Some Links (on Migration)

Russian Immigration Reform (RiaNovosti)
Is Russia the second-largest remittance sender? (PeopleMove)
Immigraion reform on both sides of the pond (PeopleMove)
Might the Arizona debacle do some good by being so bad? (Economist)
Internal Migration restrictions in China (Economist)

Some Links, Featuring Conservatives for Higher Taxes, and Evil Cul-de-Sacs

Conservatives for Higher Taxes (Economix)
Cul-de-Sacs may not be evil but they are inefficient (Infrastruturist)
Facebook's progression of suckiness over the years (AllFacebook)
Awesome Dinosaur shirt for kids
Which type of cognitive bias are you? (via Freakonomics)
No Reservations (more here)
Gas tax or hybrid subsidies? Free Exchange makes economic sense of why a gas tax is better for the environment.

Some Links, Including a couple of cool graphs

Gas price vs. miles driven over time (NY Times).














Explanations of grade inflation that can be ruled out: Hard work (Babcock & Marks, 2008).












China bubble watch (MR).

Stat Geek Post of the (Week?)

From Phil Price at "Statistical Modeling..."

A recent NY Times article/blog post discusses a classic Bayes' Theorem application -- probability that the patient has cancer, given a "positive" mammogram -- and purports to give a solution that is easy for students to understand because it doesn't require Bayes' Theorem, which is of course complicated and confusing.

The comment Phil made is priceless. Here is an excerpt:

I'm both perplexed and frustrated by your characterization of the "common sense" cancer calculation, because (except for the rounding) you have indeed applied Bayes' Theorem, whether you know it or not. ... Your calculation is EXACTLY as "labyrinthine" as Bayes' Theorem, because it is EXACTLY THE SAME as Bayes' theorem. Rather than telling your students that you have a better way of doing the calculation that avoids the complexities of Bayes' Theorem --- a claim that isn't true --- you should tell them that you can explain why Bayes' Theorem makes sense.

These journalists are one and the same who excoriate bloggers who provide information for free because it cannot possibly be "as good" as information that goes through the lens of journalistic editing. Riiiight. Or maybe experts are sick of being misquoted and taken out of contexts by journalists and figure the only way to do something right is to do it yourself.

Some Links, Should Travellers to AZ take their Passports?

Menzie Chinn asks if he should (here; news story on the law here; resolution summary here). If you solve the subsequent subgame, I'm sure someone'll get the idea that only stoping people with different skin colors or accents is a violation of civil rights, and that'll mean I should, too.
High-skilled immigrants make the economy go (here); maybe not for long (here).
Governments move to regulate remittances (here); what central bankers think of it (step one: keep better data here); mobile remittances might help keep better data (here).
How do temporary shocks affect modern economies? (Not much - here)
China's real estate bubble? (Economist, here; LA Times, here; Business Week, here) Some excerpts:

Taxi drivers boast of owning multiple flats for investment. (LA Times)

and

"My maid just asked for leave... She's rushing home to buy property. I
suggested she borrow 70% so she could cap the loss." (Business Week)

and

It's somewhat reassuring that buyers are plunking down sizeable downpayments. (Economist)

On #3, two comments: (1) ... for now; and (2) is it? If folks are leveraging 70% on speculation about the value of an asset that has had a historical real appreciation close to zero how much does it matter that they own a meager 30%? Again, you buy a house for the dividends of its use value. Investment value is speculation. and eventually a bubble.

How much is a "Hella"?

Apparently, it's possibly going to be 10^27 (a billion billion billion). (The Economist) The current highest named number is a "yotta" or 10^24.

Some Links, Non-conserving Republicans and Onshoring

Wham-O returns to the USA (Daily Show).
A program in California makes Democrats conserve, and Repulicans anti-conserve (Slate summary, gated original paper here).
Tolerance lowers HIV rates (MR summary here, ungated research paper here).
Trade surplusses are not always good (FE explains how to shrink them).
Chickenomics of Health Care (Krugman)
The State of Macroeconomics (Economist)

Two words

Pelzman effect.

More links, including more grade inflation and granger causation for hangover searches

A confession (here), grades for sale (here), and what my office is going to be like in about a week or so (here).
Searches for "mixed drinks" empirically cause searches for "hangovers" on google (HT to Hal Varian, here).
Yuan-na revalue? (Ouch! here)
5 private sector bureaucrats per doctor (here)
Should I rent or should I buy? (here)
Five cool graphs, in case you wonder why fuel efficiency hasn't improved (read: don't blame producers, here)

Some links, Old news, but things I might still bring up in teaching

Self-hating Austrian Economists (here, here, and here)

Potonomics (Ok, probably won't come up in class, but here)

Are government salaries really that relevant? (here)

Broken windows, or broken record? (here) Seriously. Austrian wannabes really need to find a new argument. Broken windows doesn't necessarily apply to every form of government spending, and with the environment, a subsidy to change over might be better for society in resolving the externality - as long as we price/tax future damage appropriately.

Cartel enforcement does decline when prices are high. Go figure. (here)

Will your house appreciate? (here) Maybe, but as I've said through the whole thing, a house's value is in what you use it for.

Houses pay hefty dividends to their owners in the form of living space — that’s
the real return on housing investment

And finally, more on curbing grade inflation (here)

Don't teach if you don't know

I may not have the most finely-tuned pedagogical technique, but at least I don't get basic shit wrong, like this:

Some years ago, my (now ex-) wife was involved in a "trivia night" fundraiser at
her elementary school, and they wanted me on their "teacher team" to round out
their knowledge. They had almost everything covered except some
technology-related topics and I was an IT guy. In round four, my moment to shine
arrived, as the category was "Math & Science" and one of the questions was,
"give the first five digits of pi." I quickly said, "3.1415." The 9 teachers at
the table ignored me and wrote down "22/7" on scrap paper and began to divide it
out. I observed this quietly at first, assuming that 22/7ths gave the right
answer for the first 5 digits, but it doesn't. It gives something like 3.1427. I
said, "Whoops, that won't work." They ignored me and consulted among themselves,
concluding that they had all done the division properly on 22/7ths out to five
digits. I said, "That's not right, it's 3.1415."

What follows is some neat storytelling on the escalation of the argument. It is revealed that the hero of the story (Mr. 3.1415) has an English degree, and (god help us) one of the "22/7 stooges" has a flippin civil engineering degree. Ultimately the teachers (who insist that 22/7 is the "correct" value of pi), get out the textbook that started this falsehood:

A great murmur arose at a few other tables as well, and my wife returned
with the text book. The teacher with whom I had been butting heads the most
grabbed it, thumbed through to the area of a circle chapter, jabbed her finger
at a sentence, and shoved the book across the table at me. The sentence said,
"Pi is an irrational number approximately equal to 22/7ths." The teacher sat
back, crossed her arms triumphantly, and said, "I hope they taught you to read
with your English degree." I read it, and slid the book back across and said,
"They also taught us to read the footnotes." As she read looked back at the
page, the blood drained from her face. At the end of the sentence was a little
"1" in superscript, and dutifully noted in the footnote were the first 20 digits
of the actual value of pi. Of which the first five are 3.1415.

Ok, so they don't know the analytical definition of pi. Surely they haven't seen the proof that 22/7 > pi, like this one. Great. But, in this case, they're just not reading, or maybe don't know what "approximately" means, or maybe too damn lazy to read a footnote.

Some Links: "Get to the point!"

Macroeconomics textbooks will need to be revamped;
War impedes trade;
Shadow bank regulation;
The "Nixon Shock";
Recycling carbon credits;
Cell penetration: 2001, 2004, and now;
Get to the point:

If your paper is more than 30 pages (double-spaced), hurry up and get to the point. If your paper is approaching 40 pages, it will not be accepted (you might get a recommendation for a revision that says "Get to the point." If your paper is over 50 pages, you've pissed me off. Your paper will be rejected.

More on Grade Inflation

From Catherine Rampell at Economix:

In the end, it probably turns out to be a wash, with everybody receiving meaninglessly high grades and feeling disappointed and demoralized by the lack of competitive advantage they were promised.

And my favorite:

Think of it this way: If everybody wears increasingly high high-heels, no one looks tall, but everybody’s feet hurt.

Dueling Fallacies

This Free Exchange piece does a good job of confronting the "Broken Window Fallacy" anti-stimulus argument. To be sure, some of the "shovel-ready" projects funded by the stimulus are a case of solutions in desperate search of a problem (i.e. there's nothing wrong but we'll fix it anyway). But some of the things are things that need fixing anyway and are things that are will only be fixed with help from a little 'nudge'. In other words, the current owners of some buildings might have installed better windows, but for the fact that the crappy window they have is already there and paid for - it's the "Sunk Cost Fallacy" and I'm starting to feel like I'm trapped in it with my current car, but that's another story.
As RA puts it:

can we really say, in a world in which the sunk cost fallacy has power, that the
broken windows fallacy is a fallacy? Let's say my old window is a cruddy window,
and I would derive net benefits from replacing it, but I am reluctant to because
I've already paid for the original window and throwing it out would seem like a
waste. If some delinquent then throws a rock through my window, I'm made better
off.

Trust me, I've hoped more than once on my drive home the last few weeks, "boy, wouldn't it be nice if some redneck rearended me just enough to total my car?" Or, since I'm theoretically gonna save tons with compact flourescent bulbs, why haven't I replaced my incandescents?

Some Links: Question of the Week

Question of the week: Why do we ascribe any credibility to a person with an undergraduate degree in political science (what is called Government at Harvard) in the area of economics (let alone accounting)? (Menzie Chinn on Robert Samuelson on economics)
Education externalities (Ed Glaser at Economix).
Blogginheads with Glen Loury (HT to MR)
Does unemployment insurance raise unemployment? (And, even if it does, there's a strong argument that longer durations of unemployment facilitate better job matches once a job is found.)

Some Links, featuring Grade Inflation by NCAA conference

Grade inflation: affine linearly increasing at about the same rate in each of the big athletic conferences. As a teacher, I can say that in practice education is becoming an increasingly consumer service whereas in theory it is more appropriately viewed as an investment. Students feel entitled (partly by high and rising tuition) to both a degree and a particular GPA. Of course, this view is not sequentially rational, since that will just debase the value of both, but the individual student has no incentive to be too concerned with the long run. With growing emphasis on student evaluations for jobs and tenure, professors no longer have a strong incentive to be credible gatekeepers.
More on China's Currency (by the Economist, here; and Menzie Chinn here)
Immigrants' unemployment surpasses natives' for the first time since 2003 (Economix)

Some links, featuring marine property rights and upward-sloping demand curves (?)

1. Should we ban bluefin trade? (No, we should find a way to allocate marine property rights more efficiently, but there's some discussion here, here, and here)
2. (Locally) upward sloping demand for spending time playing video games?
3. A very bad response to Krugman's China-bashing
4. Where does US foreign aid go? (Hint: The "Pottery Barn" rule)
5. Think term limits will curb special interests and improve government? Think again.

Some links, with tragedy of the commons in Zimbabwe

A good picture of the tragedy of the commons - the reason Elinor Ostrom shared the economics Nobel last year.
The Harvard undergraduate thesis everyone's talking about.
Does taking the first, possibly temporary, job in a crisis hurt future EP?

Some links, featuring abortion-reducing universal coverage, and deferred benefits payments in Virginia

Free health care = fewer abortions, according to Cardinal Hume (Economix)
Virginia slashes public services, including an agreement "to defer $620 million in contributions to the state pension system over the next two years." Does that mean I should worry about my 403(b)? Or, does it mean that bankers don't have to pay their bills, the state doesn't have to pay its bills, so I don't have to pay my bills? (Roanoke.com)
Microinsurance (The Economist)
China's hidden debt (The Economist)
Blogonomics (Economist's View)
National Security argument for amicable trade with China (Free Exchange)
Germany's trade surplus - somehow not as controversial as China's (Free Exchange)
If radical free market ideas can't win in the free market of ideas, use government intervention to push them on students (Economist's View)
Hardest logic puzzle ever? (FT)

Some Links, Featuring TC winning over one of my liberal friends and shamrock shortages

This post made one of my firebreathing liberal friends admit to agreeing with Tyler Cowen.
Egads, a shamrock shortage on St. Patrick's Day !
Put off changing your password! You're not lazy, you're rational (HT to TC)!
Picking your bracket on earnings potential of the schools' graduates (Economix).
Do we need more drunks or economists in government (why not both!)?

Some links, with doublespeak and not-so-evil government time regulation

Republican Double-Speak on Abortion: They were against it before they were for it.
Libertarian Alex Tabarrok would probably oppose daylight savings if proposed today; since we have it, he admits that it works, and he likes it. I wonder how many other government intrusions he feels similarly about? (Public education, o ye of public university employment?)
On a less thoughtful note - PM at Market Power thinks collecting sales taxes on actual sales is destroying activity - a keener observation would be that tax differentials and discriminatory taxes shift economic activity from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. (Another anti government curmudgin employed by a public university btw.)
Chinese stimulus. Shit, there's another thing they might be doing better than us (note that China is already well into its recovery).
Is the Yuan still actually undervalued? (Menzie Chinn)
More on Yuan-bashing from the Economist. (Free Exchange)
Some thoughts on durables and world trade (Menzie Chinn)
Modernizing Russia - Do they need Democracy? (The Economist thinks so, sorta - I don't, but I agree that they do need to reign in corruption)
From microcredit to microsavings (The Economist)

Passing the Buck

Obama shouldn't pass the buck as much as he does, but both sides do it:

Dear Fellow State Employee:
I want to personally thank you again for your hard work effort serving the
people of the Commonwealth, especially over the course of my 7 weeks in office.
... [O]ver the last several years before I became Governor the state work force
experienced a reduction of 1,651 positions, with an additional 664 recommended
layoffs in the new biennial budget introduced by Governor Kaine. When I took
office, I was faced with a $2.1 billion budget deficit. ...
Sincerely,
Robert F. McDonnell
Governor

That was a form letter sent to all state employees. I don't blame him for not mentioning the public primary and secondary schools that will be closing in rural Virginia, or spending millions to re-open several seldom-used highway reststops statewide. But the bigger point here is that I don't expect to hear John Boehner or Mitch McConnell to call him out for passing the buck to his predecessor (a democrat, incidentally). And, if you think I'm being harsh, I left out the part where he blamed bad snowstorms (oops, coulen't resist).

Some Links, Featuring Academic Wages and Pro-Immigration Seniors

Academic Wage Stickiness (short summary here; long version here)
New Index of Financial Conditions (I would prefer a factor analysis approach to a components analysis approach, so we could isolate underlying dimensions of financial conditions, but it's a start)
Property Rights for Indian Emigrants
Remittances to Tajikistan during the Downturn
Old People should Love Immigrants (but my guess is that they don't, for non-economic reasons)
How (and When) Best to to Cut Deficits?
A Couple of Dead, Liberarian Economists in Support of ARRA (the Bastiat excerpt here, courtesy of the right-leaning, Austrian-school-supporting, libertarian Library of Economics and Liberty)
Carbon Emission Policy

Budget Effects of Three Acts

From Menzie Chinn: Can you guess what these three graphs represent?

Some Links, Featuring Boogers and Rapping Dead Economists

The immune benefits of nose gold
An annotated guide to the Keynes-Hayek rap, "Fear the Boom and Bust"
How to grow a college beard when dress codes forbid it (at BYU, not VMI)
If the net increase in government spending since the recession began = zero, are we still being robbed of our liberty?
Okun's law, alive and well

Weekend Edition

Some links to stories heard on NPR doing errands:
The Bear that Wasn't
Where R U?
US vs. Canada Hockey: Right vs. Left?
And something on economics:
Remittances to India back on the increase.

Firm Heterogeneity and Export Promotion

You won't find this from a science journalist. Menzie Chinn gives a great summary of some new research (Melitz, 2003 and Kamata, 2010) on comparative advantage and export firms.

Okuns Law?

Broken?

Some Links

The macroeconomic ideology cube (5 parts):
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Think people look crazy talking to no one in particular when they're on a Bluetooth? Try this.

Some Links

Cultural Economics
Commodity Prices, 1934-2010
Simpson's Paradonx of the Day: Immigrant Crime Rates are Overstated A Sample:
How Curling Works
Pro-Poor Competition

Good Blog, Bad Blog

This piece on NPR about science journalism kind of ruffled my feathers because of this quote:

Professor Stephen Schneider, Professor of Climatology, Stanford University: I got to put down the blogosphere. The blogosphere is one of the worst places to go for information, because, unlike Paul and others, most public people are not going to spend three hours a day doing this. We really need to reestablish the mainstream media in putting some specialists back in who can smell the north end of a southbound horse, because most general assignment reporters can't and certainly their editors can't.

Now, I could care less what people think of this blog, and it probably isn't even in the top 100 for blogs by professional economists. But I can probably name 10 economics blogs off the top of my head that cover important issues in economics far, far better than any economic journalist, and many of them link over into science, technology, and humanities blogs that are equally good for their fields and subfields. True, within the blogosphere exists a substantial amount of crap, but finding a well-done blog by a professional in the field is not too tough, and many of these professionals blog, in part, because they are weary of science journalists, many of whom are barely even functionally literate in the fields they cover, consistently misquote their work or take their results horribly out of context.

Underestimating the human cost of environmental harm...

... by 1/20.
From Ezra Klein:

Bush stopped weighing the costs and benefits of deregulation ... providing industry lobbyists with a back door to block regulations. OIRA also instructed agencies to discount the value of future lives in constructing cost-benefit analyses by 7 percent a year, so that 100 lives in 50 years would only be worth 3.39 current lives. (Such logic can be used by conservatives to argue that the present cost of regulating greenhouse gases outweighs the future benefits of stopping climate change.)

7 percent! Can you imagine earning 7 percent real return on a risk-free bond (after inflation, so nominally, about 9-10 percent nominal return!)? Ridiculous!
From James Kwak:

Over the last five years, the ten-year Treasury yield has generally been between 4 and 5 percent. Call that 4.5 percent. Inflation has been in the low 2 percent range, so at best this is a risk-free return of 2.5 percent. ... Since the legal value of a life is primarily based on future income, this means that the real value of a life increases roughly with productivity. Productivity growth runs at about 2% per year. So if you are getting 2.5 percent on your risk-free investment, 2 percentage points of that just goes to make up for the fact that the people your policy is killing are getting more expensive, which means your discount rate should be 0.5 percent. ... Shouldn’t we also be discounting for risk? The textbook says you should adjust your discount rate based on that probability distribution — the wider the distribution (the riskier the investment), the higher the discount rate. This makes sense because of basic risk aversion. ... That leaves us with a discount rate of about 1 percent, not 7 percent. And instead of 3.39 lives today, you get 60.80 lives today.

Is that a pro-life policy?

The Onion Goes Paul Samuelson on Money

The Onion on the "social contrivance" of money. An excerpt:

WASHINGTON—The U.S. economy ceased to function this week after unexpected existential remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke shocked Americans into realizing that money is, in fact, just a meaningless and intangible social construct.

Enlarge Image
Calling it "basically no more than five rectangular strips of paper," Fed chairman Ben Bernanke illustrates how much "$200" is actually worth.
What began as a routine report before the Senate Finance Committee Tuesday ended with Bernanke passionately disavowing the entire concept of currency, and negating in an instant the very foundation of the world's largest economy.

"Though raising interest rates is unlikely at the moment, the Fed will of course act appropriately if we…if we…" said Bernanke, who then paused for a moment, looked down at his prepared statement, and shook his head in utter disbelief. "You know what? It doesn't matter. None of this—this so-called 'money'—really matters at all."

More Cowbell! (Lower Price!)

Don't have a cowbell to cheer at the winter olympics? Have an iPhone? Don't worry! There's an app for that!

(link here)
Ain't technology great? Now you can cheer on the olympians for less, and not have some useless piece of crap sitting around your attic until 2014.
Cheapest price I saw for a real cowbell: 2.45
Cowbell app: Free! (if you own an iPhone - I don't)

Some Links, Featuring Ugly Criminals and Short Men

Are criminals ugly?
Do shorter men pay a premium to get married?
China's newfound assertiveness in the WTO
An interesting discussion of comparative advantage and trade
The tariff Laffer Curve, Post-Bellum America
Illegal immigration on the decline
Changing the balance of components in aggregate expenditures
Simpson's Paradox and environmental conditions during the Industrial Revolution
Why is carbon tradin so high?

Some Links

Some links I'm looking at for my classes.
Harry-Potter-nomics
(Macro-)education-omics

Wording and Survey Design

It doesn't take much to make a poll on the same topic give very different results. Case in point:

I don't have the "n's" for the 2 polls, but it doesn't take a rigorous test to see that these differences are very unlikely to be random sampling error.

Mortgage Bankers, Now Renters

Funny:

Economist Humor