shuttering its doors, for instance. Soon, it will require women who post to the erotic section (which is basically the want ads for prostitutes) to submit credit card information. The price elasticity of supply to a website is pretty high. Craigslist was attractive to prostitutes in part because the ads were free. But not only will they not be technically free; they'll also have a higher risk of arrest and detection. Thus, expect the to scatter to one of the other 5 dozen sites like craigslist.

Prostitution imposes costs on society in different ways. The most obvious is through higher health risks as prostitutes help facilitate the spread of sexually transmitted infections in the network. But one way they imposes costs is by being seen. Consistently, it is shown that prostitution laws are enforced in large part because voting citizens hate to see it. Seeing prostitutes on street corners or seeing the traffic going in and out of massage parlors is itself an externality to many voters, and so they put pressure on police to enforce these laws so that the efforts can be pushed further underground. The movement online had already relaxed some of that, but I think craigslist was itself a public square and the erotic section not so far away that it bothered people. Plus, I think craigslist as a firm probably was annoyed that their site was consistently the focus of police sting operations. Now, prostitutes will scatter to other sites - there are literally dozens of these kinds of clearinghouse sites - where the chances that a non-client sees them is even slimmer.

From the perspective of society, there'll be fewer public nuisance externalities if it does move even further into the shadows. But, to the degree it's never enforced, never pursued, then the "price" of being a prostitute or soliciting a prostitute falls, and thus we get more of the prostitution services in equilibrium. Makes you wonder just what our goals really are or should be. Is it to reduce the visibility? Or is it to reduce the actual act itself? Are we trying to discourage women from working as prostitutes, or just doing so where we can see them?

Michael Crichton, RIP

Wow.

The Treatment of Bush Has Been a Disgrace

So says this wsj reporter.

Al Franken will not be Senator of Minnesota

Apparently, not even President-Elect Obama's massive momentum could save Al Franken, though indeed he apparently came within inches.

McCain's Concession Speech

Very classy concession speech. I liked the point that the victory must be a very special pride felt for African-American. Very sensitive and intuitive, and I can only imagine what it must feel like for so many Black men and women today. One day, social scientists might indeed be able to look back to this and determine whether this victory even pushed some young Black men at the margin of quitting school and going into crime to reconsider and keep pushing. Role models probably matter more than we understand. Congratulations to President-Elect Obama who ran a phenomenal and brilliant campaign.

College President Arrested for Drunk Driving

No wonder they were pushing so hard to have drinking laws changed. Seriously, though. University professors make $300-500,000/yr. We need to push the probability of being arrested up a lot higher, methinks, so it becomes really stupid to drink and drive.

Goodbye Bush

From an article about Bush's closest friends and colleagues:

Even for a declared optimist, Bush has appeared remarkably sanguine in this season of discontent. The economy is melting down, his own party has shunned him, and Tuesday's election is shaping up as a searing rebuke to his eight years in office.

Yet according to allies inside and outside the White House, Bush's mood remains buoyant and his attention is focused on the global financial collapse. In private meetings with business leaders, Bush has made a point of saying that he is happy the crisis happened on his watch so the next president and a new economic team do not have to grapple with it.

"His high energy level and spirit sets the tone for the rest of us," said Kevin Sullivan, Bush's communications director. "There's been no time to worry about any of this other stuff. . . . He believes the American people expect us to finish strong and to leave things in the best possible position for his successor."

I only voted once and that was in 2004 for Bush. I'll go to my grave a loyalist to Bush. I think, in the end, he put the country first and made hard decisions in the midst of gross uncertainty. His attitude, at least as it bubbles out into the airwaves and to my desk, seems to have consistently been that he'll try to take on as much as he can, bear all the costs on himself personally, and not leave the worst for someone else. You can debate that all day, and I won't get into that argument with you on this point, but I think his intent was that. I am grateful for the 8 years we had with him.

The Tick is on Hulu

Crikey. Looks like Hulu hit the jackpot, in the Pomeroy Kinsey sense of that term. The Tick season 1 (also the only season) is on hulu.

Q-Tip The Renaissance

I picked up Q-Tip's new album, The Renaissance today. It's playing on the turntable as I clean up the kitchen. It's getting decent, above-average reviews from what I saw, so I thought it was worth giving it a lissie-listen. Here's a review that I suspect I might end up agreeing with.

Overall, Renaissance is not a masterpiece. It’s not Low End Theory; It’s not the second coming of Tribe. And despite a the marketing campaign built around the election day “day of change” release date, the album is not political nor a radical change of direction for Q-Tip. It is however, as good as Amplified.

The only question is if 2008 is too late for another Amplified. Time will tell, but either way, it’s nice to finally see Q-Tip back in action.

Low End Theory is a masterpiece. I'd put it in the top ten albums for the 1990s.