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.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Metal as a Meme
Metal seems to have greater potential as a meme than classical music. Musical tropes are often used as examples of memes and as the starting point for discussing exactly what a meme is. (e.g., is Beethoven's Fifth Symphony a meme, or just the four-note da-da-da-dum that literate Westerners would recognize?)
The key is in how the meme is reproduced process. In classical music, you put on a CD or go to a concert, and for two days you're walking around humming "da-da-da-dum" - but does anybody else hear you and get infected? No. Of course, the same is true of that new metal CD you just bought. The difference is that someone who listens to a lot of metal is far more likely to pick up an instrument and make their own metal. When was the last time someone who listened to Bartok ran out to buy a violin? You could make an argument that this happens because people who listen to metal are on average younger and more impressionable, partly because of the parts of the brain that metal affects. As an aside, at 35, I'm sad to say I'm developing an immunity to its charms, though I've fought this seeming inevitability for several years now.
Fear not, classical music enthusiasts. Classical music isn't going anywhere, at least right away, because it has prestige value, and a wealthier (older) audience, and an established academy to produce musicians. But the market share of such a bottlenecked genre is necessarily vulnerable to the expansion of self-driven, home-grown, grass roots genres. To continue the tradition of meme enthusiasts of extending extend the analogy too far, the reproduction of classical music is eusocial, and metal is, if not viral, then bacterial.
The key is in how the meme is reproduced process. In classical music, you put on a CD or go to a concert, and for two days you're walking around humming "da-da-da-dum" - but does anybody else hear you and get infected? No. Of course, the same is true of that new metal CD you just bought. The difference is that someone who listens to a lot of metal is far more likely to pick up an instrument and make their own metal. When was the last time someone who listened to Bartok ran out to buy a violin? You could make an argument that this happens because people who listen to metal are on average younger and more impressionable, partly because of the parts of the brain that metal affects. As an aside, at 35, I'm sad to say I'm developing an immunity to its charms, though I've fought this seeming inevitability for several years now.
Fear not, classical music enthusiasts. Classical music isn't going anywhere, at least right away, because it has prestige value, and a wealthier (older) audience, and an established academy to produce musicians. But the market share of such a bottlenecked genre is necessarily vulnerable to the expansion of self-driven, home-grown, grass roots genres. To continue the tradition of meme enthusiasts of extending extend the analogy too far, the reproduction of classical music is eusocial, and metal is, if not viral, then bacterial.
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
How Screwed is Africa?
By 2100, sub-Saharan Africa will be home to one-third of human beings. This is up from almost exactly a quarter right now. From a pure self-interest standpoint, this alone is reason to start paying more attention to a continent that has seen far more than its share of depradation. Africa has been subject to multiple challenges in the last century which have been extensively treated elsewhere: among them, global warming, which will expand the Sahel further into what used to be arable land; the ironic resource curse, which is already contributing to behind-the-scences tensions between the West and China, which is wasting no time putting down stakes in Africa's oil and ore deposits; and the even more ironic poison of no-strings-attached foreign aid, which has made things worse by creating corrupt hand-out dependent states.
What worries me the most is a trend that could organize Africa's endemic miasma of troubles into a true powderkeg as its population continues climbing. North Africa has long been Muslim, and in the post-colonial period sub-Saharan Africa has shifted consistently away from non-organized (tribal) religions to Christianity.
In The Next Christendom, Philip Jenkins details the changing face and distribution of "Southern" Christianity, a cross-denominational catch-all for sects of Christianity altered by their experience in the developing world, into forms those of us in the West barely recognize (for example, is Pentecostalism as practiced in Latin America a form of Catholicism? Protestantism? Something new? Is it even a relevant question?) Jenkins discusses the possibility of an epoch of crusades and jihads in the religious borderlands south of the Sahel - the African Thirty Years War.
Again, even from a purely cynical material self-interest standpoint, the echoes from such a conflict would be felt worldwide. We will still need copper and oil; conflicts in the Islamic world have a way of not staying put; and Western Christians will be part of a religion that is increasingly darker-complected than it is today. In the case of Nigeria, we don't have to wait until 2100 to see what results when the two waves of evangelical fervor meet:
Stopping the diffusion of ideas, religious or otherwise, is ab initio a losing proposition. So is this just one more inevitable knife in Africa's back? Not necessarily. There are many countries in the world that have successfully integrated multiple evangelical traditions, and even ended the violence associated with them (as in Ireland) through neutral, secular institutions that promote and demand religious tolerance. Structural reforms in Africa must focus on building and expanding such institutions, or they're likely to see their efforts swept away in the twenty-first century by religious civil wars that further set back Africa's joining the Enlightenment. I understand that this is a tall order in a continent where educational levels are on average the lowest in the world, but the reinforcement of a secular order and religious tolerance must be part and parcel of all reform, or it will all be for naught.
What worries me the most is a trend that could organize Africa's endemic miasma of troubles into a true powderkeg as its population continues climbing. North Africa has long been Muslim, and in the post-colonial period sub-Saharan Africa has shifted consistently away from non-organized (tribal) religions to Christianity.
In The Next Christendom, Philip Jenkins details the changing face and distribution of "Southern" Christianity, a cross-denominational catch-all for sects of Christianity altered by their experience in the developing world, into forms those of us in the West barely recognize (for example, is Pentecostalism as practiced in Latin America a form of Catholicism? Protestantism? Something new? Is it even a relevant question?) Jenkins discusses the possibility of an epoch of crusades and jihads in the religious borderlands south of the Sahel - the African Thirty Years War.
Again, even from a purely cynical material self-interest standpoint, the echoes from such a conflict would be felt worldwide. We will still need copper and oil; conflicts in the Islamic world have a way of not staying put; and Western Christians will be part of a religion that is increasingly darker-complected than it is today. In the case of Nigeria, we don't have to wait until 2100 to see what results when the two waves of evangelical fervor meet:
Plateau State has the highest number of displaced people as a result of clashes between Christians and Muslim communities there. The predominantly Christian Tarok farmers consider the mostly Muslim Hausa cattle herders as outsiders, and accuse them of stealing land and trying to usurp political power. These had led to the burning down of 72 villages over between 2002 and the end of 2003. More than 1,000 people were killed in sectarian clashes between Christians and Muslims in Jos, the Plateau State capital, in September 2001.
- GlobalSecurity.org, an independent American U.S. defense policy institute, April 2005
Stopping the diffusion of ideas, religious or otherwise, is ab initio a losing proposition. So is this just one more inevitable knife in Africa's back? Not necessarily. There are many countries in the world that have successfully integrated multiple evangelical traditions, and even ended the violence associated with them (as in Ireland) through neutral, secular institutions that promote and demand religious tolerance. Structural reforms in Africa must focus on building and expanding such institutions, or they're likely to see their efforts swept away in the twenty-first century by religious civil wars that further set back Africa's joining the Enlightenment. I understand that this is a tall order in a continent where educational levels are on average the lowest in the world, but the reinforcement of a secular order and religious tolerance must be part and parcel of all reform, or it will all be for naught.
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