The 2,500 year experiment with solid currency
This article in The New York Times focuses on cash in terms of paper currency, but the lessons are generalizable to coinage as well, which pre-dates paper currency by 1,500 years. Some fascinating numbers:
…In 1970, at the dawn of plastic payment…
The future as India?
I had the same reaction as Kevin Drum to this story, In India, Dynamism Wrestles With Dysfunction. Drum says: Basically, Gurgaon has turned into something from a dystopian science fiction novel: an archipelago of self-contained corporate mini-cities that provide their own power, water, sewage, transit, postal service, schools, medical care, and security force. Meanwhile, everything […]
The housing bubble vs. the financial crisis
In the mid-2000s many regular folks knew that something was weird in housing. Of course everyone was aware that there was a short term windfall to be made if you could flip. But there were normal discussions about the bubble, and when it would burst, o…
“Gross national happiness” in numbers
Bhutan famously espouses “gross national happiness”:
The term “gross national happiness” was coined in 1972 by Bhutan’s former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who has opened Bhutan to the age of modernization, soon after the…
Against the “Thinking Machines”
Steve Hsu points me to this essay which discusses ‘high-frequency trading’, How to Make Money in Microseconds. This might elicit a takfir from my friends at the Singularity Institute, but that piece makes me less ill-disposed to a Butlerian…
Against the “Thinking Machines”
Steve Hsu points me to this essay which discusses ‘high-frequency trading’, How to Make Money in Microseconds. This might elicit a takfir from my friends at the Singularity Institute, but that piece makes me less ill-disposed to a Butlerian…
Building a harmonious society through genomics
Dan Vorhaus points me to this Newsweek feature on BGI. My friend Steve Hsu gets some face time in the piece:
…Last year, pharmaceutical giant Merck announced plans for a research collaboration with BGI, as the Chinese company’s revenue hit $150…
Can biologists admit they are wrong?
Jason Collins, an economist strongly grounded in biological principles, has a post up in response to Mike the Mad Biologist’s critique of economic misunderstandings of biology. Jason asks:
On the flip side, did Dawkins or Gould (or their respecti…
In praise of the House of Habsburg!
One of the most annoying aspects of the post-Westphalian era is the conceit that all national administrative units are equivalent in some deep fundamental sense. So, for example, you get comparisons of per capita income for nations, and Luxembourg and…
Marketplace of the Gods: How Economics Explains Religion
Link to review: The dismal gods
The Axial Age & world population
A few days ago Robin Hanson brought this chart of world population to my attention: On the x-axis you have time, 12,000 years ago to the present. On the y-axis an estimate of the total world population log-transformed. The data is derived from the US Census low estimate. Granting the data’s accuracy for the purposes […]
Which nations think over the long term
One of the major parameters which shape individual success, and macroeconomic growth in the aggregate, is time preference. Time preference basically measures an individual’s future-time orientation. Would you for example take $1,000 in the present, or wait 30 days and accept $1,500 dollars? It doesn’t need to be money, children can exhibit time preference as […]
Was the medieval European peasant wealthier than an African?
Medieval England Twice as Well Off as Today’s Poorest Nations:
The figure of $400 annually (as expressed in 1990 international dollars) is commonly is used as a measure of “bare bones subsistence” and was previously believed to be the average income in England in the middle ages.
However the University of Warwick led researchers found that English […]
Men at work: hoes, ploughs, and steel
Ancient Egyptian farmer ploughing a field
Recently several weblogs have pointed to a new working paper on the role of plough-based agriculture vs. hoe-based agriculture in shaping cultural expectations about male and female labor force participation specifically, and the differentiation of gender roles more generally. My first reaction was: “doesn’t everyone know this already?” I am […]
Tariffs, not trade?
In the the 19th century the Democratic party, rooted in large part among Southern planters who were dependent on exports of commodities and imports of finished goods, was the party of free trade. The northern Whigs, and later the Republicans, were the party of tariffs. They were the faction which drew support from the industry […]
Relative & absolute perceptions of well being
I asked this on twitter, but no one responded. If you had to choose between two scenarios, which would you choose:
– A world population of 10 billion where 90% were not malnourished?
– A world population of 500 million were 90% were malnourished?
The first scenario has 2.2 times as many malnourished individuals as the second.
This issue […]
Things are looking up for the world’s poor!
I just listened to a discussion between John Horgan and Madhusree Mukerjee, and the conversation ended on a moderately down note as Mukerjee seemed pessimistic about the prospects for the world’s poor. Where do these people get the idea that things are getting worse? I recall the same sentiment from Massimo Pigliucci. These are people […]
Third World means nothing now
I recently had an exchange on twitter about the term “Third World” (starting from a tweet pointing to the idea of “Third World America”). Here’s Wikipedia on the origins of the term:
The term ‘Third World’ arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned or not moving at all with either capitalism and […]
Investing in a nanny state for social returns
Jonah Lehrer has a post up, How Preschool Changes the Brain over at Frontal Cortex. He reports on a paper, Investing in our young people, which has been around for about 5 years. The top line of it is this, an investment in a $2,500/year (inflation adjusted) pre-school program in the early 1960s seems to […]
The rise (and fall?) of second-tier lingua francas
The New York Times has an interesting piece, As English Spreads, Indonesians Fear for Their Language. It is dense with the different strands of this story. Basically, upper and upper middle class Indonesians are switching from Bahasa Indonesian to English to give their children a leg up, and are sending their children to English-medium schools. […]