He has plenty of people to shout down people like these lunatics who claim to believe he’s a psychotic commie-Nazi, but here ya go:
Print out a high-res version and and stick it up in your local creche, why dontcha.
I also like Brad DeLong’s analysis:
Q: What is the Geithner Plan?
A: The Geithner Plan is a trillion-dollar operation by which the U.S. acts as the world’s largest hedge fund investor, committing its money to funds to buy up risky and distressed but probably fundamentally undervalued assets and, as patient capital, holding them either until maturity or until markets recover so that risk discounts are normal and it can sell them off–in either case at an immense profit.
Q: What if markets never recover, the assets are not fundamentally undervalued, and even when held to maturity the government doesn’t make back its money?
A: Then we have worse things to worry about than government losses on TARP-program money–for we are then in a world in which the only things that have value are bottled water, sewing needles, and ammunition.
The rest of it is genuinely insightful, if not as funny/terrifying.
My favourite analysis of the credit crunch so far comes from commenter Njorl on the Geithner plan to kick-start a market for toxic financial assets:
Consider a bunch of guys selling meatball sandwiches from carts. Some of them have purchased tainted beef and made some of their meatballs with it. How much is a meatball sandwich worth?
I don’t need a meatball sandwich so badly that I’ll pay even a penny for one of those.
If you know that the sandwich is ok, it’s relative value shoots up.
If you can tell a good meatball from a bad one, you can buy the sandwich and toss the bad meatball.
If you know a cart has nothing but untainted meatballs, the value of the whole cartload goes up dramatically.
When you think all of the tainted meat is gone, people will buy sandwiches again. Many will have a bit of tainted meat, but only enough to make them queasy, not dead.
If all food is tainted meatballs, we eat the guys who own the carts.
I’ve found the Irish Economy blog useful too. This graph of theirs speaks pretty loudly:
I think that’s what economists call an ‘oh shit’ moment.
In the pub last night I mentioned a coupla interesting Paul Krugman articles without quite managing to communicate what is interesting about them. The first is his pioneering opus ‘The Theory of Interstellar Trade‘:
This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer travelling with the goods than to a stationary observer. a solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved. This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics.
The second is this piece from 1991 discussing his major breakthroughs in economic theory and why most people who are not economists wouldn’t consider them major breakthroughs at all. Krugman readily supplies a certain amount of ammunition for the Post-Autistic Economics set by ‘fessing up to the fact that economists ‘just don’t see what we can’t formalize’. I think economists as a profession would probably meet with a lot less criticism if they followed Krugman’s lead in being more open about the limits of their analysis, with his interstellar providing another nice example:
To conclude this section, we should say something about the assumption that the trading planets lie in the same inertial frame. This will turn out to be a useful simplification, permitting us to limit ourselves to consideration of special relativity. It is also a reasonable approximation for those planets with which we are likely to trade. Readers may, however, wish to use general relativity to extend the analysis to trade between planets with large relative motion. This extension is left as an exercise for interested readers because the author does not understand the theory of relativity, and therefore cannot do it himself.
Here’s a great way you can get your hands on a brand new Ferrari…
It being Africa Day, it naturally poured rain in London today, so I stayed in instead and faffed around online.
And finally, some sage advice from Sesame Street and a cast of thousands (Jeremys Iron!)
According to the Center for Global Development, Ireland ranks only behind Sweden in terms of positive policies towards development in Africa.
The index attempts to quantify the impact on development of a range of policies, not just the usuals like aid and trade but also policies on migration, the environment, security and so on. Ireland does well in large part because of its contribution to peacekeeping in Africa.
A few things I’ve been reading / listening to recently, all from America:
In ‘Clogged Arteries‘, Bruce Katz and Robert Puentes say transport funding in the US has been spread too thinly and not targeted towards the congested cities where it can do most good. They link this overly-egalitarian approach to the proliferation of ‘earmarks’ in federal transportation legislation, ie the ‘everyone gets a new highway’ approach to consensus-building.
In this speech (see also here and here), Jonathan Kozol attacks (among other things) unequal public school funding: New York City spends $11,000 per child in public schools, compared to $19,000 in nearby suburbs and $22,000 on Long Island, never mind the fact that children in the city tend to come from more problematic backgrounds. Much of this disparity is due to the funding of local schools from local property taxes with little redistribution according to needs.
In ‘The Inherited Ghetto‘, Patrick Sharkey describes the forces varying from outright to indirect discrimination that have contributed to the ongoing racial segregation of residential America. Notably, the response to the growing economic marginalisation of blacks in urban areas due to industrial decline and middle class flight to the suburbs was not to try and regenerate cities but to institute mass incarceration.
Finally, in ‘A Level Playing Field for Cities‘, Ed Glaeser gives a handy summary of how these issues fit together:
While we should be encouraging development in dense, urban areas that use less energy, many of our policies work exactly in the wrong direction. Our land use restrictions push development away from dense areas, with plenty of NIMBY-ist neighbors, toward empty spaces with fewer noisy abutters. Our transportation policies fail to charge people for the full social costs of driving long distances on crowded highways. Our localized school system encourages prosperous parents to flee urban poverty.
I think there’s a fairly different approach to these kind of issues in England, which seems to have smaller spatial inequalities and greater concern over ‘postcode lotteries’ in public services and the like. The absence of a legacy of extreme racism may have a lot to do with this, but I’d also link it to the much greater centralisation of government and public finance in England. I’ve tended to see this a bad thing as it reduces local government’s incentive and ability to pro-actively develop their area, but it does have the effect of smoothing out inequalities - obviously by greater redistribution, but also in a prior sense in that when services are funded by local taxes the incentive to surround yourself with rich people and keep as far away from poor people as possible is that much stronger. It’s also worth noting that Glaeser criticises American land use restrictions of the ‘maximum density’ type, while restrictions on sprawl (which I believe he also dislikes) have arguably contributed to the relatively good performance of English cities.
Anyway, these issues clearly have ramifications beyond economics and local government finance. If I had the academic chops I’d like to try and write something about it all under the general heading of ’spatial justice’ (as compared to ’social justice’) that also brought in issues of political and environmental rights, but I don’t really have a clue where to start.
If you’re at all interested in economics, history, or economic history, I can heartily recommend listening to Brad DeLong’s lectures from the past semester at Berkeley which you can get here (iTunes podcast link here). The early ones on colonization and industrialization are probably best for brilliant tangents (e.g. the story of how the Kaiping coal mine in late 19th century China was threatened by an edict from state officials who complained that the digging was rousing the earth dragon which in turn disturbed the repose of the late empress buried nearby) while of the later ones I’d suggest this if you ever wanted to find out what monetarism is without being bored to tears.
No schwellenangst from Boris Johnson:
I don’t want to see metopes with centaurs and amazons on every entablature.
But why is it that mass housing once regularly incorporated human, animal or vegetable images - art of one kind or another - and yet we offer the buyer nothing of the kind today?
It doesn’t need to be much - just some visible point of pride - to satisfy what the Germans call the Schmuckbedurfnis - the lust for ornament.
Schmuckbedurfnis! That’s pretty good. Shame about the rest of the speech. FWIW, I think there are two main reasons new housing is generally pretty low-quality. Firstly, everyone’s so desperate to buy they’re grateful just to get on the ‘ladder’ and as a result aren’t as picky as they should be. Second, the highly skilled manual labour that produced the beautifully made Georgian and Victorian terraces Boris loves just isn’t available anymore in the plentiful quantities and / or at the relatively low cost it was back then. Most manufacturing or artisan jobs have disappeared save for some top-end niche producers, but even if somebody in China could churn out masses of attractive stucco cornicing nobody’s going to bother shipping it over here. The same goes for any number of internal or external markers of design or quality of finished product, and your averagely-priced new modern home suffers as a result. Increases in building costs already outpace general inflation, God knows what it would look like if it was actually adjusted for quality.
This argument is a bit too convenient for the many developers out there who are fundamentally imaginative and not punished for it, however, and I suspect standard designs would improve pretty fast if people started being a lot more picky about what they buy / rent.
* We need a long German word for Fellowship Of Long German Word Aficionados …
I took a cab yesterday, and as usual had to bargain with the driver. Taxis here are the acme of blunt, obvious cheating. It happens every time you get in a taxi, without fail. The meter is always covered, and you have to argue with the driver to turn it on, which works very rarely (twice in the last two years). Normally, you agree a price before setting off. This price is invariably more than the metered fare would be, but it seems to be informally regulated. You can bargain, and I have found that opening the door to get out, mid-haggle, works quite well.
In this particular cab, I did just that, and it got 500 fils (about €1.75) taken off the price of three Dinars. It was still probably a Dinar too much, but nevermind, you have to take the rough with the smooth. Demanding the meter be turned on didn’t work. The driver explained that he had picked me up from a mall, so the normal rules didn’t apply. I smiled and said “Of course.”
At the end of the journey he demanded three dinars, and I gave him two and a half, as agreed. He said “I am driver, give me half KD for Pepsi and Sheesha.” [sic] I gave a grunt of displeasure, and he repeated “I am driver. I am driver.” I don’t know what the logic behind it was, he seemed to be implying that taxi driving is a noble calling, worthy of our greatest respect, and consequent charity. Maybe if they didn’t try to cheat you all the time “I am driver” might carry some weight.
Still, there was an admirable cheekyness to it. If he wasn’t an old Arab, I would have likened him to a Victorian street urchin. A cheeky grin, a coal covered face, and the watches of a hundred gentlemen. Not nearly as contemptible as the cabbie who asked me for two and a half dinars to the destination, turned on the meter, and when it read two and a quarter, whined for the extra 250 fils. He then gave me his card, asked for my business on the return journey. I tore it up.
It’s amazing how irritated you can get over seventy cent.
‘The term ‘income inequality’ is a bit misleading because it suggests in a somewhat pejorative way that the rich are getting richer at the expense of the poor,” Edward Lazear, a Stanford University labor economist who is now chairman of Mr. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, said last May. While it’s a concern that some people are being left behind, he said, “There is some good news…most of the inequality reflects an increase in returns to ‘investing in skills.’”
Mr. Lazear has nurtured his relationship with Mr. Bush. His office is decorated with photos of the two mountain biking. When he gave Mr. Bush a copy of the Economic Report of the President this year, Mr. Bush gave him a bear hug and kissed the top of his bald head, according to people who were present.
Over at the BBC, Evan Davis, the slightly-less-barking economics correspondent, has blogged about a book by Stuart Sutherland. He cites the example of the lost theatre ticket, which is an infuriating piece of narrow thinking, made more annoying by the fact that it tries to point out a “logical fallacy”. I was going to point out its many flaws, but the responses to the post on the BBC did that already.
The notion of irrational systems, if you can call them that, is interesting though. I quite like the idea of the unthinking general throwing more troops at something that isn’t working, which seems quite apt these days.
The question is, though, whether or not you can really understand irrationality rationally. Since to look at the causes of irrational behaviour, we would find it becomes rational by the mere fact that it has causes. I suppose that’s where the theatre ticket example falters. In trying to show the irrationality, it strips away the legitimate motivations for the decision to walk away, which make the decision very rational.
This is part of a press release put out by the Minister for the Environment, Dick Roche, in October last year.
Greens Must Come Clean on their Proposals to Tax Fuel
Dick has called on the Green party to stop prevaricating and started telling the truth about their proposals to put additional tax on petrol, diesel & home heating oil through their proposed carbon taxes.
On a number of occasions over the last week Green party spokespersons have tried to dodge the issue when asked directly precisely how much their carbon tax proposals would cost consumers … Fine Gael & the Labour Party should also make it clear whether they endorsed the madcap Green Party policies. The people have the right to know! Minister Roche said.
But yesterday this appeared on breakingnews.ie.
Minister for the Environment Dick Roche has said he would be in favour of changing the car tax system to one based on emissions rather than engine size.
Yesterday, a major British government report warned consumers would have to accept new green taxes on travel if climate change was to be tackled in the coming decades.
Asked about the matter in Dublin this morning, Mr Roche said he accepted that changes were needed.
“If we actually change the taxation system so that you’re taxing vehicles on the basis of the emissions rather than necessarily on the basis of the cubic capacity of the engine, you can encourage and incentivise people to use, for example, bio-diesel, to use renewable energy sources and to use lower carbon producing sources,” he said.
Dick wouldn’t be advocating some kind of crazy “tax” on “carbon emissions”, or, as some crazy people have called it, a “carbon tax”, would he?
What a madcap policy!
Apart from that, there’s some real gold on the Wicklow Fianna Fail TD’s website including press releases entitled “Fergus O’Dowd discovers he’s FG spokesman on the Environment” and “Dick Hails Groundbreaking Shannon Callows Agreement”.
Cluebat: A metaphorical bat used to ‘beat some sense into’ someone who is blatantly stupid.
As deployed by Chris Dillow in a discussion about insuring against recession.
I’m as open to freakonomical ways of thinking as the next man, but can we stop pretending that economists were the first to uncover the phenomenon of ‘decision-making’, some time in the early years of this decade? See, for example, this really quite daft article by Tim Harford in yesterday’s FT magazine about his lunch with renowned economist Gary Becker. Best bit:
Becker’s approach to problems does not seem to have changed, with costs and benefits never far from his mind. As we head towards La Petite Folie, a French restaurant concealed inside the mall, he devotes some time to explaining the rationale behind choosing this particular eating place. He had originally suggested the University of Chicago’s Quadrangle Club, where I would have been able to observe Becker’s academic colleagues in their natural environment. In the end, though, the quality of the food outweighed all other factors: “I thought we should at least have a decent meal,” the professor says.
Brilliant! Truly we have so much to learn from this daring new science. Becker, who is by the way a very smart man indeed, comes across as distant and rather bored during their lunch, but that doesn’t stop Harford scrutinising everything he does for some trenchant and contrarian insight into the human condition:
The waiter tries again after a decent interval. Becker chooses the scallops and recommends seafood, but I am tempted by the steak. I press him to have some wine. “I’ll have a glass. No more than a glass for me.” Then we discuss whether to have French or Italian mineral water. I vote Italian. He concurs: “I like Italy. I like the Italians. They’re easy.” It is perhaps the only time in our conversation that he chuckles.
I’m afraid the article left me wanting more. How about a movie adaptation? Why, with the right mix of stony silences and statements of the obvious, this could be the sequel that ‘My Dinner with Andre‘ has been waiting for.
So I’ve got my housing blog up and running. But don’t read that, read something much better - David Alexander Smith’s Affordable Housing Institute weblog, which has funnier pictures and great writing (see his series on New New Orleans). Maybe more housing economists should double as sci-fi authors.
And that’s it for housing blogs, really. So I suppose there’s a niche, and I’m not so much exploiting it as snuggling down in there for a nice snooze.
Brad De Long isn’t your typical internationally-respected macroeconomist:
What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been…
Back in the old days–when Donald Luskin, Andrew Sullivan, and Mickey Kaus first decided that there were reputations to be made and Republican brownie-points to be earned by attacking Paul Krugman as “shrill,” and when you could (well, maybe not you, but one, or some of those one might call “one”) using only the suckers of one’s tentacles count us few members of the Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill as we gathered in the night psychotically ululating shrill screeds of Bush hatred at the dead, uncaring stars, having been driven into shrill unholy madness by the incompetence, mendacity, malevolence, and sheer disconnection from reality of George W. Bush and his administration–back in those old days, as I was saying, few would ever have thought that we would ever have the privilege of being led in Evensong here at Order of the Shrill headquarters here at Miskatonic University by tonight’s fine and harmonious quartet, made up of Newsweek’s Howard Fineman, the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, Meet the Press’s Tim Russert, and the New York Times’s John Tierney.
Howard Fineman Is Shrill
Peggy Noonan Is Shrill
Tim Russert Is Shrill
John Tierney Is ShrillWelcome, friends! We are happy to give you your robes and your copies of the Krugmanomicon as we formally induct you into the Order! It’s been a long strange trip, and you are late to the party, but you are very welcome now that you are here!
Now we will sit back and listen as your shrill ululating harmonies fill the sky beneath the dead, uncaring stars with that old favorite melody of Aaaiii! Ph’nglui Mglw’nafh Krugman R’lyeh Wagn’nagl Fhtagn! Aaaiii!!!
I’ve got to admire the conclusion of this lengthy and very involved transcript of a discussion between Masahisa Fujita and Paul Krugman on “the past, present and future of the new economic geography”:
Fujita: … Hence, a fully-fledged treatment of knowledge externalities in cities/industrial districts would require a dynamic framework in which the movement/migration of people, in both the short and long-run, among different places, characterised by different knowledge-fields, plays an essential role. This also implies that the development of such a dynamic framework will greatly contribute to the further development of a new growth theory in space, in which heterogeneous knowledge fields in different cities/regions are endogenously generated and maintained through cyclical migration of knowledge workers. Therefore, as mentioned previously, advancing the micro-foundations of knowledge externalities is critical for further development of the new economic geography.
Krugman : I definitely agree with Masa. There recently appeared several multiregional growth models such as Martin and Ottaviano (1999), Baldwin et al. (2001) and Fujita and Thisse (2002, Chapter 11) in which a core-periphery model is grafted onto a Grossman-Helpman-Romer-type model of endogenous growth.Although the concept of knowledge externalities play a crucial role in such models, its microfoundations are rather weak, leaving plenty of room for further development.
Interlocuter: Speaking of the endogenous formation of knowledge fields, such a concept is closely related with those of social norms and culture. All these concepts are recently very fashionable in geography, regional science as well as in economics.
For example, Paul, in your article, “For Richer?, in The New York Times Magazine (October 20, 2002), you repeatedly mentioned about changing social norms and culture in connection with the growing income divergence in the US. Unfortunately, however, I am unaware of any formal model that can explain the formation and evolution of different social norms and culture in different places. Don’t you think it would be important to develop such formal models in the spatial context?
K: Of course, I agree with you. But, . . .
I: Hey Paul! Why are standing up? Where are you going?
K: Talking under the Caribbean sun for over two hours has literally fuelled my now burning desire to jump into that ocean.
F:Yeah, all I can think of now is to savour this Caribbean moment with a quick dip and a large beer under the cool shade.
K and F (in unison): Hasta la vista!
Sounds of two big splashesI: Well, I guess it’s futile to get the final word on this particular aspect from these two guys. Suffice it to say that the role of social norms and culture is fertile ground for future research. Under less alluring circumstances, I would have had greater success in persuading them to give their pennies worth on the topic, but at the moment, I simply don’t have a chance against the beckoning Caribbean sea. Hey, Paul, Masa!Wait for me!
Another big splash is heard, followed by hearty laughter
With crushing inevitability, Indonesia has started cutting down and burning mind-bogglingly large amounts of forests to replace them with palm oil plantations for biodiesel.
And there was I thinking that all that surplus food we grow and raise could now be replaced by oil seed rape to meet our fuel needs. It does pretty well in our (for now) mild, damp climate, generally inhospitable to everything except cows, sheep and Land Cruisers.
Instead we’ll probably find that it’s cheaper to import biodiesel from countries who are burning natural vegetation and kicking out small farmers to replace them with massive plantations.
It feels a bit like when Monty Burns uses recycled beer-can mesh to trawl for fish.
That’s it, I’m buying a Pajero.
It’s worth subscribing to this monthly digest from the National Bureau of Economic Research if you like concise summaries of interesting economic research of the non-Freakish variety. This month they’ve got bits on international happiness comparisons, the mysterious drop in average incomes in South Africa, and ‘Acting White‘:
In the United States, the academic achievement of the average black child lags that of the average white child at kindergarten entry and the achievement difference grows throughout the school years. A typical black 17 year old reads at the same level as a typical white 13 year old. On the Scholastic Aptitude Test, the average black student scores more than a standard deviation below the average white student. Crafting effective public policies to address the achievement gap requires understanding its causes. Various possibilities have been advanced, including differences in family structure and poverty, differences in school quality, racial bias in testing or teachers’ perceptions, genetics, and differences in peer culture, socialization, or behavior.
In An Empirical Analysis of “Acting White” (NBER Working Paper No. 11334), co-authors Roland Fryer and Paul Torelli find that black and Hispanic students who earn high grades face social costs in terms of their popularity. Fryer and Torelli define “acting white” as any “statistically significant racial differences in the relationship between [student] popularity and grades.” Participants in student focus groups say that a number of behaviors are condemned as “acting white,” including enrollment in honors or advanced placement classes, speaking proper English, wearing the wrong clothes from the wrong stores, or wearing shorts in the winter …
Wearing shorts in winter? WTF?
Here’s the abstract of “The War for the Fare”: How Driver Compensation Affects Bus System Performance. I do love that last line.
Two systems of bus driver compensation exist in Santiago, Chile. Most drivers are paid per passenger transported, while a second system compensates other drivers with a fixed wage. Compared with fixed-wage drivers, per-passenger drivers have incentives to engage in “La Guerra por el Boleto” (”The War for the Fare”), in which drivers change their driving patterns to compete for passengers. This paper takes advantage of a natural experiment provided by the coexistence of these two compensation schemes on similar routes in the same city. Using data on intervals between bus arrivals, we find that the fixed-wage contract leads to more bunching of buses, and hence longer average passenger wait times. The per-passenger drivers are assisted by a group of independent information intermediaries called “sapos” who earn their living by standing at bus stops, recording arrival times, and selling the information to subsequent drivers who drive past. We find that a typical bus passenger in Santiago waits roughly 10% longer for a bus on a fixed-wage route relative to an incentive-contract route. However, the incentives also lead drivers to drive noticeably more aggressively, causing approximately 67% more accidents per kilometer driven. Our results have implications for the design of incentives in public transportation systems.
I impulse purchased ‘Freakonomics’ by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner and, unlike many other impulse book purchases, I managed to read it. That’s because it’s exceptionally easy to read.
Keeping it simple is fine. And yes, there are many assumptions neatly disposed of. Did you know that increased spending on an election campaign has almost no effect on the outcome? I certainly didn’t. Did you want to read that information spread over three pages? Me either.
Before I read this book, I naturally assumed that microeconomics had to look beyond pure formulae to the behaviour and motivations of the people in the systems it examined. So the revelation that microeconomics looks beyond pure formulae to the behaviour and motivations of the people in the systems it examines… wasn’t, really.
Still, it’s no great hardship to read things like this:
The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Crime didn’t keep soaring in the 1990s, money alone doesn’t win elections, and - surprise - drinking eight glasses of water a day has never actually been shown to do a thing for your health. Conventional wisdom is often shoddily formed and devilishly difficult to see through, but it can be done.
And economics is the tool to do it!
… there is nothing like the sheer power of numbers to scrub away layers of confusion and contradiction.
Hmm. I’ve always believed pretty much the exact opposite. Am I wrong?
Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent, depending on who wields it and how.
Well, exactly.
Sometimes ‘Freakonomics’ seems less like an novel way of using economics to explain the world and more like Journalism with Advanced Statistics. Responsible, fair and intelligent use of statistics as well as caution in their treatment has long been advocated for journalists - and anyone else who doesn’t want to look an idiot. David Randall, writing in ‘The Universal Journalist’ in 1996 had this to say:
Far from innumeracy being some badge of literary worth, it is, for the modern journalist, a fatal weakness. If you don’t know enough to question data then you really are impotent as a journalist. Sources play tricks with numbers all the time. Without the rudimentary knowledge to sniff out the bullshit figures, you will have to swallow what sources tell you, and faithfully reproduce it. The result? Your readers are mislead and misinformed, and you look - and, indeed, are - foolish.
Levitt and Dubner aren’t all about you finding out how to sniff out bullshit. They’re all about showing you how great they are at doing it. And they are good.
So I’ll leave the last word to them.
Aviva may be the one modern Hebrew name that is ready to break out: it’s easy to pronounce, pretty, peppy and suitably flexible.
In a great post over at Crooked Timber, Kieran Healy discusses Peter Bearman’s new sociological study, Doormen. Of the many interesting angles the book explores, I particularly liked this application of George Akerlof’s theory of the market for lemons (ie rubbish cars) to the market for friends:
The market for new friends also tends to produce contact with “lemons,? and consequently the common experience is that the first friendships one makes in a new community tend to be short-lived. … Think about the people who have time to meet new people. The less interesting and nice they are, the less likely they are to have friends. Since they have few friends, they have more spare time. … just like cars and apartments, these “lemon? friends tend to circulate rapidly … One of the ironies of friend markets is that while the “lemon? friends could find each other and become friends, their characteristics … are especially unappealing to other boring and intolerant people. So while they meet, they avoid each other.
Important note: Unfortunately, explaining this theory to someone at a party does not make you any less of a lemon - rather the opposite.
Anyway, I suspect that the same thing applies to the singles scene - although there’s obviously some interaction here between the market for lemons (”Hmm, if she’s single, there must be something wrong with her”) and the market for melons (”But she has got big boobs”). More research required, I think.
Moving swiftly on from that, Kieran’s post (and this applies to his stuff in general) is a nice reminder that sociology has something useful to offer in a time when economists (sorry, I mean of course Freakonomists) seem intent on capturing its territory and nicking its ideas. He also traces Bearman’s work all the way back to one of the founders of sociology, Georg Simmel, who could also be relied upon for a pithy remark or two:
Fashion is what we do to make ourselves different from the mass, Simmel argues, yet it induces fads and conformity. As societies differentiate, the people in them become more different from one another but the societies themselves start to look more alike.
Are you a New Puritan?
…if you possess a shred of New Puritanical sensibility you’re likely to think that the big brands - the junk-food peddlers, alcohol promoters, cigarette pushers and even the supermarkets - had it coming. That for too long these kinds of businesses reaped vast profits while riding roughshod over community spirit, public health and morality. The lack of a liberal backlash against increased policing of previously uncontroversial pleasures is significant, too. And it’s a trade-off the New Puritans are clearly willing to make: extra nannying for extra peace of mind.
The term was coined by Jim Murphy of the Future Foundation in a report called The Assault on Pleasure. In keeping with the demands of modernity, contrary to what the title suggests, it is not a passionate philosophical treatise but a consultants’ report.
If you look at the Future Foundation’s website, you get the distinct (and perhaps unsurprising) impression that a description of New Puritans is the first step in deciding how to prise the cash from their clenched fists. But the report, which includes the findings of a ‘national study’, does look beyond statistics to see the obligatory wider malaise.
The ‘assault on pleasure’ seems to be rooted in a myth of decline. Life is not as good as before. Social problems are multiplying and intensifying. Too much individualism and free choice - and certainly too much consumerism - are depleting our stock of spiritual resources…and so on.
And so on indeed. The counter to this poisonous ‘myth of decline’ is presumably to keep believing in the myth of progress. (Or is it?)
This is from the Wikipedia entry on Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPG, catchily):
Farming is a form of playing where a player kills monsters in the game for the money and items that the monster drops. Players who farm usually camp an area, kill monsters as they spawn, collect the loot, and later sell the items to others. Players often dislike this practice because many farmers sell the virtual loot for real money. Farmers can also dominate areas that were intended to be lucrative hunting grounds for lower-level players.
Some cyber cafés allow people to play for free as long as they give a percentage of what they earn in-game to the proprietor of the café who then sells the items for real money. There are even online sweatshops, mainly in China, where people are actually employed to collect in-game items for their employer who then sells them. It is reported that one can make up to USD$100 a day, which is actually better pay than many other jobs in China.
I thought they had to be making that bit about Chinese sweatshops up, but, according to this suitably surreal story from 1up.com, they’re not. Which is really weird. That said, there’s worse work (in fact I think I’ve done worse work), and I suppose it represents progress of a sort, or at least progress in the parting of fools and their money.
As for MMORPG, I like the sound of Kingdom of Loathing:
Players in the game choose from a number of classes:
Seal Clubbers (”Seal Clubbers hail from the frigid Northlands, because one character class always hails from the frigid Northlands”), Turtle Tamers, Pastamancers, Saucerors, Disco Bandits, and Accordion Thieves. Each player has three major attributes: Muscle, which determines strength; Mysticality, which determines magical powers; and Moxie, which corresponds to Agility and Charisma in the mainstream role-playing games. Each class specializes in one of the attributes (Seal Clubbers and Turtle Tamers in Muscle, Pastamancers and Saucerors in Mysticality and Disco Bandits and Accordion Thieves in Moxie). Raising the appropriate attribute sufficiently results in gaining a level.The aim of the game is to adventure in different areas, encountering monsters, hobos, evil food, and other such things and collecting items and meat (which is the in-game currency) until one has the prowess to take on the Naughty Sorceress.
