Elizabeth Alexander to Read at Inauguration

I think one of the things that I have liked so much about Obama winning the Presidency is all the stories that come out surrounding him, who he knows, where he's from, and what it means for Black Americans. He was so clearly moved when he announced that he'd won in Chicago, for instance. It seemed so uncharacteristically non-political when he mentioned in that speech he mentioned the Civil Rights movement. You could just feel what it meant for Black Americans, even if you're not Black (like I'm not), and specifically what it meant to him to be a part of that.

So like I said, I've enjoyed the smaller stories that have come out, too. For instance, I just learned today that Elizabeth Alexander, who is a poet at Yale's African-American studies program, will be reading at his inauguration. The entire article is short and has some interesting anecdotes about Obama and her that I enjoyed. For instance, she is what you might call a second-generation Civil Rights activist. Secondly, she and Obama are friends because she had been on faculty at the University of Chicago that same time as him, making (in her words) this a double important ceremony for her. What a unique thing that must be for those who knew Obama, and her were progressive activists in this ongoing Civil Rights movement. Not only did a Black man win, but one of their good friends at that! That makes this historical event personal, which is so rare as to get to have even the first happen, but even rarer to have both. It'd be like being MLK's dissertation adviser, or the guy who cut Malcolm X's hair, or to have gone to church with Rosa Parks - to see history unfurl like that around you and including you is a powerful thing. Congratulations to Professor Alexander. I look forward to reading her poems.

PDF now in Gmail

FYI, when someone sends you a PDF in Gmail, you have the option to view or download the file. It used to be the case that if you clicked "view," that Google would strip the text and whatnot out of the PDF and simply present it as a text file. That worked fine for about 90% of the file unless there were figures and equations in which case it obviously got a little ugly, but it wasn't a big deal really most of the time. I still tended to view it, since I hate downloading PDFs all the time, and because I read so many academic papers, I tend to get a "download" folder that fills up all the time. Anyway, I checked out just now a file someone sent me in PDF by clicking on "view" and for the first time that I had noticed, Google is presenting the PDF as a PDF.

But, I scrolled through this document and noticed that only the first few pages are clear. After the 7th page of this particular document, everything is blurry - figures, tables but also the main body text. Strange. Anyway, I guess if you want to look just at the few pages, this is better than before, but if you want to read the entire document in google's viewer, it's worse.

Nixon/Frost - 4 stars (by Ebert)

Let the MoLT family (and the other half of the Kinsey family) consider themselves warned that when we are using Borda counts to decide what to do with the night, I will be putting Nixon/Frost on the list. I'm just saying, because Ebert put it in his top movies of 2008, it's directed by Ron Howard, and the historical events on which the movie is based sounds fascinating.

What [screenplay writer, Peter] Morgan suggests is that even while Nixon was out-fencing Frost, two things were going on deep within his mind: (1) a need to confess, which may have been his buried reason for agreeing to the interviews in the first place, and (2) identification with Frost, and even sympathy for him.

Of course, like all my movie recommendations, I fully expect Borda counts to reveal that it will be ranked last when all the votes are cast. Sigh.

#1 in the "When Bad Things Happen To Good People" Series

The Max Planck Institute wanted to put some pretty Chinese writings on the cover of a recent Max Planck Institute Journal volume, more or less as decoration. Great idea, right? Well, that depends on whethera Chinese advertisement for a brothel falls within the bounds of taste, I suppose. Lo tov!

The Lost Decade

That's what people call the 1990s for Japan. The country went into a major slump from which they emerged only a decade later. Not only has Krugman openly worried that that will happen to us, but now others are murmuring as well. A decade lost. If so, we will remember it til we're old. How hard and dark are these times? I only hope I'm exaggerating when I say "hard. dark."

Has the Republican Party become too Conservative?

These kinds of questions always seem kind of silly. It's sort of like when people get into extremely intense, heated debates as to why the United States doesn't have a more popular soccer program compared to the European Union. But Colin Powell thinks it is true anyway, and blames that for Obama winning. But couldn't you just as easily mark up the Republican loss to Ockham Razor kinds of explanations? Like, oh I don't know, the worst recession in several decades which all but obliterated John McCain's chances. The recessionary explanation would explain why even as far back as January, prediction markets were estimating a democratic win (even before the primaries of either party were finished) by over 60%. The news in financial markets was already very, very bad as early as the mid-spring of 2007, so it seems like such an easy thing to say that the incumbent party is facing an extreme disadvantage in such a climate. Trying to explain the failure in anything else seems to me, fwiw, weak. Having said that, Colin Powell is a stud, so take what I say with a grain of salt.

New AER Articles

The new American Economic Review should be arriving to my doorstep any day now. Until it gets here, I can't read it as I don't remember my username and password and thus cannot read the online version. But here are some that look really good.

1. Can Hepatitis B Mothers Account for the Number of Missing Women? Evidence from Three Million Newborns in Taiwan by Ming-Jen Lin and Ming-Ching Luoh. Their conclusion?

"We demonstrate that the probability of having a male birth is only slightly higher for HBV mothers than for mothers without HBV. The sex ratio at birth rises for the higher birth order and that in families where the first two children are female. Our findings suggest that HBV status has little impact on the missing women phenomenon."

As you may recall, Emily Oster's dissertation argued strongly that hepatitis B explained the "missing women" phenomenon in Asia, particularly in either India or China where it explained either 25% or 75% of the missing women. (I say "either" because I don't have the paper in front of me, and so can't remember if it's India that she says she can explain 75% or China. One is 25%, though, and one is 75%). The theory and her evidence was met with a lot of skepticism among economists and epidemiologists. Since then, Emily has come out with a paper herself casting doubt on her original hypothesis. Now here is another one. Overall, I think the explanation that the missing women in Asia is due to anything other than son preference is probably not correct.

2. The Effect of Credit Constraints on the College Drop-Out Decision: A Direct Approach Using a New Panel Study by Ralph Stinebrickner and Todd Stinebrickner. I mention this one only because the Stinebrickner's have really rode this one Berea College dataset to town. I think this is the second AER publication, plus a ton of other top general and top field publications, all based on this one survey that one of the brothers did for their university. I was actually inspired, in part, by the success of their own original field research to engage in my own current research agenda, which involves a massive amount of original data collection. Plus, Berea uses a random roommate assignment, which allows them a fairly clean mechanism by which to estimate peer effects. This one looks really interesting, and I look forward to reading it.

3. The Demand for, and Impact of, Learning HIV Status by Rebecca Thornton. The abstract to this is really interesting, and I can't wait to read it. Again, an original piece of field research, btw.

Abstract

This paper evaluates an experiment in which individuals in rural Malawi were randomly assigned monetary incentives to learn their HIV results after being tested. Distance to the HIV results centers was also randomly assigned. Without any incentive, 34 percent of the participants learned their HIV results. However, even the smallest incentive doubled that share. Using the randomly assigned incentives and distance from results centers as instruments for the knowledge of HIV status, sexually active HIV-positive individuals who learned their results are three times more likely to purchase condoms two months later than sexually active HIV-positive individuals who did not learn their results; however, HIV-positive individuals who learned their results purchase only two additional condoms than those who did not. There is no significant effect of learning HIV-negative status on the purchase of condoms.

I will definitely be looking at this one. The effect of testing appears to increase safesex among HIV- folks, but not surprisingly, has no effect on HIV+ folks. Of course, testing - if it increases safesex among HIV- folks - is helping to limit the spread of HIV throughout the population. But what happens when the HIV+ and the HIV- person meets, both of whom have been tested? Well, that's probably where Nash bargaining problems arise, which is where my previous research has focused - on bargaining power and threat positions and overall mating conditions.

Brad DeLong on Larry White

I read the Larry White piece in Cato Unbound a few weeks ago and learned a thing or two from it. Very well-written and well-reasoned. White is an Austrian economist, and a very good monetary theorist by what I am told. Brad DeLong writes an uncharacteristically polite, but characteristically rigorous, response. I thought this closer was correct, and I agreed.

So why does Larry White’s diagnosis of what is going on differ so much from mine? I think that what is going on is a characteristic weakness of the Austrian tradition: the baseline assumption that all evils must have their origin in some form of government misregulation. If government could be drowned in the bathtub, then an Eden in which people indulged in their natural propensity to truck, barter, and exchange would emerge. And this automatically rules out what I regard as the most likely and fruitful road to walk down to understand this financial crisis: the road that starts from investigating how human psychological limits lead to bad private-sector contract design that then magnifies psychological biases.

That bias is why the austrians are stuck. The best of the Austrian tradition did not have such a bias. The worst are ideologues for whom it was written "to a child with a hammer, everything is a nail."

Links

1. Holy crap - a 99 dollar iPhone through Walmart? Please say this is true.

2. Real life Mario Kart. Banana peels and firecrackers are not as effective as you might have been taught growing up.

3. Allen Guelzo gives his opinions of Bush's record in a top five list. Increasing aid to Africa's HIV epidemic is not on the list, but probably should be. The other five are likely to not be shared as highlights of Bush's administration by a lot of people if I had to guess.

4. These types of tales scare the living daylights out of me.

The Godfather Album

Mario Puzo discusses the making of the book and the film from his point of view.

10:10 is a focal point?

From Kottke.

Ten minutes past ten o'clock, which forms a smiley face on a clock and "frames the brand" nicely, is the go-to time for watches in advertising. Timex sets their watches to precisely 10:09:36 while Rolex waits almost a minute until 10:10:31.

The Hamilton Watch Company was among the first to clock in at 10:10; that time is favored in ads dating at least as far back as 1926. Rolex began consistently setting watches in ads at 10:10 in the early 1940s. Timex appears to have begun the transition in 1953, when its Ben Hogan model showed 8:20 while the Marlin model was set to 10:10.

Weird.

Doctors Propose Universal HIV Tests

Nature reports that doctors are proposing for universal tests for HIV to try and eliminate the disease. The presumption in this is that once you find out your infected, you won't then infect someone else. But what if ignorance of your own infective status makes you more willing to have protected intercourse, but learning that your infected means you now have nothing left to lose. So what if learning your infected, because you prefer unprotected sex, means now you're more likely to commit sexual fraud and pretend you're not infected when you really are so that you can have unprotected sex with people. It's not like we don't have evidence of HIV+ men purposefully infecting other HIV- people. Testing is one of those areas in the economics of health that is theoretically ambiguous. If people are having protected sex to protect themselves, rather than others, then learning your own infection status may or may not cause you to become safer. It may perversely just cause you to be more reckless, since risky behavior is only risky if there is some chance something bad will happen to you. But if that bad thing has already happened, then you only curb your behavior if you're altruistic. So how altruistic do we think people are? Or rather, how altruistic do they have to be for this to program to be efficient?

Jupiter and Venus

The two bright stars by the moon over the last few days have been Jupiter and Venus. They are in "conjunction."