As an amateur socioeconomist, I've recognized that there is an assumption that is made by economists and development experts, but rarely stated explicitly: that there is a nice clear set of principles governing nation-level material betterment, a kind of socioeconomic answer to the three laws of thermodynamics. In his draft of The Success of Development, Charles Kenny verbalizes it, and names the eight countries that have at least quadrupled their economies from 1929 to 1988: Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Italy, Norway, Finland, Bulgaria, and the USSR. Tell me what the common thread is there.
Though such laws may exist, we haven't found them yet. After all, how many American economists even saw the recession coming in our own economy? The assumption (or hope) that such laws do exist I think comes from our sense of an orderly unvierse, as well as our sense of fairness; i.e., if country A tried it and it worked, and the world is fair, then it should work for country B as well.
What's becoming increasingly clear to me is that institutions and culture matter, and they're highly stochastic. The accidents of history ensure that development is incredibly substrate-dependent. For example: by this argument, even if China were the same size as Japan, and never had a communist government, what worked for Japan would not have worked for China. This is to illustrate my point and I recognize it's not a testable hypothesis, so over the course of the next few months I'll be asking questions that try to quantify gauge the impact of culture on economics. For example, what impact does the cultural aversion to debt (or lack thereof) have on economic growth and cycles? Beyond ensuring basic necessities, does the relation between wealth and happiness (or the impact of positional goods) change between cultures? What effect does media and Gini have, and does this differ between cultures? These questions are important if the whole project of economic growth and the search for human happiness are to be realized.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Presidential Approval Over Time
There's not a lot of non-intuitive information in this graph, except I did find it interesting that revelations of torture apparently don't damage national opinion of Bush (click to expand).
It would be interesting to look at approval urban vs. rural, to see the split widen, although again I don't think presenting the information this way would provide new insights.
It would be interesting to look at approval urban vs. rural, to see the split widen, although again I don't think presenting the information this way would provide new insights.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Islamic China
The Chinese population policy has created a surplus of males, and this is a demographic time bomb. Simply put, lots of unoccupied, unmarried young males in any one place means trouble. The linked article focuses on the human rights ramifications, in terms of the commodification of women, but I have another concern. Combine the overabundance of males with China's policies encouraging emigration to the West (by already-poor and uneducated rural workers) and we have a great recipe: unmarried, poor, marginalized young men (many of whom will go back and forth to their home province) in an area where Islam is already the dominant religion, despite the efforts of the CCP to squash it.
Could West China become the next breeding ground for extremist Islam? I suspect that we would be seeing this already, far in excess of what we've already seen with spotty incidents of Uighur militarism, if not for China's oppressive policies with regard to religion. I'm not a fan of those policies, and in any event if we're going to see a new recruiting ground for disenfranchised Islamists in western China, I'm not sure that such policies would stop it anyway.
Could West China become the next breeding ground for extremist Islam? I suspect that we would be seeing this already, far in excess of what we've already seen with spotty incidents of Uighur militarism, if not for China's oppressive policies with regard to religion. I'm not a fan of those policies, and in any event if we're going to see a new recruiting ground for disenfranchised Islamists in western China, I'm not sure that such policies would stop it anyway.
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Can Humans See Bubbles Coming?
The most underreported story of the decade is that so few seemingly smart people who spend their time thinking about economics didn't see the bubble coming.
There were several odd moments in this decade where economists realized that for the first time, consumer demand (for houses and everything else) was driving or damaging growth. Have we become so wealthy that our individual incomes are driving these cycles? Clearly not - consumer power was predicated on credit.
What's not clear is that we could have seen it coming, or that the people who claim to aren't just doomsayers who, like broken clocks, are bound to be right eventually. Bubbles are like a cognitive closure principle of economics - if we could clearly see them coming and understand the cascade leading up to them, they wouldn't happen.
Which leaves us with how to avoid them in the future. If such things as depressions are predictable in principle (even if not by the legacy system of meat inside our skulls) then we could conceivably commission economists and programmers to put together an expert system to stand guard and warn us of impending calamity, unencumbered by the madness of crowds that keps us all from seeing what's coming. But if Tolstoy's aphorism about unhappy families all being unhappy in a different way also applies to unhappy economies - as it seems to - then the only thing to be done is to accept that economic crashes are part of the human condition.
There were several odd moments in this decade where economists realized that for the first time, consumer demand (for houses and everything else) was driving or damaging growth. Have we become so wealthy that our individual incomes are driving these cycles? Clearly not - consumer power was predicated on credit.
What's not clear is that we could have seen it coming, or that the people who claim to aren't just doomsayers who, like broken clocks, are bound to be right eventually. Bubbles are like a cognitive closure principle of economics - if we could clearly see them coming and understand the cascade leading up to them, they wouldn't happen.
Which leaves us with how to avoid them in the future. If such things as depressions are predictable in principle (even if not by the legacy system of meat inside our skulls) then we could conceivably commission economists and programmers to put together an expert system to stand guard and warn us of impending calamity, unencumbered by the madness of crowds that keps us all from seeing what's coming. But if Tolstoy's aphorism about unhappy families all being unhappy in a different way also applies to unhappy economies - as it seems to - then the only thing to be done is to accept that economic crashes are part of the human condition.
Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Have There Been More Air Accidents Recently?
No. According to the Aircraft Crashes Record Office (the international record-keeper for these statistics), the number of air accidents recently (at least in 2008) is the same or lower as the average for the last ten years:
Note that these are acccidents, not deaths, although the death trend is similar. It would be a little more scientific to look at accidents per flight. Fine; the number of flights per year from 2007 to now is going to be basically flat, or maybe even slightly lower owing to the recession.
Originally I was going to post something investigating a possible relationship between the recession and the uptick in accident, but I can't do that because there is no uptick. It certainly seems like there have been more accidents, or I wouldn't have asked the question(and "more plane crashes lately" wouldn't pop right up in the Google search box). Maybe there have been more in the developed world or in the U.S.? The FAA doesn't have statistics for 2009 yet, so instead I went to planecrashinfo.com's database. Their overall-accident statistics are lower than ARCO's by a factor of 2.4 (on average for the period 2000-2008) but we can still see a trend, if there is one:
For the 2009 figures, I extrapolated events through 3 June (22, 9, and 4 resp.) out to a 365-day year. "Industrialized world" was all accidents in Australia, British Virgin Islands, Canada, France, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Macedonia, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, the UK and the US.
Still no clear trend. What could be at the root of this sense of more crashes? More mediagenic crashes, which could mean crashes with more fatalities or with more famous victims, though that's hard to quantify.
| Year | Accidents |
| 2000 | |
| 2001 | |
| 2002 | |
| 2003 | |
| 2004 | |
| 2005 | |
| 2006 | |
| 2007 | |
| 2008 |
Note that these are acccidents, not deaths, although the death trend is similar. It would be a little more scientific to look at accidents per flight. Fine; the number of flights per year from 2007 to now is going to be basically flat, or maybe even slightly lower owing to the recession.
Originally I was going to post something investigating a possible relationship between the recession and the uptick in accident, but I can't do that because there is no uptick. It certainly seems like there have been more accidents, or I wouldn't have asked the question(and "more plane crashes lately" wouldn't pop right up in the Google search box). Maybe there have been more in the developed world or in the U.S.? The FAA doesn't have statistics for 2009 yet, so instead I went to planecrashinfo.com's database. Their overall-accident statistics are lower than ARCO's by a factor of 2.4 (on average for the period 2000-2008) but we can still see a trend, if there is one:
| Year | Accidents, World | Industrialized World | U.S. Accidents |
| 2000 | |||
| 2001 | |||
| 2002 | |||
| 2003 | |||
| 2004 | |||
| 2005 | |||
| 2006 | |||
| 2007 | |||
| 2008 | |||
| 2009 |
For the 2009 figures, I extrapolated events through 3 June (22, 9, and 4 resp.) out to a 365-day year. "Industrialized world" was all accidents in Australia, British Virgin Islands, Canada, France, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Macedonia, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, the UK and the US.
Still no clear trend. What could be at the root of this sense of more crashes? More mediagenic crashes, which could mean crashes with more fatalities or with more famous victims, though that's hard to quantify.
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