Internet is for Porn

Yes, it is true. But you can also watch the LSE lectures of Krugman, Bernanke, Quah, Richard Thaler, Paul Collier...

Cooking

No, it was not the division of labour that made us.

Cooked food, by contrast, is easier to digest, gives you more energy, and
takes no time to eat. Cooking also kills bacteria and renders many natural
poisons inactive. So the simple expedient of heating food gave us access to many
more safe calories every day, which was a survival jackpot. Once we started to
eat soft, cooked food, our jaws and teeth were no longer required to munch
ceaselessly, and they became smaller and more delicate. That is why we don't
look like apes anymore. Similarly, the more cooked food we ate, the less
industrial-strength digestion we had to do, and the smaller our guts became. In
the same way that our bodies evolved to better walk on two legs, our bellies
changed to better handle well-done over rare.

Paris

(By Arnaldo Interata 04/28/2009)

Software Tips

- I gave up Remember the Milk and moved to Google Tasks (5 additional ways to access it);
- Quantum GIS, the open source alternative to ArcView.
- Go-oo, an Open Office upgrade. HT Renato Colistete. (If you use Ubuntu there is no need to upgrade.)

Industrial Revolution. Why Europe and not China? Why Britain?

Two new explanations:
-Hans-Joachim Voth (et alii) says that the reason lies in the emergence of the European Marriage Pattern . (BTW, Voth creates amazing papers' titles)
- Robert Allen asserts that trade created the conditions for the British Industrial Revolution: high wages and cheap energy. (The book with the full story is here. The Economist reviews it here).

European Slaves in Africa

I know that human trafficking was quite common during the poor, nasty, brutish, and long human history. However, this really have surprised me:

"According to one estimate, 7,000 English people were abducted between 1622-1644, many of them ships' crews and passengers. But the corsairs also landed on unguarded beaches, often at night, to snatch the unwary.
Almost all the inhabitants of the village of Baltimore, in Ireland, were captured in 1631, and there were other raids in Devon and Cornwall."

It seems that one million Europeans (an overestimation, some may say) were slaved by North African pirates between 1530 and 1780. More about the subject.

Google Maps + Time Machine

Be prepared to spend more than 8 hours just in Hypercities.
(Zephyr Frank and Sidney Chalhoub were (are?) working on something similar for Rio de Janeiro)
Via Wired.

56th Annual North American Regional Science Association Conference

Here.

Consumer surplus

To whom it may concern: atemoya (2 USD/kg in Brazil) generates the highest consumer surplus possible (at least for me).
UPDATE: The price fell to 1,5 USD/kg!!!

Jorge Luís Borges reads "Del rigor en la ciencia" (On Exactitude in Science) (Via Boing Boing)

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Borges' short stories give lessons in Methodology . "El rigor..." is a perfect response when somebody criticizes a model for being an abstraction of reality. "Funes, the Memorious" explains why it is dangerous to consider all details of reality or history. Abstraction is a necessity.

Rodrik X Easterly on Industrial Policy and Steady Growth

William Easterly nailed it!

"So here is Dani Rodrik on success and industrial policy: “the countries that have produced steady, long-term growth during the last six decades are those that relied on a different strategy: promoting diversification into manufactured … goods” (cited in Economist’s View).

So Dani concludes, “What matters [for growth in developing countries] is their output of modern industrial goods” and that developing countries will have to get busy with “real industrial policies.” Finally, “external policy actors (for example, the World Trade Organization) will have to be more tolerant of these policies.”

Unfortunately, Dani is also REVERSING CONDITIONAL PROBABILITIES. Dani’s evidence is based on what he believes is the high probability that IF you have had steady growth for six decades, THEN you had industrial policy. This is interesting, but this is not the right probability in deciding whether to choose industrial policy, which is “IF you have industrial policy, THEN what is your chance of steady growth for six decades?”"

HT Brad DeLong.

"It is the economy, companheiro!": an empirical analysis of Lula's re-election based on municipal data

by Araújo Jr, Carraro, Damé, Shikida and me in the Economics Bulletin

This paper discusses the reasons that led to the Lula's 2006 re-election. Spatial analysis methods revealed that,contrary to 2002, the President had more votes in less developed municipalities of Brazil. The econometric results cast doubt on the analyses that attribute to Bolsa Família Programme total responsibility for the re-election. Lula''s electoral success results from changes in the labor market, low inflation and an export boom that have reduced inequality and
improved the real wages of the Brazilian poor.

GM, Ford , and Chrysler should not loose hope

Honda makes mistakes after all. (and/or Jeremy Clarkson is a comedy genius)
via Arts and Letters Daily

Moving II

By the end of the month, I am leaving UFABC and I will join IPEA, the Brazilian Institute of Applied Economics, in Brasília.

Unfair competition

When people say "unfair competition" they usually mean a) "I not understand comparative advantages"; b) "I have vested interest in protectionism. However in this situation "unfair competition" is an understatement.

The Credit Crunch of 1294

MCCXCIV !

Economist should be despised

Hayek said that Marshall said:

‘Students of social science, must fear popular approval: Evil is with
them when all men speak well of them’.

(Strangely I could not find the exact reference. Maybe Hayek was just like Keynes, who had the habit of making up quotations.)

Oliver Williamson, Transaction Costs and Dilbert

How useful is anthropometric history?

...Some reflections on Paul Hohenberg’s recent presidential address to the American Economic History Association by John Komlos:

"In his recent presidential address to the American Economic History Association, Paul Hohenberg argued that anthropometric history does not meet his criteria for useful research in the field of economic history. He considers research useful if (a) it “helps shape one of our underlying disciplines”; b) it contributes “to clear—even fresh—thinking about current, policy-related issues or on-going scholarly debates about the historical past"; and c) it “penetrates the fuzzy realm of identity-shaping popular discourse”. I argue briefly that only a superficial reading of the literature would lead to the conclusion that anthropometric history has not been useful."

Obviously I am on Professor Komlos' side. (In fact, I think that Economic History should not try to be useful in any sense. Searching for the truth (or Truth or "truth", you choose) is a mission tough enough.)

Parks and Recreation

Greg Daniels has created a kind of The Office set in the public sector: Parks and Recreation. It is not really funny, but it is terrific.

Is the crisis over? (II)

I hope it is. But I think it is kind of sad that one of the boldest forecasts is based just on a historic correlation. There is no model or explanatory theory.

Carlo Cipolla and Stupidity

The famous Italian historian Carlo Cipolla - quite surprisingly - stated the basic laws of stupidity.
I do believe that the root of all human suffering is stupidity, not evilness and not evil. Maybe I am wrong but this idea comforts me
Via Marginal Revolution.

Why Ubuntu?

In order to protect my tired madelung wrists, I gave up my dear T61 and I've bought a desktop and an ergonomic keyboard. Pretty cool machine, but it took me a couple of hours to remove the bloatware from Windows Vista.
Yesterday I installed the new Ubuntu. One hour later, everything was working perfectly, including the microsoft keyboard and the all-in-one printer. It took me 30 extra minutes to install all extra software. (In Ubuntu world you just choose the softwares that you want from a list. It downloads, installs and tracks new versions No need for going to each website and clicking "I accept" a thousand times). Awesome.

Ulisses M. Ruiz de Gamboa, a cliometrician

Strangely, the works of Ulisses were flying under my radar. He's been working with historical Brazilian public finance for many years and now he and William Summerhill are uncovering "fiscal skeletons".
I met him last week and found out that, besides being technically sophisticated, he is a nice guy!

Ubuntu 9.04!!!

Download it here!

I'm back...

The conference was great. It was terrific to spend 3 days among economic historians. Soon I will write posts about the work of the colleagues that I met there.
Now I am back to real life. Yet no symptoms of the flu.
(By the way, the post bellow was already scheduled before the outbreak. Just plain coincidence.)

The Map of the Plague

Aqui. Hat tip Rafael P.
What happened in Milan? Google says that there "city officials immediately walled up houses found to have the plague, isolating the healthy in them along with the sick". Ouch.

More or Less by Tim Harford

A new series of one my favorite radio shows. In the first show Tim Harford investigates the costs drug prohibition.

Latin American Economies: History and Globalization

Conference sponsored by the Center for Economic History da UCLA. I am going to LA in a few hours and I'll back on Monday. The conference papers are available for download.

Is the crisis over?

Nicholas Bloom forecasted the 2009 crisis (take a look at his cool graph of stock market volatility since 1880). Now he says that uncertainty is falling and recovery in on the way.

Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists, and the End of Slavery in Brazil: Correspondence 1880-1905

The Institute for the Study of the Americas is pleased to invite you to the launch of

Joaquim Nabuco, British Abolitionists and the End of Slavery in Brazil
edited by Leslie Bethell and José Murilo de Carvalho

Wednesday 22 April at 4.30pm
Venue: Conference Room, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, Charles Clore House, 17 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DR

Contact: olga.jiemenz@sas.ac.uk or 020 7862 8871

A little studied aspect of the struggle to abolish slavery in Brazil in the 1880s is the relationship established and maintained between Joaquim Nabuco, the leading Brazilian abolitionist, and the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society in London. The correspondence between Nabuco and Charles Harris Allen, Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, and other British abolitionists throughout the decade and beyond reveals a partnership consciously sought by Nabuco in order to internationalise the struggle. These letters provide a unique insight into the evolution of Nabuco's thinking on both slavery and abolition and at the same time a running commentary on the slow and (at least until 1887) uncertain progress of the abolitionist cause in Brazil.

Leslie Bethell is Emeritus Professor of Latin American History at the University of London, Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, Senior Research Fellow at the Centro de Pesquisa e Documentação de História Contemporânea do Brasil, Fundação Getúlio Vargas, Rio de Janeiro and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences. He is an Honorary Research Fellow of the Institute for the Study of the Americas.

José Murilo de Carvalho is Professor of History at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters and the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

Compre na Amazon aqui (US$30).

The bank that had Christopher Columbus account

Banco di San Giorgio was the creator of:
- Government bonds;
- Double-entry book-keeping;
among many other things....
(a Giuseppe Felloni's bilingual book about the bank is available here for free)

Markets in Everything ... maybe not

"Somewhere out there is a company that has actually figured out how to enlarge penises, and it is helpless to reach out potential consumers"

xkcd

Cambridge Centre for Quantitative Economic History

Maybe I've already blogged about this group, but here it goes.
By the way, I finally updated the blogroll.

Historical National Accounts

Aqui.
(HT Shikida)

Useful links for a world in crisis

Sourcetone: a music therapy on-line radio. (listeners outside the US face limitations);
Taxi fare calculator: World and Brazil. (HT: Ricardo Freire);
Ubuntu Pocket Guide;
Quick R: R for stata, spss and SAS users;
Vuze: by far the best torrent client for Windows and Linux;
Monty Python - The Movies (6 Disc Box Set) for 11 GBP (16 USD)!

The Effect of Prayer on God's Attitude Toward Mankind

"This paper uses data available from the National Opinion Research Center's (NORC) survey on religious attitudes and powerful statistical methods to evaluate the effect of prayer on the attitude of God toward human beings."

James Heckman has a great sense of humor.

Great Depression versus 2008 Crisis

Eichengreen and O'Rourke bring good and bad news:

To summarize: the world is currently undergoing an economic shock every bit as big as the Great Depression shock of 1929-30. Looking just at the US leads one to overlook how alarming the current situation is even in comparison with 1929-30.
The good news, of course, is that the policy response is very different. The question now is whether that policy response will work. For the answer, stay tuned for our next column.

(The graphs are awesome)

Economics 2.0 by Häring and Storbeck

The book aims the non-specialist curious about the last decade of results from the Economics research (mainly empirical). It covers some topics that other economics-for-the-masses-books also deal: Behavioral Economics, Economics of Happiness, Discrimination, Game Theory. Moreover, it is has chapters on: Anthropometric History, History of Globalization, Efficient Market Hypothesis, Economics of Sports and even a chapter on the subprime crisis.

Highly recommended for non-specialists and for over specialized economists drowning in pdf's an willing to have an overview of other areas.

(Disclosure: I received the book as a gift from the editors.)

Conference on Quantitative Social Science Research Using R

Here.

It is really strange world...

when I just can not notice anymore what it is April fool's day or true science.

Good news from Zimbabwe

Well... sort of...
And:

"Life in Harare is great - a lot better than in the past - for me at least.
If I want to buy sugar, soap or bread, I no longer have to travel to South Africa.
I can go to the local supermarket.
The trip to to South Africa was 20 hours by bus - and another 20 hours back."

How Economics can get you a date

By Tim Harford, my favourite pop Economics writer:

Moving

I have just left UFPel for a position as professor of Economics at the Center for Engineering, Modeling and Applied Social Sciences at UFABC, São Paulo, Brazil.

The legacy of slavery

Nathan Nunn has published amazing papers on the economic legacy of slave trade for the development of Africa (his paper with Diego Puga is impressive as well). Now his paper with Leonard Wantchekon shows that "individuals whose ancestors were heavily raided during the slave trade today exhibit less trust in neighbors, relatives, and their local government".

HT Claudio Shikida.

If Pollock were a graph designer

Forget Andrew Gelman and his clean graphs. The new style is Pollock-esque.
Congratulations to Ian!!!

Brave New (Virtual) Worlds

an estimated 400,000 Asian workers are now employed in gold farming in a trade worth up to £700m a year.

Edward Castronova has more to say about this.
HT Boing Boing.

Correlation and Causality

Here.
(put the mouse over the image).

Inequality in Latin America was low

Stop the press and read Jeffrey Williamson's paper. I haven't read it yet, but I am wondering if the results hold if you consider the concepts of inequality possibility frontier and the inequality extraction ratio.

Poll: the best title for an Economics paper

I came across "Poor, Hungry and Stupid: Numeracy and the Impact of High Food Prices in Industrializing Britain, 1780-1850" and it remind me the role of a good title. A title that forces you to read the whole paper. From the top of my mind, I suggest two contestants: "I just ran two million regressions" and "Das Human Kapital". Any suggestion?

"It is the demography, stupid"

The homicide rate in São Paulo dropped from 52 to 24 per 100.000 between 1999 and 2005. The usual explanations were quite unconvincing, but João Manoel Pinho De Mello and Alexandre Schneider have shown that changes in the demographic structure of the population can explain a large share of that drop. A must read if you are interested in violence in Brazil.

University of California at Berkeley: two syllabus

I bet that there will be no empty seats at Prof. Eichengreen's The World Economy in the Twentieth Century and at Prof.Voth's Financial Crises, Bubbles, and Crashes

HT Brad Delong.

Private Tooth Decay as Public Economic Virtue

The paper starts with a quote from Thomas and Bean (1974):

The only group of clear gainers of British trans-atlantic slave trade, and even those gains were small, were European consumers of sugar and tobacco and other plantation crops. They were given the chance to purchase dental decay and lung cancer at somewhat lower price than would have been the case without the slave trade.

And takes another direction, arguing for the role of sugar as a mass-consumption commodity in the protoindustrialization of Europe.
HT to Brad Delong. You must read the general notes of his class.

Whipple's index in R

The index measures the degree of age heaping in demographic data. Joerg Baten have been applying it to appraise the numeracy of historical populations. Surely there is neater way to do it, but here is the code in R that I've just written:

tmp1<-data[data>=23 & data<=62]
tmp2<-tmp1%%5
whipple<-(length(tmp2[tmp2==0])/length(tmp1))*500
whipple

Graph of regression results

Thanks to the R code written by the guys at Tables2Graphs (take a look at the blog of Eduardo Leoni, one of the authors), I've managed to get the graph bellow. It represents the estimated coefficients of a regression concerning the height of workers born between 1889-1921 and registered at Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

Click here for amazing R graphs.

É Carnaval!!!

There is an alternative if you can not do the samba. You may join the contest "Dance your PhD". The winners of 2009 are here. Take a look at "Cerebral activation patterns induced by inflection of regular and irregular verbs with positron emission tomography. A comparison between single subject and group analysis". It is a perfect substitute for the written thesis (I guess).

Fornicating with nuns in fifteenth-century Bologna

The amazing Economic History blog has called my attention to this paper. Check out:

The Order of Saint Mary Magdalen was founded in 1227 and provided shelter to repentant prostitutes and tried to marry them. It helped to blur the distinction between nunneries and brothels. Pimps commonly forced their former protégés to receive clients inside the convents (p.378).

Another evidence in favor of the thesis that the human appetite for sex and trade is unstoppable.

Marx and the current crisis

{Sigh} Oh boy... I've never thought that I would miss the good old Internet hoaxes. The quote bellow just hit my mail box:

"Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism (Das Kapital, 1867)"

My research assistant confirms that - not surprisingly - Marx never wrote this.

Finance and the poor

Tim Harford says:

The trouble with living on two dollars a day is that you don’t actually get two dollars a day.

Cuture and Development

"...we still suffer from vestigial traces of a prejudice against 'trade', left over from the days when the aristocracy and landed gentry lived off the rents from their land and estates, and did not engage in anything so vulgar as the making and selling of goods."

A pretty good portrait of Brazil, isn't it? Due to its history, the Brazilian culture opposes entrepreneurship or money making activities, and this has been an obstacle for development. Damn Portuguese colonization! At least this is what lots of people say...
Funny enough, the quote above is about the English and not the Brazilians! The author, Kate Fox, shows that traces of a aristocracy mentality explain many issues of contemporary English people. ( Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour, an excellent anthropology for non-anthropologists - book. Strongly recommended.)
The English prejudice against trade didn't hinder the Industrial Revolution at all. My point is that, by the same token, the aristocratic and slave-holding mentality of Brazilians is not the reason why the country fell behind. Well, but this is only my opinion.

The Economist on Darwin

A great article on the Theory of Evolution, that deals with the precursors of the idea. Here scientists tell what would do if they had dinner with Mr. Darwin.

Economic History Blog

Excellent!
(Memo to myself: update blogroll. Stop procrastinating)

Why do I learn French?

The reason is not the music, food or tourism. Some time ago, I grabbed a copy of Leroy-Beaulieu's De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes (1874) . It seems that he created the concept of "colonies of settlement" and "colonies of exploitation" (Roscher may have said something similar. I bought his book, but I gave up learning German 20 years ago). Every schoolboy in Brazil learns the diference between exploitation and settlement colonies thanks to Caio Prado Jr, a marxist historian. One day, I may write about the intelectual evolution of these concepts. A possible title of the paper: "From Roscher to Acemoglu"...Would anyone like to participate in this project?

(There was another reason to learn Frech: reading Thisse et al. textbook on Regional Economics, but I've just found out that it has been published in English as well. )

Inequality and Innovation in the US

From Our Own Correspondent is the best radio show since the day that Marconi had a great working day. BBC journalists analyse current affairs around the world based on their personal experiences. In a recent edition, Justin Webb starts with the sad fact that his child had just been diagnosed with diabetes to write about inequality, profit, and innovation in America.
(While you are there, check out this one on Fortaleza, Brazil)

The 3rd World Conference of the Spatial Econometrics - Deadline extension

Here.

Gmail offline!

Here.

The Consolation of Economic History

Brad Delong, the wise, writes:

...
The current recession may turn into a small depression, and may push global living standards down by five percent for one or two or (we hope not) five years, but that does not erase the gulf between those of us in the globe's middle and upper classes and all human existence prior to the Industrial Revolution.
...
The 18th Century British family could buy 17 copies of the Wealth of Nations out of its annual income. The American family in 2009 can buy 6,000 copies: a multiplication factor of 350.
...
I'm convinced that everyone I know can easily imagine how to spend up to three times their current income usefully and productively. (It is only beyond three times your current spending that people judge others' spending as absurd and wasteful.) And everybody I know finds it very difficult to imagine how people can survive on less than one-third of what they spend—never mind that all of our pre-industrial ancestors did so all the time.

Markets in Everything, the cartoon

Via Mahalanobis. More, obviously.

Eat the Poor

A debate on Swift's A Modest Propostal.

Dysrationalia

"Stanovich coined his own term — dysrationalia — for 'the inability to think and behave rationally despite adequate intelligence.' That 'disorder,' he suggests, might afflict some of the smartest people you know."

Acemoglu's "Introducion to Modern Economic Growth"

The winner of the John Bates Clark medal finally launches his book on Growth. Something tells me that very soon every graduate student of Economics in the world will be carrying it around. It is a bargain: US$61 for 1000 pages!
The impressive Table of Contents and sample chapters are available here.

Did Railroads Induce or Follow Economic Growth? Urbanization and Population Growth in the American Midwest, 1850-60

Jeremy Atack, Fred Bateman, Michael Haines, Robert A. Margo say:

For generations of scholars and observers, the "transportation revolution," especially the railroad, has loomed large as a dominant factor in the settlement and development of the United States in the nineteenth century. There has, however, been considerable debate as to whether transportation improvements led economic development or simply followed. Using a newly developed GIS transportation database we examine this issue in the context of the American Midwest, focusing on two indicators of broader economic change, population density and the fraction of population living in urban areas. Our difference in differences estimates (supported by IV robustness checks) strongly suggest that the coming of the railroad had little or no impact upon population densities just as Albert Fishlow concluded some 40 years ago. BUT, our results also imply that the railroad was the "cause" of midwestern urbanization, accounting for more than half of the increase in the fraction of population living in urban areas during the 1850s.

That is exactly the kind of paper in economic history that I love. Lots of historical data + GIS database + econometrics= an answer to an interesting question.

Who survived the Titanic?

Frey, Savage and Torgler have shown that the social rule "women and children first" was respected while the boat sunk. Another interesting result (despite being quite expected): the dummy "English" reduced the chances of survival, while "American" increased. Politeness has its costs. More on the subject.

New York Times on R

R !

HT Na Prática.

Breaking the Grouxo Marx Principle

There was only one club that I would like to join and would (hopefully) accept me: The Flat Earth Society. But I've just discovered another association that I support without reserves.

Institutions matter?

Sometimes they don't.

Best economics paper of 1959

Following the tradition of this blog, here goes my choice of paper that celebrates its 50th year. There is Herbert Simon's paper, but my very personal choice goes to a work from Douglass North that does not rank among his most popular ones:

North, Douglass. "Agriculture in Regional Economic Growth. Journal of Farm Economics, v. 51, 943-51

He extends his 1955 paper, and shows the role of the distribution of wealth and the production function on long run regional growth. A must read for regional economists and economic historians.

Urbanization data for Brazil

A very nice piece on Zipf's Law in Brazil and in the US. Unfortunately there is a problem: the quality of the data on urbanization in Brazil. José Eli da Veiga has stressed how unreliable and insane are the 1938 official criteria on definition of urban areas in Brazil. Official data on urban population in Brazil is hugely overestimated and weirdly related to the number of municipalities created. Therefore, historical trends on urbanization in Brazil are unreliable and international comparisons should be avoided.
Recently, Embrapa used satellite images to identify urban areas and this is the best data that you can get. (The main limitation, obviously, is that there is no historical data)

Greg Clark responds to his critics

Here. More posts on Farewell to Alms.
Addendum: Greg Clark did something really rude in his reply that I'll not mention here.

Paranoia is fun

My New Year's resolution is to do the same thing:

xkcd is terrific. Really.

Happy 2010!

Gerschenkron

I've just read
The Fly Swatter: How My Grandfather Made His Way in the World, the biography of Alexander Gerschenkron written by his grandson. It is an excellent book. Even the cover is great: a portrait of the economic historian drawn by Leontief.
During this week I will post a few stories and quotes from the book. Just a taste of it: Gerschenkron played chess (and lost superbly) to Marcel Duchamp and Vladimir Nabokov named a character after him (for very mean reasons) .

Heights and Human Welfare: Recent Developments and New Directions

Richard Steckel, one of the founding fathers of Anthoropometric History, has written a new survey.

Brad Delong: American Economic History Podcast

Here. I've listened to previous Prof Delong podcasts and I can assure you: they are great! Erudite, witty, and insightful.
The best things in life are free...

Merry Xmas!

Let's celebrate! (Are you sure?...)

Off-line

I am going to be off-line until Dec 29. Happy Holidays!
(I left a few scheduled posts)

Science, Financial Crisis, and Paul Romer

Paul Romer:

"...after Citibank made some bets that turned out badly in the Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s, its CEO John Reed helped mid-wife the Economics Program at the Santa Fe Institute. He wanted the new theoretical insights about financial crises that the new complexity scientists promised. Ever since, the complexity scientists have been telling us that markets are self-organizing systems. For the life of me, I can't see how this puts us way ahead. Didn't seem to help Citibank either, which I've noticed is back in the headlines.
(...)
I agree with the closing suggestion, that air transport is a good place to look for lessons about avoiding crashes. No matter what we do, we will still have financial crises, just as we still have plane crashes. But judging from our success in making air travel safer, it seems reasonable to bet on an institutionalized commitment to systematic data collection as a way to reduce their frequency and severity. As a traveler and an investor, I feel much safer in the hands of experts with good data than tourists from other scientific disciplines bearing new models.

Here.

Talkin' about science, there is a bonus.

Ideapad S10 e Ubuntu Netbook Remix

One month ago I bought a Lenovo Ideapad S10. Beautiful, light, small, and fast. I am a very happy owner. The obvious limitations are the size of the screen and keyboard. They are perfect for smurfs, but normal human beings suffer a lot after 3 hours of use.
It came with Windows XP so I was not in a hurry to run Ubuntu. Yesterday, I took a break and installed Ubuntu Netbook Remix, ie, Ubuntu for tiny notebooks. It is perfect and almost solves the screen issue.

You know that you have reached k* when

... this happens:

Via boingboing.

Every flight on Earth

24 hours in 72 seconds. (Imagine the size of the W matrix!)
Suggestion: plot Eltis' data on trans-Atlantic slave write. I'll write to Prof Rege right now!

Bayesian econometrics

O Introduction to Modern Bayesian Econometrics by Tony Lancaster is a great book . It provides the first steps on the subject, and it comes with the S-Plus (or R) and BUGS code to follow the book. HT to Márcio Laurini, the über-econometrician.

Long-run spatial inequality in France: Evolution and determinants

Guess what? The regional inegalité is inverted-U shaped. Readhere.

Industrialization in Latin America

Or..."Was It Prices, Productivity or Policy? The Timing and Pace of Latin American Industrialization after 1870" by Jeffrey Williamson and Aurora Gómez Galvarriato.

Brazil, Mexico and a few other Latin American republics enjoyed faster industrialization after 1870 than did the rest of Latin America and even faster than the rest of the poor periphery (except East Asia). How much of this economic performance was due to more accommodating institutions and greater political stability, changes that would have facilitated greater technology transfer and accumulation? That is, how much to changing fundamentals? How much instead to a cessation in the secular rise in the net barter terms of trade which reversed de-industrialization forces, thus favoring manufacturing? How much instead to cheaper foodstuffs coming from more open commercial policies ('grain invasions'), and from railroad-induced integration of domestic grain markets, serving to keep urban grain prices and thus nominal wages in industry low, helping to maintain competitiveness? How much instead to more pro-industrial real exchange rate and tariff policy? Which of these forces contributed most to industrialization among the Latin American leaders, long before their mid 20th century adoption of ISI policies? Changing fundamentals, changing market conditions, or changing policies?

http://papers.nber.org/papers/w13990

More or Less

Tim Harford, my favorite writer of "economics for the masses" books, presents a new series on statistics and math on BBC radio 4.

Mary Poppins and the financial crisis

Nothing new under the sun...

Fidelity Fiduciary Bank
Mr. Dawes Sr, Mr. Banks and Bankers:
If you invest your tuppence
Wisely in the bank
Safe and sound
Soon that tuppence,
Safely invested in the bank,
Will compound
And you'll achieve that sense of conquest
As your affluence expands
In the hands of the directors
Who invest as propriety demands
You see, Michael, you'll be part of
Railways through Africa
Dams across the Nile
Fleets of ocean greyhounds
Majestic, self-amortizing canals
Plantations of ripening tea
All from tuppence, prudently
Fruitfully, frugally invested
In the, to be specific,
In the Dawes, Tomes
Mousely, Grubbs
Fidelity Fiduciary Bank!
Now, Michael,
When you deposit tuppence in a bank account
Soon you'll see
That it blooms into credit of a generous amount
Semiannually
And you'll achieve that sense of stature
As your influence expands
To the high financial strata
That established credit now commands
You can purchase first and second trust deeds
Think of the foreclosures!
Bonds! Chattels! Dividends! Shares!
Bankruptcies! Debtor sales!
Opportunities!
All manner of private enterprise!
Shipyards! The mercantile!
Collieries! Tanneries!
Incorporations! Amalgamations! Banks!
You see, Michael
Tuppence, patiently, cautiously trustingly invested
In the, to be specific,
In the Dawes, Tomes
Mousely, Grubbs
Fidelity Fiduciary Bank!

The bank run scene is here (around 1:25).
HT to Niall Fergunson. BTW, his new book (The Ascent of Money: a Financial History of the World) seems pretty interesting.

Obama

Tomorrow I will go back to my normal personality: cynical and pessimist. But today I just can't...

"Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run. Obama's running so we all can fly."

Jay-Z

Wealth of the Nations in the Long-run

Before 1500...
Was the Wealth of Nations Determined in 1000 B.C.?
Diego Comin, William Easterly, Erick Gong

We assemble a dataset on technology adoption in 1000 B.C., 0 A.D., and 1500 A.D. for the predecessors to today’s nation states. We find that this very old history of technology adoption is surprisingly significant for today’s national development outcomes. Our strong and robust results are for 1500 A.D.determining per capita income today. We find technological persistence across long epochs: from 1000 BC to 0 AD, from 0 AD to 1500 AD, and from 1500 AD to the present. Although the data allow only some suggestive tests of rival hypotheses to explain long‐run technological persistence, we find the evidence to be most consistent with a model of endogenous technology adoption where the cost of adopting new technologies declines sufficiently with the current level of adoption. The evidence is less consistent with a dominant role for
population as predicted by the semi‐endogenous growth models or for countrylevel
factors like culture, genes or institutions.

(dica do Shikida).

After 1500...
Post-1500 Population Flows and the Long Run Determinants of Economic Growth and Inequality
Louis Putterman, David N. Weil

We construct a matrix showing the share of the year 2000 population in every country that is descended from people in different source countries in the year 1500. Using this matrix, we analyze how post-1500 migration has influenced the level of GDP per capita and within-country income inequality in the world today. Indicators of early development such as early state history and the timing of transition to agriculture have much better predictive power for current GDP when one looks at the ancestors of the people who currently live in a country than when one considers the history on that country's territory, without adjusting for migration. Measures of the ethnic or linguistic heterogeneity of a country's current population do not predict income inequality as well as measures of the ethnic or linguistic heterogeneity of the current population's ancestors. An even better predictor of current inequality in a country is the variance of early development history of the country's inhabitants, with ethnic groups originating in regions having longer histories of agriculture and organized states tending to be at the upper end of a country's income distribution. However, high within-country variance of early development also predicts higher income per capita, holding constant the average level of early development.

I can not say that the papers deal with the veeery long-run because the brilliant Michael Kremer set a new standard.

8th Spatial Econometrics and Statistics workshop

Dear colleagues,

We are very pleased to invite you to Besançon, France, to participate to
the 8th edition of the Spatial Econometrics and Statistics Workshop,
which will be held on June 1-2, 2009. This workshop aims at reinforcing
and stimulating the interactions between well established and young
researchers involved in spatial statistics and econometrics.
Both theoretical and empirical contributions are welcome.

You are invited to submit your paper or long abstract (6 pages)
electronically to the following email address:
spatial2009@univ-fcomte.fr. The deadline for submission of
abstracts/papers is February 15th, 2009. Notification of acceptance will
be sent by March 20, 2009. The call for papers is enclosed.

More information concerning the workshop is available at :
http://sew2009.univ-fcomte.fr/index.htm or
http://sew2009.univ-fcomte.fr/english/home.htm

We are looking forward to meeting you in Besançon.

Best regards,
Julie Le Gallo

(for the scientific and organizing committees)

Landes versus Crafts

They have a long history of arguments. The tone is quite rude sometimes, but I was not expecting this.
Landes on Crafts:

I am struck by the fact that I have no place in his bibliography. (I know he reads me, if only to disagree.)

Here.

Money on the Brain by Tim Harford

Tim Harford on Neuroeconomics at BBC Radio 4. You have only 2 days to listen to it! (Or you can download (ou então baixe the podcast)