I passed the Macro prelim. Looks like Paige and I will actually get to have a vacation this summer after all. Had I failed, I would've been stuck spending the month of May studying for it all over again to take again in June. Paige and I are going to try and go to Sweden to visit friends that month, but we were waiting to see if I got it or not.
Strangely, I still feel like my knowedge of this material is weak. I feel like my mind forgets it almost as quickly as I learn it. What I wish I could do is stop the program right now (or after this semester), apply to another school, start it in the fall, and retake the entire two years over again. I feel like someone who majored in Economics as an undergrad right now - not someone in a doctorate economics program. When do you actually get to where you're smart at something? I have no idea. I have the suspicion that I'll never be good at economics. At best, what I'll end up doing is knowing enough about the projects I'm working on. I'll carve a little space to call my own, understand it, and understand my projects. And that'll be it. I hope so, anyway.
One of the first year students, Robi Ragan, pointed me to an article on applying to graduate school that he wrote a few years ago.
On a different note, my class today on supply and demand didn't go so well. Why? For one, I went into it thinking that the experiment we did Wednesday night would provide more talking points than it seemed to. I had too many transparencies, too. I kept getting lost in my own notes. And, because I decided to talk about efficiency before talking about anything else, I ended up being in waters which were murkier, from my perspective, than what I was used to.
I also may want to reconsider giving out prizes to the students the next time I do this. I gave out two gift certificates to the people who did the "best" in the game. But, I decided not to use the people with the highest actual profits. The reason was because each person was randomly given a "seller cost" or a "buyer value," and so your profits were a function of that. So profits were mostly random as a result.
Instead, what I chose to do was reward the winners based on how they did compared to how the model predicated they would do. Man, did that ever not go over well. I ended up on this rabbit trail defending the idea of doing that, which was made worse by getting lost in my own transparencies. And so, the experiment - while excellent and pedagogically useful - never really got to have the "punch" it could've had. I'll pick up the pieces on Monday, finish up supply and demand, and then move on to efficiency in markets.
Again, the lesson here is preparation. I am consistently not as prepared as I could be. This semester has gone better than the last, but I ended up winging the supply and demand class today more than I should've, only because usually, that's such an easy class to teach. The problem was efficiency - I was not a 100% on efficient markets, and since I was using efficiency as the metric to reward students, I should've been. "Preparation" is something that I can fix, too. Some of the qualities that I'm aiming for - like being able to "inspire" the students or cause them to "love" economics - are a function of experience. They may never get here, in fact. But preparation is something that I can control, and the returns to it are fairly large. So, that's what I need to keep working on. Being more prepared for my lectures.
William Carden is a PhD student in Washington University's Department of Economics. I think he's a third year student. He's also the research assistant for Douglas North (Nobel Laureate). He has written a working paper on Christian ethics and Economic growth which looks interesting. Here's the abstract:
"ABSTRACT: Christians have a moral obligation to help the poor and destitute, and many Christians argue that we must exercise our moral obligation via the coercive machinery of the state—i.e., by erecting formal institutions aimed at redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor. I argue that Christians must proceed with caution when prescribing such policies: it may very well be that the resulting changes in incentives embodied in changed formal institutions may in fact work to the detriment of “the least of these.”
I'm printing this one out to read later today. It's only 21 pages, and given that Carden is an Austrian, as well as being an economic historian in his training, I'm going to go out on a limb and presume that this is probably going to be one of the more readable economic papers you'll find written by a graduate student. You may not like Austrian economics, but one thing that they seem to have a comparative advantage in over mainstream economists is their ability to write in plain English.
Perusing, I found an interesting footnote. Camden's paper is on whether forcible redistribution of wealth by the state can actually run counter to the Christian's moral responsibilities towards the poor. But he notes, in passing, the role of beliefs in forming institutional structures in an economy (institutions being important because, following North, he argues that these are the chief drivers of growth, and not merely human capital and physical capital accumulation). He mentions that North has a new book coming out on this very topic - that is, on the role of beliefs in institutional formation. That should prove to be really interesting.
If you're an astute observer of trends in people's work, you'll probably notice that the Weberian thesis is being rediscovered all the time by economists.
Move over Ben and JLo, Jason and Brittney, an even bigger breakup bomb has hit. Pixar has announced that it will not be renewing its lucrative partnership with Disney in the future. Also see here. The NYTimes article insinuates that Eisner may have mismanaged the Pixar relationship - that is, at least, some of the spin coming from Eisner's political opponents at Disney, as well as Pixar itself. But other reasons are discussed, such as Pixar's financial demands. This is sure to be a big story in the weeks to come, especially in light of the criticism Eisner has received by various board members for his management of Disney.
You can bet that this is one relationship in which both parties are smarting. Pixar and Disney seem like such a great fit. Pixar essentially rode the wave of Disney's heritage and feature-film branding. Disney is synonymous with quality family films, and more or less is identified with making animation serious, commerically if not artistically. Pixar's brand was imbued with all of the strengths of Disney's brand, without any of the weaknesses. In Pixar, you have a cutting-edge, technologically superb visuals, and well-crafted narratives. But there was something about the partnership that made Pixar stand even higher than it could on the merits of its individual films.
The articles both note that originally, it was Disney's deep pockets, distribution channels and strong brand that was so valuable for upstart Pixar. Disney, in return, got to split the profits, a portion of box office revenues, and some other perks that I glossed over. They also got to be on the receiving end of a creative shot in the arm. It'll be interesting to see what happens with Eisner, with Jobs, with Pixar's future, and all things related to the two companies.
Matt will probably be one of the few to make note of this, since he alone of all the people I know is pursuing behavioral economics as a career. Ed Glaeser has an interesting looking article over at the Harvard Working Paper archive entitled Economics and Psychology and it has a fairly provocative abstract.
Abstract:Prospect theory, loss aversion, mental accounts, hyperbolic discounting, cues, and the endowment effect can all be seen as examples of situationalism— the view that people isolate decisions and overweight immediate aspects of the situation relative to longer term concerns. But outside of the laboratory, emotionally-powerful situational factors— frames, social influence, mental accounts— are almost always endogenous and often the result of self-interested entrepreneurs. As such, laboratory work and, indeed, psychology more generally, gives us little guidance as to market outcomes. Economics provides a stronger basis for understanding the supply of emotionally-relevant situational variables. Paradoxically, the rise of situationalism actually increases the relative importance of economics.
I haven't read this yet, but in the abstract he tacitly criticized behavioral economists for their reliance on laboratories. This is supposed to be the subject of my game theory paper, coincidentally, but I can't seem to get started on it. It's moved to that nether-region, North Pole zone called "the back burner." Anyhow, I keep hearing this critique - that behavioral economists create certain types of outcomes in labs to support theories which may not apply in markets.
Spruced things up around the ole blog, as you can tell. Got rid of all the articles, and just up the "my favorite living economists" sidebar. Also cleaned up broken links, blogs I no longer read, and added ones I do read, like Andy's and Jeannette's. If only I knew how to program in HTML, maybe I'd think about fooling around with this blog, but it's probably best that I don't otherwise my productivity would drop even lower than it already is.
This guy used to be a highly paid, much coveted screenwriter in Hollywood. Now he lives in Cleveland. He hasn't had a hit in years (remember Jade and Showgirls?). He's dying of cancer from smoking four packs of cigerettes a day. And now he's got a new monster of a book (over 700 pages long) in which he trashes and gossips on everyone in Hollywood - telling the most outrageous tales about people's sexual problems and sexual tastes, drug appetites, insecurities, physical inadequacies, you name it. My impression? This is a guy who once was a big star, now isn't, is dying, and misses the limelight. He knows he'll never get another movie greenlighted because, frankly, his movies sucked, and so he figured if he writes something like this, it'll sell big, and everyone'll be talking about him again.
What I'm beginning to realize is that Bush does things like this to stimy Democrat criticism of his domestic policy in order to win in the 2004 election. Subsidizing the arts is an interesting topic to explore - something I haven't though about in a long time. But even putting aside the specifics of this move, I keep getting the sense that Bush has one goal and one goal only, and that's to win the 2004 election against what will probably be a close race.
There are a few recurring themes on Arts and Letters Daily that interest me. They are globalization and Terry Eagleton, the Marxist literary theorist. It's an interesting source of news information, for me, because in college, I had high hopes for literary theory and literature, and pursued it with fierce intensity. But, in the end, I abandoned it and focused instead of 19th and 20th century poetry. Poetry, in my program, struck me as the least ideological area to work in. It was one of the few remaining subjects where teachers in my program weren't merely using the texts or the class as medium to propogate their own political ideological views. Professors, even the more politically minded, retained enough of an interest in poetry to let that dominate everything else. In the end, though, it was my continual exposure to postmodern literary theory, with its continual morphing along basic Marxist lines, that planted in me an interest in capitalism, and ultimately economics.
But getting back to Arts and Letters, if you check this site regularly, you'll notice that Terry Eagleton's name appears about every week, or every other week. One recent post notes some of the changes that Eagleton seems to be experiecing in regards to his approach to and advocacy for theory. He seems to actually lament, on some level, the irrelevance of theory and the dominance of it in literature. And he specifically mentions the failure of Marxist literary theory to enter into the possibly important ethical debates about truth.
A recent post at Arts and Letters notes that the state of affairs of Marxist literary theory in academia seems to be changing. We've all heard the joke - "where's the last bastions of Marxism? In American literature programs." Yet this article says this could be changing. From the article:
"For literary traditionalists, the riddle is apropos. They have long bemoaned the effete nature of postmodern literary theory, calling it as hopelessly out of touch with both reality and literature as was Lenin with real-life economics.But theory's impact on the study of literature in the US has been pervasive if nothing else. Large numbers of the last two generations of English majors have been instructed not to experience novels and poems directly, but rather to view them through the lens of some kind of theory - Marxism being one of the most popular.
...
Some of the biggest names in the field would seem to agree. In Chicago last spring at a discussion sponsored by the journal "Critical Inquiry" cutting-edge thinkers such as Stanley Fish, Frederic Jameson, Homi Bhabha, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. spent two hours saying that postmodern theory was ineffective and no longer mattered in the world outside academe, if it ever did.
And in his new book "After Theory," Terry Eagleton of Manchester University argues that postmodern literary theory (which he defines as "the contemporary movement of thought which rejects . . . the possibility of objective knowledge" and is therefore "skeptical of truth, unity, and progress") was relevant in its heyday, but no more."
Nine years ago, members of the World Trade Organization agreed not to take each other to court over farm subsidies. This "peace clause" expired on December 31st, and some agricultural exporters are beginning the process of bringing suit against the subisidizing countries. From the article:
"So what? If profligate governments want to play sugar daddy with their taxpayers’ money, surely that is their sovereign right? What business is it of the WTO? The problem is that subsidies distort trade. Export subsidies do so by design, encouraging firms to increase their share of foreign markets. Other kinds of handout distort trade indirectly. By making production cheaper, they encourage more of it. This oversupply depresses world prices or accumulates unsold, in the wine lakes and butter mountains that used to characterise European agriculture. Slowly, the EU is moving away from paying farmers to overfarm. It wants to “decouple” subsidies from production.Countries that import food (many of them poor) benefit from the largesse of rich-world subsidies, but agricultural exporters suffer. They are no longer willing to suffer in silence. The 17 countries of the Cairns Group, which includes Australia, Brazil and Argentina, have campaigned long and hard against export subsidies. But as long as the peace clause remained in place, they could not mount a legal challenge."
Man alive. Aplia, the software I'm using to help teach my principles of macroeconomics class this spring semester, has several on-line experiments which I can use to help the kids understand things like supply and demand or what have you. Tonight, we held our first one (on supply and demand), and it was incredible. The equilibrium price and equilibrium quantity looks to have been exactly what the predictions said it were, even though the experiment only consisted of forty kids (half buyers, half sellers) shouting prices (electronically of course) to one another. I'm going to rewrite my lecture for Friday and basically just make it a discussion class, and use the discussion to guide us into the mechanics of how markets work, their efficiency, and how competition maximizes consumer and seller surplus.
It was really hysterical, too, to listen to them talking trash to one another in the "chatroom." One girl even made this really interesting point, "Hey, why don't we [meaning sellers] all get together and keep the price high so we can make more money?" In other words, she was proposing that they collude and form a cartel and drive prices above the equilibrium price. I would've given anything if she could've tried to get them to do that. At twenty sellers of homogensous products, it would seem to me that that cartel would be inherently unstable. One of them would see that if they broke with the agreement, they could maximize their own profits by selling at a price below their agreed price.
I tell you - this Aplia software is incredible. It actually makes me look good, as a teacher. The kids were so freaking energized. Now I need to help them connect the rest of the dots and get to where they understand what happened tonight.
I added MetaCritic to my sidebar of places to go. It seems like a great service. It brings together all available reviews of movies in one place, giving the viewer an overall sense of what critics thought of it. A great resource - but it would be even better if I could have it with me in the video store.
The teaser is up. Uma seems kind of melodramatic in it, though. I'm not 100% on her performance in volume 1, either. Some scenes seemed "too cool" for me. I could almost hear Tarantino urging her on, maniacally, to be more cool after each take. Still, I'm ready to see this next part.
From Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind:
"The marketing campaign for The Godfather was traditional; the money was spent on print ads. The exhibition pattern, however, broke new ground, would change the way movies were distributed, paving the way for the ultimate destruction of the New Hollywood. Prior to The Godfather, pictures played first runs for a specifid number of weeks before they went into their second and third runs. During the first run, they opened at one A screen in every market. The A screen had 'clearance' over other A theaters in the vicinity, which meant that if a picture played a prime location, say, the National in Westwood, no other theater within a fifty-mile radius could book it for the length of the first run, which could last for a year or more. Then the picture worked its way down to the second- and third-run movies. Moviegoers in Hollywood or the San Fernando Valley were expected to make the trek to Westwood. This was a good system from the director's point of view - the movies had plenty of time to find their audiences - but was less than desirable from the studio point of view. For one thing, the ad dollars were expended on the first run when the picture was playing a relatively small number of theaters, so by the time it got to the thousands of second- and third-run theaters, there was no advertising support. For another, the revenue from exhibitors trickled in slowly, over months, sometimes years. To Yablans's way of thinking, the studios were risking huge amounts of money, and in effect subsidizing the construction of new theaters with money that properly belonged to them and could have been collecting interest. He not only bullied the exhibitors into paying substantial amounts up front, often more than covering the costs of production, he also got a better split. In the case of The Godfather, Yablans says he got an unprecedented $25 to $30 million from the chains before the picture even opened, and a 90/10 split (in favor of Paramount) for the first twelve weeks, after which the percentages became more equitable. As Ruddy put it, Yablans made the exhibitors an offer they couldn't refuse: 'It was the start of the blockbuster mentality. Paramount had the locomotive, and [expletive] killed them. You want The Godfather? You owe us $80,000. We want the money, now!'"...
"In New York City, The Godfather opened in five first-run theaters, with playtimes staggered. Nationally, The Godfather made what was then an unusually wide break, going to 316 theaters, adding another fifty-odd over the course of the next few weeks. The cumulative result of Yablans's methods - the money up front, the favorable splits, the massive release - resulted in a dramatic, not to say revolutionary, transofrmation of Paramount's cash flow. Money poured through the pipeline, faster and in vastly greater volume than ever before in the history of the movie business, a million dollars a day by mid-April. In mid-September, only six months after it had opened, the film became the biggest grosser of all time, surpassing Gone With the Wind, which took thirty-three years and numerous re-releases to set its record. By the time its first run was concluded, The Godfather netted $86.2 million in domestic rentals. Not only did The Godfather revive Paramount, which owned an unprecedented 84 of the 100 [profit percentage] points, it was like a jolt of electricity for the industry, which was still awakening from the half-decade-long coma that began after The Sound of Music."
Lost in Translation as made on a shoestring of a budget. Only $10m, using Box Office Mojo numbers, in combined production and marketing costs. Yet, already, in the North American market, it's made over $30m, which is definitely going to go up with it getting so many Oscar nominations. It's currently playing in 357 theaters, but at its heighth, it was only playing in around 900 theaters (compared to LoTR, which was playing in close to 4000). I've never watched the distribution of movies so much as this past year, so I'm interested to see how the effect of an Oscar nomination will impact this smaller film's (re)distribution and gross revenues in the upcoming weeks and months. Either way, it's already made back 300% of the investment. I wonder what Coppola's percentage of the profits were. Being her father's daughter, you can bet she's learned the finer points of negotiating the points in her favor.
Haven't read this yet, but the Weekly Standard has an article on declining marraige rates in Sweden. It's a bit long, but looks interesting, and is probably relevant to studying the effects of Sweden's ban on spanking.
The Oscars nominees are up. Great to see Bill Murray and Sophia Coppola getting their well-deserved notice. It's emotionally a tough call between Coppola and Peter Jackson. Even though I think Coppola should get it, it seems like LoTR should win some big slots for the sake of the trilogy, if not for the value of the third film itself. Still, Coppola made one of the best movies of the year, all the more surprising given that this is only her second film. I would like to Murray take home Best Actor, but when you look at the running, there are actually three interesting actors in the Leading Actor category: Johnny Depp, Billy Murray and Sean Penn. Ben Kingsley has already won, and it is not too surprising to see him in the list. But barring him, that's a unique blend of serious actors that don't usually get Oscar notice, either because they're commercially not bankable (Depp), mentally unbalanced (Depp and Penn), or because they're seen as straight comedic actors (Murray), as opposed to "dramatic."
Best Picture
“The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King”
“Lost in Translation”
“Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World”
“Mystic River”
“Seabiscuit”
Best Animated Feature
“Brother Bear”
“Finding Nemo”
“The Triplets of Belleville”
Leading Actor
Johnny Depp in "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl"
Ben Kingsley in "House of Sand and Fog"
Jude Law in "Cold Mountain"
Bill Murray in "Lost in Translation"
Sean Penn in "Mystic River"
Leading Actress
Keisha Castle-Hughes in "Whale Rider"
Diane Keaton in "Something's Gotta Give"
Samantha Morton in "In America"
Charlize Theron in "Monster"
Naomi Watts in "21 Grams"
Directing
"City of God" Fernando Meirelles
"The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" Peter Jackson
"Lost in Translation" Sofia Coppola
"Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World" Peter Weir
"Mystic River" Clint Eastwood
I mentioned on here previously about the two NBER papers that Robert Barro (Harvard economist) and Rachel McCleary (Harvard sociologist) have written on economic growth and religious belief. The Economist has a review of these two papers. One paragraph from it:
"The most striking conclusion, though, is that belief in the afterlife, heaven and hell are good for economic growth. Of these, fear of hell is by far the most powerful, but all three indicators have a bigger impact on economic performance than merely turning up for church. The authors surmise, therefore, that religion works via belief, not practice. A parish priest might tell you that simply going through the motions will bring you little benefit in the next world. If Mr Barro and Ms McCleary are right, it does you little good in this one either.Indeed, Mr Barro and Ms McCleary go further. They find that church-going, after a certain point, is (in an economic sense, anyway) a waste of time. They argue that higher church attendance uses up time and resources, and eventually runs into diminishing returns. The “religion sector”, as they call it, can consume more than it yields.
All this is intriguing, but does religion make much difference? Japan, where there are many sects but little fear of hell, has grown far faster since the second world war than the Catholic Philippines. Officially atheist China is growing at a cracking pace. Presumably, what your religion is matters as much as whether you are religious: has anyone theorised about a Catholic work ethic? And if religion does have an effect, is a 20-year period long enough to find it?
Equally, religious people would say that prosperity is not the purpose of faith. Few these days would even see it as a reward for their belief and behaviour, but as at most a by-product, and then not necessarily a welcome one. Recall Jesus's words about the rich man, a camel and the eye of a needle. So is Mr Barro's and Ms McCleary's rough, preliminary research good news for the faithful? Or is it just a little disconcerting?"
Any help on this is appreciated.
1. What are the differences between a B.D., an M.Div., and a S.T.B.? S.T.B. seems to be the degree of choice for Orthodox and Anglican pastors preparing for ministry. It's a 3-year professional degree for pastors entering the ministry and appears to be the same as an M.Div. But what exactly is a B.D. then?
2. If you were looking for cues and signals to determine where a seminary fit on the theological spectrum, what words and phrases would you look for? "Authority of the Bible," "Lordship of Jesus Christ" seem to suggest conservative theology, but are there other cues that I should be attentive to? And secondly, what might the comparable cues be for the other end of the theological spectrum? I'm entering enrollment data from the Association of Theological Schools of Canada and the United States going back to 1968. Each seminary includes a short paragraph about themselves which is considered to describe their "distinctive characteristics." I wanted to try and use this paragraph to determine whether the seminary was conservative, liberal, or some other classification, but to do so, I need to find some kind of rigid rule that I could use. Like, if the words "evangelical" appears, then classify as 1=Conservative. If "uses new methods and more recent scholarship to interpret and apply doctrine" or something like that, then 2=Liberal. Any of you who are most familiar with non-conservative theology and institiutions care to provide me with some direction?
Jon Barlow's remix of Howard Dean's wild speech after placing third in the Iowa caucus has become, incredibly, some kind of Internet phenomenon! Barlow said that immediately after he posted it, he got calls from ABC, NBC, NY Times, MTV, E!, and a dozen other media oulets. Rolling Stone is doing a story on Garageband and is going to mention him and the spoof in it. Incredible! I mean, I wouldn't be surprised at all if even Bush and Rove have heard it by now!
What's interesting, too, is that when you think about how everyone's been saying the Internet has been the principal engine of Dean's campaign, a stupid fifteen second freak-out on stage has now been played over and over on the Internet, and very well could sink his campaign. It seems like the Internet is a double-edged sword. It can kill a person just as quickly as it can raise them to elevated heights.
This week, in response to Miles' chicken pox outbreak, I decided to rent Toy Story 2 for him. He'd never really seen any full feature film - not even a Disney film. This is mainly because, we don't own any, and then secondly, he's so young and we're trying to move away from the tendency we sometimes have of using the television to babysit Miles. But, because he was sick, I wanted to get a movie for him and I to watch together.
If you haven't seen Toy Story 2, you should. You should see it whether you have any children in your life or not, because it's a great movie. The graphics are weird. The mannerisms of the dolls, the texture of their skin and clothes, look more real than anything I've ever seen in a cartoon. Pixar has shown themselves to be an important force in children's entertainment by consistently creating movies which are visually astonishing and entertaining. It's no wonder that Disney has begun laying off, en masse, its traditional two-dimensional cartoon artists. For one, the computer-generated cartoons cost less to make, but are as profitable as the traditional hand-drawn cartoons.
So, this week alone, I've watched the movie at least three times. Okay, five times, but who's counting? But it was only yesterday afternoon, after watching it again, that I was finally able to articulate how disturbing the movie is. It is superficially a movie about love, friendship and courage, but at a deeper level, it is quite dark and disturbing. (Spoiler alert!)
The backdrop of the movie is a certain uneasiness caused by the realization that children eventually outgrow their toys. As they grow up, they either grow tired of their older toys due to shifts in their tastes towards more mature toys appropriate to their age, they lose interest in a toy because it breaks, or they outgrow toys altogether. Early in the movie, Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks) is agitated because he cannot find his cowboy hat. This is important to him because his owner, Andy - a seven-year-old boy - is leaving for Cowboy Camp that evening, and Woody is worried that Andy won't take him without his cowboy hat. To help him, Buzz Lightyear (voiced by Tim Allen) has all the toys in Andy's room looking for the hat. Eventually, the hat is found and everyone is relieved, especially Woody.
In this early scene, the audience can sense the capricious nature of children's tastes. When one of Woody's seams is torn during exciting play with Andy and the other toys, Andy decides to leave Woody at home while he goes to Cowboy Camp. Woody is placed on the "top shelf" - apparently where broken toys go - and watches sadly through the window as Andy leaves for camp. While up there, he finds his old friend, Squeeky - a squeeky Penguin doll who had disappeared months earlier when his "squeaker" (the device in the doll's throat that made a squeaking noise whenever the doll was squeezed) had broken. Andy's mom had told Andy that she was taking Squeeky to get him fixed, but in fact, she had lied. She had only told him that, we learn, to calm him down. She had no intention of fixing a broken squeaker - finding a replacement toy is much cheaper, undoubtedly, than to purchase a squeaker and manage the difficult task of replacing it. Squeeky tells Woody that life, for a toy, is ultimately meaningless because at any given moment, toys are always only one broken seam or one broken squeaker away from ending up in dreaded "Yard Sale." And of course, at that moment, Woody looks out the window and sees that Andy's mom is having a yard sale. Within moments, she appears in his room with an empty box, and begins filling it with broken toys and games that Andy has outgrown. Squeaky, sadly, is one of the ones that she grabs. And thus begins the exciting story of Woody setting out to rescue his friend, and in the process, getting taken by a thieving toy store salesman who realizes that Woody is actually a valuable old "Howdy Doody"-type of 1950s era doll.
Several times in the movie, the fears of toys are highlighted, and they are, I have to admit, legitimate fears and quite horrifying. Their worst fear is being separated from their owner. Why? Because life is only worth living when you're being loved by a kid. This is the part of the movie(s) that is beautiful, nostalgic and romantic. Yet it's very difficult to make this theme stick, since as the movie shows us repeatedly, toys are cursed with never growing up, nor having much control over their lives, which is problematic given the certainty that their owners will, in fact, abandon them. So, for instance, we see Woody have a nightmare in which Andy returns home from Cowboy Camp early, pull Woody down from the top shelf to play with him, then stop once he realizes that Woody is "broken." He tosses Woody into a giant trash can with thousands of other broken toy parts. Later, in the movie, we are introduced to a girl cowboy toy named Jessie - a part of Woody's circa 1950s "Roundup Crew." She, along with a horse named Bullseye and an unopened toy named Stinky Pete, the old prospector, have been in storage for decades, and it has been a traumatic experience. This is all about to change, though, since Woody's been discovered. Now the toystore manager can finally sell his entire Woody's Roundup collection of merchandise to a Japanes toy museum, where Jessie, Woody, Pete and Bullseye will live for eternity being adored - but never touched - by millions of children. They will never have to endure the harsh years of loneliness and darkness caused by being abandoned by children or being placed in storage. Jessie then recounts a deeply sad story about her owner, Emily, whom she loved immensely. Emily had, like every young child, played with her dolls daily. But slowly, she started to grow up, and as that happened, Jessie was forgotten. She fell under the bed at one point, where she stayed for what seemed like years. Emily, on the other hand, became interested in boys, progressed into high school, and eventually grew up altogether. Looking for something under the bed, Emily finds her old childhood friend, and for a moment, it's pure bliss for Jessie as she rides with her owner in the car, tucked close to Emily's body. But the story only ends painfully, for Emily actually throws Jessie away by placing her in an anonymous donation box and drives away.
The movie ends, in my opinion, somewhat glibly. I mean, it has to, right? It's a kid's movie. Woody decides that even though he knows his days are numbered, he wants to be there to watch Andy grow up regardless. He wouldn't miss seeing him through those last days of childhood for the world. And besides, he'll have the company of other toys, like his best friend Buzz, to keep him company when that day comes.
Yet, this is completely unsatisfying for me as a viewer. The bottom line is, Andy will grow up, he will abandon Woody, and there is no guarantee at all that Woody will be passed onto some other child along with all the other toys, including Buzz. More than likely, he will end up in the yard sale, or broken, or thrown away, and he'll be separated forever from Buzz and his friends. Toys are different from people in the movie because unlike people, they do not grow up, they are not autonomous, and they do not die. They can be broken, but they do not die. So they must live eternity here on earth, and must spend most of that time - unless they are extremely lucky, which is not presented as likely situation given the fickle tastes of children - alone. The story tries at various points to say that meaningfulness of life can be created if the quality of time spent with one's owner is maximized. In other words, if one has a child who loves him, and has some friends, then that will be enough to make life worth living. But apparently, from watching Jessie's experience, this is factually not true. Jessie had a great life with her owner, Emily. Emily genuinely loved Jessie - as much as Andy loves Woody, if not moreso. Yet the end still came, and she ended up in the prison of pitch black storage, for decades. Decades, she spent, trapped in a box, unable to see anything, unable to move, unable to communicate with another toy. The quality of her relationship Emily was, we come to see, unable to comfort her in any way during those silent, dark, eternal nights.
This is where the story is ultimately disturbing, and I'll add just one more thing before summarizing my thoughts. You can say that the movie is merely meant to be about toys, and is not intended to be anything else, but I personally think that that is not true. I believe we are meant to see ourselves in the toys, at least partially. The themes of both movies are things like friendship, love, loyalty - themes which hit us all, as people, not as impartial observers of a strange little world. There's a sense in which we are to see our own lives in the lives of these dolls. So my question is, what exactly is Toy Story 2 saying?
I don't want to push this too far, but suffice it to say, it's a movie about hopelessness. From the perspective of the toys themselves, life is utterly impersonal and cruel. Their owners will forget them! They will abandon them, betray them, throw them away! And it's clear from the movie - it's explicitly stated numerous times - that the meaning of life is to be loved by these children, and then secondly, to have community with other toys. And yet, while this is the only thing to satisfy a toy in anyway, they must live with the knowledge that their owners do not really care about them. The love is apparently one-sided. They can only have any purpose in the context of a child loving them and being incorporated into that child's imaginary world, but that is with certainty briefly experienced. Most of their lives will be spent alone, in insecurity, isolation, and fear.
I think that on a subtle level, the movie cannot help but reflect the secular humantist worldview of Disney. There is no God; there is no heaven or hell; there is only the now. And life is meaningful insofar as you can make it meaninful, and consistent with their sentimentalism, that comes through friendship and being loved. Yet, it's utterly irrational, and the movie does not, in my opinion, really solve the problem that they've introduced in the first place. Not to be glib, but the portrait of life contained in Toy Story 2 is deeply disturbing, despite being an overall great movie. It's horrifying, actually. All one can hope from life is to end up at the bottom of a trash can or locked in a cardboard box for eternity. How, knowing that that day is coming, can any of the toys sit around, sing songs, dance, and go about their normal lives? How can that not paralyze them with fear and immobility?
And then I realized - isn't this essentially the Disney version of death? Death waits for us all. Yet there is nothing in Disney to conquer death. Here, the great enemy is merely the growing up of children. But it's ultimately a story about death, its immutability, and the hopelessness of life in light of it. The truth is, I think a person can endure the difficulties described in this movie like insecurity, imprisonment, loneliness, etc. only if he or she knows that one day, he will be reunited with the child and the friends he loves. I could never go on living, the more I meditate on this movie, if all that life had to offer me was the end shown in this movie. I would not be able to dance or sing at all. None of the moral platitudes in the movie about friendship, courage and loyalty would make any sense to me in light of that ultimate end. I would try and find some way to distenegrate myself so as to ensure death and a loss of consciousness, rather than endure the unknown and the chance that I'll end up somewhere alone, with my mind intact.
The reason I wrote all this was because I began the week mainly noting all the points of contact the movie had with Christianity, at least topically. The love of a child, the community of friends, the value of friendship, etc. These all reminded me, generally speaking, of communion with Christ and the Church. But then the more I watched it, the more problematic that seemed. Has God abandoned us? Is this the framework out of which the movie is operating us? The movie recognizes that we only have meaning in life in the context of the stories given to us by the owner, and experienced communally with others, yet the owner is ultimately fickle, and possibly even cruel - not cruel in any outright sense, but cruel because the owners forget us and don't take us seriously. We are merely toys to them. They use us up, break us, then forget us. We are not valuable, ultimately, because of who we are, and therefore are forgotten.
This is the part where I must interject my own religious views - the only thing that keeps me going is the knowledge that this is not how I am viewed by God or Jesus Christ. Yes, it is true, life is only worth living if you are being loved by God and among friends. But it is not true that God abandons us. Death is certain, but the wonderful news of the gospel is that God loved us so much that he killed death, and therefore took away its "sting." I will be reconciled with my owner one day, and I'll live eternity not in darkness, insecure and alone, but rather with hordes of people and friends before my living owner. It'll be great.
This article cites a Jewish leader who criticizes Gibson's film for being anti-semitic. But, what is interesting is that it almost seems to me like the Jewish leader is criticizing the book of John even more than he is Gibson. That is, he seems to be saying that any faithful rendition of the gospel narratives will therefore be anti-semitic since those original texts were themselves anti-semitic.
First, the obvious qualification. Gibson's response to this is worth repeating oftentimes. Since Jesus came to die for sinners, the ultimate cause of Jesus's death can be attributed to mankind, in general, or more specifically, to me. If a person watching any passion play comes away with anything other than that conclusion, then they are lost in the details of the play and probably don't understand the gospel very well. So, that's the first thing to point out - ultimately Christianity teaches that sinners, generally speaking, are culpable for the death of Christ, and not uniquely a single race. This has been repeated, often, by almost every reviewer who has seen the movie. They almost all seem to come with the same reaction from seeing the movie - it was my sin that caused this, not some abstract entity called "the Jews."
But secondly, clearly the proximate cause of Jesus was a group of influential Jewish priests and religious leaders at the time. Complicit in that act of betrayal was the Roman government who sacrificed justice to avoid a violent uprising by a mob. And more specifically, a governor named Pontius Pilate is responsible, in a proximate sense, for Jesus's death.
So the question I have is this - even if you grant that those specific individuals were responsible for the death of Christ, why does that therefore indict the entire race to which those people belonged? They were not federal representatives of that entire race, so why is it believed that if certain Jewish men and women orchestrated the kangaroo trial and execution of Jesus, that therefore every single Jew following from their bloodlines is responsible? And how is this affected by the fact that the very same texts show that Jesus and his disciples were Jews, and that there existed at least some Jewish religious leaders who opposed the trial (such as Nicodemus), but who did not politically have the ability to stop it? Even if the gospel narratives only showed one single race orchestrating the execution, it still wouldn't mean that those same texts therefore are indicting the entire race. And this charge is made even more implausible when you consider the number of people in the stories who were themselves Jews, yet were not complicit in Jesus's death (ie, pretty much everyone else).
Peggy Noonan explores whether the Pope did or did not say "It is as it was." It's difficult to believe the co-producers fabricated that endorsement, since at least three different media outlets (of which, Noonan was the only one who used the co-producer as a source; the others used an anonymous Vatican official) reported it on the same day. The quote was fact-checked numerously - with the translator who relayed the quote (spoken by the Archbishop) to the co-producer (he said the statement was true), to others in the Vatican - and it seems clear that the statement attributed to the Pope was passed onto the co-producer by the Archbishop. That event, at least, seems to have happened. Noonan relays in the above article her careful checking of the sources, as well as the other media outlets attempt to check the sources, as well as noting that the NYTimes in a piece critical of the film and its marketing also verified that the Archbishop did make the statement. Yet, now the Vatican is actually saying that the statement was never said, and is implying that the co-producer fabricated the entire story. It sounds very strange.
Thanks to Valerie for pointing me out to Third Millenium's bibliography of several of John Frame's articles. I was intrigued to see on this page several articles Frame had written on movie viewing and film, in general, from a Christian perspective. I've printed them out and will look them over as I prepare for teaching a class on Christianity and Film this summer at the Reformed Youth Movement summer conference in Florida. Thanks Val!
Survivorship studies are originally due to an observation made by George Stigler. From my textbook, "If a particular plant size is efficient, eventually all plants in the industry should approach that size. Any plant or firm size that survives for a long time is efficient. Accordingly, Stigler classified the fraction of output from petroleium-refining plants of various sizes. Stigler uses these data to conclude that the very smallest and the very largest plants are inefficient, because their share of industry output declined over time." (Modern Industrial Organization, 3d edition, Dennis W. Carlton and Jeffrey M. Perloff).
I was wondering whether any survivorship studies had been done of non-profit maximizing firms, such as charitable organizations or churches. Well, specifically, I was wondering whether you could use the idea of survivorship and apply it to religious markets. Any firm or plant that survives over a long period time is therefore efficient - does this, then, mean that the Catholic Church was efficient? After all, for approximately 1500 years, the Catholic Church was the only manifestation of the Christian Church in the Western world. If it was efficient, what exactly does that mean in this context, and then, how was it efficient?
But then secondly, what was it about the 1500s that would've made those conditions change? Clearly, we cannot say the Protestant church is inefficient, because its share of the market has only grown over time.
Interesting article about Cornell economist, Robert Frank's, new book on morality and rationality. Frank, being the economic naturality, trains his eye on activities normally considered outside the scope of economics - in this case, morality. He asks the question of whether it's rational to "do the right thing" or not. His new book, What Price the Moral High Ground? Ethical Dilemmas in Competitive Environments looks good. I'm currently using Frank's textbook for my macro class.
Now that I'm walking down memory lane, anyone remember the Humble Guys? THG was a piracy group in the late 1980s, early 1990s. For a brief spell, they seemed to be the most prolific group out there. They were cracking games and software and putting them in distribution through their various distribution sites, or sell them directly to some groups who in turn repackage and sell them. I used to be fascinated by this group because they seemed so much more professional than any hackers I personally knew. For instance: how did they get beta versions of DOS, which were not going to be released for months and then distribute them before anyone else? This short article discusses how they managed to get access to the software.
"From various places around the world such as Europe, the pirate groups pay people who work in software companies to send them commercial or beta software. Then the pirate groups hire "crackers" (people who alter the program's code) to un-copy-protect the software. Once this is done, the pirate groups ask various U.S. BBS's to pay them for this un-copy-protected software. Then, as you already know, the BBS asks the end-user for an annual fee to have access to the BBS. So, for an individual to risk his job for a fast buck, many people are able to get software at much of a discount."
For an even better history of the evolution of phreaking, hacking, piracy and cracking, as well as some discussion of The Humble Guys, check this out. This kind of captures what I remember about THG - that they were all pompous jerks, but managed to get software on the street at lightning speeds.
I posted this once a long time ago, but I was prowling around the web and found something about it, and decided to post it again. If you look at this old issue of Phrack magazine, an mid-to-late 1980s hacker e-zine, and search for "Silicon Central," you'll find my old BBS. Apparently, at the 1992 National Computer Security Association's 1st Annual Conference on Viruses, a "hit list" of BBSs that circulated viruses was distributed. You can see my old BBS among them below:
... +1-717-367-3501 Night Eyes +1-818-831-3189 Pirate's Cove +1-901-756-4756 Silicon Central +1-916-729-2112 The Welfare Department ...
It's so cool to think that my BBS actually appeared in Phrack, even if it was under such scary circumstances. I did use to distribute viruses, but I'm not sure if I had a lot or a little relative to other BBSs (it's been so long). The number "400" is in my head, and so I'm thinking I had approximately that many on my harddrive for distribution.
But it was actually around this time (1992) that I closed that BBS down. My harddrive crashed one day, taking Silicon Central with it. It truly sucked to lose that site. I had installed a mail distributing software called "Frontdoor" on it and had begun a loosely affiliated group called "The Elite Corporation" which had, at one point, around 15 or so members. All message boards on my site were therefore linked to the other boards, and every night at midnight, FrontDoor would call each of the sites, collect and organize the daily mail, and redistribute it to each BBS. What it offered many of us was a way of consolidating our mail and communication in a time when only University professors had VAX accounts and access to Telnet. The sheer stupidity of it was that I used phreaked calling card codes to do the calling each night for me. It was therefore only a matter of time before I got busted, but in those days, I tended to be even more myopic and short-sighted than I am now.
I had that running, though, for around 4 months, and let me tell you, it was really glorious. I could feel the potential of such a service for the other BBSs. And, what was cool, is that I could see the network effects happening in real time. With each new member joining, the value of the service grew, such that there were actually increasing returns to membership. In other words, I could see in that little experiment the value of something like an Internet which could link everyone, costlessly, and provide speedy access to information and communication to participants. Before, I had to log on to every single BBS, check my mail, and participate in message boards, and while I didn't complain, in retrospect, that was incredibly time consuming (albeit fun).
Anyway, like I said, the old IBM PS/2 Model 30, with its 20 meg harddrive, its 8088 processor, its VGA monitor, its 640K memory, and its 2400 baud modem just --poof-- broke on me one day. The whole thing crashed and with it Silicon Central. When I read something like this, it makes me thing about how good for me it was that that happened.
I read this morning that President Bush is only narrowly ahead in the polls on the eve of his state of the union address. When matched against a generic Democrat, Bush tends to lose on all domestic issues, even while maintaining a lead in foreign policy and the war on terrorism. Is it really any wonder, then, that Bush is planning to increase Medicare payments by 10.6%? Bush may not be the brightest individual by academic standards, but one thing that has always impressed me is his pragmatic understanding of people and management. He seems loosely identified with general conservative Christian beliefs, but in the end, Bush strikes me as a Machiavellian politician of sorts (which is not at all to criticize him). He understands, I think correctly, that for him to win in 2004, he has to cross some ideological lines in the sand by spending on various domestic problems like education, healthcare, NASA, and whatever else. He always seems to do this from the vantage point of doing more than merely redistributing wealth, though, or in the name of generic equity. He seems to want be trying to improve the economy and its growth by providing productive capital - by investing in science, education, and private providers of healthcare. His solutions to the recession were tax cuts designed to increase productivity, which he correctly believed would end up getting the job done. This recession was historically very mild and short-lived. Productivity is up, which will eventually drive the hiring of more workers, and in turn, continue to raise the living standards of average Americans everywhere.
Bush's strength in that area is, though, what makes him so untrustworthy to many small-government Republicans and libertarians. His decision to enforce counter-productive, protectionist tarrifs on steel, as well as other imports, was done, without question, for political reasons. The move hurt importers of steel abroad, many of whom are far poorer than Americans and who lost jobs as a result of the measure, as well as domestic steel consumers. Milton Friedman once said of Richard Nixon that he was far too quick to sacrifice principle for political gain, and while I don't think that that applies to Bush necessarily, there are times when I think he is too pragmatic and prone to make those kinds of decisions.
Then there is the defecit. Recently, Bush made a point to note that 2004 would be the year that government spending would be curtailed significantly. The federal defecit is at an all-time high (nominally speaking that is. In terms of percentage of GDP, the defecit is lower than it was during the Reagan administration, and even lower than the other times in history when the defecit peaked), and Ricardian Equivalence aside, this very well could be a counteracting force in driving growth, insofar as the federal debt crowds out private investment in capital.
Nonetheless, one does wonder whether we live in a world anylonger in which "small government" is at all feasible, or even desirable. I came into graduate school a diehard libertarian, and after a mere two years, have a pragmatic, Machiavellian edge to my own thinking about politics. Bush has certain objectives which he sees as being in the country's best interest - increasing national defense, fighting the war on terror, exporting American ideals and democracy through foreign policy to oppressed regions in the Middle East, Asia and Eastern Europe, etc. These are all, arguably, run-of-the-mill conservative ideals and hardly representative of some alleged "neoconservativism." Bush has many hawks in his administration, but he also has Colin Powell who has always struck me as more dovelike with his tendency to want to exhaust multi-lateral measures, such as diplomacy through the United Nations, before restorting to direct unilateral force by the United States. But even the presence of hawks doesn't prove anything - conservatives, going back to John Adams, have always been somewhat hawkish.
I'm leaning towards supporting Bush this fall in the election. If I voted, it would be my first time to vote. There are many important judicial appointments that will undoubtedly occur over the next four to five years, and I'd prefer Bush in the White House to anyone else. Secondly, though, I think Bush's tax cuts were the right idea, and I'd like to see more economic policy aimed at driving growth (notwithstanding his damaging protectionist policies, which I believe he learned his lesson on after the WTO found them illegal and threatened to allow foreign retaliation). And thirdly, whatever one thinks about the war on Iraq and Afghanistan, I personally would rather see Bush oversee the reconstruction of both than someone who is highly critical of the current adminstration.
Good for China - their economy grew a spectacular 9.1% in 2003. Their total GDP is around $1.3 trillion a year now. A better statistic is to look at GDP per person, though. China's GDP per person is still only around $1000. Compare that with the United States or Japan, both of which enjoy upwards of $30,000 per person, and it helps reveal some of the differences between standards of living in communist countries and market economies. China's relatively recent embracing of markets is nonetheless putting the country on the right path. They'll continue to grow at a strong pace similar to Japan's spectacular growth over the 20th century because they are so poor. Poorer countries always have higher growth rates than richer countries - something economists call the "catch-up effect." And as that country becomes richer, and its people directly participate in those gains, the political control of the communists will become less powerful in time.
Laurence Iannaccone makes several predictions about the state of affairs for religion in the 21st century. He makes some general observations about changes in technology over the last hundred years which, in and of themselves, are quite interesting. In a footnote he writes,
"Consider the changes that would have greeted a Rip Van Winkle who slept from 1935 through 1975, or from 1895 through 1935. These lucky but thoroughly bemused souls would awaken to electrical lights, radios, telephones, movies, cars, airplanes, hot water, indoor plumbing, electrical appliances, modern heating, refrigeration, vaccines, antibiotics, modern dentistry, birth control, and virtually all effective forms medicine, plastics, synthetics, and modern chemistry, the agricultural revolution, television, automation and
computing, modern physics, astronomy, and space exploration, atomic power, radically increased health, wealth, education, leisure, and life expectancy; major changes in the rights of women and minorities, new sexual norms, American military, economic, and cultural dominance, radically changed forms of art, music, visual entertainment. The list is virtually endless, altering every aspect of life and encompassing everything we do, say, own, or experience. By contrast, a Van Winkle who slept from 1973 through 2003 could immediately understand our conversation, dress, diet, housing, appliances, entertainment, economy,
government, energy sources, transportation methods, work activities, and even our policy debates. And a reasonably intelligent Rip would require just days or weeks to master the basics of CDs, DVDs, TV remotes, cell phones, faxes, answering machines, ATMs, and email."
Many of his actual predictions about religion flow out of the novelty of this new age we live in - one in which individuals are simply incapable of understanding the world in which they live. This marks a new period in human history, he argues. Iannaccones notes that historically people did have the capability of understanding their environment, given the primitive nature of the technologies they used.
"For more than a century, scholars mistakenly forecast religious decline based upon flawed views of both religion and science. In particular, they predicted the “disenchantment” of mankind, as the growth of science, spread of technology, and mastery over nature, displaced ignorance, faith, and superstition. They underestimated religion’s intrinsic appeal, but entirely overlooked the ways in which progress itself promotes non-scientific beliefs. Farmers of the 19th century were never far from hardship and hunger or sickness and death, but they could readily understand the tools, technologies, and products they used, bought, or saw. There was nothing particularly mysterious about livestock and plants, water and fertilizer, plo ws and harvesting equipment, candles and kerosene lamps, or houses and horse-drawn carriages – and they probably had a better grasp of their social, economic, and political environment than most college students have today. Factory workers were surrounded by more machinery, larger populations, and more sophisticated markets, but they too could understand most of what they saw and experienced. Flash forward to the present, and notice that today’s farmers, factory workers, and office employees have not the slightest clue how their world works. They know next to nothing about telephones and radios, refrigerators and microwaves, automobiles and airplanes, polymers and metal alloys, laser lights and TV tubes, medicines and cosmetics, modern agriculture and automated factories – to say nothing of computing, telecommunications, nuclear power, space exploration, and genetic engineering (Dixon 198x). This overwhelming ignorance is not proof of poor education, low intelligence, or deficient curiosity. It is the inevitable consequence of systems that aggregate and coordinate the knowledge, skills, and efforts of millions upon millions of people. Technological progress and market economics thus permit a normal population to produce mountains of goods and services, even the simplest of which outstrips the capabilities of a towering genius. With progress, the boundaries separating knowledge from faith, science from superstition, and technology from magic become ever more elusive – for who can know how or why almost anything works? In the decades to come, we will almost never get beyond the interfaces mediating our interactions with the incredibly complex products that will dominate our daily activities. We will know which buttons to press and which commands to speak, but the results will be determined by “black boxes” of technology – hidden from view, microscopically small, remotely located, spread over networks, or floating in orbit. In such a world, the “miracles” of technology may support a thriving market for pseudo-scientific magic, supernatural speculation, and bona fide religion. Indeed, science may fuel faith even among the educated elite, for the “real” world of For more than a century, scholars mistakenly forecast religious decline based upon flawed views of both religion and science. In particular, they predicted the “disenchantment” of mankind, as the growth of science, spread of technology, and mastery over nature, displaced ignorance, faith, and superstition. They underestimated religion’s intrinsic appeal, but entirely overlooked the ways in which progress itself promotes non-scientific beliefs. Farmers of the 19th century were never far from hardship and hunger or sickness and death, but they could readily understand the tools, technologies, and products they used, bought, or saw. There was nothing particularly mysterious about livestock and plants, water and fertilizer, plows and harvesting equipment, candles and kerosene lamps, or houses and horse-drawn carriages – and they probably had a better grasp of their social, economic, and political environment than most college students have today. Factory workers were surrounded by more machinery, larger populations, and more sophisticated markets, but they too could understand most of what they saw and experienced. Flash forward to the present, and notice that today’s farmers, factory workers, and office employees have not the slightest clue how their world works. They know next to nothing about telephones and radios, refrigerators and microwaves, automobiles and airplanes, polymers and metal alloys, laser lights and TV tubes, medicines and cosmetics, modern agriculture and automated factories – to say nothing of computing, telecommunications, nuclear power, space exploration, and genetic engineering (Dixon 198x). This overwhelming ignorance is not proof of poor education, low intelligence, or deficient curiosity. It is the inevitable consequence of systems that aggregate and coordinate the knowledge, skills, and efforts of millions upon millions of people. Technological progress and market economics thus permit a normal population to produce mountains of goods and services, even the simplest of which outstrips the capabilities of a towering genius. With progress, the boundaries separating knowledge from faith, science from superstition, and technology from magic become ever more elusive – for who can know how or why almost anything works? In the decades to come, we will almost never get beyond the interfaces mediating our interactions with the incredibly complex products that will dominate our daily activities. We will know which buttons to press and which commands to speak, but the results will be determined by “black boxes” of technology – hidden from view, microscopically small, remotely located, spread over networks, or floating in orbit. In such a world, the “miracles” of technology may support a thriving market for pseudo-scientific magic, supernatural speculation, and bona fide religion. Indeed, science may fuel faith even among the educated elite, for the “real” world of For more than a century, scholars mistakenly forecast religious decline based upon flawed views of both religion and science. In particular, they predicted the “disenchantment” of mankind, as the growth of science, spread of technology, and mastery over nature, displaced ignorance, faith, and superstition. They underestimated religion’s intrinsic appeal, but entirely overlooked the ways in which progress itself promotes non-scientific beliefs. Farmers of the 19th century were never far from hardship and hunger or sickness and death, but they could readily understand the tools, technologies, and products they used, bought, or saw. There was nothing particularly mysterious about livestock and plants, water and fertilizer, plo ws and harvesting equipment, candles and kerosene lamps, or houses and horse-drawn carriages – and they probably had a better grasp of their social, economic, and political environment than most college students have today. Factory workers were surrounded by more machinery, larger populations, and more sophisticated markets, but they too could understand most of what they saw and experienced. Flash forward to the present, and notice that today’s farmers, factory workers, and office employees have not the slightest clue how their world works. They know next to nothing about telephones and radios, refrigerators and microwaves, automobiles and airplanes, polymers and metal alloys, laser lights and TV tubes, medicines and cosmetics, modern agriculture and automated factories – to say nothing of computing, telecommunications, nuclear power, space exploration, and genetic engineering (Dixon 198x). This overwhelming ignorance is not proof of poor education, low intelligence, or deficient curiosity. It is the inevitable consequence of systems that aggregate and coordinate the knowledge, skills, and efforts of millions upon millions of people. Technological progress and market economics thus permit a normal population to produce mountains of goods and services, even the simplest of which outstrips the capabilities of a towering genius. With progress, the boundaries separating knowledge from faith, science from superstition, and technology from magic become ever more elusive – for who can know how or why almost anything works? In the decades to come, we will almost never get beyond the interfaces mediating our interactions with the incredibly complex products that will dominate our daily activities. We will know which buttons to press and which commands to speak, but the results will be determined by “black boxes” of technology – hidden from view, microscopically small, remotely located, spread over networks, or floating in orbit. In such a world, the “miracles” of technology may support a thriving market for pseudo-scientific magic, supernatural speculation, and bona fide religion. Indeed, science may fuel faith even among the educated elite, for the “real” world of relativity, quantum physics, and contemporary cosmology is more strange and wondrous than any conceived by prophets or priests."
One thing which I found particularly interesting was his observation about even as many of Christianity's opponents have gained ground over the 20th century in terms of their reach and voice (modern liberalism, for instance), they actually depend on Christian values for their own values. Taking liberalism as an example, liberalism's perennial themes of diversity, equality and freedom from oppressive forces are all historically Christian themes - ones which Iannaccone argues do not appear in traditional pagan religions. He makes note of similar trends and concludes that Christianity has succeeded in remaking the world, even while creating an atmosphere in which it is attacked. If I didn't know better, I'd say that Iannaccone has been reading Cornelius Van Til. This is essentially the argument that Van Tillians have always made (as well as G.K. Chesterton) - that what we now see in modernism is the orphaning of the virtues from their proper source (namely the Church) and a society living off of borrowed capital from Christianity.
Matt Drudge scooped this months ago - that Since then, the endorsement has been repeated hundreds of times by media outlets and journalists. Given that Gibson is a member of a traditionalist Catholic sect which is highly critical of the current pope, as well as various 20th century reforms such as Vatican II, the Pope's comment has always surprised me if for no other reason that it struck me as incredibly cordial. That is, since Gibson's sect has called Pope John Paul II "the antichrist" among other things, that he would without qualification endorse the movie's validity seemed if nothing else incredibly warm and forgiving. It's interesting, then, to learn that the Pope may never have utthered those statements. According to Archbishop Dziwisz, with whom the Pope watched the film, the Pope made no comment about the film. Previously it had been reported that Archbishop Dziwisz met with co-producer, Steve McEveety, and Jan Michelini, assistant director of the film, and informed that of the Pope's statement and his overall positive feelings about the film. Now, the Archbishop is saying that he never said that. "I said clearly to McEveety and Michelini that the Holy Father made no declaration," the archbishop said. "I said the Holy Father saw the film privately in his apartment, but gave no declaration to anyone," he said. "He does not make judgments on art of this kind; he leaves that to others, to experts... Clearly, the Holy Father made no judgment of the film," he said.
I'll be interested in hearing Icon Production's response to this.
We think Miles's most recent chicken pox vaccine is the reason why Miles is currently covered in scabby pox. He calls them his "chicken pockets." I cannot independantly verify whether this is a mild or severe case of the pox. He is covered with them, and that includes the insides of his mouth, his scalp, back, arms, legs, chest, stomach, thighs, and feet. But, he doesn't seem to be in a lot of pain. He's just mildly irritated. And, he doesn't seem to be itching like crazy - even though he does itch them occasionally. Hopefully they'll be gone in a few weeks and he won't have any scarring.
I have been attacked, again and again, by some kind of trolling Internet wizard who fills my comment boxes with fortune cookie spam. See the last fifty billion comments for proof of this. Spam to my email I can understand - these guys receive ungodly sums of money to fill my email with advertisements for get-rich-quick schemes and penis enlargements. But this? This is just pure cruelty. I could just delete them using Moveable Type, but it's a bit clunky and awkward to do that. I have to go back and forth, back and forth, deleting comments as I go, which is just costly enough to keep me from doing it.
Along Came Polly has managed to dethrone Lord of the Rings. After five strong weeks, LoTR has experienced a minor setback. Its total North American gross is currently at around $325m, but it's possible that Along Came Polly will only be at no. 1 temporarily and that LoTR might jump back. It did, after all, still manage to rake in $10m over the weekend - even as New Line pulled it from 700 theaters across the country.
But, a strong showing for Along Came Polly seems to spell good news for Jennifer Aniston, who may be one of the few Friends' stars with the box office clout to espace the black hole pull of "syndication purgatory." Lisa Kudrow appears to be the only other Friends star who has made relatively strong films - if not in box office appeal, then at least critically.
If you look at Aniston's filmography, though, you see a lot of variance in her movies' returns. She appeared in several formulaic romantic comedies throughout the years - and it's these that appear to have been the strongest in terms of box office reveues. Omitted from that list is Bruce Almighty which earned a whopping $250m domestically from first run theaters. This, arguably, is also another romantic comedy in which Aniston plays the love interest to some protagonist, and occasionally offers her own "Rachel-style" quirky humor. Along Came Polly could possibly merely be an extension of Aniston's other successful movies - the romantic comedy in which she plays the straight man (er... woman) to some other A-list comedian.
Aniston does not appear content with such limiting roles. She seems to take them because she's good at them, they pay the bills, and more than likely, the very best roles in that genre undoubtedly go to her before they go to anyone else. She and Cameron Diaz seem to have that niche cornered. But she seems to be interested in having access to quality, dramatic roles (for instance, her high profile role in quasi-indie film, The Good Girl, for which she received positive reviews). One necessary condition for getting onto the A-list is box office clout. The success of movies like Bruce Almighty and possibly Along Came Polly are good for her.
Perhaps, like Cameron Diaz, she will be able to ride the romantic comedy, wacky girl next door, roles for a while until she finally comes within the orbit of quality roles. Diaz is, in my opinion, the better actress with better range. She seems to have very little inhibition - she can play in a Farrelly Brothers movie, and give 110% of herself to the part, putting her character through innocent humiliation scene after scene and she can play the wonderfully wounded and sick part that she played as Tom Cruise's girl-toy in Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky. And I hear her performance in Scorsese's Gangs of New York was great as well. Aniston, on the other hand, does not strike me as having that kind of range. Or maybe to put it more fairly, Aniston doesn't seem to me the passion of Diaz, either comedically or dramatically.
Still, for such an uphill climb, Aniston's done well in escaping Friends' success. The paradox of television is that success there can ultimately prove disastrous to an actor's career. James Gandolfini of The Sopranos resports that he has had trouble getting film roles because film directors cannot see him in anything other than Tony Soprano. (More than likely, though, it's not film directors but audiences themselves who are having that problem). Now that Jason Alexander is firmly cemented in our imaginations as George Castanza, can we allow ourselves to see George doing things other than making us laugh in the way only he could? This is the problem - we fall in love with certain characters, and because of the life span of successful television shows, it becomes difficult to separate the actor from the character. The fact that Jennifer Aniston is making headway into successful movies shows either that audiences are able to see her in parts other than "Rachel," or it proves the point, since most of her successful films have been Rachel-types of films.
My student evaluations are in. Here were the general themes:
Criticisms: Disorganized, Second exam much more difficult than the first (ie, lack of consistency between first and second exams), Lack of confidence, Lack of preparation, Needs to know material better, Tests didn't reflect material taught in class, Confusing explanations, Ventured into waters I didn't know well and shoul've therefore avoided, Lectures followed outline of book to a tee.
Positive Notes: Met with students frequently, Willingness to help students under any circumstances, Good personality, Tried to get students excited about economics, Aimed for comprehension not memorization, Identified with students, sense of humor.
The scores I got were average, and really aren't as helpful to me as the comments. None of these comments surprised me at all; if you at all followed my blogging last semester, you'll recognize all of these. So, what can I do with this. Feel free to submit your own recommendations on how to improve. Here are some of my thoughts.
1. Lack of preparation, disorganization, lectures following chapter too closely - No doubt, this is the biggest problem I've got. I'm not a linear thinker. I move in and out of ideas, and oftentimes come to a better grasp of something while teaching it. Most of my preparation last semester was basically to get me to a place where I actually understood the material; very little was left over, after that, to devote to pedagogy. This semester, the task is going to be to abstract from my book and invent my own lectures, essentially. I realized this the other day while preparing my second lecture (I am rewriting all lectures this semester instead of using last semester's over again). I need to begin the lecture with a clear focus in my mind of what it is I need to accomplish - what concepts are important, how do I introduce them best, how do I best illustrate them using problems similar to what they'll see on the exam? I need to use the book to give me a sense of what we should cover, but I need to somehow devise a set of lectures that are ultimately my own, and not merely a linear progression through each chapter.
In one of my econometrics courses this semester, the professor posts on the overhead the outline of what he is trying to cover. This frames both the lecture and subsequent lectures for the students, as well as helping the professor stay on track, and possibly even freeing him up from his notes. I wrote the second lecture with this in mind, and intend to print out overheads with outlines on them that'll remain on the screen throughout the class. I'll just write around the screen, on the blackboard to the left and right of it, instead.
2. Difficult second exam, Tests did not adequately reflect lectures. Undoubtedly, the second exam was much harder than the first. But the reason for this was not because the second exam was too hard, but rather, the first exam was way too easy. This was because, first of all, the first part of the class is very easy. We are covering basic ideas like cost-benefit analysis, comparative advantage and supply & demand. Later, we move into national income accounts, growth and productivity, determinants of employment and wages in the labor markets, expansions and recessions, and the Keynesian model of aggregated expenditure. So, in one sense, the increasing difficulty of the exams reflected that fact.
But, that's not the only reason the second exam was so much more difficult than the first. The first exam consisted mostly of definitional questions in a multiple-choice framework. I asked a lot of questions about concepts, and had very little actual problem-solving questions on the test. As the class progressed, I began to realize that the course needed to have more problem solving in it, and so in retrospect, ended up over-shooting when designing the second exam by making it too long. The problem here was that I did not manage the students' expectations very well at all. So, how can I better manage their expectations about test-taking in the future?
First of all, I am considering making last semester's exams available to them. This would at least give them some sense of what to expect.
Secondly, I am going to need to do more problems in class. I now think that it's a good idea, pedagogically, to work out problems in class, and use problems as a way of explaining the concepts underlying them. Before, I would belabor the concept, going at it from a myriad of directions, before I ever dove into a problem.
3. Focused on things I didn't know well, lack of confidence, needs to know material better - These are all things which, hopefully, will just improve with time, as I teach the class more and more. I am more confident with the material now. I do know the material better this time around. Still, I don't think that I know it all that great, even now. So there's still tons of room for improvement.
The good things that were reported really didn't have to do with my teaching at all. They more had to do with my personality. That I care about comprehension, that I was helpful and made myself available, that I was apporoachable, that I was funny and had a good personality, that I was well-liked. These are all things which are nice, but aren't direct drivers of being a good teacher. They're more about "being liked" which I think I need to steer clear of as much as I can. "Being liked" has nothing to do with being a good teacher (as my graduate coordinator told me recently), or even with being a loving teacher who embodies the servant-nature of Christ to the students (which is ultimately my goal as a teacher).
Dennis Miller is moments away from getting a talkshow with CNBC. Hearing this news brings me back to that ever familiar place of "I wish I had cable. I wish Athens picked up any news channel. I wish the only thing to watch in the house was not Veggietales, the Tick reruns, Woody Allen movies, and Winnie the Pooh." But alas, for now, and probably for two to three more years, I will remain in my cultural seclusion. But going back to Miller, I loved the end of the article:
"Mr. Miller said his own comedic influences include Jonathan Miller, Richard Pryor, Richard Belzer and Mr. Leno. He speaks more hesitantly about the two comedians with whom he has often been compared, Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce.He said he had transcripts of some of Mr. Sahl's early shows and was amazed by them. But then he lost interest. Mr. Sahl, he said, became too close to the Kennedy family and was "a savage name-dropper." Mr. Miller added, "It always reminded me to watch myself."
Surprisingly he is tougher on Lenny Bruce. "Lenny was a heroin addict, and I could care less about heroin addicts," Mr. Miller said. "Once I hear a guy is a heroin addict, and they tell me he's a genius, I think, really? I'm not trying to be judgmental. But anybody whose last vision is of a tile pattern on a bathroom floor, I don't know what kind of genius they are."
Wow. Mel Gibson's The Passion will premiere next month on approximately 2000 screens nationwide. Apparently, this was prompted by huge demand for advance ticketsales. Bob Barney, President of New Market distributors, says "We've had a flood of calls. People call and say, 'I want 10,000 tickets.'" One multiplex in a suburb of Dallas is reserving all 20 of their screens for this movie - twenty screens!
It's hard to believe that initially, Gibson wasn't even sure he was going to find a distributor for this. He ended up bankrolling the entire project out of his own pocket ($25 million). This could easily turn into a substantial money making venture for him, given the buzz and the controversy surrounding it, the Pope giving it two thumbs up, and now the wide distribution. Breaking $25 million isn't difficult to do these days. Add into that somewhere around $10-20 for marketing costs. Add into that, also, the slot that Gibson's selected for release - Ash Wednesday, Feb. 25th - which I'm guessing probably hasn't historically been a date known for generating much attention by the film industry, and you have conditions which are nice for Gibson and his Icon Production.
Here's a great interview with Becker, which also has a brief discussion of behavioral economics. I completely agree with his criticism of behavioral economics being too dependant on laboratory experimentation. I was reading back over the early Kahneman/Tversky article on prospect theory, in which they attempt to replace expected utility theory, and the way that they came up with this theory was really wild. They essentially, as far as I could tell, would ask the people how they would behave in various hypothetical risky situations, and from that deduced that people were not always behaving rationally. It made me remember last semester when I asked the class, "how many of you will show up for a review" and practically the entire class raised their hands. Yet, how many actually showed up? Four.
For my paper on game theory, that was one of the things I was trying to look into actually. I got the sense that behavioral economists had, for a long time, conducted tests which were not valid because they did not use financial incentives. One study I have gave individuals actual high wealth to work with (as much as $1000 was earned by test subjects during the experiment), and in those situations, their subsequent decisions were entirely consistent with expected utility theory. When faced with real financial gains and losses, their risk preferences began to kick in, in other words.
Anyhow, to see Becker's thoughts, check out the extended entry below.
REGION: I'd like to ask you about the field of behavioral economics. Much of your work has applied economic thought to sociological and psychological phenomena. These days a number of so-called behavioral economists, including your colleague Richard Thaler, are effectively reversing that looking glass by applying psychology and sociology to economic analysis. What do you think of the potential for such efforts?
BECKER: A lot depends on what is meant by behavioral economics. If that means a broadening of the scope of variables that influence people's behavior, it is quite relevant. For example, if I own a bottle of wine for two years and it appreciates a lot in value, then I may not want to sell it, even though I would not pay that much for a bottle of wine. That's sometimes called the endowment effect. It is not inconsistent with rational behavior, but economists have neglected these types of considerations.
One of the things I have tried to do in my research is to broaden the type of considerations that go into models of people's preferences. I have no problem in my vision of economics with endowment effects, fairness issues and many other considerations that affect people's preferences. Therefore, in a sense, I'm a behavioral economist.
But I would have some major differences with behavioral economics as it is usually defined. Let me say two things: First, there is a heck of a difference between demonstrating something in a laboratory, in experiments, even highly sophisticated experiments, and showing that they are important in the marketplace.
Economists have a theory of behavior in markets, not in labs, and the relevant theories can be very different. One reason is the division of labor in markets. Consider, for example, the claim by behavioral economists that most people cannot calculate probabilities accurately. I agree to some extent but am confident that people who work at blackjack tables know the relevant probabilities very well. Otherwise they don't work at these jobs. People go into activities when they are either good at those activities, or when they learn to be reasonably good. So while the average person may not calculate certain probabilities very well, they do not end up in jobs where they need to make those calculations.
A market economy is a group of specialists who are integrated by exchange. It may be that each of these specialists is terrible at other activities, but the whole aggregate can be highly efficient. The aggregate may make few mistakes. One of the things some behavioralists have missed is that a specialized economy eliminates many mistakes because vulnerable people don't get put into positions where they can make these mistakes.
The second related criticism I have is that some of the defects in behavior claimed by behaviorists tend for a different reason to be eliminated in an exchange economy. It is sometimes claimed, for example, that people's preferences are not transitive. Transitivity means that if I like a group of goods donated by A over another group, B, and B over C, then I like A over C.
Now suppose a case that violates transitivity. Suppose I prefer one apple to one orange and one orange to one pear, but I prefer one pear to an apple. That is intransitive preferences. What would happen? Someone would come to me and say since I prefer an orange to one pear, I should give him a pear plus money in exchange for an orange. Then he gives me an apple for my orange plus money. OK again. But since by assumption I prefer a pear to an apple, he gives me back my pear in exchange for the apple plus more money. I end up with the pear I started with, but I lost money in three transactions. Why? Because in each case I have given him some money plus a piece of fruit.
This is called the Dutch book argument in economic theory. I do not know if you have heard that before. I don't know where the expression comes from, but it is illustrated here by a series of exchanges that can take advantage of these intransitive preferences. Many other of the behaviorists' claims are subject to similar Dutch book arguments that either make behavior more rational, or a person goes broke. Since this is mainly an implication of exchange, it is hard for me to believe that such inconsistent behavior is important in modern
exchange-based economics.
Barnum said there's a sucker born every minute of the day. Well, suckers lose their money. Another example: I have fair dice, but you believe that a 12 is going to come up half the time. I would love to play craps against you. You will continue to lose until either you change your beliefs, or you lose your shirt. Exchange and the division of labor do not eliminate all the issues brought up by behavioral economics but I believe “behavioral” economics has a different place in modern economies than is often claimed.
To be sure, I agree that economists have often taken a very naive, materialistic, narrow approach to preferences and behaviors. I also agree that we do not want to assume that everybody is a perfect calculator. There are limits to our ability to calculate. Broader preferences and “bounded” rationality are part of a more relevant model of rational behavior. In my own way I have been trying to broaden preferences to take account of some of these points. But I am dubious about behavior that won't survive in an exchange economy with an extensive division of labor. This is where experimental and market behavior may be totally different.
REGION: This seems another area where comparing theory with empirical evidence from the marketplace is important to future development of the field.
BECKER: It's crucial. One can get excellent suggestions from experiments, but economics theory is not about how people act in experiments, but how they act in markets. And those are very different things. It is similar to asking people why they do things. That may be useful to get suggestions, but it is not a test of the theory. The theory is not about how people answer questions. It is a theory about how people behave in market situations. Once you recognize that, it is essential to have a dialogue between market behavior and the theory in order to test various hypotheses.
I wonder if what makes a person somewhat suspicious of behavioral economic is somewhat dependant on the avenue the person took to get to economics in the first place. I was just reading that some behavioral economists question the idea that rationality dictates we ignore sunk costs. This is a basic idea - that the only costs we should consider are the ones we face at the margin. We are to ignore all "sunk" costs - i.e., costs which exist independant of our decisions in the moment. So, for instance, say you lose a $10 ticket to see a movie. Should you buy another one or not? If I'm not mistaken, assuming away wealth effects from the lost income, Homo economicus will buy the ticket again. The marginal benefits have stayed the same and the marginal cost of the movie is, again, only $10. Not, mind you, $20. The only cost you should concern yourself with is the ten dollars you pay for the ticket - you should not combine that cost with the previous cost of the ticket you lost.
This is where economics can actually cease to be purely descriptive and becomes prescriptive. Economists are now saying, "This is not merely how people behave; this is how rational people should behave. And since rationality is always desirable, this is how you should behave."
Behavioral economics seems to come in between this space of neoclassical postiive and normative analysis. Neoclassical economists assume rationality, and in so doing, explain away many interesting types of behavior. For instance, school teachers are given the option of being paid over a nine-month cycle, or being paid over a twelve-month cycle. Rationally, if they wanted to maximize their financial wealth, they should choose to be paid over the nine month period, then invest the difference. This would actually increase one's income over the annual cycle. So why do teachers do the opposite, most of the time? Studies show that most teachers actually choose the nine-month cycle, over the twelve-month cycle. Are they irrational? Are they stupid? Or do our concepts of maximization and rationality need to be looked at more closely? The simple explanation is probably the correct one - teachers do not trust themselves to make those financially prudent choices, and so to remove those temptations, opt to be paid over the twelve-month cycle instead.
Another example I read about recently is of people using the sunk costs of joining an expensive gym as an incentive for them to go out and exercise. Rationally, if I'm thinking of this correctly, the $350 up-front membership fee should never be calculated in the daily decision to exercise. The only costs that matter are the ones the person faces that day, with respect to that decision to exercise or not. Yet, I'm learning that behavioral economists have found evidence that refutes this in special circumstances. (I think that some economists have countered by noting that rationality seems to be more strictly adhered to in high stakes situations, such as business operations. There, the least rational players are weeded out by the market, or replaced by shareholders with more profitable executives).
Anyhow, I was thinking as I was reading about this - I bet it really gets under some economists skin to listen to some of the work being done by behavioral economists, like Daniel Kahnemann (2002's Nobel Prize winner who likes to say that he's never taken a class in economics [he's a psychologist by training]).
Anyone out there familiar with Richard Thaler's political philosophy called "libertarian paternalism"? It sounds similar to some of the things that were mentioned on this site several months ago when we were talking about Wal-mart. Jim mentioned that we may make collective decisions in some previous period that remove various options in later periods, because we anticipate that if and when we reached that node, we'd make decisions that weren't good for us. Consider pornography. You know that in some very specific environment, you may equate costs against benefits and choose to consume x units of pornography, even though outside of the situation, you wish you hadn't. So, you make various decisions to remove yourself from the possibility of that environment. Thaler's idea of libertarian paternalism sounds similar to this. It still allows for freedom of choice, but restricts the number of options (hence the paternalistic dimension to it), therefore effectively leading the individual to choose something which the paternalistic player believes is ultimately better for him/her.
In a recent Chronicles of Higher Education article, they feature Berkeley economist, and co-author of Thaler, Sendhil Mullainathan. In one study of Mullainathan's, he was studying the effects of variations in cigerette taxes on self-reported rankings of happiness among consumers. What he found gives some limited empirical support to Thaler's philosophy. The article reads:
"In a paper written with his MIT [Mullainathan's former employer] colleague Jonathan Gruber, he argued that large-scale survey evidence suggested that high cigarette taxes might improve smokers' happiness and well-being. Using data from the U.S. and the Canadian General Social Surveys, Mr. Gruber and Mr. Mullainathan looked at variation in cigarette taxes in states and provinces. They found that higher taxes appeared to have a strong positive effect on the self-reported happiness of a group of people who, according to various demographic correlations, were likely to be smokers or former smokers. Mr. Mullainathan believes that the effect might be related to certain smokers' unfulfillled wish to force themselves to quit. For many such smokers, he suggests, a high cigarette tax offers the incentive that they claim to desire."
Whatever you think about this in practice, in principle, this seems like it would work. We went over an entry-exit model in game theory last semester in which an entrant firm had the option of entering the market and fighting an incumbent firm, or choosing not to enter, and thus gaining zero profits. The entrant will choose to enter and fight the incumbent if and only if there is a credible threat that the incumbent will fight. If the incumbent has no choice but to fight, and if by fighting, it causes the entrant's profits to be lower than zero, then the entrant will actually never enter the market in the first place.
So what am I saying in all of that? What I'm saying is simply that ordinarily we think that expanding people's options increases overall welfare. But in that specific application, restricting the options made it undesirable for the entrant to enter, and thus ended up being more efficient than the previous example in which the incumbent had more options. So what I am really saying? What I'm really saying is that, you can show theoretically that restricting people's options may actually lead to greater utility for them and others, even while allowing those people to continue to pursue objectives freely.
I've been thinking about pornography, specifically. I blogged not too long about how I suspected that the "social costs" of pornography had fell in response to technological improvements over the last thirty years, because now people can consume porn privately. The real costs of consuming porn are not monetary, but are the risks of being seen, of being found out. And those costs are, at the margin, enough to deter most people from doing it. A married man may not have been willing to go see a pornographic movie at a theater thirty years ago for the simple fact that he could get caught. But VHS, and magazine pornography deliverable by mail, and then eventually the Internet, lowered the risk of discovery signficantly, thus increasing the demand for porn. So what if someone could create rules which did not ban pornography, but rather, forced it to be purchased publicly, rather than secretly? This would raise the riskiness of consumption, and would lower demand, leaving only those people who were relatively uninterested in being discovered. Perhaps single males, for instance, while taking many married males out of the market altogether.
What if it could also be showed that similar to high taxes on cigerettes plausibly causing higher levels of happiness, increasing the risk associated with consuming pornography would have a similar effect? The problem is that unlike taxes on cigerettes, there does not exist any regulation of Internet x-rated commerce, so you can't really test that thesis very well. Still, it's kind of intriguging.
First of all, everyone reading this should seriously consider taking my advice and renting Bend it Like Beckham. It's a British comedy about a traditionalist Indian family living in England and their daughter who loves soccer. It's one of these "clash of civilizations" movies, with a mix of Romeo and Juliet. Soccer serves to reunite these two people groups by giving expression to one family's years of felt-pain over racism and oppression by the Brits. It's also a sports movie, and so has so many of those great qualities from movies like Hoosiers and Rudy where you're rooting for the underdog the entire time. Only this time, the underdog is a traditional Indian girl who is both excellent and modest and forced to keep her love of the sport secret from her family, who feel it's inappropriate for a young lady to be playing sports. So then, it also becomes a story about sexual norms within Indian culture. Like I said, it places soccer at the center of the deep divide between Western and Eastern culture, and uses soccer to heal many broken hearts and lives. Very beautiful movie. I cried pretty much the whole way through. But, I cry in most movies these days, for some reason, so that may not mean much.
But secondly, this was an interesting article. I only read the first few paragraphs to be honest. But it reminded me of something I had told two of my buddies from the econ program the other day. I had told them that David Beckham may very well be the first soccer celebrity on the same level as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. They immediately responded, "What about Pele?" But my point was not that there didn't exist, prior to Beckham, great soccer players, or even famous soccer players. But there did not really exist, until Beckham, an athletic celebrity - and by that I mean someone who had succeeded in branding himself and marketing himself through endorsements, and whatever else these atheletic icons do. Pele was more like Babe Ruth than he was like Sammy Sosa. He was a legend, not a branded celebrity. At least, that's my impression.
Big drop in my classroom rolls. I had 54 students originally signed up, and then it dropped down to 40 this week. I wonder why that happened. I did require a lot of the students, like attendance, numerous problem sets, and even outside-of-class experiments. I wonder if that drove some kids away...
On the student evaluation front of things, I'm still waiting. The kids' evaluations are in, but I've not received them yet. I still haven't shown up on My Professor Sucks dot com, though, which is slightly encouraging. But I credit most of that to the fact that my kids were generally unfamiliar with the site. Anyhow, I'll be posting the basic stuff about that as soon as I get it.
Lastly, I'm debating about taking an economics of law class being offered through the law school, being taught by one of our professors in the Finance department (I say "one of our." He's not one of our professors. He's just in the same Business school that I'm in). It would count 2 credit hours, seems to be minimal work, is reportedly an easy class (it's economics for lawyers, so a lot of it is basic principles stuff, at least from what I saw of the early part of the course outline), and only has one grade for the class - a final or a research project, whichever I choose. So I was thinking of taking it, using it as an opportunity to familiarize myself with more law and economics, and trying to get something put together on this "punishment and crime" paper I've been wanting to do on Sweden and its corporal punishment ban. Speaking of, I'm taking two econometrics courses this semester, and it hit me today. If I am going to be an applied economist, doing mostly empirical work, then I've got to get my butt in gear. I can't believe how dense this stuff actually is! It's not like empirical work is the lesser of the difficult paths to take. I can't believe how much can be said about estimators. I need to start cranking on this stuff as soon as possible and quit blogging about junk.
Mesh mentioned something to this effect a while back, and it's stuck in my head ever since. I was reading one of Iannaccone's new articles on Catholic monopolies, and I found a really interesting quote. This is from a reply to a critique of Iannaccone's who questioned Iannaccone's claim that Catholicism tolerated more diversity within itself than Protestant churches. He writes,
"First, Catholicism's internal diversity is a matter of record. Consider, for example, the following scholars' statements regarding the range of products available to Catholic consumers. Hanson (1987) observed that to be truly 'Catholic,' the Church always 'has tolerated large variations in the content and style of belief as long as its members publicly professed ecclesiastical unity and loyalty to the institution' (p. 120). This has led to the availability of numerous expressions of Catholicism stressing different styles of worship (liturgical and pentecostal), different beliefs, different political philosophies (monarchist and democratic), and radically different economic orientations (ranging from quasi-Marxist 'liberation theology' to the right-wing economics of 'Opus Dei'). What appears to the untrained (Protestant) eye as a 'Roman monolith' is in fact a 'mosaic' of local parishes with widely divergent practices and orientations (Rodney Stark and Roger Finke forthcoming). Hence, as Andrew Greeley (1977) noted in his statistical portrait of American Catholics, 'every generalization that begins with the word "Catholic" is likely to be misleading, if not erroneous, precisely because the generalization will mask substantial differences in values that exist among the Catholic subpopulations' (p. 252). Research on Catholicism abounds with statements like these. Papal pronouncements and Protestant presumptions notwithstanding, it is simply not true that the Church offers 'no choice' to its customers."
On a different note, did your skin crawl when he used the phrases "product selection" and "customers" when speaking about the Catholic Church? Reading this, I am reminded of the endless blank stares and weird looks I've gotten over the last year and a half when I tell people I'm wanting to do something on the economics of religion. No matter how hard I try, I seem unable to use language like the kind of language Iannaccone uses without offending someone.
I recently heard that Laurence Iannaccone, professor of economist at George Mason University, has begun a center at George Mason called "the Center for the Economic Study of Religion." The funding for this enterprise will be coming from, among other places, the Templeton Institution, which if I'm not mistaken, is a philanthropic organization that funds various religion and science enterprises.
This is somewhat exciting for me, for different reasons. For one, Iannaccone is the most aggressive promoter of this "new paradigm" within the sociology of religion, and so for any economist interested in working in this area, Iannaccone's progress in venues like this one is good news for them. It's good news both because it promotes the economic approach to the study of religion, which could ultimately help broaden the market for those economists working in that area. But it's also good because, let's just say that someone knew a young economist looking for a job who worked in that area - maybe there'll eventually be a spot for them at that center. Or something like that.
But it's also good because it's forced Iannaccone to update the Economics of Religion website. It has several new articles online, including Iannaccone's dissertation from Chicago on the formation of habits and addiction, with a specific application to religion, within an optimizing framework. The idea with rational choice is that individuals weigh costs against benefits in making decisions. Yet there are some phenomenon we observe which don't seem to quite fit into that kind of framework - like addiction. With addiction, the individual seems to be constrained by past actions, and does not seem to be free to pursue choices in the present. The way that Becker and others have solved this (I think) has been to adapt the "human capital" models of education and productivity and apply them to various social investments, like aesthetic appreciation and drug addiction. There are several good articles on this idea of social capital in Becker's excellent, Accounting for Tastes.
Sociologists of religion have also borrowed this idea (and perhaps it's not all that original with Becker in the first place, but he seems to be the one in my circles who is credited with deriving the results, perhaps for no other reason than he built several models explaining it) and used it to explain things like conversion and apostasy. What they argue is that individuals are not likely to convert, ever. Conversions happen along social networks as people become invested with social capital. That is, as they possess substantial deposits of attachments to a network of individuals of a certain faith, they may seek to diminish the distance between themselves and those people by converting. In a modern sense, an interesting anecdoate I heard was that Jehovah's Witnesses rarely ever convert someone in their door-to-door missionary activities, but in situations in which a person is living with a Jehovah's Witness (a roommate situation), that person will convert to JW 50% of the time.
This suggests a few things, but one thing it suggests is that perhaps the real value of those door-to-door activities is not for reasons of effective proselytization. Perhaps, instead, what it does is deepen the individual's "religious capital." I was thinking about this other day as I was listening to a former Navigator leader criticize the number of college students that Navigator sends overseas each year. For a much smaller price, those same kids could be sent locally to do mission work, and would more than likely be far more effective than in their short-lived trips to Asia or wherever. But that made me wonder - if they are so ineffective, then why does the organization continue to spend so much of their resources doing it? That's not to say that necessarily, just because an organization does something, that that much mean it's a good thing. But if something sticks around for a long time, year after year, then it does suggest that certain objectives are being met. It also suggests something economists call "efficiency."
So I began to wonder, perhaps the real value of sending those kids to Asia is not because we believe that in doing so, we are necessarily being effective at proselytizing the Christian faith to nonbelievers abroad. But rather, perhaps it is because those experiences are particularly effective at driving home the subjective validity and reality of the Christian faith to the missionaries. It's important for the development of their own religious capital; not necessarily for the purpose of evangelizing the world.
Anyway, that's a perfectly good rambling post. I started off talking about Iannaccone, then his new Center for the Economic Study of Religion, then Navigators and proselytizing.
Did you know that there are large populations of people living underground New York City in makeshift communities? They are called, by one LA Times intern from an early 1990s book, "The mole people." She estimated that as many as 5000 people lived underground New York City, in the labrynth of subway tunnels and sewage system. In most cases, these are solitary souls - mentally ill and deranged individuals (probably very similar to the crazy man who accosted me downtown last week at 6:30am on the morning of my macro prelim screaming at me about the mafia and the bills he'd paid for 18 years) wandering and scavenging. But in some situations, she reports that communities of around 200 people with elaborate social structures and even "mayors" had formed. Yet, before you start packing your bag to head underground, even in these little "communities," it was apparently hell on earth. The author reported that these communities consisted mostly of drug addicts and alcoholics, and that they were routinely terrorized by roving gangs or each other. Since then, numerous crackdowns and cleanups by the NYC police department has probably caused these numbers to dwindle, as well as to force some of the larger bodies to relocate.
Roger Ebert's review of Monster is up, and he gives it four stars. I unsuccessfully tried to persuade my brother and sister-in-law to see it over the weekend. We saw, instead, Master and Commander (which was nonetheless fantastic). So I look forward to catching Monster on video when it comes out. Here's a quote from Ebert on the movie.
We are told to hate the sin but not the sinner, and as I watched "Monster" I began to see it as an exercise in the theological virtue of charity. It refuses to objectify Wuornos and her crimes and refuses to exploit her story in the cynical manner of true crime sensationalism -- insisting instead on seeing her as one of God's creatures worthy of our attention. She has been so cruelly twisted by life that she seems incapable of goodness, and yet when she feels love for the first time she is inspired to try to be a better person.She is unequipped for this struggle, and lacks the gifts of intelligence and common sense. She is devoid of conventional moral standards. She is impulsive, reckless, angry and violent, and she devastates her victims, their families and herself. There are no excuses for what she does, but there are reasons, and the purpose of the movie is to make them visible. If life had given her anything at all to work with, we would feel no sympathy. But life has beaten her beyond redemption.
I must, once again, give mad props to Allbookstores.com. Allbookstores is a search engine that searches through ten to fifteen online book retailers, including a few used bookstores, to find the best deals available on books. The savings that I've experienced by buying my textbooks through this service are starting to really mount up. I just bought Jeffrey Wooldridge's econometrics textbook, using allbookstores, from a Canadian retailer called "Chapters Indigo." The book normally sells for around $100, give or take, but I found it for $25, brand new, through allbookstores, at "Chapters Indigo" in Canada. The shipping and handling was a bit steep, though, since it's coming from Canada ($9 total), but still, that's quite a savings.
A new intellectual biography of F.A. Hayek entitled Hayek's Challenge, by Bruce Cadwell, has recently been published. Virginia Postrel reviews it for the Boston Globe. Of the many things the book appears to cover, the reviewer notes the numerous areas in which Hayek ventured outside professional economics. His work on the brain is said to have anticipated later developments in cognitive psychology. And in a general sense, his critiques of culture are embryionic forms of postmodernism. I did not know this, but apparently late in his career, Michael Foucault lectured on Hayek's writings.
The review notes that Hayek has begun to be taken more seriously in areas like information technology, computer science, and social theory. Sadly, he is rarely if ever discussed in graduate economics. Unless the graduate student has had a reason to encounter Austrian economics, or libertarian political philosophy, he may spend his entire graduate school experience having never heard or read of F.A. Hayek. This may be because, as the reviewer notes, Hayek was one of the last non-professionalized economists. The profession has developed a common language based on methods of optimization and differentiation, something which Hayek disavowed as an Austrian purist. His insight into the role of information in an economy was eventually brought into the field through the work of Nobel Laureates like Akerloff and Stiglitz. His theories of money and business cycles have yet to be seriously looked into by modern economists.
But, what is ultimately lost by modern economics ignorance of Hayek (and Mises) is that keen understanding of how economies actually work, and of the emerging order that results, given certain institutions, spontaneously in society. What's never discussed in class, nor taught to students, are the way in which a decentralized body of individualized actors can bring about a harmonious order, and the role that information-laden prices has in directing it. So I am looking forward to this new biography to hopefully help complement my own education somewhat. I hope that it is more interesting and stimulating that Alan Ebenstein's biography, written a few years ago. While helpful, it suffered from being overly dry. But then again, it was an intellectual biography, and since I've read so few of those, perhaps they're all like that.
Paige and I finished watching The Sopranos fourth season two nights ago. We are both completely and utterly addicted to this show. It totally came from left field, too. We only started watching the show last year on DVD, during the mid-semester break. We were immediately hooked. It's got to be one of the best television shows I've ever watched. I used to say that about Twin Peaks, but this one could be about to pass that one in the subjective ranking of favorite dramatic television shows that I hide in my heart. Tony's wife, Carmella, gave a simply incredible performance in the final two episodes of the fourth season. She was so utterly broken, so distraught over finding out that Tony had not changed his philandering ways. I couldn't believe that this actress was capable of channeling such raw pain and strength, but she did, and it was fantastic.
I read that Gandolfini wasn't too different from Tony and that it was what fueled his recent divorce. His wife reported that he was, like Tony Soprano, a serial womanizer and a party boy. He just recently became engaged to a woman that he met on the set of The Mexican (at which time he was married). Very sad. I'd like to watch those scenes of Tony being confronted by Carmella again, because it's interesting to know that the actor playing them was having to deal directly with material from his own life, such as his own adultery.
Anyhow, I'm incredibly excited about the fifth season. They are saying that Steve Buscemi will be coming on as the maternal cousin of Tony Soprano. Buscemi isn't a stranger to the series. I believe he directed at least one of the shows so far. There's a lot going on - Tony and Carmella's split, Christopher's recovery from heroin addiction, Johnny Sachs anger towards Tony for backing out of the plan to assassinate the family boss, and numerous other threads. If you have a DVD, and haven't seen it, I recommend going out and watching the first season. It can get incredibly dark, and sexually can be quite graphic, but it tapers off a little bit in the third season. The second season was the worst regarding those elements. It showed a violent rape scene (which thankfully lasted only a few seconds) and lots of shots at the Bling Bling strip club, as well as a lot of explicit soft-core sex scenes. Thankfully, as I mentioned, by the third season, there's a lot less nudity and less graphic violence (but of course, it is the mafia, so it saturates the show if only impliticitly).
Actually, there were no real first day jitters to speak of today. I held my first lecture for my new principles of macroeconomics course (Econ 2105) today. It's a Monday/Wed/Fri course, 9:05 to 9:55am. I'm kind of psyched. This Aplia software is sweet. Really user-friendly, beautiful interface, and lots of tools that'll be valuable for me (and the students) over the course of the semester. I'm assigning somewhere close to 20 (that's twenty) problem sets this semester. Remember last semester, when I complained so much about six? Well, now it'll be three times as bad. Only, actually, it'll be a breeze now because I'll be using Aplia to distribute the problem sets, grade the problem sets, and design the problem sets. On my end, it takes a huge burden off, allows me to spend more time teaching and preparing, and less time grading, and will still give students plenty of opportunity to prepare for the exams. Problem sets count 10% of their grade.
I also decided to stick with the attendance policy. It counts 5% of their final grade. In the end, I was generally satisfied with the whole thing. The one thing I didn't like was each day having to print out the attendance sheet. But I think what I'll do in the future is, instead, spend one day printing them out, then just keep them with me. I'll need to do that soon, either today or tomorrow or something, while I have the energy to devote to it, and while I'm still relatively not busy. But if I can get sufficiently organized, it should work out better. I decided to do this partly because one of my counterparts, Tom, another T.A., didn't do attendance, and his attendance had more variance than mine. Approximately 95% of the students got the full attendance credit. I don't know, though, if it necessarily helped the students who did come, but I suspect it did. That's an empirical question, and I may eventually try to study it. I think I'd have to divide the students into two groups - one that received credit for attendance, and one that didn't. Then see if grades were higher in the one group where attendance was mandatory for those students who didn't exceed the minimum three absences. Anyway, that's another matter.
I'm also in another building, and this time, I have only a chalk board to use and an overhead. I'm kind of glad. Those white boards get old really quick, especially if your marker runs out of ink, or if the white board won't erase properly.
On other fronts, the public choice class was cancelled due to lack of interest. They needed five students, minimum, but only two were enrolled (me being one of them). It's a political science class, which I guess means there's not too much interest over there in game theoretic and economic approaches to political economy. So, I've decided to only take two classes this semester, and spend the remaining time being around the house more during the day, as well as beefing up my econometrics skills. There's an online class with the London School of Economics for learning Stata that I'm going to take. I'm also sitting in on Econometrics I again (which I took last spring), and taking an advanced course. I don't know why I'm so scared of stats. But I'm incredibly intimidated by Stata - so much so that I've not been able to really make any progress on my research, except in collecting the data. Hopefully that'll change after this semester, if only a little bit.
Return of the King is kicking butt and taking names at the box office. In a mere three weeks, it'x grossed approximately $300 million in the North American market alone. (FYI, From what I understand, the reason the numbers are reported for North American market and not the total gross worldwide is because the profit sharing for distributors is higher in the North American market. The contracts read differently in Europe or Asia, and may not favor the studios as much over there as they do over here).
I wonder what constitutes a "hit" nowadays. I read in the Wall Street Journal that over 25 movies broke the $100 million mark in 2003 alone.
Speaking of hits, I've been watching some of the financials for studios for the first time recently. And the other day, I realized just what a hit Titanic actually was. It appeared at the end of 1997, and went on to gross $600 million in the North American market alone (that's not counting worldwide, DVD sales, soundtrack sales, etc.). It was at no. 1 for six months, and continued to play until August of 1998. That's incredible when you compare it to the hits of this year. Is anything that appeared last February still playing? Is anything from June still no. 1? I think part of the key to Titanic was how it captured so many different target audiences at once - young and old, male and female, history buffs and romance types. It was cutting edge special effects, but it also had this love story that seemed to even overshadow the effects. And lastly, it was the kind of movie that people wanted to see more than once. That was something that occured to me the other day - part of the key to a hit is making one that appeals to so many different segments, but also is the type of movie people want to see more than once. Going back to Return of the King, as much as I loved it, I couldn't see it again. It was so emotionally draining for me. I cried for the entire three and a half hours. Everything tore me up. I loved it, but I couldn't see it again. It just took too much out of me.
Titanic on the other hand was light and entertaining. It was a feast of the eyes and the imagination. I'm fascinated by things like tidal waves and ships sinking - I think partly because they happen out at sea or away from cameras, and so I've never really gotten to see what one looks like. In Titanic, though, I got to actually relive the event of the Titanic sinking. That was enough to probably drive a lot of people back to the theaters to see it twice, three times, even four times. That, and the romance. It seemed like people were sick over that love story. I wasn't all that crazy about that part of the movie. But I can see how it would be.
Just finished taking the macroeconomics prelim. I won't know for three or more weeks how I did. Can't really tell, either, how I did based on the exam. There were seven questions and I had to answer six. It covered all the material that I knew well - Keynesian vs. Classical macro models, Rational Expectations vs. Adaptive Expectations, first and second generation growth models, Ricardian Equivalence, some other stuff - but there was still so much to know. I may not have done some of the endogenous growth models correctly, which could've cost me the exam. Anyway, if I failed, I think I'll be able to pass it the second time. It wasn't too difficult. If I failed, it would be because I only spent seven days studying for this one as opposed to the micro prelim, where I spent five weeks.
Anyway, I'm relieved it's over. School starts on Thursday. I've got Econometrics on Tuesday/Thursdays, my macro class on Monday/Wednesday/Fridays at 9:00, IO part I on MW, and Public Choice on Wednesdays from 3:30 to 6:30. I'm looking forward to the semester (barring finding out I failed the macro, in which case, it'll be a stenuous semester again). Public Choice is being taught at the PoliSci department, yet is entirely game theoretic and economics-based. I think it'll give me a chance to better my knowledge of modeling, game theory, and theory in general. Also, public choice is an interesting field - another one of those "economic imperliaism" fields I usually gravitate towards. Industrial Organization is the theory of the firm, and this will be ultimately one of my fields along with Labor. The professor teaching it is someone I've rarely seen, let alone spoken to, but I get the sense that he's "old school" IO, and the second part is being taught by a younger guy who is more "new school." By old school, I mean I think we're going to be doing a lot of traditional IO - looking at Cournot and Bertrand pricing, monopolistic and ologopolistic stuff, etc. Then in the second one, I think we'll get into the transaction costs stuff, vertical integration, all that other stuff. Anyway, I'm really pumped. The econometrics will, hopefully, result in me actually knowing something about econometrics. I'm going to be trying to make progress on this labor paper I began last semester looking at the targeted shortages of pastors at small Protestant churches. I think I'm making progress, but it's all baby steps.