EclectEcon

Last year, I was really looking forward to the television crime show, Numb3rs, in which a mathematician helps his FBI-agent brother solve crimes. After the first episode, I was less impressed than many reviewers. My conclusion was,

I give it a 6 out of 10. I hope it gets better.

It has, indeed, become much better. Charlie, the hero, is definitely very human, and the math is often some variant of Baysian probability analysis. It isn't that I think everyone in the universe ought to be exposed to Bayesian analysis; rather, I am delighted to see a rather sophisticated treatment of statistics and probability in prime time drama.

Of course that isn't the only math in the show. There's some physics, some geometry, a gratuitous mis-application of the prisoners' dilemma, and some location theory, too. For more, see the discussion in the comments section here.

Last summer or spring (2005), I was invited to join Pajamas Media. I never got around to it, in part because I hate paperwork and just joining looked like more work than it would be worth. But that's just me.

Daniel Gross, writing in Slate, says that the blogging business has peaked or at least is past the go-go stage. Along the way, he has some unkind things to say about Pajamas Media:

The Gullible Latecomers: In the end stages of any investment mania, the clueless and the greedy flood in. You know things are really poised for a fall when people who have no management experience and feeble business plans somehow manage to raise cash for ventures. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Pajamas Media. Last November, the collection of right-wing blogs (with a few lefties thrown in for laughs) grandly announced the closing of a $3.5 million round of venture capital financing. Roger Simon, the screenwriter-turned-blogger who is the CEO of the enterprise, promised "to change the way people report and access news and commentary." I don't know. It looks to me like a bunch of blogs with their own logo.

BenS recently pointed me toward U.N. Watch. From their "about us" statement,

UN Watch is foremost concerned with the just application of UN Charter principles. Areas of interest include: UN management reform, the UN and civil society, equality within the UN, and the equal treatment of member states. UN Watch notes that the disproportionate attention and unfair treatment applied by the UN toward Israel over the years offers an object lesson (though not the only one) in how due process, equal treatment, and other fundamental principles of the UN Charter are often ignored or selectively upheld.

One of the organization's recent pieces in its Wednesday Watch is pithy and to the point:

An alien observing the United Nations' debates, reading its resolutions, and walking its halls would conclude that a principal purpose of the world body is to censure a tiny country called Israel. [emphasis added]

Beginning around 1967, the full weight of the UN was gradually but deliberately turned against the country it had conceived by General Assembly resolution a mere two decades earlier. The campaign to demonize and delegitimize Israel at every opportunity and in every forum was initiated by the Arab states together with the former Soviet Union, and supported by what has become known as an "automatic majority" of Third World UN member states. The result today is that the UN's political organs, specialized agencies, and bureaucratic divisions have been subverted in the name of a relentless propaganda war against the Jewish state.

Paradoxically, one of the greatest violators of the UN Charter's equality guarantee has been the UN body charged with establishing and enforcing international human rights, the Commission on Human Rights. This case study examines how this UN Commission systematically singles out Israel for discriminatory treatment, as an instance of the UN's denial to Israel of equality before the law. It also discusses the efforts of UN Watch, a human rights monitoring organization in Geneva, Switzerland, to combat this bias and restore the UN to its original purposes.

There is much more; see this.

Ever since Playboy announced that there is a calendar available with nude photos of female curlers from different countries, there has been a lot of traffic on this blog from people looking for the pictures.

Here is a link to a site that has a couple of the photos. To see the photos, click on the drop-down menu and then click on calendar. I really like the cover photo — the one that has a curling rock in it; it also appears on the CBC site. [h/t to The Emirates Economist who sent me the link; he found it at Fark]

This morning, I received the following message from Ezra Levant, publisher of the Western Standard:

By now you have probably heard about our decision to publish the Danish cartoons — those same cartoons that have been the excuse for riots around the world.

We believe that reprinting the cartoons is essential to properly telling that news story, which is why we did it. We also published them as a symbol of our freedom of the press, and in defiance of those around the world who would censor us through threats of violence.

... Not everyone is happy with us, of course. A Calgary Muslim leader has reported us to the police, trying to get them to charge me with hate crimes. He has also filed a complaint against us with the human rights commission on the same grounds. Ironically, he has called our freedom of the press "intellectual terrorism".

Those are nuisance suits, of course. But the idea is to cost us money and time, break our spirit, erode our freedom of speech, and teach a lesson to all other media: that anyone who doesn't censor themselves will be made to wish they did.

The threats are working. Already, many Canadian magazine retailers who normally carry the Western Standard have caved in, announcing — even before they see our new issue — that they won't put us on their shelves. Again, the purpose of the censors is obvious: hurt our magazine economically, and make an example of us as a warning to all other media.

That's why I'm writing to you today: to ask for your help. Please do three things:

1. Let me know how you feel.

If you support our magazine's decision, let me know. Send me an e-mail to info@westernstandard.ca and I'll share it with the rest of our staff, to help buoy their spirits as we face this hurricane, to let them know we're not alone.

2. Encourage your local retailer to stock the Western Standard

Magazine retailers need to know that you value freedom of the press and your freedom to make up your own mind, and to not be censored by them or anyone else. Ask them to stock the magazine, or even to order it in just for you. You'll not only help us survive the boycott, but you'll put some steel in the spine of your local retailer.

3. Help us out directly.

... [Subscribe.] You can find out more and do all of that right online, at http://www.westernstandard.ca/subscribe

I truly dislike PowerPoint presentations. I know they have their place and have phenomenal advantages in some situations, but every time I am subjected to one, no matter how good it is, I have the uneasy feeling I'm being "glitzed" (if that word can be construed as an active verb). Perhaps this is just a personal attitude, but when I look around the room during PowerPoint presentations, I get the feeling that others share it.

So, to everyone who uses PowerPoint, here is the 10-20-30 Rule from Guy Kawasaki:

[A] PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

• ... Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting...
  
• ... You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. Sure, you have an hour time slot, but you’re using a Windows laptop, so it will take forty minutes to make it work with the projector. Even if setup goes perfectly, people will arrive late and have to leave early. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.
  
• ... The reason people use a small font is twofold: first, that they don’t know their material well enough; second, they think that more text is more convincing. Total bozosity. Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points. I guarantee it will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the most salient points and to know how to explain them well. If “thirty points,” is too dogmatic, the I offer you an algorithm: find out the age of the oldest person in your audience and divide it by two. That’s you’re optimal font size.

Note to my students: PowerPoint is acceptable for class presentations, but please, PLEASE, do not prepare PowerPoint slides (or overhead transparencies) and then just read from them.

Aside: despite my age, I am still able to read 30-point font.

What is the most effective way to demonstrate solidarity with Denmark's position on freedom of the press? What is the most effective way to demonstrate that the fear of violent reactions to the exercise of freedom of the press must not be allowed to affect our decisions?

The Italian Reform Minister, Roberto Calderoli has one suggestion [link courtesy of SmartEconomist]:

Roberto Calderoli, Italy's Minister for Institutional Reform and a member of the anti-immigrant Northern League, has been reported as saying, "I've had T-shirts made with the cartoons that have upset Islam and I shall start wearing them today". Mr Calderoli also offered to hand out the T-shirts to anyone who wanted them.

My preference would be to sew the Danish flag onto a sleeve or on the back of my jacket, to wave the Danish flag at the Olympics, etc.

Close friends tell me I'd be a fool to wave a Danish flag at the Olympics. I guess they would prefer I be a free-rider, but I disagree: others must join the likes of Ezra Levant in taking a stand against using the threat of violence to impede freedom of the press.

An employer has monopsony power if it has an impact on the wage rate paid to its employees. Typically this definition means the employer knows that it must raise the wage rate in order increase the number of qualified people it can hire.

The U.S. Army's hiring of soldiers and officers fits this definition:

The Army, forecasting a shortage of several thousand officers as wartime demands grow, is boosting the incentives it offers to try to hold on to experienced commanders.

... "We are worried," said Army Secretary Francis J. Harvey. "So what we're trying to do is give them an incentive to stay."

And, of course, when a firm has monopsony power, it has a rising marginal factor cost curve that lies above the supply curve it faces.

The article [reg. req'd] also hints that the army might be practicing some imperfect price discrimination by extracting some rents from (i.e. remobilizing) some present officers to help keep its marginal factor costs from rising so much above the supply curve it faces.

In addition to speeding promotions and rolling out incentives to entice officers to stay, the Army is also using involuntary 545-day call-ups to compel inactive officers to leave civilian life for duty in Iraq.

... Harvey said he would look into any complaints of unfairness in the mobilizations, and acknowledged problems in record-keeping. Simply finding IRR members remains a problem, he said: "We don't know where the hell half of them are, or 40 percent of them are."

Phillip Greenspun obviously retired with more money than I will ever have. But even he faced some interesting questions about making his retirement "meaningful" in some sense [h/t to Newmark's Door — a must-read blog].

Ask a wage slave what he'd like to accomplish. Chances are the response will be something like "I'd start every day at the gym and work out for two hours until I was as buff as Brad Pitt. Then I'd practice the piano for three hours. I'd become fluent in Mandarin so that I could be prepared to understand the largest transformation of our time. I'd really learn how to handle a polo pony. I'd learn to fly a helicopter. I'd finish the screenplay that I've been writing and direct a production of it in HDTV."

Why hasn't he accomplished all of those things? "Because I'm chained to this desk 50 hours per week at this horrible [insurance| programming| government| administrative| whatever] job.

So he has no doubt that he would get all these things done if he didn't have to work? "Absolutely none. If I didn't have the job, I would be out there living the dream."

Suppose that the guy cashes in his investments and does retire. What do we find? He is waking up at 9:30 am, surfing the Web, sorting out the cable TV bill, watching DVDs, talking about going to the gym, eating Doritos, and maybe accomplishing one of his stated goals.

The article by Greenspun is interesting and useful. As Jack wrote to me after reading the article,

Quite excellent actually. I can attest to much of what he says.

But the premise of Greenspun's piece is that people are driven to accomplish something. As one of my friends once argued,

"What is it to you if I don't want to accomplish anything? What's wrong with 'waking up at 9:30 am, surfing the Web, sorting out the cable TV bill, watching DVDs, talking about going to the gym, eating Doritos, and maybe accomplishing one of [my] stated goals'?"

She then added,

Sloth is a highly under-rated vice.

JB (my favourite drug dealer and not to be confused with JC) added

The interesting thing is to run arguments backwards (like reverse engineering software) to see if opposite criteria lead to opposite results.

If I don't follow Mr. Greenspun's advice towards more happiness ("keep a gratitude journal, once a week, in which you write down three to five things for which you are current thankful practice acts of kindness to make yourself feel generous and capable thank a mentor--in detail and, if possible, in person write letters of forgiveness to people who have hurt or wronged you...etc) will that make me *unhappy*? To be honest, not in the slightest (although I do some of what he suggests already, likely because we share commonalities)

Tyler Cowen and I recently had an e-mail exchange about this topic. Neither of us plans to retire. I expect our plans fit nicely with academic careers, where we have the flexibility to pursue many interests.

As I have said before, I expect to teach until I'm 90 [see here and here].

From the Jewish World Review
The caption under the cartoon says,

Not that we admit it: We dress up our capitulation in fancy talk of "tolerance," "responsibility" and "sensitivity."

To see a clearer version of the cartoon, please follow the link. That cartoon is a beautiful complement to this piece by Caroline Ben-Ari:

A few years ago a very nasty political cartoon, showing Ariel Sharon eating a Palestinian baby, was published in The Independent in the U.K. The cartoon caused an uproar for its vicious nature.

The cartoonist suffered no ill effects for his insulting and crude publication. On the contrary, he was honoured with the 2003 Political Cartoon of the Year Award from the British Political Cartoon Society. When Canadian journalist Martin Himel asked the director of the British Political Cartoon Society why there were no cartoons showing Arafat eating babies, the director responded, "Jews don't issue fatwas."

Is it fear that affected university policies at The University of Prince Edward Island and at St. Mary's University in Canada? Are the presidents of these universities hiding under their desks? The Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship has written the following (in part) to the President of St. Mary's University:

We are writing to strongly protest your order to Professor Peter March to remove the controversial material [ed: the dozen Danish cartoons] placed on his office door. In your memorandum of 9 February to the Saint Mary’s University community, you offered as justification for your action that you “thought their public display without context was a matter of concern. Given the strong, and in several cases violent, responses to the cartoons in many parts of the world, there was a reasonable apprehension of risk to the safety of members of the campus community.”

By censoring debate at your campus in this way, rather than taking the necessary steps to provide appropriate security to allow debate to happen, you have encouraged the view that the threat of violence, real or imagined, is an effective way to challenge ideas with which one disagrees.

And here is what SAFS wrote to the president of UPEI:

We are writing to strongly protest the actions of the UPEI administration in seizing copies of the student newspaper, The Cadre (issue dated February 8) [ed: which included copies of the cartoons], and preventing their distribution. UPEI's public statement of February 8 that censorship of The Cadre can be justified "on grounds that publication of the caricatures represents a reckless invitation to public disorder and humiliation" is contrary to the duty of all university presidents to maintain their campuses as places where debate of controversial issues may take place. Fear of possible ‘mob action’ must not be allowed to dictate to UPEI or any other Canadian university what ideas its students and faculty may express, disseminate and debate. By censoring this debate at your campus rather than taking the necessary steps to provide appropriate security to allow debate to happen, you have encouraged the view that the threat of violence, real or imagined, is an effective way to challenge ideas with which one disagrees.

The decision as to what is to be included in a newspaper must be made by the editorial board, based on their understanding of the newsworthiness of the story. Those who disagree with the newspaper's coverage or viewpoint can register their opposition through writing letters to the editor, demonstrating, or simply by refusing to read the paper or to advertise in it. Disagreeable speech should be countered by opposing arguments.

From the Associated Press: [h/t to BenS]

The unavoidable fact is that GM's unionized workers enjoy a level of pay, health insurance and pension benefits that can't be sustained. And then there's the jobs bank, a singularly unique entitlement program that pays laid-off workers most of their salaries for an extended period.

Last week I listened to an interview with Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Hudson Institute. She made a very important point that she kept emphasizing throughout the interview: Long-term economic growth is fostered by labour market flexibility.

As transportation and communication costs shrink, people change jobs frequently. This is good for the economy in that we are more likely to find jobs that suit us better and in which we are more productive.

Similarly, as companies face bankruptcy it is usually because they are not competitive in providing goods and services that customers want at prices we are willing to pay. If these companies do not face a credible threat of bankruptcy, they have less incentive to respond to market incentives. Bailing them out or protecting them from competition encourages less innovation, less entrepreneurship, and it reduces prospects for long-term growth.

More from the Associated Press:

General Motors Corp. made some tough decisions this week. Unfortunately, the automaker's mess requires tougher moves and a jolt of imagination.

... The issues, like two invisible monster trucks in the room, are more than a quarter million workers with hugely expensive benefits and a management team that hasn't figured out how to design and build cars as well as those sold by Asian rivals. You can't fix problems like these with financial nips and tucks.

Presumably, workers at (and retirees from) GM have seen the problems coming; I blogged about it last April. For the sake of retirees from GM who are counting on GM to provide them with pensions and benefits, I hope GM can turn it around. But I also hope that GM will not be bailed out or receive protection if it cannot compete effectively. As Diana Furchtgott-Roth made so clear in her interview, one of the reasons the U.S. has had such economic success in the past has been the tremendous flexibility in the labour markets.

Rebekah K at Composite Drawlings has drawn and posted her own cartoon.

Someone once told me that every year after his annual lecture on the free-rider problem, students left the classroom much more littered and messy than they had before they learned, formally, about the free-rider problem. If so, that means, on the margin, learning the concept had an effect on their behaviour. Not all of them litter after the lecture; and those that do litter do not do so all the time. But learning the concept clearly affects the behaviour of some of the students some of the time (at the margin); after all, people respond to incentives.

Is it possible to generalize this result? What if it were possible to instruct each potential suicide bomber all about the economics of the free-rider problem? Would some (even a few) of them start thinking about the possibility of letting someone else blow themselves up?

Not all would change their behaviour; probably not many would — many perceive a higher calling or a sense of belonging that would not be overcome by the benefits of becoming a free-rider. But it might deter a few and hence raise the costs of recruiting suicide bombers.

What was that song that came out during the Vietnam War? "Billy, Don't Be a Hero..." or something like that. I often thought of that song as encouragement from a fiancee to Billy that he should not only be careful as a soldier, but that he should consider being a free-rider, implicitly if not explicitly.

Probably continuing to work on ways to promote economic growth (vs. rent-seeking) is a more valuable use of economists' time.

The guy in the 30km race. The guy who was knocked down by others who fell at the start. The guy who, as a result, had a broken ski and had to put on a new ski, and then had to change that one. The guy who finally got off to a start about 45 seconds behind the pack. The guy who was nowhere to be seen in the pack with just a km to go. The guy who finished the race second, just a fraction of a second behind the Russian winner. Amazing.

Here's an excerpt from the CBC report:

Defending Olympic gold medallist Frode Estil of Norway rebounded from a crash in the mass start to win silver, 0.6 seconds behind Dementiev.

The Norwegian, who lost 45 seconds from the crash, made a valiant effort in the final 10 m but couldn't catch Dementiev at the finish line.

And how 'bout the Canadian Women's Hockey Team? As I write this, they have outscored their opponents 25 - 0: they won 16 - 0 over the Italians, and are now leading, 9-0 over the Russians after two periods.

Update: The Canadian women beat the Russian women 12 - 0.

I've never seen a bedbug. I do, however, recall a scene from the movie "The L-Shaped Room" in which the hero teaches the heroine that she can catch bedbugs by softening a large bar of soap in water, then slamming the bar onto the scurrying bedbugs as she turns on the light and throws back the covers.

Judging from this article in the New Yorker, I get the feeling that technique might not be very effective.

According to Andy Linares, the proprietor of the Bug Off Pest Control Center, in Washington Heights, which he describes as the largest supplier of pest-control products in the city, New York is witnessing “without a doubt, a dramatic increase in bedbug activity. We hadn’t seen bedbugs in New York in sixty years. Then, all of a sudden, bingo. Who’da thunk it?”...

Whatever satisfaction Alexis [the subject of this article] and her roommates might have derived from having caught the wave of an interesting new trend was offset by the heart-of-darkness horror of it. That’s how they felt, anyway, after the fourth or fifth visit from the exterminator, a redundancy necessitated by the fact that, as Alexis explained the other day, “the bedbugs kept not going away.”