Mozilla Scrapbook 2: November 22, 2002 - December 15, 2002
Week of December 9, 2002:
- Sites_to_watch_…ech_trends.html
- Guardian_Gujarat.html
- cath_sac_bee2.html
- Cath_Sac_Bee1.html
- Wilton_Gregory.html
- dallasmorningnewsdatabase.html
- cc_letter.html
- MLK-jail.html
- Google_Demos.html
- williamson_consensus.htm
- Lotts_allies.html
- Lott_Times.html
- math.forum.shared.lessons.html
- classicfermi.html
- Mass_AJ_Reilly.html
- brinklindsey_lott.html
- Edsall_on_Lott.html
- back_of_the_envelope.html
- tom_tomorrow.html
- cafe_raise.html
- Orzel_math.html
- sitebwspacedescpopundervar.html
- Gleckman_on_Snow.htm
- Economist_Donaldson.html
- Thurmond_stump.html
- Burton_money_and_the_net.html
- Phoenix_OBrien_immunity.html
- Nagel_terror.html
- kaus_thurmond.html
- SEC_Donaldson.html
- Drake_equation.html : How to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations.
- oreilly_on_iapps.html: Tim O'Reilly on Apple's iApps...
- daniel_drezner_on_krugman.html: A lousy piece criticizing Krugman. Takes your typical ivory-tower political scientist's overly-cynical view of politicians.
- krugman_on_lott.html: Paul Krugman on Trent Lott.
- Is the Computer…interfaces.html: Steven Johnson on the next generation of the interface wars.
- Denton_weblog-b…businesses.html: Nick Denton wants to discover some ways to make money on the internet through weblog-based businesses.
- bricklin_tabletpc.htm: Dan Bricklin's reaction to a tablet PC
- bricklin_lostdecade.htm: Dan Bricklin is surprised by how much today's tablet PCs are like the Go machines of a decade ago. That's the price we have paid for Microsoft's squelching of Go: we've lost a decade of experimentation and technological development.
- satn_learningbyusing.html: How we don't know what a product is good for until we have held it in our hands and experimented with it for a long time.
- technorati_top100.html: What weblogs are saying interesting things...
- 2002-12-11-tech…ati_cosmos.html: What weblogs are reacting to me...
- 2002-12-11-recessions.pdf: The National Bureau of Economic Research once more declines to say that the recession is over. They must be frightened, and believe there is still a significant chance of a double dip.
- Murray_Snow.html: Alan Murray on what John Snow and Stephen Friedman need to do to make Bush economic policy good for the country. It's hard to see how they will do this, given that Karl Rove and company have declared that they will have no influence on economic policy.
- Catholic_NH.html: The Catholic diocese of New Hampshire admits that it has--in some ways--acted like a criminal organization: its policy has been to expose children to sexual abuse. "This really, it's mind-boggling to me," said James A. Coriden, a canon lawyer and professor of church law at Washington Theological Union. "The possibility of criminal action against a diocese, that's big-time stuff. I can't imagine what brought them to this admission." Professor Coriden clearly has a limited imagination: I can imagine what brought them to this admission. Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, issued a statement saying: "I understand the pressures under which the diocese acted, and I note that this resolution is specific to the facts in the Diocese of Manchester and to the laws of the state of New Hampshire. It does not in any way indicate agreement on the part of any other diocese or of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops in the legal analysis on which the office of the attorney general of New Hampshire has acted." Since true justice is the same in Maryland as in New Hampshire, it seems that Wilton Gregory is saying that the New Hampshire church has been unjustly railroaded into an unfair settlement. Clearly it's time for Wilton Gregory to go...
- Post_Friedman.html: Karl Rove explain what the new Bush economic advisers' impact will be on economic policy: none at all. They have been hired to sell the policy, not make it. If I were either Friedman or Snow, I would turn down the job offer. The White House Mess privileges are not worth it if the price is being bossed by deputy assistant press secretaries.
- lott.bju.amicus.brief.doc: Trent Lott's defense of Bob Jones University's segregation practices.
- esq_rove_0103.html: Ron Suskind's Esquire article on Karl Rove.
- Weatherson - Ch…mily Yoffe.html: Emily Yoffe is creeped out by the New York Times's coverage of the Boudin family. I'm creeped out too. It's really Orwellian--how the three murdered security guards and their nine children have no existence in either the Boudin family's or the New York Times's world.
- xmas_goodkingwenceslaus.shtml: Lyrics to "Good King Wenceslas"
Week of December 2, 2002:
Week of November 24, 2002:
- lefanu_carmilla.htm: One of the earliest of the vampire stories. Of course, the only way I have ever heard of the author--J. Sheridan LeFanu--is that Harriet Vane is trying to write a book about his work in Dorothy Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey novel Gaudy Night.
- ib182.pdf: Bush proposal fails tests any successful stimulus package should pass, by Christian Weller and Laura Singleton, EPI issue brief.
- ib183.pdf: Misplaced focus of tax enforcement could be remedied by simplifying credits for children, by Max B. Sawicky, EPI issue brief.
- uncanny_valley.html: Dave Bryant: "Japanese roboticist Doctor Masahiro Mori is not exactly a household name, but, for the speculative fiction community at least, he could prove to be an important one. The reason why can be summed up in a simple, strangely elegant phrase that translates into English as 'the uncanny valley.' Though originally intended to provide an insight into human psychological reaction to robotic design, the concept expressed by this phrase is equally applicable to interactions with nearly any nonhuman entity. Stated simply, the idea is that if one were to plot emotional response against similarity to human appearance and movement, the curve is not a sure, steady upward trend. Instead, there is a peak shortly before one reaches a completely human 'look'. . . but then a deep chasm plunges below neutrality into a strongly negative response before rebounding to a second peak where resemblance to humanity is complete."
- tomlinson_kipling.htm: Rudyard Kipling poem about a soul denied entrance to both heaven and hell.
- Martha_Brandt.html: How the shadow cast by Bill Clinton still dominates today's White House.
- sff_doylemacdonald.htm: A pointer to a library of public domain fantasy, science fiction, and horror works maintained by James D. Macdonald. Source of lefanu_carmilla.htm.
- star_wars_fraud.html: More on how SDI tests were rigged in the 1990s.
- somerby_birnbaum.shtml: It used to be said that the Episcopal Church was the Republican Party at prayer. Today Fox News is the Republican Party at propaganda.
- Froomkin_Leigh_Jackson.html: Michael Froomkin forwards a web reference to our Sidwell Friends classmate Leigh A. Jackson.
- Vernon_Smith.html: An interview with Nobel Prize-winning experimental economist Vernon Smith.
- lost_atm.html: Phone numbers for dealing with a lost ATM card.
- tigers.html: Conservation success: wild tiger populations are stabilizing.
- datazone2.xls: Spreadsheets from EPIs State of Working America 2002-2003 about the current state of American material well-being.
- The Infinite Ma…: French oil scandals marvelled at by Bruce Sterling: "Well, the French finally decided to go easy on the top-dog malefactors in their massive oil-and-politics scandal. Enron people will get off the same way, someday. The wackiest thing about the Elf-Aquitaine scandal was the sex angle. Namely, Christine Deviers-Joncour, the self-proclaimed 'Whore of the Republic.' I'll be sorry to see Christine fade into Monica Lewinsky obscurity, because when it came to cherchez-la-femme, Christine classed the whole planet up. Snazzy Paris love-nest, ancient Greek statuary, a real paying job, and so chic, too. The top Elf-Aquitaine moment for me was when cops apprehended fugitive oil exec Alfred Sirven and he ATE HIS CELL PHONE. Yes, he ATE it. Dang!"
- w9259,pdf: "Factor Endowments, Inequality, and Paths of Development Among New World Economies." Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff. NBER Working Paper No. 9259. October 2002. JEL No. N10. ABSTRACT: Whereas traditional explanations of differences in long-run paths of development across the Americas generally point to the significance of differences in national heritage or religion, we highlight the relevance of stark contrasts in the degree of inequality in wealth, human capital, and political power in accounting for how fundamental economic institutions evolved over time. We argue, moreover, that the roots of these disparities in the extent of inequality lay in differences in the initial factor endowments (dating back to the era of European colonization). We document -- through comparative studies of suffrage, public land, and schooling policies -- systematic patterns by which societies in the Americas that began with more extreme inequality or heterogeneity in the population were more likely to develop institutional structures that greatly advantaged members of elite classes (and disadvantaging the bulk of the population) by providing them with more political influence and access to economic opportunities. The clear implication is that institutions should not be presumed to be exogenous; economists need to learn more about where they come from to understand their relation to economic development. Our findings not only contribute to our knowledge of why extreme differences in the extent of inequality across New World economies have persisted for centuries, but also to the study of processes of long-run economic growth past and present. [A paper that I have to spend a considerable amount of time cracking and thinking about in the next few weeks--in my copious free time, that is...]
"Perhaps the most striking example is the contrast between the two colonies established simultaneously by the Puritans early in the seventeenth century: Providence Island (off the coast of Nicaragua and now part of Colombia) and the more famous Massachusetts Bay Colony. Although the eventual overrunning of Providence Island makes for a shorter time series than analysts would prefer, Karen Kupperman’s comparative study demonstrates that the paths of the two Puritan colonies diverged radically right from the beginning.27 While we are all familiar with the intense work ethic of the Puritans that settled in the cold harsh New England environment, the Puritans that located on Providence Island quickly determined that manual labor was for Native Americans, slaves, and indentured servants—not them."
Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. 1993. Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony. Cambridge University Press.
Coatsworth, John H. 1993. “Notes on the Comparative Economic History of Latin America and the United
States.” In Development and Underdevelopment in America: Contrasts of Economic Growth in North and
Latin America in Historical Perspective, edited by Walter L. Bernecker and Hans Werner Tobler, 10–30.
Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
———. 1998. “Economic and Institutional Trajectories in Nineteenth-Century Latin America.” In Latin America
and the World Economy since 1800, edited by John H. Coatsworth and Alan M. Taylor, 23–54.
Cambridge, Mass.: David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.
- w9282.pdf: "After the Big Bang? Obstacles to the Emergence of the Rule of Law
in Post-Communist Societies." Karla Hoff and Joseph E. Stiglitz. NBER Working Paper No. 9282. October 2002. JEL No. P26. ABSTRACT: When Russia launched mass privatization, it was widely believed that it would create a powerful constituency for the rule of law. That didn’t happen. We present a dynamic equilibrium model of the political demand for the rule of law and show that beneficiaries of mass privatization may fail to demand the rule of law even if it is the Pareto efficient “rule of the game.” The reason is that uncertainty about the legal regime can lead to asset stripping, and stripping can give agents an interest in prolonging the absence of the rule of law. [I need to forward this to Konstantin Magin. Another potentially-important paper that I need to find time to seriously crack in the next few weeks--in my copious spare time...]
- w9288.pdf: "Financial Globalization and Emerging Markets: With or Without Crash?" Philippe Martin and Hélène Rey. NBER Working Paper No. 9288. October 2002. JEL No. F3, F4, E0, G1. ABSTRACT: We analyze the impact of financial globalization on asset prices, investment and the possibility of crashes driven by self-fulfilling expectations in emerging markets. In a two-country model with one emerging market (intermediate income level) and one industrialized country (high income level), we show that liberalization of capital flows increases asset prices, investment and income in the emerging market. However, for intermediate levels of international financial transaction costs, we find that pessimistic expectations can be self-fulfilling, leading to a financial crash. The crash is accompanied by capital flight, a drop in income and investment below the financial autarky level and more market incompleteness. We show that emerging markets are more prone to financial crashes simply because they have a lower income level and not because of the existence of market failures (moral hazard or credit constraints), bad monetary policies or exchange rate regimes.
- w9308.pdf: "Did The 2001 Tax Rebate Stimulate Spending? Evidence From Taxpayer Surveys." Matthew D. Shapiro, Joel Slemrod. NBER Working Paper No. 9308. October 2002. JEL No. E21, H31. ABSTRACT:
In 2001, many households received rebate checks as advanced payments of the benefit of the new,
10 percent federal income tax bracket. A survey conducted at the time the rebates were mailed finds that
few households said that the rebate led them mostly to increase spending. A follow-up survey in 2002,
as well as a similar survey conducted after the attacks of 9/11, also indicates low spending rates. This
paper investigates the robustness of these survey responses and assesses whether such surveys are useful
for policy evaluation. It also draws lessons from the surveys for macroeconomic analysis of the tax
rebate.
- w9318.pdf: "The Rise and Fall of World Trade, 1870-1939." Antoni Estevadeordal, Brian Frantz, Alan M. Taylor. October 2002. JEL Nos.: F02, F10, F33, N10, N70. ABSTRACT:
Measured by the ratio of trade to output, the period 1870–1913 marked the birth of the first era of trade
globalization and the period 1914–39 its death. What caused the boom and bust? We use an augmented
gravity model to examine the gold standard, tariffs, and transport costs as determinants of trade. Until
1913 the rise of the gold standard and the fall in transport costs were the main trade-creating forces. As
of 1929 the reversal was driven by higher transport costs. In the 1930s, the final collapse of the gold
standard drove trade volumes even lower.
- w9325.pdf: "Why Have Health Expenditures as a Share of GDP Risen So Much?" Charles I. Jones. NBER Working Paper No. 9325. November 2002. JEL No. I1, O40. ABSTRACT: Aggregate health expenditures as a share of GDP have risen in the United States from about 5 percent in 1960 to nearly 14 percent in recent years. Why? This paper explores a simple explanation based on technological progress. Medical advances allow diseases to be cured today, at a cost, that could not be cured at any price in the past. When this technological progress is combined with a Medicare- like transfer program to pay the health expenses of the elderly, the model is able to reproduce the basic facts of recent U.S. experience, including the large increase in the health expenditure share, a rise in life expectancy, and an increase in the size of health-related transfer payments as a share of GDP. [Yes, but is the rise in health expenditures a good thing or a bad thing? And is a Medicare-like program the right way to fund a part of the growth in health expenditures? The very wise, very thoughtful, and very knowledgeable David Cutler says (a) that one-third of health expenditures are unnecessary and counterproductive, and (b) that American's human happiness would be significantly enhanced if we spent even more money on health care.]
- w9326.pdf: "Globalization, Trade, and Development: Some Lessons From History." Alan M. Taylor. NBER Working Paper No. 9326. November 2002. JEL No. F02, F10, N00, N70, O10. ABSTRACT: Recent research in international economic history has opened up new lines of enquiry on the origins of globalization, as well as its causes and consequences. Such findings have the potential to inform contemporary debates and this paper considers what lessons this body of historical work has for our current understanding of the linkages between trade and development. [Another worthless abstract.]
- w9336.pdf: Ayres and Donahue don't believe that "More Guns, Less Crime" is robust: "Shooting Down the More Guns, Less Crime Hypothesis." Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue III. NBER Working Paper No. 9336. November 2002. JEL No. H0, K0. ABSTRACT: John Lott and David Mustard have used regression analysis to argue forcefully that "shall-issue" laws (which give citizens an unimpeded right to secure permits for concealed weapons) reduce violent crime. While certain facially plausible statistical models appear to generate this conclusion, more refined analyses of more recent state and county data undermine the more guns, less crime hypothesis. The most robust finding on the state data is that certain property crimes rise with passage of shall- issue laws, although the absence of any clear theory as to why this would be the case tends to undercut any strong conclusions. Estimating more statistically preferred disaggregated models on more complete county data, we show that in most states shall- issue laws have been associated with more crime and that the apparent stimulus to crime tends to be especially strong for those states that adopted in the last decade. While there are substantial concerns about model reliability and robustness, we present estimates based on disaggregated county data models that on net the passage of the law in 24 jurisdictions has increased the annual cost of crime slightly -- somewhere on the order of half a billion dollars. We also provide an illustration of how our jurisdiction-specific regression model has the capacity to generate more nuanced assessments concerning which states might profit from or be harmed by a particular legal intervention.
- w9342.pdf: "Why Measure Inequality?" Louis Kaplow. NBER Working Paper No. 9342. November 2002. JEL No. D31, D63, H23, I32. ABSTRACT: A large body of literature is devoted to the measurement of income inequality, yet little attention is given to the question, Why measure inequality? However, the reasons for measurement bear importantly on whether and how measurement should be done. Upon examination, normative measures are found to be of questionable value. Descriptive measures, by contrast, may be useful, but the appropriate measure depends on the field of application rather than on general, a priori principles of the sort that are emphasized in the existing measurement literature. Measures of poverty are also considered, and similar conclusions are reached. [A very annoying abstract. Louis Kaplow is always worth reading, but this is the kind of abstract that gives a skimmer absolutely no information about just what the meat of the paper's argument is.]
Week of November 17, 2002:
- pklein.pdf: Pablo Klein's c.v.: Berkeley job market for Ph.D. candidates, 2002-2003.
- upay850.pdf: Berkeley administrative benefit forms--yet more paperwork.
- Senate2001fullVR.pdf: Americans for Democratic Action, Inc. ADA VOTING RECORD 2001. United States Senate. 107th. Congress 1st. Session.