Chronic Murmuring

Shutting Down

Dear Friends and Lurkers - once again, I'm going to close down the blog. This particular site is the third incarnation of my blog and I'm extremely attached to it. I love the people who stop by on a regular basis most of all, but I also just like writing into the maw of the web. But, I also like it too much given all that's going on right now, so for now, I'll be closing it down. If the past is at all a good sign of the future, I'll turn it on again, but hopefully it won't be for a long time. I'm nearing the end of my coursework, I'm starting to hone in on research, and I'm taking on more responsibilities, generally speaking, at home and at school. That being the case, since I can't seem to harness my energy and output on here, prudence in this context means simply shutting it down. I'll leave this message up for at least a few days, but then I'll have Josiah erase this domain name, as well as the archives.

Extra Credit: Hayek

I'm debating about whether to assign an extra credit assignment to my class to aid those students who on either of the two tests we've had so far did not do as well as they had wished. I've been generous with the curves so far, but I was thinking to myself - it's so easy to get lost in the calculations and the curves for this class. They may leave here and never really understand the few basic things I want them to understand - most notably, comparative advantage and how markets work. So, I'm considering offering a simple extra credit assignment that would allow a person's lowest grade on a test to be pushed upward some amount (I'm not sure how much to make this - enough to help some desperate soul is all I know, but not sure what that should mean). And I was considering assigning F.A. Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" from the AER 1945. Probably one of the more important papers published last century, and secondly, one of the least technical. But, I still wonder if it's maybe too tough for these guys, most of whom are freshmen. But, at the same time, it's an extra credit assignment. It's not mandatory. I keep going back and forth on it.

Music

Wal-mart's recent entry into the point-to-point distribution of singles is interesting. First, iTunes was selling songs for 99 cents a song. Now Wal-mart is selling songs for 88 cents a song. I also read that roughly 50 (or was it 500???) new suits were brought against pirates trading songs illegally. And while I don't have numbers on this, from what I can gather, this point-to-point distribution of songs digitally is a healthy new market for music.

I was wondering the other day - why has it been historically the case that artists produced and sold songs bundled in the "album"? There seems to be some advantage to the returns to scale on the seller's end by doing it that way, but there may also be a way in which the album can generate more demand for the artist. If you know you like one song, you purchase the entire album, the album as a whole becomes the experience good you care about, and by repetition of listening to several songs, rather than simply one song, by the same artist, you may be able to accumulate some tastes for the artist. If that's the case, then I wouldn't expect the proliferation of technology like iPods and MP3 players to change that too much. But, I also get the sense that bundling several songs on the single album was something which studios because of the returns to scale. Selling individual songs straight to consumers historically was not viable given the high transaction costs and tranportation costs associated with buying and distribution. Bundling the songs was one way of practically driving down the average costs - include more songs on the album, raising the price of the album, and produce enough copies to drive down average cost.

But with digital distiribution, do the returns to scale exist anymore? iTunes, but more Napster in its day, reveals that consumers are willing to purchase individual songs. The transaction costs for purchasing more songs is relatively low since the catalogs are themselves only a click away, and the transportation costs are also nonexistent. Also, products like Apple's Garageband, which allow artists to replicate much of the production sophistication that takes place in a mixing studio, seems to be loosening artists' dependance on studios for bringing their products to market. It makes me wonder if in the future, will we even have albums anymore? A band could realistically use Garageband to record a song or several songs, contract with Wal-mart or iTunes to have it distributed, and entirely circumvent the studios completely. The main value it seems of studios in the future will be in marketing the product, but who's to say that Wal-mart or iTunes cannot do that either?

This new technology has the potential to turn how music is produced, distributed and consumed entirely on its head. The technology has achieved a place where music is entirely portable, for instance, which for all the advantages of CDs, really was nothing like this at all. My friend Matt is at my house right now, and he has with him his iPod. His iPod has 11 gigabytes and is about twice the size of a Zippo lighter. He has 400 albums stored on it, and he tells me that he still has half of his memory free. That's approximately 4000 songs. The iPod synchronizes with his computer, and has the capabilities to be wired into his car's stereo, as well as his home system. Music can be easily selected via the iTune store and downloaded instantly, at a very affordable price. I'm trying to figure out, in light of all these radical changes happening all at once, how will this affect the nature of the entertainment products being produced and consumed?

Chabon Wrote Spiderman 2

Over at Mesh's crib, I learned from Amy that Michael Chabon wrote the screenplay for this summer's sure-to-be-kick-a-awesome Spiderman 2. Let me just take this moment to say to the reading public - if ever you believed that because I'm always talking about comic books, movies and economics, that I therefore much be an authority in any of those three categories, please know that that would be false. I had no idea Michael Chabon wrote this movie, and if I wasn't so absolutely ecstatic at learning this, I would be embarassed and ashamed.

Roulette Scam

Three gamblers were arrested after having won nearly 2 million pounds betting on roulette. They won 300,000 pounds one night, came back the next night, and walked out with 1.2 million pounds. They are suspected of using a device that enabled them to calculate the speed of the ball as it traveled around the roulette wheel. A laser measure the time it takes the ball to pass through the same point twice, from which a computer calculates the "decaying orbit" of the ball. This allows the better to determine the slot - within a given range - in which the ball will land. It cannot determine the exact stopping point, it moves the probabilities closer to the better. They've been able to do this, evidentally, in laboratory settings, but this would be the first time it was done successfully in an actual casino. You can read about it here, but below, I'll post the article's simple breakdown of how the scam works.

How the plan might work

1 A laser scanner hidden in a mobile phone which measures velocity is aimed at a roulette wheel as it is spun by the croupier.

2 The laser measures the speed of the ball as it is released and as it passes a second point. The ball's "decaying orbit" can be calculated.

3 The two figures are relayed to a computer, which works out where the ball is likely to come to rest. It would almost certainly not be able to predict the slot but may have been able to work out the sector, improving the odds for the gambler.

4 The computer's prediction is relayed back to the mobile phone. The bet or bets are placed before the cut-off point of three turns of the roulette wheel. The whole operation takes two or three seconds.

The Lifecycle of Economists

Galenson and Weinberg do the study again, but this time studying economists - specifically Nobel Laureates. Again, the comparison is between conceptual work and the type of work where experience affects the peak ages when the best work is done. Here is the article. I'm reading it now, but I think the more conceptual work is the more theoretical work - your Paul Samuelson's who basically invent neoclassical economics with their Harvard dissertations - and the type of work that depends on experience is the applied empirical, econometrics work. For poetry, it would undoubtedly be someone like T.S. Eliot who at the age of his mid-20s, wrote the excellent "Love Song of J. Alred Prufrock." (I was wondering, too, if in theological work, you saw a similar breakdown. John Calvin wrote the first edition of Institutes of the Christian Religion when he was a wee lad).

Anyway, they find support for the theory that in economics, there are differences in the life-cycles and creativity. But I was looking over their sample, and it's a little bit strange. They have Coase in the "experimental economics" but if I'm not mistaken, he wrote his "Nature of the Firm" when he was relatively young (although "The Problem of Social Cost," from which we get the "Coase Theorem" [not really a theorem, but nonetheless important], did come later, and it's for that he has probably had a more lasting effect on the profession). And Douglass North is listed as an experimental economist, which does make sense, because I know that for a long while, he did a lot of boring growth work. It was actually in the context of doing that work that he accumulated the evidence needed from which he began to draw generalizations about the role of institutions in economic growth.

Ironically, it was after reading Galenson's and Weinberg's earlier study of painters that persuaded me to focus more on econometrics and applied empirical work than pure theory, only because I figure, being 28, I'm probably too old to be any good at that anyway. Plus, I was a poet for several years, and it taught me that I improve at something only after much failure and after much time. I'm more like a glacier than a cheetah. After reading this, I'm even more convinced this is true. I had written a professor the other telling him I was a bit concerned because I'm more of an inductive thinker than I am a deductive thinker. I cannot arrive at these theories simply by reasoning deductively from a priori axioms. Instead, I move from accumulating a massive body of data to the theory. In other words, I ground the theory, always, in the phenomenon I'm seeking to explain. Economics, as a science, hardly seems to me an inductive science, though, which is partly why I get a little frustrated. But it only convinces me of the desperate need I have of mastering econometrics. If I can really understand that science, then I will have the tools I need to approach the kinds of experiments I want to do. I'm still hung up on the most basic aspects of econometrics, though, that I am consistently discouraged about this whole endeavor.

I realized the other day, incidentally, that Stephen King's Misery is best understood as an allegory of graduate school - specifically, a doctorate in economics. It's so obvious now that that is what he meant that I can't believe anyone thought it was about anything else.

Age and Work

Russell Roberts (scroll down to March 24, "Child Labor" (he doesn't have permalinks), mentions how the technological shifts occuring in the marketplace are affecting the age at which workers do work. The Internet, for instance, for a variety of reasons, seems to now be a classic case in point. Whereas three to four years ago, a person could make a great living designing webpages for firms, now that work is going overseas and/or to teenagers. It's not uncommon to find the excellent web designers who are 14 years old, or even younger.

Bruce Weinberg and David Galenson have a JPE article entitled "Age and the Quality of Work: The Case of Modern American Painters" (registration required) that lends some insight into some changes we're seeing in the relationship between age, human capital, experience and one's best work. They take two distinct periods in 20th century art - abstract expressionism (of whom Jackson Pollack is best known) and the later pop art (of whom And Warhol is best known), conceptual art, etc. movements - and identifies the average ages at which the each movement did their best work (as measured by the prices the paintings commanded in auctions at Sotheby's and Christy's). What they found was that the best work done by the earlier abstract expressionist painters peaked at ages greater than those in the following movements. The abstract expressionists did their best work when they were older, whereas the pop art, conceptual art, etc. artists peaked at much younger ages.

Weinberg and Galenson use this evidence to support the theory that certain types of work will have higher returns that differ depending on the worker's age. Certain types of work are much more craft-like, wherein experience and education play an important role in increasing one's "productivity" whereas other types of work are arguably more conceptual, and therefore do not benefit as much from extensive experience. It is said that the best work done by mathematicians is at the average of 27, and I believe that something similar can be said of poets, theoretical physicists and the like. But, for other types of work, the worker accumulates a certain amount of human capital over the life-cycle that therefore increases their productivity and enhances the quality of their output. The abstract expressionists, while to the untrained eye, might seem to be a more conceptual bunch, but the truth is that Pollack and his informal group had spent years perfecting their own unique style. Warhol, on the other hand who used a silk screening method to transfer pop culture images, did not even himself participate in the actual construction of his art. He used an assembly line to do it, and his actual input was limited to the concept he was after and the selection of the actual images themselves.

It's possible that what Roberts notes about child labor and the Internet is something along these lines. There may be something inherent about web design which makes the peak age at which designers do their best work very young. In other words, the Mincer-like increasing but diminishing returns to education and experience may not apply in certain industries where the work relies on this kind of "conceptual" way of working. If that is true, then it calls into question whether there is much value in getting a college education if one is a web designer. Those years spent getting a college degree may in fact be wasteful, from the perspective of one's output, if in fact there is a window of time when one's best work can be done.

Spartan tanking

Although it can't touch Gigli's dramatic fall from grace, which experienced an 82% fall in revenues in its second week, and was pulled from approximately 1700 theaters by its third week, Mamet's new film, Spartan is nonetheless itching to try. It's revenues were down 60% in its second weekend. But, it also is only in a mere 800 theaters (compared to Gigli which opened on over 2000 theaters). It takes time for a movie to finds its audience, and a big opening is one way to do that. Roger Ebert also praised the film, giving it four stars.

When David Mamet's films work, they're fantastic. And even when they don't quite work, like The Spanish Prisoner, they're still wonderful to behold. Glengary Glen Ross is fantastic, and The Heist is a great genre piece. But, his an acquired taste it seems like. Not everyone likes his storytelling, and particularly how he writes dialogue.

China's Closing Down Domestic Weblogs

Yan is the propriestor of Glutter and is a Chinese citizen (I think). He notes that the Chinese government has banned all domestically run Typepad weblogs. He writes, "China has been systematically shutting down blog servers within the country in the last weeks as a means to tighten up information. So far foreign blog servers has avoided detection. Is this the beginning of even more vigilant crackdown of information?" You can read more about what is going on here and here. Please circulate news of this. Blogging disperses information more quickly than regular news media, and in many ways, can actually drive what the regular news media covers. I've sent an email to Matt Drudge, so perhaps it'll get picked up by someone.

No-fault divorce study

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolutions brings attention to what looks like a fascinating new study from the National Bureau of Economics Research on the effects of no-fault divorce laws. I'm surprised that no one has done this study until now, actually, because just from skimming the study, it looks like the data was readily available. Here's Cowen's post:

In the past three decades, liberalized divorce laws have reduced suicides among women, sparked a dramatic reduction in domestic violence and led to a decline in women murdered by their partners, according to economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers. Specifically, they claim, these benefits have resulted from the adoption of so-called "no-fault" divorce laws, in which one partner can end the marriage without the consent of the other.

After states adopted no-fault divorce laws, suicides among women dropped by 20 percent, the rate of domestic abuse fell by a third, and the number of women murdered by their partners dropped by about 10 percent, Stevenson and Wolfers found.

Adoption of unilateral divorce laws didn't affect the suicide rate of men or the likelihood that they would be murdered by their partners. But domestic violence directed at both men and women declined, the researchers reported in a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper.

blogging

Not sure if I ever posted this, but Russell Roberts has a good article from BW on outsourcing. He also, incidentally, has started blogging at Invisible Heart. Roberts is a rare talent in economics. Great economist, great communicator of economics. He wrote a romance novel called The Invisible Heart that illustrated the economic way of thinking, and actually succeeded in avoiding becoming corny! That's an achievement, folks.

I also wrote my professor, Dwight Lee, this morning and told him I thought he should start blogging.

The Effect of Disgust and Sadness on Price Reservations

An intriguing looking new study in behavioral economics is reported in the paper. The researcher, a psychologist, studied the effect that sadness and disgust, as well as happiness and emotional neutrality, had on individuals' reservation prices. (What are reservation prices, you ask? These are the maximum or minimum value you place on the purchase or the sell of a good. For instance, assume you are selling back your textbook next semester to the bookstore. What is the absolute lowest amount you'll accept? $100? $80? $50? $10? Whatever it is, this is your reservation price, and if the price goes below the reservation price, you will not sell the book. If the price is above it, you will sell the book. Preferably, as a seller, you want to sell above reservation prices in order to make profits. If you are a buyer, you want to buy at prices lower to get good deals.).

What this researcher did, apparently, was simply have a group of people watch scenes from various films (The Champ, Trainspotting and scenes of the coral reef). They then wrote down how they all felt. They then were given a set of highlighters and allowed to sell them. Those who felt disgusted from what they had watched sold the pens at lower prices, apparently, than those who felt neutral. The point of the study was to determine what effect, if any, events from a different situation might affect the current economic situation at hand.

It sounds plausible, on some level. When we were looking for a house, Paige kept hoping to find someone who was going through a divorce, because she reasoned that person would be trying to unload their house in a hurry and possibly at a price below what it was worth. She also was looking for someone who had just gotten a job on the other side of the country who was also in a hurry. She was thinking of how their need to get out of town might affect their reservation price, but this study suggests more might be going on if the person is severely depressed.

But, I will note this - the complaint about behavioral economics that continues to appear in the literature is that they depend almost entirely on experiments for their data. Kahneman and Tversky, when constructing their altnerative theory of risk, essentially asked the volunteers how they would behave under some hypothetical situation in which some high large sum of money was at stake. They deviated from the relevant economic theory, which gave Kahneman and Tversky's theories some credibility. But from what I have been able to gather, in subsequent tests in which excessively high sums are at stake, and individuals in the studies really do stand to lose their earnings, they did not behave as Kahneman and Tversky predicted, but rather, behaved rationally as the economic theory predicted, seeking to maximize expected revenues. In the same way, I'm intrigued by this study, and hope to read it when it's published, but I'm a bit skeptical. How I behave after watching Trainspotting and then handed a box of highlighters - I mean seriously, just how reliable is this when we're talking about the sale of a car, or a house, in actual markets? I'm not saying that it's not possible that there is in fact an effect, but something better than simple experiments is needed to determine it. Thankfully, they did at least use actual monies, although the objects sold were not their own, nor were they particularly valuable. Do the experiment over and get them to sell their cars - see whether they will sell below Blue Book value. If that happens, then you've got an interesting paper.

Schraeder on The Passion

Paul Schraeder, the Calvin College graduate who grew up in a calvinist home and a member of the CRC in Grand Rapids, Michigan and who later went on to pen Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and who adapted Nikos Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ for the screen, comments on Gibson's The Passion. I've been waiting to hear either him or Scorsese say something about the film since before the movie opened a month ago, if for no other reason than the two movies are similar in that they generated a lot of controversy but were theologically quite different in their movies' respective views of Christ. I actually did not like The Last Temptation, but I also fell asleep during the last half hour, so I never saw the Last Supper nor the Crucifiction. I thought, going into it, that it would be great if one took the movie to be talking about the struggles of following Christ, rather than a literal depiction of Christ. The self-doubt and the self-hatred work that Scorsese's Christ has works better when you consider his Jesus as embodying simply "the believer," but is more troubling if you take the movie to be Jesus himself. But, after viewing the film, it seems like a bit of a stretch to interpret the film like that - at least uniformly. But I didn't not-like the film because of blasphemy or anything. It just never really connected with me. There were a few lines in it that did, but the movie as a whole missed me. I'd need to watch it again to explain myself better.

Anyhow, Paul Schraeder comments on the film. He has several interesting comments. He more or less repeats a lot of criticism - that it's fundamentalist religion and therefore ignorant. But he also reveals some biographical details about his Calvinist upbringing, which is something that I'm fascinated by. He says:

The problem [that Schrader has with Gibson's film], one suspects, is that Gibson is faith-driven and Schrader is not. "I was raised as a Calvinist, which is doctrine driven," he says. "And though there are many things wrong with Calvinism, you are at least encouraged to argue about things. But once you get into a faith-driven belief system there's not much you can do. They can say to you, for instance, that women have three breasts. And even when you line up 100 women and show them that they only have two breasts, they still say that women have three breasts because they were told it in a dream. And there's nothing you can do about that."

If ever you get a chance, you should rent a movie called Hardcore, which Schraeder wrote and directed and which stars George C. Scott. When I was beginning to feel the rumblings of frustration inside me about being a "theological prick," and started to believe that certain aspects of my Christian beliefs had become ideological and system-driven, I was watching Schraeder's films and trying to see if it could at all shed light on some of the things I was feeling. Hardcore is, at the very least, an interesting narrative - moreso if you're a Calvinist privy to all our myopic obsession theological minutiae. The movie opens with a shot of a cold winter in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Snow is everywhere - more snow than I've ever witnessed. The coldness, I think, is meant to reinforce the coldness in the community's calvinistic beliefs, because we immediately move into the house of a Grand Rapids businessman, played by Scott, where several people are gathered for food and discussion. It's probably after church on a Sunday. The conversations are intense. You can hear two people arguing vehemently over the five points of Calvinism in the kitchen, for example. I think they're either arguing about limited atonment or unconditional election - I can't remember. But it's fascinating to watch, given Schraeder's penchant for violent films and notoreity and importance as a screenwriter in the emerging "new Hollywood" period of the 1970s. He actually gets so many details about Calvinist doctrine correct - that's what is so interesting to me. Anyway, the movie is about Scott's daughter who runs away from home. Scott hires a private investigator to find her. The PI finds her alright - in a hardcore pornographic film. So Scott moves to Los Angeles where the distributor is located and begins to search for her. He befriends a hooker who apparently knows her, or knows of her, and there is some fascinating exchanges with her. In fact, it's primarily his relationship with her that is the best part of the film. She is everything he is not, yet they develop an intimate father-daughter like relationship as she assists him. And you can sense that for her, this is deeply important, which makes the ending all the more tragic. But, there's several humorous scenes between those two - like the one in the airport where Scott explains "the gospel" to her. He basically tells her an extremely fatalist version of the five points of calvinism, which causes her to start laughing about how that's the stupidest thing she's ever heard, and at which he point he agrees.

In the end, the movie wasn't as illuminating to my own life as I was hoping it might be. Of course, that is an awful lot of responsibility to place upon a movie. It's not the greatest film, by any means, but is a personal film by a former Christian that contains many not-so-subtle criticisms of the Calvinist ethos which was nonetheless valuable to watch and understand. I think the main lesson was a tad bit on the sentimental side, though. In the end, the coldness of Grand Rapids is the coldness of Calvinism, and Schraeder seems to have been particularly injured by the lack of love he experienced by the religious people he grew up with. That is, at least, what the daughter expresses to the father, in so many words. And this is, I think, the most important, the most obvious thing that one can say about the ideological mentality that dominates many young Reformed believers (and even old ones). But, the problem I think I've learned is not so much in believing something strongly - which for a while there, was the conclusion I came to - but rather in something else. There's definitely a problem with Calvinism when what it becomes is principally a set of doctrinal beliefs one believes, and that via believing, one is therefore saved. To the sensitive artist, this is unbelievably oppressive. To the introverted, relationally stunted, loner, this is liberation.

So I think Schraeder is great, in other words, and that Hardcore, while flawed and weak on many levels, is nonetheless an interesting film - especially if viewed by Calvinists to whom some of the movie's jabs are directed. Schraeder is haunted by God, though. You see it in all of his movies. He cannot get past him, which is one reason his rebellion against him fascinates me.

The Genius of the System

I cannot recommend Thomas Schatz's The Genius of the System enough. The book's title is taken from a famous quote by by Andrew Bazin (1957):

"The American cinema is a classical art, but why not then admire in it what is most admirable, i.e., not only the talent of this or that filmaker, but the genius of the system."

The book is a historical analysis of the studio system which dominated American filmmaking from the silent era until the Paramount antitrust case in the late 1930s. You learn about, not merely the stars, the films and directors from this classic period, but more importantly, the money men, the studios, the business and the producers who were principally the people creating films. In film theory, it is fashionable to focus only on the director - seeing each film as the product of his genius. But Hollywood is a business, and not merely any one director's blank canvas, and understanding how that business works, and the things which drive the machine, is important to understanding the products it produces. Thomas Schatz does this, and does it in an exciting way. I have never been more fascinated by budget numbers, production schedules, and contracts with movie stars than in reading this film.

The Passion

The Passion juggernaut is still going on. It was knocked from the number one spot by Dawn of the Dead, but it still made approximately $19.5 million this weekend. The fact that it's been playing for almost an entire month, and still pulls in $19.5 million over the weekend is impressive. Each weekend is dropping around 30-40% from the previous one, but Easter is coming up, which might drive the numbers temporarily back up for one last weekend. I won't at all be surprised if we see $30-40 million Easter weekend. When I worshipped with Paige's family over spring break at their Church of Christ church in Nashville, the pastor used a powerpoint presentation for his sermon that had The Passion poster in the background of each slide. All I kept thinking was "free advertising."

I also read that it's entirely plausible that the movie will eventually become the highest grossing film of all time, even after adjusting for inflation, because of the potential revenues to be reaped in repeated re-release (whew! say that five times fast...). It has a built-in audience, the author said, for Christmas and Easter. But, I doubt that, a little bit anyway. True, Gone With the Wind used this strategy. It has been re-released 33 times since 1939, placing it in the number one position (after adjusting for inflation) at $1.2 billion. But, Gone With the Wind also did this in a day when households did not have DVD or VHS players. DVDs and VHS versions of a film are imperfect substitutes for theater films. While a temporary campaign targeted just at the liturgical holiday of Easter or Christman could potentially increase the movie's revenues, I'm not sure I believe it could maintain that more than a few times. Still, it will go down in history as, at least, the highest grossing R-rated film of all time (and could very well keep that position for a long, long time - to beat it, a film would have to appeal to teenagers in the same way that Matrix or this film did. Those films, while not impossible to create, are nonetheless difficult because the synergy is tough. The Matrix largely relied on the first movie to generate demand among teens, which allowed it to survive with an R-rating, but normally, R-ratings limit the market. And, according to one study by Arthur de Vany, "Does Hollywood make too many R-rated movies?: risk, stochasitc dominance and the illusion of expectation," R-rated films simply do much more poorly at the box office relative to G and PG. So there's built-in incentives to avoid extraneous violence, profanity and sexual content - something that Robi hinted at earlier in the semester on this blog.

Marc Andreessen on Outsourcing

Mark Andreesen, pioneer of the Mosaic browser and later Netscape, is briefly mentioned in a USA Today op-ed piece defending outsourcing. Larry Ellison, Paul Romer (Economist at Stanford), He also, elsewhere, made a list of America's "comparative advantages." (I found this, of course, on MR). To something Bobber had mentioned, the article also briefly comments on how international trade affects political relations between hostile countries.

"One last note: The more this goes on, the less likely the United States will have enemies. If India's economy is booming because U.S. companies outsource there, India pretty quickly becomes our friend. Same with China and elsewhere. We'd have a lot easier time with North Korea's Kim Jong Il if a few American telemarketers could move their call centers to Pyongyang."

Now, whether international trade is actually good for political relations, whether international trade is indeed a threat to national security, requires more careful study. But, intuitively, it strikes me that national security would actually be helped, not hurt, by trade. (I'm not being original here). It builds friendships and alliances between the two countries and also raises the living standards in both. When one of those countries having their living standards raised is dirt poor and is trying its dangdest to undo decades of damage caused by high tariffs and centralized planning (India), as well as Western colonialization, then it seems as though there's the potential to build strong relations between the two countries by allowing trade. Besides, the fears are misplaced as the article notes. Japan was once feared to take away all our jobs, and what happened? Does anyone really believe that Japan has made us worse off? Japan is better off, in fact, due to its specialziation and open trade policy and we are better off. Living standards rose in both countries, job creation occurred here at rapid pace, outstripping even the rate that the population itself grew, even while productivity slumped. The best thing for America is every developing country becomes as wealthy as we are and if we can export more jobs to them. As bad as that sounds, such a reality will drive growth in our country, create more jobs here, increase living standards in all partners in trade, and lead to the creation of important, new technologies.

How Not to Get your Contract Renewed

Some advice. If your contract as a visiting assistant professor ends in June, don't vandalize your own car with racial and sexist epithets in a lame attempt to get the much coveted tenure-track position. Definitely don't do it when there are witnesses.

Blogger updates

A few updates. First, Joel Wilhelm has reopened his old blog. It's entitled "Eleysium." It will be good to hear his daily thoughts again.

Also, Wayne has moved to a new domain. Wayne, and his close kin Brian Davis, remind me of Yeats and his father, the painter. Neither of them seemed able to actually finish their works. All of their poems and paintings were works in progress, continually being revised. It was said that the senior Yeats had been contracted by a European prince to paint his portrait, and that thirteen years later, Mr. Yeats refused to give him the painting because he "wasn't finished yet." So, even though Wayne's new domain and new blog is beautiful, don't expect it to be finished yet either.

On a different note, I'm going into hybernation for a while. The ongoing battle with personal productivity requires that I get out of this office during the day. My officemates play Rush Limbaugh on the radio for about eight hours straight, and I can't get anything done, nor do I particularly enjoy listening to Rush. And besides, when I have access to my blog, I blog on anything I can think about. This blog has fully taken the place of my journal. In fact, I'm far more consistent in recording my thoughts with this blog than I ever was with my journal. For that alone, I see the blog as a good thing. I think I have the innate need to share my thoughts with others, and that that is partly why the journal was so irregular. I used to beat myself up about that. Virginia Woolf used to as well. She felt it revealed a lack of authenticity to her writing that she needed to publish. She believed, for the most part, that the writer should write out of a love for writing, which is certainly true, but she couldn't understand the value of needing to have it published. But I think there must be something inherently communal about writing, and while it is important to closely examine our motivations for doing everything - including blogging - I think it's probably true that writing requires an audience in order for the writer to feel satisfied. Woolf felt the need for publication because she needed someone else to consume her words for the process to make sense. Writing is a form of communication, but that implies that it is to someone. Still, my productivity's down, I need to get out of this office, at least for a few weeks, and hopefully, I'll only be updating this occasionally.

Review of the Passion

Here is an interesting, in-depth review of The Passion. A dispassionate review of The Passion you might say (hah! I'm so witty!). Lots of coverage over what was and was not in the Bible in the review is interesting. He also contains numerous references to what may have happened, historically, had Jesus been condemned to die before or after he was flogged. Apparently, that matters, since the flagellum (the whip which shred Jesus's flesh) was normally used only on condemned men. It was used, but from what this author notes, it was normally used only on men who were condemned to die because it pretty much almost killed them as it was and the Romans wanted their death on the cross to be speedy. But the gospels, according to this author, don't agree on the context of the flogging. He writes:

"If the flogging was done after Jesus was condemned by Pilate, then using the flagellum would have been expected, because the Romans generally wanted prisoners to die quickly on the cross. The scourging alone would half kill a man. But if a man was not condemned, just sentenced to be punished, a flagellum would not have been used because it was potentially lethal itself. Matthew and Mark agree that Jesus was flogged before being sentenced to die, but John says he was condemned after being flogged. Gibson's movie goes along with John, but he has to account for the discrepancy of the Gospels. Hence, when the soldiers see that Jesus isn't properly subdued by the rods, they turn to the flagellum. The centurion enters and halts the flogging precisely because Jesus was not condemned. By then, however, Jesus has been flogged to a bloody rag of a human being."

He also recommends a prequel be made. He says the movie begs for it. Hadn't really thought of it that way. I suppose if Gibson is ever in the need for another $350 million, he might want to make a prequel to this movie. Think about that - doesn't it seem likely that Gibson has a virtual lock on this audience? A lot of the people who have come out of the woodworks to see this film were people who hadn't stepped foot in a theater in years. They didn't know about the multiplex, or the DTS, or the stadium seating. But this phenomenon is so strong it makes me believe that Gibson has successfully branded himself as a director much the way Spielberg has, and that were he to make another movie like The Passion, he could probably pool these people in again. While we may witness a plethora of religious films in the ensuing months and even years, I doubt that they will do as well as this one. Previous religious films did relatively poorly at the box office. I think the highest grossing religious film had been Jonah and the Whale (ie, Veggietales), and even it did badly. What I think people are identifying with is the sincereity of Gibson's vision and the intensity of the film itself. There's a certain amount of reputational capital that Gibson has accumulated in the minds of his audience that is not easily transferrable to simply any other director making a "religious film." Gibson may have the Midas Touch, if one exists, for at least a while longer, and one might expect him to strike the iron while it was still hot and consider making at least one more biblically-themed movie. If only to firmly establish Icon as a signfiicant player in Hollywood.

One last thing - the writer makes several good points about the two-dimensional presentation of the Jewish Sanhedrin. The most complex characters in the film, in my mind, were Pilate and Mary. Pilate especially, though. Yet the Sanhedrin was disappointing because Gibson doesn't really adequately portray why the death of Jesus was important to them. I think had Gibson designed their characters, and the drama of the trial, better, he could've made this film much better. Had we come away genuinely able to see the power and the tension pulling in different directions, and had we really understood and felt that the Sanhedrin was so enraged over this man's blasphemy and failed political efforts, it would radically improved the movie in my opinion.

This reviewer notes, though, that what Gibson presents to us is a theological justification for Jesus's death; not a historical, political one. He focuses on the necessity of the atonement and what that atonement accomplished for God's people. Just as Jesus told Mary, his death made all things new, and this paradox is captured well by the movie. Our good shepherd laid down his life for us, his sheep. His power was best conceived on the cross when he submitted to the rule of Rome, the injustice of the Sanhedrin, and the perfect will of his Father. So the fact that Gibson omits more historical detail surrounding the causes of the Jews' anger towards him may be because, given his soteriological and Christological objectives, that was outside the scope of the story he was telling. But arguably, it's not. Truthfully, to what degree can we really understand Christ's mission without understanding the political environment and the messianic expectations of Jesus's day? Having that would improve the story immensely.

Child Labor and Trade

Basically, anything related to economics is more than likely originally something I found on Tyler Cowen's blog. Today is no different. He notes a post from this blog on a recent study on the negative relationship between child labor and international trade. It's a NBER working paper by Eric Edmonds and Nina Pavcnik. What they note is that there is endogeneity between child labor and international trade which obscures the direction of causality. Therefore, it's necessary to break this circle by instrumenting trade using some variable correlated with trade but not with child labor.

They do this - again based on the abstract - using what looks like a gravity model of trade. Gravity models incorporate geography into trade flows. It allows for distance between trading partners to impact the level of trade. It's called gravity because it is similar to theories of large bodies in space where the proximity between one another affects the pull toward one another. This is the second paper I've seen in international trade that deals explicitly with this problem of endogeneity by instrumenting trade with a gravity model. Anyhow, similar to the previous post, this is an interesting finding since normally we associate increased industrialization with child labor - at least historically, it appears to have progressed that way. But this paper seems to say that child labor is actually an "inferior good" of sorts - that as our incomes increase, we voluntarily pull children out of the working sector. Poverty, not wealth, is the cause of child labor.

Cool, Beautiful Data

Boy, is this not a great website. GapMinder provides beautiful global data for those of us who (1) get creeped out by data, but also (2) never know where to get it when we need and (3) can't afford to buy data. They're data is dynamic and informative. I particularly like the World Health Chart. If you download the program, be sure to run logged child survival rate against logged GDP. You couldn't make the data fit better - there's such an obvious strong correlation between wealthier countries and child mortality rates. The wealthier the country, the greater the probability of survival for infants. If you want to look at something different, simply click on the vertical axis where the label is (after you download the file) and you can select from dozens of other types of data, many of which have a time dimension which allows you to dynamically view the relationship between the two datapoints change over time.

Strange, somewhat discomforting recommendations for markets for babies and organs

Provactive little blog over at Marginal Revolutions. Tyler Cowen notes that the FDA has passed a device that will extend the time a person can live while waiting for a heart transplant. I didn't link through to the story, because I'm lazy, but it sounds like a temporary heart to assist a diseased or failed heart, thus allowing the person to live for a longer period of time while they wait for an actual transplant. Cowen notes the gray lining beneath this wonderful news and notes that the artificial heart will do nothing to increase the number of lives are saved. "But even if the artificial heart performs exactly as designed and even if it prolongs the lives of those who receive it, it won't save lives overall." Why? Because at present 2200 hearts are available for donation, and this device does nothing to increase that number. His solution, which is something some will immediately scoff at, is to consider allowing markets for organs to develop.

I was thinking the same thing other day, only in regards to babies. Who is it that aborts their children? It's mothers who do not want their babies. If markets for babies existed, then these mothers - who we know do not want their babies - could be compensated if they sold their babies to people who wanted them. It may not completely remove the market for adoptions, though, since it would require the mother to carry the baby to term, and from what I can gather, many women who abort are afraid of carrying the baby to term for fear that they will actually love their child, and not want to give them up then. So they make a decision to eliminate the child in a previous period when there do not yet exist attachments to the child. Some mothers will likely still want to abort, insofar as they are motivated to abort the child because of the nine-month term and because of the fear of attachments. But, for those who are motivated to abort because they cannot afford the baby, or regret the pregnancy, or are signal, or whatever - a market for babies would actually decrease the number of babies being aborted.

Of course, it would probably also lead to an increase in illegitimacy rates. You might imagine small farms for babies arising where a man would impregnate his mistress or wife serially. Now this is entirely possible. But the babies would still be moving to people who value them most of all - potentially parents who love them more than those original parents. Of course, there's something inherently discomforting, if not downright disgusting, about this scenario. But there's a very real baby shortage out there. Some estimates are as high as one million - one million couples at any given period of time are searching and waiting for a child to adopt but cannot.

So insofar as it's important to deal with that, it's worth at least considering how markets might be developed to deal with both of these problems - shortages in organs and babies. There is an excessively high number of babies destroyed each year because they are not wanted by parents, and simultaneously, there is a high number of parents searching for children.

Unions Hijack Real World

Apparently, The Real World was scheduled to film in Philadelphia but because of Union problems, they've decided to not film there. The author calls the city of Philadelphia "the last bastion of union construction trades." The controversy appears to have been caused by demands made by Teamsters. The Real World does not use union work - or has not in any of its previous cities. It sought to do the same in Philadelphia and contracted nonunion construction workers in renovating a building where the kids would be living. This was met with opposition from unions in the city, who demanded to be hired over the nonunion workers, as well as to be employed once filming actually began.

"Informed of Bunim/Murray's pullout, Jeff Zeh, president of the Southeast Pennsylvania chapter of Associated Builders & Contractors Inc., which represents nonunion contractors, said, "What else is new in Philadelphia?

"You saw the list of the cities where they've produced their projects, and Philadelphia is the only one where they had a problem," he said. "It really is a sad commentary."

"We ask for fair wages and benefits, and [then they] make a fuss and take their ball and go home - what kind of real world do they represent?" said Gillespie, of the Building Trades Council. "We'll be called the Neanderthals and the pug uglies because of what we're trying to do."

I thought this quote by Gillespie was interesting. He says the union people ask for fair wages and benefits. But The Real World had found and was employing nonunion workers who agree to work for lower pay. They weren't even seeking to negotiate with the union workers, yet the unions are complaining that they weren't being offered "fair wages and benefits." So then The Real World leaves and no one is employed.

What a bunch of selfish babies. They offer their bids in, their bid is rejected for a lower bid, so then they start screaming "unfair!" So now the people with the lower costs who The Real World had originally sought to hire aren't getting the work. Any wonder why unions cause unemployment?

american religion

Alan Wolfe on America's affect on Christianity.

Joke

Last night, I taught Miles this joke:

Miles: Daddy, guess what?

Scott: What?

Miles: Chicken butt.

Jersey Girl Review

I'm only posting this review because I currently own 700 shares in the movie. They note that the film is kind of nice, because Smith finally moves away from the vulgarity. That is one of my biggest complaints about his movies. Besides finding them boring, I also find the vulgar dialogue completely distracting and strange. Who talks like those people? Anyway, I'm hoping this movie will give some boost to my stock in Affleck and jersey girl.

The Passion

A fascinating article at Hollywood Report predicts that the success of Gibson's movie will be studied at film schools for many years to come. They also note that it's entirely possible that this movie will become the highest grossing film of all time, since it's extremely likely the movie will be re-released in the years to come (especially around Easter). Gone with the Wind was re-released over 30 times before it managed to grow to the number one spot. And The Exorcist was re-released and became one of the highest grossing R-rated films of all time (apparently, a risky distribution scheme was executed in its initial release, which cost them plenty of revenue. This was made up for in the second release, which contained numerous deleted scenes). Anyway, the article lists 10 Commandments in Hollywood, all of which Gibson broke to make this movie. I mean, to me, while I love this movie, I think I'm more amazed at the risks Gibson took to make it, and the way in which the film was carefully marketed. It really was brilliantly done.

Hollywood Stock Exchange

Thank you Sean Burns for ruining my life. Sean just led me to Hollywood Stock Exchange. As though I needed something like this in my life. But I've always felt jealous of everyone who has all this cool stuff they get to do with sports, like betting on NCAA tournaments, that I'm going to not worry about this too much. Anyway, I've bought 500 shares of Ben Affleck and 200 shares of Agent Cody Banks 2. I think Affleck's undervalued - the guy had one significant bomb (Gigli) and one disappointing film (Paycheck), but I think audiences are very forgiving. In the end, the guy is incredibly likeable onscreen, and not tough on the eyes for the ladies. He can do action films, comedy, drama. And, he has a new film this weekend - Jersey Girl - by Kevin Smith. It's co-starring JLo, which I think is one reason people expect it to do really badly, but this isn't an Affleck movie. It's a Kevin Smith movie, and Smith's movies (which I hate, big time) do pretty well, all things considered. His last two films turned significant profits. Chasing Amy (which I hated) was made on a paltry $50,000 budget, but made over $12 million in the theaters. All of his films have turned profits, in fact. And I think his actors all take pay cuts to work with him. So, I'm thinking the movie is undervalued (so I bought 400 shares of it), and I think Affleck is too (so I have 650 shares in him).

The decision to buy Agent Cody Banks 2 may not have been too smart. I was thinking - the first movie came out exactly a year ago, and I think did okay with its audience. It also doesn't seem likely that The Passion is competing with that movie at all. It opened to around $8 million this last weekend, but I still don't know enough about how all of this works to tell what will happen. We'll see. The average lifespan of a movie, I read, is around 5 weeks. So I'm trying to figure out when to sell and when to buy and all that other stuff.

It'll be interesting to see if the efficient market hypothesis works here. Samuel Goldman once said "nobody knows anything" about what makes a movie work. Hollywood is an industry in which "maximum uncertainty" plagues both supply and demand. Executives don't know what people want, and cannot make a movie a hit. Audiences make movies hits, not stars nor executives. But audiences, too, don't know what they want, because each film is unique and each film is an experience good - demand only becomes clear after the good is experienced. Informaiton becomes important in this market, as a result - specifically word of mouth.

That being said, I kept thinking to myself things like, Should I buy The Passion? It's stock value has grown to almost $300 a share (up from $6 a share). I expect a surge in revenues around Easter, but this is public knowledge, so shouldn't that event already be included in the current price?

Fable of the Bees revisited

A little background for those unfamiliar with Cheung's 1973 article, "Fable of the Bees." Imagine a situation in which an apple farmer and a beekeeper operate in adjacent spaces of land. The beekeeper's bees pollinate the apple orchard's apples, yet the beekeeper is only motivated by his own, internalized costs and benefits. This "spillover" of benefits to the apple farmer represents what economists call an externality, which signals an instant in which markets failed (ie, market failure). The problem is that the social benefits are greater than the marginal benefits to the beekeeper, and therefore too little honey will be produced. The solution, to correct this market failure, is to subsidize the beekeeper in order to increase his output and therefore increase the benefits accrued by the apple farmer. Cheung studied the actual apple orchard and beekeeping markets, though, and found elaborate contracting between beekeepers and the farmers. Beekeepers would pay farmers to house their bees when pollination wasn't needed, and farmers would pay beekeepers in seasons when pollination was needed. In other words, markets had responded to deal with the externalities, and while Cheung did not say that externalities did not therefore exist in other markets (or even in this one), his paper gave some pause to many.

I found this on this morning's The Idea Store. In this month's Journal of Law and Economics, there's a study entitled "THE FABLE OF THE BEES REVISITED: CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF THE U.S. HONEY PROGRAM." Apparently, the United States government has ran a Honey Program which at some points cost as much as $100 million annually. It was eliminated in 1996 under a farm reform bill, but was reinstated under the 2002 Farm Bill. I'll post the abstract of the article below.

ABSTRACT. In his 1973 paper, Steven Cheung discredited the "fable of the bees" by demonstrating that markets for beekeeping services exist and function well. Although economists heeded Cheung's lessons, policy makers did not. The honey program has operated for over 50 years, supporting the price of honey through a variety of mechanisms. Its effects were minor before the 1980s but then became important, with annual government expenditures near $100 million for several years. Reforms of the program in the late 1980s reduced its market effects and budget costs, returning it to its original role as a minor commodity program. Although the 1996 Farm Bill formally eliminated the honey program, it was reinstated in the 2002 Farm Bill. We measure the historical welfare effects of the program during its various incarnations, examine its frequently stated public interest rationalethe encouragement of honeybee pollinationand interpret its history in light of economic theories of regulation.

Blame India Watch

This looks interesting. A new blog (or new to me anyway) has opened up and it's entitled Blame India Watch. (Thanks to MR).

Bagel Virus

This new bagel virus is pretty sharp. Microsoft Outlook is, I'm guessing, pretty attractive to most programmers of these viruses. But people seem to have learned a lot over the last two years or so about the new golden rule of the information economy, which is: never open attachments from strangers. But these virus programmers must just take this as being a challenge, because the viruses keep getting trickier and tricker. Like this bagel one, for instance. I got an email this morning from "administrator@uga.edu." It had all this gobbly gook in it which made it seem authentic, talking about how I was having my email address closed down because I had tried to send an attachment that had been infected by the virus. In fact, it was like the second or third of these I've received over the last few days, but I've been so confused by them that I haven't paid them any attention. But this one caught my attention, because it sounded like I had been sending out infected attachments. Even though I don't use Microsoft Outlook - I use a web server which doesn't have an address book. The email said that if I wanted to reconnect my account, that I would just need to follow the instructions in the attachment that was included in the email. But I decided to, instead, write administrator@uga.edu and ask what in the world was going on, and to see if they could get someone up to my office to check my computer out. They loaded my computer up with all kinds of security goodies, so I was thinking I was pretty safe. Well, sure enough, the email bounces back because there is no "administrator@uga.edu." Then I realized that the whole thing was just an ingenius scam to get me to open the attachment. It was the first time in a while that I actually almost fell for it. I basically don't even look at something, let alone open an attachment, unless I know the person, and even then I'm leery of opening an attachment. But this one really got me. The more I looked at the actual letter, though, the more it seemed like it wasn't as authentic as I thought. (Of course, watch it be real and tomorrow my account gets canceled).

"The new phone book's here! The new phone book's here!"

Finally, after three long weeks of waiting and watching for the postman to get here, my new book, Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry by Arthur De Vany here. I decided to have Amazon.com send it to me the cheapest route possible, to save money. If you order something from Amazon.com, you can actually forego paying for shipping and handling (kind of cool), but only if you don't mind waiting three weeks. The book is gorgeous - I almost don't want to open it or else it'll get all bent up and gross. It's in some kind of funky font on the cover, with a picture of Jimmy Stewart from Vertigo hanging by his fingertips (during the opening scene of the movie) and is published by Routledge.

Infanticide

Imagine a hypothetical, primitive island composed of 100 men, 100 women and 200 children under the age of 10. Corporations employ the men, women and their children in labor-intensive work. I wonder if child labor laws, which forbid that children under a certain age work, could result in an increase in infanticide rates. Under that policy, children become a liability, rather than an economic asset, and thus increasing family size becomes relatively more costly for the family than a situation in which the child can work.

Trade and Democracy

An interesting abstract over at Brad DeLong's weblog on a new study by J. Ernesto Lopez-Cordova and Christopher Meissner on the relationship between globalization and democracy. A low rumble from the crowd, too, in the comments is also worth checking out. Here's the abstract.

Abstract: We study whether international trade fosters democracy. The likely endogeneity between democracy and trade is addressed via the gravity model of trade, allowing us to obtain a measure of natural openness. This serves as our instrumental variable for actual trade openness a la Frankel and Romer (1989). We use this powerful instrument to obtain consistent estimates of the causal impact of openness on democratization. The positive impact of openness on democracy is apparent from about 1895 onward. Late nineteenth century globalization may have helped to generate the "first wave" of democratization. Between 1920 and 1938 countries more exposed to international trade were less likely to become authoritarian. Finally, our post-World War II results suggest that a one standard deviation increase in trade with other countries could bring countries like Indonesia, Russia, or Venezuela to be as democratic as the U.S., Great Britain, or France. We also see some variation of the impact of openness by region and note that commodity exporters and petroleum producers do not seem to become more democratic by exporting more of such items.

Jobs and Economic Growth

Found this at MR. The article notes that the job loss has less to do with outsourcing and more to do with increased productivity and technologically-biased changes taking place. The author writes:

"History has shown time and again that jobs follow growth, but not necessarily in a simple, linear fashion. America has a dynamic, fast-changing economy that embodies Joseph A. Schumpeter's ideal of creative destruction. We are now experiencing the maximum pain from the wreckage of outmoded jobs while still awaiting the innovations that will generate the work of the future. While America's faith in its innovation economy has often been tested, it has never been betrayed. Given the chance, the economy will deliver the jobs and prosperity that it has in the past."

Jobs and Economic Growth

Found this at MR. The article notes that the job loss has less to do with outsourcing and more to do with increased productivity and technologically-biased changes taking place. The author writes:

"History has shown time and again that jobs follow growth, but not necessarily in a simple, linear fashion. America has a dynamic, fast-changing economy that embodies Joseph A. Schumpeter's ideal of creative destruction. We are now experiencing the maximum pain from the wreckage of outmoded jobs while still awaiting the innovations that will generate the work of the future. While America's faith in its innovation economy has often been tested, it has never been betrayed. Given the chance, the economy will deliver the jobs and prosperity that it has in the past."

More Economc News

One of the bloggers at Marginal Revolution responds to Paul Krugman's recent accusation that the CEA is corrupt.

Also, found an interesting new economic website called The Decembrist. I found this quote from the page:

In December, the CEO of a California-based high tech firm told me that "there is no amount of overtime that we will not pay, there is no level of temporary services that we will not use, there is no level of outsourcing or offshoring that we will not do, in order to prevent us from having to hire one new, permanent worker in the U.S." As I travel around the country, meeting with business leaders, I hear similar, though less succinct thoughts in almost every sector and every part of the country. U.S. wages, health care, and other benefit costs have gotten so high -- and the press by investors for high stock prices is so great -- that the premium is on wringing every last bit of work out of as few employees as possible, to do anything but incur the costs of adding permanent employees. [emphasis added]

It is strange that increases in productivity are as high as they are, and yet we're not seeing substantial job growth. This writer says that unless we see an increase in real aggregate demand, there is no incentive for firms to hire more people. He gives examples of how he sees increases in demand coming. A lot to sort through, for me, though.

Also decided to add a sidebar devoted just to economists' weblogs.

Passion Trends

Eventually, I hope to get box office data loaded up into a spread sheet so I can analyze and graph the trends a little bit. As it is, I've just been eyeballing it. But one thing I noticed was that for The Passion, each weekend recedes by around 30-40%.

Starsky & Hutch, on the other hand, dropped more like 40-50% in its second weekend. (The Passion actually fell closer to 30% in its second weekend, and more like 40% in the third weekend).

50 First Dates dropped more like 40% its second weekend, then around 30-40% each subsequent weekend.

So, regardless of gross revenues in opening weekends, there appears to be a drop-off of around 40% each subsequent weekend.

DVD/VHS Sales

Anyone out there know of "free," quality datasources on VHS/DVD point-of-purchase sales data? I am looking at Rentrak, but I have a feeling that this product - which looks great - is expensive. I didn't do a thorough search of the page, but from experience, data services like these charge an arm and a leg for their data. I'm wanting to study the impact of an Academy Award win in one of the top five categories on both first-run exhibition markets in terms of ticket revenue, as well as secondary markets like DVD/VHS rentals/purchases. If anyone ever finds a datasource on rentals/purchases, would they mind posting it in any random comment box they find? Thanks ahead of time.

Tyler Cowen on jobless recovery

Some commentary over at Marginal Revolutions on the jobless recovery. Only skimmed it, so don't leave comments telling me how Tyler Cowen sucks. Just wanted to direct anyone to it, like Bobber or Robi, who might be interested in this kind of thing.

Colby

I read this morning that Colby from Survivor: All Stars was the most recent to be voted off the tribe. I, unfortunately, do not have access to even basic network channels so I have only managed to watch one episode this season. The one episode I saw was the one where Susan walked off at the end. On that episode, Colby chews out one of his Asian, female teammates (I forget her name) for basically "flying under the radar" (arguably, one of wisest strategies a contestant can use, since a large portion of the final winners have been "under the radar" people like Ethan and Tina, and no doubt others). But it pisses Colby off, and he chews her out in essence because he is the one who must bear all the costs for hard decisions, risking unpopularity, while a silent player gets all the benefits but takes no risks. The fact that this works so well should signal to a rational player, like Colby, that the player is not being dishonest, but rather, is playing the game well. But for whatever reason, Colby in that episode was weirdly preachy. I kept thinking he was going to do something productive from the perspective of his own strategy, but he never did. Instead, he just vented, and in the end, alienated her completely. She left the meeting not only unwilling to entertain an alliance with him, but wanting to vote him off. One is only powerful if one's alliance is larger than the residual non-alliance teammates, and Colby's wasn't. His also wasn't as strong as he thought.

A few thoughts. I think the strongest players routinely forget the rules of the game. I've seen this repeatedly. They become cocky, arrogant, and begin thinking that their actual productivity (brute strength, hunter-gatherer skills, etc.) can be a good strategy all alone. But it can't. Actually, none of those things matter, really, in the end. The game is not about surviving on a desert island; the game is about surviving on Survivor, which has little to nothing to do with stamina and endurance. Players like Colby understand this. Colby, in his first season's play, understood this better than any of the other players. He played the game with real finesse. His best moment from that first season a few years ago, in my opinion, was when the two teams had just merged. They were evenly matched: 5-to-5. The first tribal council would dictate who would, in the end, be voted off. If Colby's original team could avoid going under the knife, then they would go towards the end with a majority. If not, then his team would potentially be picked off one-by-one. Colby pulled his team together and came up with a plan. They had overheard someone on the other team state that one of the people had a vote against him. If it came down to a tie - which it undoubtedly would since 5 would be voting against 5 - then the tie breaker would be whomever had accumulated the most number of votes to date, including all previous tribal councils. Colby had no votes against him, and his team believed that someone on the other team did. So Colby attempted to do things over the course of a day that might draw some derision and anger from the other side, and hopefully accumulate five votes against himself. If he could get five votes, then they would still win if his team all block voted against this particular person who had a vote against him already. And it worked. It may seem like a small victory, but very few collective strategies had been planned and successfully executed on this show. Most of the strategies are individual strategies involving alliances, but to actually see one player coordinate a strategy involving deception and alliance was, in my opinion, breath-taking.

So what happened? Why the slip-up this time by one of the strongest players of the game? I was walking down the hall a moment ago, when I remembered the conversation he had had with the Asian girl. His conversation was weird. It was uncharacteristic. He was attacking her for going under the radar. He was recognizing to her that he deserved more for his efforts, and it angered him that a silent player could free-ride and ultimately steal the glory from a player like himself. And then it hit me. Tina won against Colby in the original Survivor by a margin of one vote, and he has never gotten over it. He gave Tina a million dollars, and while on one level, everyone who likes Colby came to like him even more when he did that, we also all thought the same thing: that was the stupidest thing Colby has ever done.

And I think his bitterness over that original loss cast a shadow over his play this time around - even if only a slight shadow. He let himself preach at a teammate, which alienated her, and put himself at the top of people's list of people to vote off. Colby had a lot of negatives against him going into this game. He was well-known beforehand as being one of the stronger players, for one. They knew that they needed him in the beginning to win and for leadership (note: physical strength will get you to the merger, but not beyond), but they remembered his winning streak towards the end (note: he won, I believe, something like four straight immunity challenges towards the end, all the way up until the final vote). He's intelligent, political and physically strong. This is not, note, a strength - since everyone knows this about him, it is undoubtedly a weakness. It can only become a strenght if Colby can forge an alliance with people who need him. People like Ethan, for instance, who also begin with a disadvantage being winners who most don't believe "deserve" a second win. Colby is almost as dangerous, though. People believe he "deserved" the original win, and so therefore if you want to win, you want to eliminate him. It's almost as though he forgot all of that, or chose to ignore, or chose to believe his own press clippings. Or something. Anyhow, I think he slipped partly because of how the previous game ended with Tina winning the whole kit and caboodle, and Colby getting second place and a bunch of hugs from Tina. (And no movie deals from Hollywood, either, which from what I've heard, is an angle he's been working since that first season. He even read for The Bourne Identity, and from what the director said, it was a great read. But come on - Damon or Colby?).

Passion Copycats

Several people connected to Hollywood, such as the president of Newmarket films, are predicting The Passion's success to spawn a series of religiously-themed imitators. The fact that Titanic - the highest grossing film of all time (unadjusted for inflation, that is) - did not lead to copycats doesn't matter, since Titanic cost so much to produce (north of $200 million). Titanic was more of a classic hit - very risky, and unpredictable. But Gibson's film is much less risky. It cost a mere $30 million, and required only a single star to power the film, as well as a producer of uncompromising spiritual vision. As far as feature films go, cost-wise, that's peanutes. Plus, it's been repeatedly noted in the press that a significant share of The Passion's audience are individuals who haven't stepped foot in a theater in ages. The market for religious commodities is quite large, but some wonder if Hollywood has forgotten this group, which might partly explain how Gibson managed to do so well with this movie. This statistic was particularly interesting: survey data suggest that nearly 40% of the population regularly participate in church or synagogue worship. That's nearly four times as many people in regular, weekly attendance to religious services than people waiting in line at the local movie theater. The article reads:

"Until now, most producers disregarded this faith-based audience, claiming that they seldom went to the movies anyway so it made no sense to appeal to them. The explosive response to The Passion blows that theory to smithereens: The movie's projected box office gross is some $400 million in its North American theatrical run alone."

So what can we expect down the pipe? Probably a lot of crap, but maybe also some diamonds in the rough as well. Walt Disney (perhaps partly out of guilt for passing on such no-brainers as Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter) will be releasing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, scheduled for Christmas 2005.

Best-selling artist of all time

Who is the best-selling artist of all time? Swiss religious artist, Annie Vallotten.

"In the 1970s, Vallotton drew the simple illustrations for the Good News Bible, a new basic English translation. She provided 500 line drawings of figures dancing, praying, fighting and raising the dead. These depicted not only the scripture, but the translators' philosophy that the Bible should be accessible and enjoyable."

Religious Revenues

Undoubtedly, this will gross out most readers. Fool.com has an article on the market size and the value of the market for religious-oriented commodities here.

Paxifist

Paul Baxter's wife, Lenise, has a weblog entitled "Paxifist". I hear that Paul's wife was, like me, once a grad student in economics. He told me that she was surprised to learn upon entering Chapel Hill's PhD program that no one else had ever read Smith's Wealth of Nations. The fact that Paul retold that anecdote in a way that made his wife sound shocked and angry is one reason I plan to read this blog regularly.

The Passion and Church-going

It'd be interesting to, some time next year, have a dataset for church attendence in a single city - perhaps a non-Biblebelt city - over 2003/2004. And specifically try and determine what effect The Passion had on church attendance during the window in which it screened. It happened during Lent, and since during this season (most notably Easter although maybe it's true for the entire season, especially if you're Catholic), you see unusual spikes in church attendance, it'd be difficult to separate the effect of the movie from the more general cycle in church attendance. Still, it'd be interesting. Iannaccone has an interesting paper out there called "Never on Sunny Days: Lessons from Congregational Attendance Counts" which is currently in press. In it he found - somewhat contrary to my original intuition, but now it makes sense - that sunny days tended to lower church attendance, whereas drearier days resulted in greater attendance. The conclusion he draws from the entire study is that what has the biggest effect on church attendance is not barriers, necessarily, like bad weather, but rather the number of competing things we could do with our time that day. A sunny day opens up a number of leisure activities, while a rainy day closes them. I'm more or less of the opinion that nothing like a single cultural event - no matter how great it may be - has any kind of cultural affect on permanent attendance trends. But, that is an empirical question worth pursuing. Everyone is talking about massive conversions, revivals, and other related phenomenon resulting from this film. It'd be interesting to look at the attendance rates of churches a certain distance from theaters exhibiting the film and see what effect, if any, the film had on those attendance rates. Iannaccone talks about the problems with this data in his paper - for one, the errors in collecting the data most likely differ from church to church. Some churches keep really good records on attendance; some keep little to no records. It's the lack of good data that makes empirical work on religious phenomenon a bit scary (for me). I had the hardest time finding any reliable cross-section, time-series dataset on clergy compensation last semester. I could've used the the monthly Current Population Survey, since in both, "clergy" is an occupation listed, and wage is listed. But I couldn't control for religion (is the person a Christian, a Jewish rabbi, a Muslim cleric, or even a druid? I never could get a sense of whether the CPS controlled for those variables), and I wasn't confident that the wage attributed to the clergy was the total compensation of the clergy (ie, did it include things like the parsonage or housing allowance). Eventually, once I get more experienced with empirical work, I'll return to that paper. I want to test my hypothesis that the decline in the relative wages of clergy is principally what is driving the megachurch phenomenon, as well as the increasing number of shortages of preachers in small churches. But that has nothing to do with this post, which was simply me wondering whether this movie will have any noticeable effect over church attendance.

Fuzzy Math

Hollywood Reporter breaks down the math for us. Newmarket, as the distributor, will probably get around 45% of the profits, meaning that if the film makes $400 million, they'll see around $180 million (not bad, for a no-name, tiny distributor). Gibson will probably see around $100 million, according to HR, though. He gets more, I take it, from international box office revenues (expected to reach $300 million) as well as DVD rentals, merchandising, etc. Anyway, the point being, the breakdown of profits are complicated, but it looks like however you cut it, Mel Gibson's filthy rich.

This happened to George Lucas with Star Wars. Like The Passion, the movie was not believed to have blockbuster potential, and for whatever reason, Lucas got left with a bunch of profit points. It became one of the highest grossing films of all time, as we all know, and Lucas became stinking rich. Each sequel only increased that. But Lucas responded to his sudden wealth by, interestingly, not seeking to make more films. Instead, he chose to create Industrial Light and Magic and Lucasfilm. He pushed for digital sound in theaters and greater special effects. He was not considered to be the greatest filmmaker by his contemporaries - not even a mediocre one from what I can gather. He hated actors, and couldn't write dialogue to save his life. Gibson, on the other hand, seems to enjoy filmmaking, loves actors (he is, after all, first and foremost an actor, giving him more sympathy for them than Lucas who was and is more of a techie guy), and has created a production company intent on creating more films. So it seems likely that this sudden windfall for Gibson will result in more films being made, which is a good thing methinks.

Marie Augusta Neal

I received the following in my email moments ago:

Sister Marie Augusta Neal passed away on Wednesday, February 25, at the
age of 82. Sister Marie, who received her Ph.D. from Harvard in 1963,
was for many years the chair of the Sociology Department at Emmanuel
College in Boston. Among her numerous awards was the 1986 ASA
Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award. In addition to an
impressive record of scholarly work, she was known for her passion for
social justice. She inspired a number of people to work for justice,
including Kip Tiernan, founder of the Poor People's United Fund and of
Rosie's Place, a women's shelter in Boston, and anti-death penalty
activist Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking. For further
information, please contact Madeleine Cousineau (mcousineau@mountida.edu).

The Passion: First Thoughts

I finally saw The Passion this afternoon. I saw it under ideal settings. I was all alone, on an afternoon matinee, in a dark theater in a super deluxe multiplex. I can't review it; any attempt at a review will sound incredibly stupid. I cannot hold my attention long enough to actually construct reviews. I may just jot down thoughts occasionally instead. The rest of this post is just rambling, so don't expect anything except for that if you care to read it.

As far as whether I liked or not, I liked it a lot. I realized, once the credits were finished rolling, that I must be the audience that Mel Gibson had in mind. I'm not sure what that means, precisely, either. I am undoubtedly what you would call "religious," but I feel like every day I am some kind of "lapsed religious" person. I am also a moviegoer, first and foremost. And, I have felt for a long time unable to penetrate the Jesus as he is contained in the pages of the New Testament. This movie was powerful to me on a number of levels. One level that particuarly affected me was the relationship between Mary and Jesus. I sniffled a lot throughout the movie, but one scene caused me to fall into deep weeping. It was the scene where Mary has asked John the disciple to get her closer to Jesus (who is carrying his cross through the streets). John maneuvers her into an alley, or what looks like an alley, and you can tell that Jesus is getting closer because of the crowd people moving at the edge of the alley, on the street. But Mary's frozen. For whatever reason, she can't bring herself to walk to him. Then she sees him at the mouth of the alley. He falls down in pain and Gibson flashes back to a memory of Jesus as a little boy falling outside his home. Mary sees him and runs to him in her memory, telling him that she is there with him, which prompts her to do the same in the present. She rushes to his side and tells him that she is there. But his response was really hit me hard. He tells her, "look mother. I make all things new." When he said that, I cried and cried.

I could see this movie again and again. I was mesmerized. For one, it wasn't nearly as violent as I was led to believe from reading Ebert's review. But Barlow had mentioned that he felt Ebert was exaggerating, and/or he simply had never bothered to think about the death of Christ in any concrete way. There were only two parts that I couldn't bear to look. One was where the cat o' nine tails slapped onto Jesus's back, and the guard paused for a second or two before ripping it away. I figured that that was a sign from the director that I was about see a couple of inches of flesh torn off his back, which I couldn't bear to see. The other time was when the guards hammered the pike into Jesus's leg when he was on the cross.

Another scene that I found poignant was Simon being forced to carry Jesus's cross. Simon begins completely unwilling to carry the cross. But over the journey to Mt. Golgotha, he undergoes a visible change. He defends Jesus against the people persecuting him and threatens to stop carrying it if they don't stop hitting him. He begins to speak in affectionate, fatherly tones to Jesus along the way, tell him "almost done" and "almost there." Jesus would fall repeatedly on his way to the mountain, and when he would stand up and lean against Simon, all I could think was how wonderful it was to be Simon at that moment. I actually wanted to be Simon at that moment, to be honest. Jesus leaning against him like that, their arms locked around the cross as they carried it. Simon was helping Jesus carry the cross, not understanding that Jesus was carrying the cross for him. And that was interesting and powerful. But for me, what was more powerful was just seeing Jesus and him together, touching one another, leaning on one another.

The movie seemed full of moments like the ones I'm trying to describe, almost as though Gibson is holding out moments from those last few hours for us to simply see and experience. I suppose this fits, even, the extensive criticisms I've read of the movie. It's abstracted from a contextual story which in many ways possibly threatens to confuse the story it's trying to tell. I only know that that is not at all a problem for me, being so familiar with the story. Watching Gibson hover over certain details was a powerful experience. It was like Chinese poetry, which I also love, which often seems to me to do this very thing - to hover over certain mundane details, forcing me to witness them. A wind blowing, curtains rippling, water falling from a leaf, chests rising as we breathe - I can become easily hypnotized by these sorts of things, and that happened a lot today.

I think it's partly because of that I don't feel it to be fair to make Gibson bear the full responsibility to tell every part of the gospel. That's a criticism I've also heard a lot. Because he focused more on the passion than anything else, it failed to convey properly some larger story. But to me, that's so dull. Let someone else make that movie. Gibson wanted this one, and I found it powerful. I don't usually like religious-themed art - at least not 20th century commercialized Christian art. I don't own a single "Christian" album, nor have I ever in my lifetime. I like my Christianity old, antique-like. I like liturgy, smells and bells. I like councils and dust. I like the sound of the faithful chanting in dead languages. I like silent monks. Yet, I'm right beside no telling how many evangelical protestants who don't share any of those interests of mine, in loving this movie and finding it powerfully affective. And besides, I like what I read recently on another blog - I liked seeing this because Mel made it for his people. It's communal storytelling. He said, "I have something I've made which I want you to see," and I want to have fellowship with him by seeing it. And I'm grateful he made it. I plan to see it, strangely, as many more times as I can bear it. It'll probably be the second DVD of my very small DVD section. I'll place it right beside my DVD copy of Boogie Nights - another favorite Christian story of mine.

Violent Porn Ban

The mother of a murdered British teacher is suing to have violent pornography banned. Her daughter's killer had a seven-year addiction to violent pornography, which she believes helped fan the flame of his violent tendencies, directly leading to the death of her daughter.

Elsewhere, a 69-year-old deacon of an Australian Baptist church was fined $3,000 for downloading 2800 images of child pornography. He had done so, apparently, while caring for his dying wife (who has since passed away).

Man, I hate pornography. I wish there existed more public discussion over how to deal with it, and more research out there on its effects. Not to sound like a commercial myself, but I'm more or less committed myself to installing XXX Church on any and every computer I use. I'm at my parents' house for the week, and I even installed it here. XXX Church keeps a log of your Internet activity, flags any questionable site, and sends it to an individual of your choice every 2 to 4 weeks. I think that of all the "solutions" offered to men who struggle with pornography, this one makes the most sense to me. I've stated this repeatedly on this website, but I'll say it again. Technology has over the last forty years made pornographic images more accessible. It had the unfortunate effect of lowering the social costs one incurs when consuming pornography - most notably the risks of getting caught. Now, unless one has an interest in child pornography, chances are one can lead a perfectly normal life with their interest in pornography completely hidden. One doesn't need to walk several city blocks and sit in a dark theater, where the chances of being seen or even arrested (Pee Wee Herman) are relatively high. One doesn't need to walk into an adult bookstore or a video store and have to actually look at the human being at the cash register. One doesn't even have to worry about what the mailman might be thinking of them. XXX Church is ideal because it forces pornography consumption into a slightly more public forum, where the person is forced to ask themselves, "Yes I want to view pornography, but do I really want it more than I want to have to explain it to one of my friends?" In other words, the marginal costs associated with pornography are socialized. It's effectiveness doesn't depend on one's own will power or self-control (which, let's be honest, if you had either of, then you wouldn't be addicted to pornography in the first place, right?). It just requires that the consumer be rational.

If you do struggle with pornography, and you're wanting to stop, might I recommend installing XXX Church. Choose a friend who you definitely would not want knowing that you have consumed pornography, though. Don't let the person who receives your bi-weekly email be someone who doesn't really care one way or the other. Send it to your dad, if you're really brave.

The Passion Numbers

The Passion's first significant drop occurred yesterday. It grossed $5 million, down 50% from last week. But, when compared to the top ten movies, it was by far the highest grossing film of that day. Box Office Mojo still has not released the numbers for many of the other new releases, such as Hidalgo or Starsky & Hutch, but I'm guessing that it probably was still the highest grossing film by far for that day.

Call for Papers

FYI: The Third Annual Conference on Religion, Economics and Culture is scheduled October 22-24, 2004 in Kansas City. The call for papers is out.

Water Balloon

I found this interesting site through TMN. There's lots of interesting time-lapsed photography on here - like three and a half hours at Yosemite Park sped into a few seconds (much more eerie a place that way), or watching a woman age over her entire lifetime. But I thought this water balloon bounce was beautiful. The cameraman dropped a water balloon but slowed the action down to a tenth of a second. The balloon begins nearly perfectly spherical, due to the combined force of gravity and the tension of the balloon. But once it hits the table, new forces are introduced, and exciting new shapes emerge. The shapes appear too quickly for the naked eye to notice, but slowed down to a tenth of a second, you can see it all.

Gary North on The Passion

North's review of The Passion, for those interested. It's an insightful review with many interesting points. Here's one line:

"This is why I regard this movie as the ultimate Passion play, which is a tradition going back to medieval times. We see what we have never seen before: the extent of the suffering. The movie has an R-rating because of it. I say, take along your younger children, but not if you don't intend to explain to them before and after the movie why this event took place. Death is ugly. It is ugly for a reason. Mankind really has angered God. It is this reason that appalls theological liberals."

Rape as a Capital Crime

Awhile ago, I privately held the view that rape should be a capital crime. I can't say I had any sophisticated arguments for this, except that I felt that rapists were brutal animals who I felt should die. I held this for a while, but then recently realized that if rape was treated as a capital crime, wouldn't it be likely that the result would be an increase in homicides, and not necessarily a decrease in rapes? After all, right now one thing which keeps a rapist from killing his victim is that the marginal costs are so high and do not exceed the marginal benefits. If the rapist murders his victim, the probability of arrest is much greater, the probability of conviction even greater, and the likelihood of the death penalty a possibility depending on the state the rapist lives in. But, if rape was punishable as a capital crime, then you have the unique situation where a rapist realizes that is in his best interest to murder the victim. What are the benefits of leaving the victim alive? Nothing that I can think of, except for whatever utility the rapist gets from withholding murder (which since he just raped the victim, I'm assuming that the rapist is not altruistic, and therefore this won't apply). But the costs of not murdering are high - there is a witness to his crime. So murdering actually becomes the better strategy if rape is punished as a capital crime, since in so doing, it increases the rapist's chances of survival. The punishment for rape needs to be great enough to discourage the activity, but not so great that it actually encourages the rapist to murder the victim. Thinking along these lines, I realized three things. I realized that keeping capital punishment presevered for murder had the effect of discouraging people from upgrading their crimes to murder as a way of strategically covering up their smaller crimes. I also realized that by not punishing rapists with death, the law was protecting victims. Finally, I realized that women who come forward and prosecute their rapists are heros, because everytime a woman does this, she increases the probability that a rapist will be arrested and consequently convicted, and this raises the costs associated with the crime.

Passion Numbers

They have revised the initial estimates of $212,000,000 by roughly a million, making the total somewhere around $213 million after twelve days. I noticed that The Matrix: Reloaded had, after twelve days, grossed $209 million. The Matrix currently holds the first place position for highest grossing R-rated movie of all time (in nominal dollars) at around $285 million, so I was thinking that it might be interesting to compare The Passion's progress with it. What is interesting is to compare not where each movie was after twelve days (roughly equal), but to compare the second week of each movie with one another.

The second week of The Matrix was strong - Monday it pulled $10 million, Tuesday it pulled $7 million, Wednesday $6 million, Thursday $5 million.

The second week of The Passion was arguably stronger - Monday it pulled $10 million, Tuesday it pulled $9 million, Wednesday $8 million, and Thursday $7 million.

The second weekends of each movie are also worth comparing. The second weekend of The Matrix pulled in approximately $37 million. The second weekend of The Passion pulled in approximately $53 million.

You can't completely compare these two movies, since for a number of reasons they are different movies with different release dates. They therefore shouldn't be expected to trend the same. But, it is still interesting that given the much more difficult release date that The Passion is in (The Matrix was released as a summer blockbuster), the interest in the movie has waned only slightly. The Passion's second weekend was down approximately 30% from the first weekend, whereas The Matrix was down more like 60% from its first weekend. Easter is still waiting at the end of the month, giving me reason to believe that the movie will have one last surge that weekend before it gives up its last breath. It will continue to stick around for many more months, but probably it won't be a juggernaut of Titanic proportions. At least, not until it goes into DVD sales.

Gay Weddings

Tyler Cowen comments on the economics of gay weddings.

Barro on the Defecit

Robert Barro responds to the comment allegedly made by VP Cheney that went, "Ronald Reagan proved that defecits don't matter. He notes that what matters is not defecits - under certain conditions outlined by David Ricardo (discovered a hundred years later again by Barro himself in a doctrine now called "Ricardian Equivalence"), whether government funds its spending through debt or taxing, the outcome should not matter. The defecit does not drive up interest rates, nor crowd out private investment, if these certain conditions are met. But, what does matter is the level of spending itself. Reagan, according to Barro, successfully curbed taxation, but was not able to curb spending by Congress. The result was a high debt to GDP ratio. But, Reagan used that increasing defecit to eventually force Congress to curb their own spending. It's here, Barro said, where the defecit does matter.

It's an interesting article, too, simply for explaining the distortionary effects of marginal tax rates on the very rich and the very poor. I wouldn't mind getting a subscription to Business Week, if for no other reason than to get the monthly column by Barro and the montly column by Gary Becker.

Starsky and Hutch Movie Review

Paige and I saw Starsk & Huch yesterday at the matinee. We were in the mood for something light, and so it was either 50 First Dates or S&H. I love Adam Sandler movies when they're really good, but I hate them with a passion when they're bad. I just think he goes for the cheap gags too often to satisfying his 13-year-old target audience. There's only so many jokes that involving some variation of farting on an old lady that I can take before I get bored. So I twisted her arm and we saw S&H, instead, even though she and I share a deep affection for Drew Barrymore's romantic comedies.

The movie is not a great movie by any means. But it has enough great scenes and great bits that made it worth our time. The script is a bit clunky at places, and Snoop Dogg never seemed completely comfortable as an actor. On the whole, it seemed like the writer and the director used the shotgun approach to comedy - the variance in the range of the jokes released was wide so that some jokes didn't hit at all, while others were priceless. And on average, even though a lot of it was stupid, slightly more was fun, and I had a good time. I figure that's all you can really ask from a movie like this.

Some of my favorite parts involved Wil Farrell. Farrell is a great ensemble comedic actor. He plays well off of other actors in the scene with him, usually underplays his characte and never feels the need to steal the scene. I contrast him with someone like Robin Williams or Jim Carrey, whose comedic presence usually ends up dominating whatever scene they're in. Farrell played a prisoner named "Big Earl" who has a penchant for sewing dragons on clothing. A dead man who washed ashore had one of these dragons embroidered on his denim jacket, so the cop duo went to speak with him in jail. From there, things get a little weird. But he will exchange information only on the condition that Owen Wilson perform for him. He tells Ben Still to tell Owen Wilson to go across the room, arch his back, and look over his shoulder at Farrell "mean, like a dragon!" That interaction between Farrell and them is worth the price of admission alone.

There are other funny parts, too, but they're not classic by any means. The movie was mostly a nice viewing experience because of the friendship between Starsky and Hutch. Owen Wilson plays his typical affectionate, sincere self - a part that I never tire seeing him in. Ben Stiller plays someone who seems incredily tense - like he's been waiting for twenty minutes for someone to get out of the bathroom so he can go. And over the course of the movie, they come to appreciate one another and love one another, and ultimately become partners - professinoaly, but mostly personally. That was what was mostly nice about the movie for me. It did have a bunch of funny parts, but I appreciated that the director did not try to force Wilson and Stiller to focus only on exagerrating the qualities of their characters (which I felt like almost happened, especially with Stiller, who seemed to overplay his character's anal-retentive style). Instead, he allows them to become friends, and so even though there was a lot of hit and miss with the jokes, and even though the plot was slim, and even though I felt like someone else should've been cast as Huggy Bear, it gave the movie a good feeling in the end.

Some Tidbits to Chew on

One. You should make it a habit to read Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok's collective weblog entitled Marginal Revolution. I can't believe I haven't made it a rule to read this site regularly. It's brilliant. Both of these guys are economists at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. Tyler Cowen is a very intriguing economist, incidentally. He's written in areas off the beaten path of economics - like in the area of art. He's written a book entitled In Praise of Commercial Culture, another entitled Creative Destruction: How Globalization is Changing the World's Cultures. Alex Tabarrok has also written and edited numerous interesting-looking books. One of them that I have on my "must read" list is his The Voluntary City.

Two. Foreign Policy has created something called The Globalization Index. There's one page that is particularly interesting having to do with the relationship between globalization (however they measure that) and religiosity that you can see here. They notice that among the lowest ranked countries on the index, there is a lot of clumping for religious participation. This supports the secularization thesis, which says that religion is an inferior good which people demand less of as their incomes increase. Or to put it less charitably, only stupid, poor people would believe in God, and as we as a people become more sophisticated in our technologicaly-integrated society and achieve higher levels of education, we learn that there is no God - only sound and fury signifying nothing.

But, if you look, there are some interesting exceptions. The article reads, "Ireland and the United States, which both rank in the top 10 in this year's Globalization Index, are among the most religious societies in the world. Conversely, Greece (ranked 28th) and Ukraine (ranked 43rd), exhibit low levels of religious participation. And Iran, which ranks last on our index, is actually less religious than highly globalized countries such as Canada (6th) and Portugal (16th)." I thought that was interesting - Greece, ranked 28th in the Globalization Index exhibits low levels of religious participation. If I'm not mistaken, Greece has a state religion - Greek Orthodoxy.

More work needs to be done, obviously, on the relationship between religious freedom and religious participation, as well as the relationship between economic growth and religious participation, but if you are at all interested in these questions, this index is worth reading. It also has some interesting charts relating women's incomes and globalization - not surprisingly, they find that higher ranked countries in the index have higher levels of "women well-being (as measured by a number of things like literacy rates, earned income, access to healthcare, etc.). Chances are, if you are an English major at, oh I don't know, the University of Tennesee-Knoxville (my alma mater), then you'll never hear anything remotely like this.

Drops in Enrollment

It's so strange - another classmate of mine, who is a much more experienced teacher and who has actually won teaching awards, told me today that he has had large numbers of withdrawals from his class. Today is the deadline, and so a lot of kids are coming in under the wire trying to withdraw. I only had two withdrawals, but I did have a large number drop the class after the first day. And I'm not alone - the same thing happened to another student teacher friend of mine. So I don't think it's just something unique about my class. It seems more general, although that's just based on my limited perspective. Some people have speculated that the HOPE scholarship - which pays a Georgia resident's full tuition if they maintain a 3.0 GPA - could be driving some things like this. As students realize they may not get a B, or even an A, in the class, they face incentives to drop the course. They also speculate that the HOPE scholarship has resulted in increased enrollments in "softer" subjects where a 3.0 in more ensured, and has led to a drain from the harder subjects, like engineering, mathematics, physics, etc. where it is much more difficult to maintain a 3.0. Yet, from the perspective of Georgia as an economy, and the nation as a whole, if this is true, then it represents a subsidization of liberal arts. And while I love the liberal arts, it's not clear to me whether it's better for the economy for there to be less investment in science and technology at the human capital level.

Of course, I could just be rationalizing the fact that I am not a good teacher.

Neorologists study mystical union with God

A neurologist is hooking nuns up with electrodes to better understand union with God. Talk about weird.

In the first of what he hopes will be a series of experiments, Dr Beauregard and his doctoral student Vincent Paquette are recording electrical activity in the brains of seven Carmelite nuns through electrodes attached to their scalps. Their aim is to identify the brain processes underlying the Unio Mystica—the Christian notion of mystical union with God. The nuns (the researchers hope to recruit 15 in all) will also have their brains scanned using positron-emission tomography and functional magnetic-resonance imaging, the most powerful brain-imaging tools available.

Ebert Reviews Starsky and Hutch

He gives the film 3 stars and writes

"As Hollywood works its way through retreads of TV series from the 1960s and '70s, I find I can approach each project with a certain purity, since I never saw any of the original shows. Never saw a single "Starsky and Hutch." Not one episode of "I Spy." No "Mod Squad." No "Charlie's Angels." What was I doing instead, apart from seeing thousands of movies? Avoiding episodic television like a communicable disease and improving myself with the great literature of the ages. Plus partying."

I love this man. I also never saw the old television show, nor do I know a single person my age who has. So I was wondering whether this movie could actually be all that popular given that this is not a show that is really "top of mind" in the consciousness of my generation. But, I thought to myself, with Stiller and Owen Wilson, as well as Snoop Dogg, in the starring roles, you draw their fans into the theater and maybe it won't matter whether anyone saw the old show. So long as the movie is not filled with a lot of inside jokes, it could work. But if it's one long inside joke, then I'm not going to get it, since I don't know anything about this old show.

It should be known that Ebert's new collection of reviews is out. It is titled Roger Ebert's Movie Yearbook 2004 and is available at your neighboring Barnes and Noble or Borders.. So, if a stranger were to have pity on my financially and cinematically poor situation and send me this book, not only would the book not be refused, but it would sit on the back of my toilet for many moons allowing me to spend long hours of pure bliss on the toilet. That, my friend, is a promise.

Box Office Receipts

The Passion is doing well on weekdays - a good sign, it would seem, as to how it will do this weekend. It's being pulling in around $10 million each weekday, which is a good sign for the weekend when you consider, again, that a movie's strongest during its debut weekend, then depending on how well the movie is being received, begins to drastically decline. This is partly why distributors seek such wide releases for the opening weekend - a movie can expect to, at the very least, have a strong opening weekend. But once word of mouth takes over, it will experience sharp declines. Except for blockbusters. They will decline, but the drop is not so severe. Return of the King was also pulling north of $10 million in the weekdays after its debut. But, Return of the King also had an advantage that The Passion does not. The week after its debut was the week of Christmas, and so children were out of school, the movie was rated PG-13 so they were all able to see it, etc. So it's something to note that, all those things advantages being absent here, the movie is still showing strong. You're seeing a lot of repeat viewing, for one, and despite its religious theme, the movie actually seems to be garnering a much broader appeal. This is not your typical kitschy Christian crap, but from most accounts, is a film with craft, one that is well-made, interesting, and emotionally quite powerful. I'll be interested to see how it performs in its second weekend.

On a slightly different note, I was reading some economic of film the other day, and I learned some interesting things about the film industry. The economists who work in this area say that the market for motion pictures is unique among all other products because motion pictures suffer from "maximum uncertainty." That is, because film is an "experience good" - one does not know what one likes until one experiences the film - suppliers do not know beforehand what people want. They do not, in other words, know "demand." But, this is not simply a situation of asymmetric information, because oddly enough, even consumers suffer from the same problem. They, too, do not know what they want. This creates a lot of uncertainty and a lot of risk around the production of films. A famous saying by one screenwriter (Goldman I think) is "no one knows anything" about what will be received. There are no rules for making a blockbuster. Executives may rely heavily on formula - using star power, using narrow formulas, etc. - but they have no ability to make a movie a blockbuster. So it makes for an interesting market.

I also read an article in a law review journal which revisted the Paramount antitrust cases of the 1930s. In the Paramount cases, the courts found the studios to be behaving in an anti-competitive fashion. They broke the studios up considerably. There was vertical integration in the market - that means, studios not only created the product, but they also owned the exhibiting houses. So, for instance, Paramount owned chains of exhibition houses across the country, which gave them the ability to show exclusively Paramount films. Likewise, they participated in actions which the counts found anti-competitive like "block booking" - writing contracts which forced independant exhibitors to accept other less popular films for the more popular ones. So you couldn't just buy individual films - you had to buy also these ones over here that might be really bad. Two economists revisit these cases and argue that the Paramount was wrong on efficiency grounds. They make an interesting argument - one that I won't reproduce here until, possibly, I actually finish reading it. But they actually argue that those previous practices were not monopolistic, but were actually efficient organizational developments within the industry which were entirely due to the unique problems that motion pictures presented - things like maximum uncertainty, for instance.

Do Police Deter Crime?

In Becker's seminal article, "Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach," he modeled a model of crime as a labor phenomenon in which utility-maximizing agents choose to engage in either illicit or legal labor market opportunities. He theorized that depending the level of risk aversion in the criminal, penalties, probabilities of arrests and the severity of those penalties will deter crime. This question has been empirically tested numerous times. Isaac Ehrlich, in 1973, found that capital punishment reduced the number of violent crimes and the paper - while villifying him and more than likely costing him tenure at numerous universities - found its way into the hands of the Supreme Court and helped overturn the temporary moratorium on capital punishment. One of my professors conducted a similar study involving gun control legislation. Professor David Mustard found that in states where law-abiding citizens were allowed to carry firearms, the crime level was reduced since the presence of firearms in the civilian population theoretically should represent a cost to the criminal. His chances of successfully engaging in criminal activity is reduced, and the the costs of engaging have risen, thus resulting in a negative net gain in those states. Empirically, that was what he found.

But one thing that has troubled economists for a long time has been the fact that empirically, police per capita does not seem to have the expected negative effect on crime rates. Probabilities of arrests, severity of arrests, probabilities of conviction - these and other deterrent variables will be shown to negatively affect crime rates in a region, but police per capita strangely will not. This has always been interpreted to be a problem of "endogeneity," though, and economists have not usually been found to believe the data. The problem is, police hirings are often associated with rising crime rates, and thus isolating the causal effect of police hirings on crime rates is difficult since they are usually correlated. The solution which is technically straightforward is to use "instrumental variables." Find some variable correlated with police hirings which is not correlated with crime rates, and you will be able to effectively to remove that endogeneity.

While a graduate student at MIT, Steven Levitt had been studying congressional and mayoral races, and he had noticed that when mayors came up for re-election, they hired police. It was a simple solution, yet a creative one, and when Levitt used this instrument in his regressions, he found police did indeed reduce crime rates.

All this is to give the reader some background to this classic problem, so that I can simply post a working paper from George Mason I found a minute ago. I post it because it, too, is an ingenious use of an instrument, and in their study, is found to reduce crime. They look at changes in the terror alert system issued by Homeland Security. The name of the working paper is "Using Terror Alert Levels to Estimate the Effect of Police on Crime." The co-authors are Jonathan Klick and Alexander Tabarrok. They also found there to be a negative relationship between police and crime rates.

Oldman cast as Gordon

Gary Oldman has been officially cast as Lieutenant Gordon in the upcoming Batman film, Batman Begins. That is an interesting choice. Oldman plays intense, complicated characters. If the movie follows the rough outine of Miller's Batman: Year One, then we will follow the newly hired police lieutenant as he is shocked by how things are done within Gotham City's police force. He will encounter deeply entrenched corruption, which will lead him to forge a friendship with a new vigilante in Gotham who shares his tough stance on injustice. If the script is strong, casting Oldman bodes well for the film.

Mel's Take

Forbes estimates Gibson will personally pocket north of $300 million for this picture. He is probably keeping 40-50% of the gross, and they're forecasting in this article the movie to rake in $300 domestically and $350 internationally in first-run rentals. Then there's the DVD sales, as well as the cut he gets on all the Christian merchandising. $300 million.

My Own Private Idaho, er..., Jesus

Jesus may be enjoying another renaissance at the moment, but he has never really flagged as a pop inspiration. In all genres: punk road warriors the Minutemen imagined a life consisting of "Jesus and Tequila," while professional bohemian Tom Waits sang of worshiping a "Chocolate Jesus." Today, the Christian music industry claims annual sales of $4 billion, with superstars such as Jaci Velasquez bringing the Word to fans of Britney.

We all find the Jesus we want to find, Albert Schweitzer once said -- nearly a century before Mel Gibson found his whipping boy.

Passion Merchandising

From the former surfer who brought us the WWJD bracelet, now comes his next great idea: The Passion nail.

"I look at the nail and I thought, 'Wow, what if we... what if we just take a nail like right from the movie and put it on a pendant,' " he said.

The nails come in small (17/8-inch) and large (25/8-inch), hang from leather cords, and sell for $12.99 and $16.99. About 75,000 pendants have been shipped to Christian bookstores, along with an equal number of Passion-related crucifixes.

I just want to go up to this guy and go, "You know, some of us are actually trying to make the argument that The Passion is not something Christians should abhor, and you're really making very difficult." Oh well, you gotta take the good with the bad when you embrace a deregulated religious marketplace, even if the bad really does suck.

Homosexuality and Sex Ratios

I haven't been following the debate over homosexual marriage in San Francisco, but I have been reading up on sex ratios and their effect on marriage markets. I've been thinking about possibly pursuing the following idea: that drug laws are causing the high rates of illegitimacy and female head of households in African-American communities by reducing the supply of marriageable black males to the market for marriage. This puts women, in the market, at a disadvantage. They are now competing for fewer marriageable men, which means they are being forced to pay higher prices for these men. When you consider that the men removed from the population via violence and incarceration may very well be the population's best - not worst - men, it means women are paying higher prices, either in terms of settling for less quality men, or by paying higher prices for those same men. (My argument is that these removed men could be the community's best, because they are the community's risk-takers and most enterprising).

What might high prices for women mean? Maybe it means things like men no longer having to commit, at the margin, since more women are willing to compromise, at the margin. Couple this with government welfare policies which aid lower income, pregnant females with housing and aid, then you maybe this is driving some, if not most, of the persistent problems concerning long-term wage inequality, high crime rates, and family composition (ie, female head of household) within lower income, African-American communities. The theory is the easy part; it's testing this that's going to be hard.

But it made me wonder - practically speaking, what might the effect of legislated homosexual marriage have? You'd likely see an increase in the number of homosexual matches, since the current legislation forbidding it probably does raise the costs of homosexual matching somewhat. You might see less promiscuity among homosexuals, too, since they enter into a binding legal contract with one another in which they are jointly produce and share family income. That makes divorce sticky, and so insofar as there are social advantages to this, it might be an improvement to the current situation.

But I was also wondering if you might see it affecting the heterosexual marriage market, as well. Are men substitutes for women? I posed the following question to my class: assume an island in which 100 men lived and 100 women lived, and this island went to war. To build its army, the island relied exclusively on a draft which drew out of the population exactly 50 men. These men are all killed and are not replaced (no immigration allowed). What would happen? We talked about it and some interesting suggestions were made. The price of men rises due to the shift in supply, and the number of marriages decreases. But what does "price" mean in this context. One student said maybe women are having to settle for lower quality males - he called this the "Bubba effect." There's more "Bubba's," relative to the entire male population. Another student threw out polygamy, which was interesting. In periods where polygamy prospered, were the sex ratios imbalanced? When they decline, do you see a balancing out of the sex ratios? It was an interesting question. And then one student humorously said, "Maybe you'd see substitution effects." Meaning, women would start matching with one another due to the shift in the supply of men. We all snickered, but it got me thinking. Freud actually reports this phenemon happening. In prisons, males who were historically heterosexual will voluntarily (and involuntarily) become practicing homosexuals. This behavior will cease once they re-enter the civilian population. There are also anecdotal tales of this happening on submarines. This is mainly an empirical question, though. My guess is that most men and women do not consider men and women substitutes. But still, I'd be interested in testing that.

Christianity and the Movies

Interesting article on Christians and movies at CT. Thanks to Billy Crawford (smile) for sending it my way.

Movie Books

Dang! Lake County Shop has every single book on the movie industry that you can imagine. Going through the first 100 titles, I found six or seven books for the "beginner" that will be of real value (I hope) in helping me better understand this industry. That's been one of the chief barriers for studying this so far. I cannot get my head around how the business is actually organized, how the profits are measured, nor have I seen precise distribution and talent contracts. But it looks like there's a lot on this in here.

Arthus de Vany in the New Yorker

The New Yorker has an interesting article about the work of economist, Arthur de Vany. I just discovered who de Vany is around thirty minutes ago, because Dr. Kamerschen left an article about one recent study of his on my desk. But I'm learning quickly that he's one of the only people to have done work in the economics of film. In that thirty minutes, I've bought his book, just published by Routledge in January 2004, and am trying to get my hands on some of his publications. This is kind of encouraging. The other day I said to myself, "You know, Scott, the fact that no other economist is even peripheally interested in the motion picture industry should probably be considered a strong sign that there's nothing there." Yet, I know there's a lot in that industry that would make it very appropriate for an economist to study - there's the central role of uncertainty in the success of films, there's the pricing of tickets at the exhibitor level, there's various antitrust issues, there's the effect of rating boards on the quality of film, there's the question about the returns to awards. There's a lot of things which strike me as definitely important and worth pursuing. They just seem, like everything, heavier than my capabilities can lift. As de Vany points out, the economics of film is very complicated. Still, this is kind of encouraging. At the least, it means that I can ignore that little comment my brain made to me last week. I'm going to talk to Kamerschen today about doing some kind of event study on the film industry - specifically trying to measure the returns to Oscar wins. I think what I need right now is to just work on simple empirical problems for a while. While this isn't that, it at least will get me handling data, specifying models, and working with Stata. That, I continue to believe, is key for me right now.

Film Economics

I just ordered this book, Hollywood Economics: How Extreme Uncertainty Shapes the Film Industry, by Arthur S. de Vany. I also found this bibliography of de Vany's research in the area. A recent study from 2002 looks very similar to something that I had posted earlier about the possible effects that MPAA ratings had had on the types of films produced (which was based on something Gary North had said in his review of Finding Nemo). The name of the article is "Does Hollywood Make Too Many R-Rated Movies? Risk, Stochastic Dominance and the Illusion of Expectation," and appeared in the Journal of Business (which, much to my frustration, despite being a major finance journal, does not appear in Jstor.). The content of the short article is printed below.

According to a 2002 paper, the motion picture rating "R" might as well stand for "risky."

Authors De Vany and Walls analyzed industry data for the period 1985-1996. They noted, first and foremost, that forecasting returns for movies is difficult, concluding that it's an "illusion" to believe that accurate predictions of box office sales are possible.

Nonetheless, the data did suggest a few important insights. The first is that returns on R-rated movies are approximately 5 times as risky as on other kinds of movies.

This leads to the second insight, which is that R-rated movies were (at the time of the analysis) an uneconomically high proportion of the portfolio of Hollywood studio releases. R-rated movies, on average, earned about the same return -- U.S. theatrical revenues divided by production costs -- as, say, G-rated movies. But the authors show that this was a statistical mirage, as among R-rated moviesa a handful of blockbusters skewed the average for the whole category. In fact, the probability of an R-rated movie earning three times its production costs was approximately one-half that of R-rated movies in the period.

The source is: De Vany and Walls, "Does Hollywood Make Too Many R-Rated Movies? Risk, Stochastic Dominance, and the Illusion of Expectation," (Journal of Business, vol. 75, no. 3).

Blah

I realized yesterday that when something is said on a blog, it is public knowledge. I learned this by the worst kind of lesson imaginable. Of course, the discipline of blogging should be no different from conversation, in general, for the Christian. Simply put: you should always build people up, not subtly or not-so-subtly tear them down with your words. God is good if he humiliates you when you did the latter.

Our spring break begins this weekend, at which point Paige and I will be driving to Memphis to see my parents. I can't wait; she can't wait; Miles can't wait. My cat, Jack, probably could wait as he always throws up in the car on long drives, and therefore will definitely not be making this journey with us. He will instead stay here and be cared for by strangers who will come by periodically to let him out of the house to run around with his new friend, "Garfield," the neighboring tomcat.

Stewart Davenport, a recently minted historian from Yale now teaching at Pepperdine, has a dissertation on economics and religion that might interest one occasional reader. I don't know anything about whether it'll be published soon or not. But the abstract sounded very interesting.

Oscar Effect

What I think would be interesting is to determine the marginal effect of winning an Oscar in one of the six to seven major categories (Best Director, Picture, Actor, Actress, Supporting, Screenplay) on box office rentals. Box Office Mojo has all the data. In fact, the data is fantastic. You could look at this over several years, going back to 1982 (before 1982, BOM's data gets a little more sketchy). For instance, Monster and Return of the King were both released within a week of one another. M was released on Christmas Eve, and RotK was released a couple of days earlier. But RotK was released to approximately 3700 theaters, while M was released, initially, to only 4 theaters. M added theaters slowly. It picked up a dozen in the next week, then a few more, then gradually it grew until a month and a half later, it was playing at 1000 theaters. Now, I would expect M to get more mileage for its Best Actress-Charlize Theron winning than for RotK sweeping the entire race, only because at this point, still relatively speaking, hardly anyone has seen M. Yet, RotK has been viewed extensively over the last two months, and looks read to bow out. So I'm not entirely sure how to do a study like this. I imagine it'd be something like an event study, though, similar to what finance people ("peeps") do. Maybe this is something I could bring up to my IO professor as a possible project. I kind of just want an excuse to do something with BOM's dataset. Maybe measuring the marginal effect of a Oscar win (as well as an Oscar nomination) on box office receipts would be the way to go. Mesh had mentioned elsewhere that one of the main ways the Oscar nod is a premium is actually in the secondary market - in DVD sales and rentals. That's where there's a long effect on Oscars. But, the problem is that I imagine that data is a headache to get, whereas BOM is all laid out, nice and pretty, and at least as far actually getting the data is concerned, wouldn't require me to go through all the headaches I went through last semester when I was trying to get data on clergy wages. Ugh, what a horrible experience that was. Just thinking about that topic makes me ill. The only good thing to come out of that failed study was the title of an incomplete paper - "Left Behind: Relative Wage Changes in the Market for Clergy." About a handful of people probably would've even found that funny, including myself, but boy did I laugh about that title for days. It made up for the fact that I had a theory that I never could test.

Box Office Mojo

This is one of the more interesting pages on Box Office Mojo. It's their "alltime records" page. If you just go through and look at the months, you can see top thirty films of all time. It makes you wonder the strategizing that goes into setting release dates. What is it, really, about May that makes it such an important month for blockbusters? Is it school ending, like I suggested? I mean, teenagers and schoolage children are a big demographic, and as real incomes have grown over the past thirty to forty years, presumably disposable income within families have grown. More than likely, that translates into higher allowances for teens and tweens. So this might explain why you see these changes in release patterns over time. I don't know, but I think that it was beginning with Jaws that the potential of the "summer blockbuster" was realized. But I wonder to what degree did that date just sit there, untapped? A year, two years, ten years, fifty years? How long before Hollywood realized that they could take advantage of whatever factors existed during these beginning weeks of summer? Reading Biskind's book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, I get the sense that everyone was a bit surprised by the strength of Jaws during its run.

Box Office Results II

Josiah asked me about the breakdown of revenues according to theater counts, and I thought I'd post those numbers up here, too. The Passion appeared on approximately 700 fewer theaters than LoTR, yet grossed more in five days by a margin of $1 million. When you consider the fact that LoTR appears to have had the advantage, this is incredible. For instance, LoTR was PG-13; Passion was R. LoTR benefited enormously from the two previous movies, as well as being released at Christmas where kids are not in school. Passion was embroiled in controversy for five to six months, which helped market it in the same way that the two previous LoTR did for Return of the King, but it was also dealing with schooldays, as well as other things that probably make February, in general, a far less bankable month than summer and Christman weekends (I just can't think of them offhand). And Jeannette points out the season of Lent probably is driving some of this, too. I agree with her on that, and I expect that Easter will also be a big date for the way in which the church season generates interest in a certain kind of subject matter. Still, it's the overall delivery of the film that - abstracting from the controversy and the craft of the film - that is what I think is worth noticing. They used grassroots campaigning, carefully selected prescreenings among church leaders and conservative pundits, and a release strategy that took advantage of Lent to help drive this movie. This allowed them to forego spending on marketing. They spent $15 million on marketing, while Return of the King spent $50 million. Yet, in the end, the effect was the same - everyone was talking about this film. Anyway, here are those numbers:

Passion: it opened in 3,006 theaters. It was averaging $8,800 per theater for Wednesday, $4,917 for Thursday, $7,500 for Friday, $10,800 for Saturday, and $9,150 for Sunday.

Revenue per theater, daily
Return of the King: it opened on 3,703 theaters. It was averaging lower revenue per theater: $9,000 for the opening Wednesday, $4500 for Thursday, $5900 for Friday, $7400 for Saturday, and $6200 for Sunday

Spiderman: it opened in 3,615 theaters. It was averaging the following revenue per theater: $10,091 for Friday, $12,067 for Saturday, $8,801 for Sunday, $3,052 for Monday, and $2,756 for Tuesday.

Total Averages after five days
The Passion: $41,000 per theater

LoTR: $33,513 per theater

Spiderman: $37,576 per theater

Box Office Results

They adjusted the weekend estimates, and The Passion actually grossed $8 million more than previous reported. The final, actual tally was $125,185,971. This has it beating Return of the King, which took in $124,100,534 over the similar Wednesday-to-Sunday cycle. It's still not the fastest grossing over the first five day period, though. I think that may belong to Spiderman, which grossed $135,840,755 after its first five days. But Spiderman and LoTR too both were facing a different weekend. This was a February weekend - one which historically has not been correlated with "big blockbuster" openings. Previously, Hannibal had the record for largest weekend opening. But The Passion blew it out of the water. But Spiderman and LoTR both were appearing during blockbuster weekends - Spiderman as summer was beginning, and LoTR during Christmas. That's not to diminish the achievements of those films (in terms of their revenues, not craft), but just a reminder to keep The Passion's grosses in perspective.

Sports Economics

Craig Adken has an interesting hypothesis:

Upcoming Paper: I am looking into team salaries and team performance after naming rights are sold. Economic theory suggests that if team owners try to maximize utility in wins then team salaries and/or wins should increase after naming rights are sold as the team owner tries to get more wins. Most sports economists (including me) have come to the conclusion that team owners care a heck of a lot more about profits than winning. Therefore, team owners who maximize profit should not spend a dime more on salaries/wins, ceteris paribus, after selling naming rights...paper is in the works, look for it by the end of March."