EclectEcon

Apod Pornography

Ms. Eclectic thinks a recent photo at Apod might be seen as pornographic by some viewers. I disagree. Did anyone else see it as either Freudian or pornographic?

The Hamilton College Alumni for Governance Reform [HCAGR]

The HCAGR are (is?) really pissed off. Here's why. And here are the first three paragraphs of their public declaration [thanks to BenS for the pointer]:

In recent years the reputation of Hamilton College has been hurt by a series of events that have resulted in severely negative press in the national media. The College hired a professor who was a member of the Raelian cult that claimed to be pursuing the cloning of human beings. Former college president Gene Tobin engaged in plagiarism and resigned. The College Honor Code specifies that academic dishonesty is a serious offense that “will often result in removal from the course, assignment of an XF for the course, or separation from the College community, or some combination of these.”

Nonetheless, Tobin received a generous severance package and an endowed professorship in his name. In recent months, the Director of the Kirkland Project unilaterally appointed to the faculty Susan Rosenberg, a convicted felon whose sentence was commuted by Bill Clinton during the last days of his administration and then selected and paid an honorarium to Ward Churchill who has written and spoken that the victims of 9/11 deserved their fate as “little Eichmanns.” This Director’s acts have created an unprecedented wave of negative publicity that damaged the integrity and scholarly reputation of the school.

These events and the College’s response to them share a common thread: a failure of the school’s internal controls, policies and procedures. To our knowledge, the College has made only minor changes to the way it conducts business. We believe that more fundamental changes are necessary if the College wishes to prevent the mistakes of the recent past from being repeated. To support this goal we have formed Hamilton College Alumni For Governance Reform. Our goal is to establish that Hamilton’s primary mission is to educate its students by focusing all its energy and resources to scholarly research and pedagogical application.

Buttonwood on Oil Prices

Those who subscribe to The Economist can receive a weekly e-mail called, "The Global Agenda." It usually concludes with an interesting column, called "Buttonwood," the most recent of which is about Oil Prices:

... The surprise is not that the price of oil is rising. It has been doing so, broadly speaking, for a year.

... The surprise is rather that it took share prices so long to fall in response. In the month from May 22nd, oil prices rose by 21% yet the S&P 500 went up by 2.1%—a respectable clip. When oil first touched $60 it knocked share prices back a bit for three days, but they resumed their climb thereafter. True, some of that gain is accounted for by oil companies and their suppliers, who are suddenly being touted as a buy all over town. But what about other sectors?

One theory is that both shares and oil have been rising in response to common factors: buoyant economic growth and profits, and low interest rates.

She continues, citing research showing

that oil-price changes and stockmarket returns are linked but lagged: if oil prices rise, shares do fall, but not right away. Shares of obviously energy-related firms adjust at once, but broad stockmarket returns fall only during the following month or even two months—a pattern that is clearest with biggish oil increases and in countries that are most dependent on energy. This, if true, suggests a genuine market inefficiency. [emphasis added]

On that model, expect shares to fall next month—or at least fail to make the gains they would otherwise have made.

... Oil bears, conversely, see demand for oil slowing as economic growth slows, especially in China (whose imports dropped slightly in the first five months of this year, says Andy Xie of Morgan Stanley). And alternative sources of oil—Canada’s tar sands, Africa’s deepwater reserves—are nearer than many think: Cambridge Energy Research Associates, a think-tank, predicts that these and other developments will provide some 6m-7.5m bpd more capacity than the world needs by the end of the decade.

If there really is a lagged adjustment of share prices to oil prices, it is time to go liquid if you expect oil prices to continue to rise. But if you expect oil prices to fall, maybe the equity market is due for another rise. So, according to this hypothesis, how you treat the equity market might also be a reflection of your oil price expectations.

But why does the inefficiency exist?
And if it does still exist, will it soon be arbitraged away?

Phil Miller also has some material about oil prices at Market Power.

Canadians' Views.More from the PEW Survey

I posted yesterday about a survey showing [among many other things] that a majority of Canadians is dissatisfied with the direction their country is taking. Here are some more results of the PEW survey about attitudes in Canada [thanks, again, to John Chilton for the pointer].

Image of the United States and Canada

• Favorable ratings for the U.S. continue to slip in Canada; 59% have a positive view of the U.S., down from 63% in 2003, and 72% in 2002.
• Favorable views of Americans have also declined. Two-thirds of Canadians (66%) have a positive view of Americans, compared with the 77% in 2003 and 78% in 2002.
• About three-quarters of Canadians associate Americans with the positive characteristics“inventive” (76%) and “hardworking” (77%), but just 42% say Americans are “honest.” Majorities of Canadians also associate the negative traits of “rude,” “violent” and “greedy” with Americans.
• U.S. attitudes toward Canada remain positive, with 76% of the American public holding a favorable view of Canada. This is up from 65% in 2003, yet not quite as high as it was in 2002 (83% favorable).

Canadian opinions of their own country

• Nearly all Canadians (94%) believe that their country is well-liked by other nations. This is the highest percentage among the 16 nations surveyed.
• Canadians are increasingly dissatisfied with the way things are going in their country. Fewer than half (45%) say they are satisfied with national conditions, down from 60% in 2003 and 56% in 2002.
• Canadians have strongly positive opinions of the impact of immigration; 77% say Asian immigrants are a good thing, and 78% say that about immigrants from Mexico and Latin America.

The Iraq War and U.S. Policies

• Eight-in-ten Canadians believe their government made the right decision not to use military force against Iraq. This is up significantly from 65% in 2003.
• A majority of Canadians believe the world is a more dangerous place as a result of the war in Iraq that removed Saddam Hussein from power; 37% believe it is safer. And, just 24% say Iraq will be more stable in the wake of the January elections there while a 61% majority thinks the situation in Iraq will not change much.
• Just 19% of Canadians feel the U.S. takes Canadian interests into account at least a fair amount when making foreign policy.
• A majority of Canadians (57%) now favor Canada taking a more independent approach from the U.S. to security and diplomatic affairs, up from 43% two years ago.
• Canadians, once among the strongest U.S. allies in the war on terror, are now about evenly split on the issue, with 47% opposing the U.S.- led effort and 45% in favor. That represents a significant reversal from May 2003, when more than two-thirds of Canadians backed the war on terror (68%).

Note that the survey is small-sample:

The Global Attitudes Project conducted telephone interviews with a random sample of 500 Canadians from May 6- 11, 2005. For results based on the total sample, one can say with 95% confidence that the error attributable to sampling is plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Got Warts? Here's Good Advice

If you [or more likely a pre-teen or teenager you know] have warts, here is some interesting advice from Medscape [h/t to BenS]: See your pharmacist, not your physician!

A substantial part of the U.S. population has warts at any one time. Fortunately, most warts are of no consequence, other than being unsightly, although some cause pain or embarrassment. You may want to treat warts with OTC products rather than seeing a physician. Although some people try to ignore warts, this is not always a good idea for several reasons. First, warts will spread into new uninfected tissue without warning. They may also spread to other people if warts are damaged. For instance, a wart may interfere with work and be torn slightly, allowing the virus to escape. Children may pick or scratch at warts, allowing them to spread. Warts on the foot can be spread to other people who use the same bathing facilities. For these reasons, it is usually better to remove warts.

Should I Go to the Doctor?

Visiting a physician for treatment of a common wart (one with a cauliflower look to the surface) or plantar wart (a wart on the bottom of the foot) before trying a nonprescription product is not always the best move. Physicians remove warts through freezing, surgery, electrical methods, caustic chemicals, or lasers. Generally, these methods are expensive and painful. Treating a single wart with freezing can take nine weeks, with each treatment causing pain that lasts for several days.

Fortunately, your pharmacist can recommend several nonprescription products that have some important advantages over methods your physician may use[Emphasis added]. They contain salicylic acid, either in the form of liquids or pads. Salicylic acid products will be less expensive than physician methods such as electricity, surgery, lasers, and freezing. They produce little or no pain, as opposed to freezing or lasers (which may require general anesthesia in children). Salicylic acid products are also safer to use, as evidenced by the fact that they may be sold for home use. Finally, they are equally effective as some physician methods such as freezing, according to the latest evidence. Given all of these advantages, it makes sense to try to treat the plantar or common wart with these products before resorting to physician care.

Especially in Canada, where the waiting time to see a pharmacist is usually no more than five minutes, but the waiting time to see a dermatologist is often 5 months!

When BenS sent this to me, he added, "Pharmacists triumph over dermatologists. Score one wart (or more). Take aspirin and duct-tape and call me (your friendly local pharmacist) in the morning."

Samuelson's Foundations:There Is a Reason Nobody Listed It

One of the books we all had to read/work our way through as graduate students in most major economics programmes in the 1960s was Paul Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis. I note with some pleasure that none -- not one -- of the economists' book-tag responses that I have read mentions this book [Though I did see that Craig Newmark listed Samuelson's intro text].

There is a reason Samuelson's Foundations isn't listed. As I recently wrote to Walt, who asked me why so many modern grad schools emphasize math instead of economic logic,

I would say the bad aspects of the trend came with Samuelson's Foundations of Economic Analysis. Math was used in economics long before then, but his dissertation/book seemed to set the discipline off in a direction that was not very productive.

Math is good. Math has helped me. Math has helped others straighten me out. I was once a macho-math man. But math isn't worth much without a good appreciation of the Economic Way of Thinking.

The Ten Commandments and the Supremes;the pre-emption of "etched in stone"

There is only one reason I can come up with for the split decision by the U.S. Supremes on public displays of the Ten Commandments, and it doesn't involve drive-in theatres showing old Charleton Heston movies.

I figure they (actually, Justice O'Connor, the swing voter) thought it would be really easy to get courthouses in Kentucky to remove the framed lists of the Ten Commandments, but it would be very costly to get Texas to blast or hoist out their granite copy. I certainly hope they/she didn't make the decision because the granite copy cost more to produce than the framed copies --- that would mean they/she don't/doesn't understand the importance of looking beyond sunk costs!

The incentive effects from the decision?
Look for more granite displays of the Ten Commandments.

Furthermore, if this simplistic hypothesis is correct, when any issue might be in doubt, look for more etched-in-stone pre-emptive, claim-staking strategic moves.

Don't the Supremes ever think about the incentive effects of their decisions?

I'm mostly an atheist, but I still think the 10 commandments have great historical value when discussing or celebrating the law, even if not all the reindeer are included.

Does More Wealth Make More People Satisfied with Conditions in Their Country?

The Pew Global Attitudes Projectis a series of worldwide public opinion surveys that encompasses a broad array of subjects ranging from people's assessments of their own lives to their views about the current state of the world and important issues of the day. More than 90,000 interviews in 50 countries have been conducted as part of the project's work.

[Thanks to The Emirates Economist for the pointer]

As a part of its survey of people in different countries, PEW found that the number of people satisfied with how things were going in their countries was this:

It looks as if these numbers reflect people's expectations and their comparisons of the current state of their countries relative to these expectations. The countries with the higher numbers of satisfied people most likely have done well, compared with the past and compared with people's expectations; and the countries with the lower numbers of people satisfied need to work on lowering their citizens' expectations....

8-)

Lincoln University Should Not Be Proud of this Faculty Member

From the Campus Report Online:

One of the remarkable aspects of the War on Terror is the degree to which those who sympathize with movements with which the United States is in armed military conflict operate openly in America, particularly in Academia.

“Each Muslim, male and female, must realize the need for resistance (known as jihad in Islamic terminology) is as important as prayer and fasting,” Kaukab Siddique, an English professor at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, writes in Dajjal: Superpower U. S. A.. Originally published in 1991, the 31-page booklet went into its second printing in 2002, seven months after the September 11th, 2001 attacks upon the United States that claimed more lives than were lost in the 1941 attack upon Pearl Harbor that started World War II.

Furthermore, I would venture that this booklet counted positively toward his promotion, tenure, and salary determination even though he is in the English department.

Blu Ray vs. HD-DVD

As most of you know, there is a battle raging for format supremacy in the post-DVD world. The two major contenders are perennial loser, Sony (Beta, memory stick) with Blue Ray Disc [BD], and Toshiba with HD-DVD. The story is that Blue Ray is "better" [I think we heard this about Beta in the past] but that HD-DVD will be much cheaper to implement. Sony has lots of technical and computer-type firms aligned with it; Toshiba seems to have more movie studios aligned with it.

There have been talks between supporters of the two formats, but there has been no public appearance of any movement by either side.

Sony first made the suggestion back in April, in a bid to prevent not only a war between the two formats as each battles to win the favour of consumers, but also to limit HD DVD's lead in content availability. Pre-recorded movies on HD DVD are expected to ship in the US in Q4, just ahead of BD-based movies. And while the HD DVD spec is complete, some elements, such as copy protection, have yet to be finalised by the BD camp.

By late May, however, it was clear the negotiations were in deadlock, and so the principals brought in more senior staffers, including Kutaragi, to bring the discussions to a higher level. Once again, Sony's suggestion that HD DVD's data structure be incorporated into BD's, with BD providing the unified physical structure appear to have been rejected by Toshiba. To be fair, Sony hasn't been willing to embrace HD DVD, either.

So far the prognosticators have spent far too much time discussing technical merits and who supports whom. Not enough attention has been paid to what the consumers are likely to want. In the end (probably within 2-3 years) consumer sovereignty will anoint a winner. As Stan Liebowitz has shown for other technologies, there certainly is no reason to worry about path dependency. For his complete work in this area, see his Re-Thinking the Network Economy.

My own view is "enough already!" I have absolutely no desire to have to upgrade my meagre video collection once again. I'm quite content with our current DVDs. In fact, the new technologies befuddle me. But then it probably doesn't matter all that much to me, really; I don't watch very much on DVD; I mostly keep sports or music going in the background while I surf the net.

Plastination, Corpses, and Art

Would you be willing to donate your body (or that of a parent or spouse [after their death, Jack]) to German anatomist Gunther von Hagens to use in his art projects?

Plastination, invented ... in 1978, is a process that replaces water and other fluids with plastic, preserving dead tissue indefinitely without odour.

He does this with cadavers and calls it art. And quite successfully.

Body Worlds 2, which features some 200 plastinated cadavers and body parts, will run at the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto from Sept. 30 until Feb. 26, 2006.

... In the past decade, more than 17 million people around the world have seen the show and its predecessor, Body Worlds 1. In several cities, museums and science centres presenting the display were forced to extend viewing hours to accommodate the demand.

... Medical ethicists have decried the exhibit as a crass, commercial exploitation of the human body. Nevertheless, the Body Worlds shows are reported to have grossed about $200-million worldwide.

Von Hagens grosses over $200m from donated bodies. Do you think suppliers might start raising the price above zero once knowledge of his gross receipts becomes more widespread? Or is the quantity supplied at a zero price so large he will not have to start paying for them.

I'm thinking of specifying in my will that von Hagen and the medical schools can have a bidding war for my body, subject to a minimum reserve bid set by my heirs.

Or, in the present, do you think e-bay would accept this item for auction?
There are none listed there as I write this. Why not? It's just a forward contract.

What Is Wrong with Most MBA Programmes?

Paul Kedrosky has several recent interesting postings at Infectious Greed about the lack of hands-on knowledge among most biz skool profs and how that lack affects their courses. In one, he opines, Time to Fire a Few MBA Professors. Commenting on remarks by Yale School of Management Dean, Jeff Garten, Paul says

I couldn't agree more strongly that a root of the problem is that almost all business school professors have no business experience. And the incentive system is completely cock-eyed, with it being an embarassment that business schools treat promotion & tenure decisions as if biz school profs are lab physicists. Then again, all Garten's twin-track approach [some profs do practical teaching; others do research] will likely do is create a caste system inside schools, with the insiders hoarding power and control over the "mere" clinical faculty who, the dumb bastards, actually know what they are talking about. Craziness.

The comments and his responses make for good reading. In another piece, Paul links to this quote from Jeffrey Pfeffer:

There is little evidence that mastery of the knowledge acquired in business schools enhances people’s careers, or that even attaining the MBA credential itself has much effect on graduates’ salaries or career attainment.

In many respects, Kedrosky provides some useful insights. One reason the case-teaching method still has strong proponents in some of the better bizskools is that profs who use the case method typically have had at least some decision-making experience.

If you get a chance, ask Paul about his DBA dissertation.

Why Coinstar Inc. Loves Pennies

From NBC and the Associated Press:

62-year-old Edmond Knowles set a world record yesterday when he cashed in 1, 380,459 pennies.

Officials with Coinstar Incorporated sent an armored vehicle to collect the spare change, which was counted at Escambia County Bank.

There is much more, along with photos at the Coinstar site.

Coinstar has long been been ambivalent about my "Ban-the-Penny" campaign. After all, they earn their income off our higher transaction costs.

For more on getting rid of the penny, see Centsless.

Dark Chocolates are Healthybut this does nothing to tighten my priors

The Macon Georgia Daily News is reporting yet another study[this one from the June, 2005, Am. Jl. of Hypertension] indicating that indulging in dark chocolate is good for one's arteries [thanks to Jack for the link].

The researchers examined the effects of flavonoid-rich dark chocolate on blood-vessel function in 17 young, healthy volunteers over a 3-hour period after they consumed 100 grams of a commercially available dark chocolate.The investigators saw that an artery in the arm dilated significantly more in response to an increase in bloodflow. Chocolate consumption also led to a significant 7-percent decrease in aortic stiffness."The predominant mechanism appears to be dilation of small and medium-sized peripheral arteries and arterioles," Vlachopoulos and colleagues suggest.

Show me some longitudinal studies, and my priors might tighten a bit, but this study isn't all that convincing. Unfortunately.

Prostates, PSA-tests, and Cancer

Recent research has indicated that PSA tests for cancer may have considerable type I and type II errors.

The P.S.A. test "is just not as discriminating as we thought it was," said Dr. Michael J. Barry, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

As a result, many experts are suggesting that the P.S.A. not be the single focus of prostate cancer screening, but rather one piece in a puzzle with other risk factors.

... First Dr. Ian M. Thompson Jr., chief of urology at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, published a paper in The New England Journal of Medicine reporting that biopsies found prostate cancer in as many as 15 percent of men with P.S.A. levels below 4.

Then Dr. Thomas Stamey, professor of urology at Stanford University School of Medicine, published a paper in The Journal of Urology saying that P.S.A. tests were virtually useless. In most men, P.S.A. levels of 2 to 10 are caused by nothing more than a harmless enlargement of the prostate that occurs when men age. But prostate cancer is so common that biopsies find prostate cancer in most middle-aged and older men if doctors look hard enough. So the results would be the same if doctors simply biopsied men age 50 and older than if they did a P.S.A. test first.

One word of warning from the article is that if PSA levels are rising, there may be cause for concern, even if the levels are less than 4.0, which is a standard cut-off [variable confidence interval?]

The other major point made in the article has been well-known for over 20 years.

... last month, Dr. Peter C. Albertsen of the University of Connecticut Health Center published a study in The Journal of the American Medical Association saying men with prostate cancers that do not look particularly aggressive under a microscope - the majority of men whose cancers are found with P.S.A. tests these days - can do perfectly well with no treatment for at least 20 years. All they need is to be monitored by a doctor to ensure that their P.S.A. levels are not shooting up.

It is interesting to see that this is still a view widely held among prostate oncologists.

h/t to BenS. Neither of us has prostate cancer, so far as I know.

Live-8 Is a REALLY Stupid Idea.And Possibly Even Dangerous

I wrote last week that I do not think more aid and debt relief will help alleviate world poverty, but that free trade will help. Here is some really compelling evidence supporting my argument [h/t to Econotarian]

Fundamentally, economic growth depends on
qualitative, not quantitative, factors: the structure of
property rights, the extent to which courts of law apply
and enforce abstract, clear rules inexpensively and
quickly, the size of government and its effectiveness in
delivering public goods, and the openness of the
economy to trade and investment with the outside
world.

It would be more sensible to scale back levels of aid,
provide aid only to governments that are already
reforming, and make aid available for a strictly limited
period of time. Other reforms, such as removing trade
barriers and eliminating trade-distorting agricultural
subsidies, would yield far more benefits than increasing
aid.

The data and the tables are fascinating, so read the whole thing. Here is a summary of one section of its research:

There is also strong correlation between the number of
loans and negative performance: the more adjustment
loans a country received, the worse it performed. This
reflects the politics of aid: donors want to salvage their
failures with new loans, and this sends a message to
recipient governments that they do not have to deliver
reforms to get more loans. There are good reasons to
believe that several governments had an incentive not
to deliver reforms since they could obtain more money
by not reforming.

... The conclusion is simple: donors cannot buy reforms in
developing countries. It is naïve to believe that foreign
aid and conditionality can achieve what the domestic
political process has not accomplished. That idea rests
on the assumption that political leaders in poor
countries actually are interested in reforms that are
conducive to economic growth, and have the capacity to
deliver those reforms. If we have learned anything from
political history, it is that such a romantic view of the
nature of politics is seriously ill informed – if not
altogether dangerous.

Powerful rhetoric!

For more, which captures my earlier thoughts, but which is much better written, see Rondi Adamson's column about Live-8 in The Trono Star, "...fairer trade rules will do a lot more for Africa." And here is Daniel Drezner on the inadequacies of Jeffrey Sachs' proposals [which are perilously close to those of Live-8] for reducing extreme world poverty in The End of Poverty .

Serena Williams: Love Her or Hate Her, There's No Need for This

I don't know who Henry Wanker Wancke is. But there is no call for his style and tone as he described the loss of Serena Williams at Wimbledon on Saturday. What surprises me is that it is on the official Wimbledon site.

Pre- and Post-Mating Decisions;Trophy Spouses?

From Mahalanobis:

Married men earn more than bachelors so long as their wives stay at home doing the housework, according to a report Wednesday from Britain's Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER).

There are many competing hypotheses here.
1) Specialization leads to greater efficiency, so in that case the man can be a better worker.
2) Stay-at-home wives may prefer men with more earnings power, so it is really the women choosing the higher income men as opposed to creating them.
3) Men may prefer stay-at-home wives, but these are costly to support. Here men's preferences are creating the disparity, in that wealthy men disproportionately can afford to choose women with stay-at-home preferences.

I'd venture that married women also earn more than comparable single women if their husbands do all the homemaking chores. If so, how common is it for these guys to be perceived as trophies? If rarely, then the specialization hypothesis takes on more credibility.

Here's a further hypothesis for testing: married women earn less than their single counterparts if they are expected to manage the bulk of the homemaking chores in addition to a full-time job. The same specialization explanation applies, only with a variation. Assuming homemaking is more time-consuming for a family than for a single woman, a married woman will have more demands on her time unless her partner takes on a big chunk of the homemaking tasks, which, I gather, doesn't really happen all that much. This hypothesis helps explain the Fraser Institute result of many years ago that never-married women have incomes that are similar to those of comparable men.

The Truth about Hillary;a salacious new book review

The Truth about Hillary by Edward Klein is sure to be gossip delight. Here is a portion of Blake Wilson's review in Slate:

How nasty is The Truth About Hillary, Edward Klein's new biography of the former first lady? Let's just say that Monica Lewinsky appears on Page 1, groping Bill Clinton's crotch at the rope line outside a cocktail reception for his 50th birthday.

... Little Rock private investigator Ivan Duda tells Klein that Hillary called on him after Bill was defeated in his second governor's race. According to Duda, she said, "I want you to get rid of all these bitches he's seeing. ... I want you to give me the names and addresses and phone numbers, and we can get them under control."

... Michael Galster, a former Arkansas prison contractor who had social connections to the Clintons, tells Klein that when he considered blowing the whistle on a crooked scheme that implicated Bill, Vince Foster came to intimidate him: "You know what your noncooperation means as far as the state's renewing your orthopedic contract, don't you, Mike?"
... According to Galster, "It was accepted as a fact that Hillary and Vince were sleeping with each other."

Klein's gossipy source also tells him that Liz Moynihan said Hillary is "duplicitous. ... She would say or do anything that would forward her ambitions. She can look you straight in the eye and lie, and sort of not know she's lying. Lying isn't a sufficient word; it's distortion—distorting the truth to fit the case."

What impact will the book have on Hillary's political career?
My guess is that it will have zero effect, or possibly a slightly positive effect, a view supported by the reviewer for Publishers' Weekly:

This clip+paste job by a former editor of the New York Times magazine is unlikely to change a single mind, let alone vote - to paraphrase the political commentator, conservative Tucker Carlson, readers who already hate lightning-rod Clinton know why they hate her. Those who like her won't find their minds changed by any of the ersatz revelations in this ultimately uninteresting book.

Toronto, Ontario!Live with Culture

Actually, the new slogan being bandied about by Trahnah's culture vultures is TO Live with Culture. [TO means "Toronto, Ontario, where Toronto is pronounced "Trahnah"].

I know SARS was a virus, not a bacteria, but do they really think "Live with Culture" is the best way to sell the city?

And how are they pronouncing the "i" in "Live"? Long or short?

If You Love Me, You'll Divorce Me

From Secret Dubai,

The 22-year-old wife had given her 27-year-old husband an ultimatum, saying that if he really loved her, he would divorce her.

Staff at the Justice Department were not particularly impressed, describing the wife as "immature" and the husband as "childish". They recommended the couple seek psychiatric help.

A rare instance in which I agree with a bureaucratic decision.

Hell Hath No Fury Like a 78-Year-Old Woman Scorned

78-year-old woman shoots and kills ex-beau at a seniors' home in Georgia. [Also available at the WashPost (reg. req'd]:

Furious that their romance was ending, a 78-year-old great-grandmother shot her 85-year-old ex-beau to death as he read the newspaper in a senior citizens home, police said.

"I did it and I'd do it again!" Lena Driskell yelled to officers who arrived at the home June 10, according to testimony. Police said she was wearing a bathrobe and slippers, waving an antique handgun with her finger still on the trigger.

... After [a] nasty breakup with Winslow, she kept showing up uninvited at his apartment in Hightower Manor, the complex for seniors where they lived, Detective D.B. Mathis said. A security guard tried to calm her down, but Driskell drew out her gun, pressed it to Winslow's head and fired up to four times...

Do you think she'd have done it if either Winslow or the guard had been carrying a gun?
What would John Lott say?

PayPal spoof/fraud

I just received two copies of e-mail that are clearly an attempt to break into my PayPal account. The messages say to click on a website link so they can check on something because maybe someone has been trying to use my account fraudulently. This one is hilariously bad, though:

If you recently noticed one or more attempts your account while traveling, the unusual log in attempts may have been initiated by you. However, if your are rightful holder of the account, click on the link below tolog into your account and fallow the intrusctions.

Yup. My account is lying fallow, awaiting further intrusctions. The spelling and grammar get worse, though:

If you choose to ignore our request, you leave us no choise but not temporaly suspend account.

We ask that you fallow at least 72 hours for the case to be investigated and we strongly recomanded to verify your account in that time.

and then, when you run your cursor over the web site link, you see that the link is to a numbered IP address.

In case you don't know, don't do it.

Leftists Aren't Pink or Red They're Pale Grey

From George Baker, of the Times Online [pointer from Melanie Phillips]:

... What does th[e] surprising, tentative resurgence for the Left signify in global politics? Not a triumph for progressive policies, that’s for sure. On the contrary, if you look hard at what unites the left across Europe and the US, it is decidedly reactionary.

... The French Left, and its allies in the rest of Europe, stands not for some progressive dream of international solidarity for the dispossessed, but four-square behind the protection of the continent’s own illusory privileges.

The Left’s new rallying cry is to build a protective system that would impoverish Bulgarians, Romanians, Turks, Indians and Chinese and would, of course, as do all attempts to retreat from the realities of the global market, ill serve its own workers.

And the real kicker:

In the Middle East the left finds it much easier to side with the mullahs and the jihadists, the persecutors of women and the torturers of dissidents. America’s flaws at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are viewed by the Left’s political and intellectual leaders as morally indistinguishable from (or perhaps worse than) anything the Islamists and Arab despots have got up to.

Re-Tagged in Book Tag

I have been re-tagged in book-tag, this time by Mapmaster of London Fog and by Sparky at SCSU Scholars. I wouldn't ordinarily consider re-playing, but for three reasons I'll play again.

First, it is intriguing that in one variation of the game, people ask how many books do I own, whereas in the first version with which I was tagged, the question was "How many books have you owned?" Mapmaster tagged me with the former; Sparky with the latter. The evolution has been fun to watch.

Second, there are some bloggers who need to be tagged.

Third, after reading other people's answers, and after reading more books, I have different answers.

1. a. How many books have I owned? I don't know. We buy them, we read them (or not, sometimes), we give them away. Probably between 4,000 and 5,000.
   b. How many books do I own? I haven't done a count, but a rough estimate is about 700. We have moved several times in the past decade, and I gave away tonnes of books before each move. Also, at one time I was seriously considering early retirement [aka offering my tenure for sale to the university], and I started paring down my economics library.
2. The Last Book I Bought. It just arrived. A used copy of A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment from the Journals of Alfred Kazin (highly recommended to me by BenS, purchased from Amazon.ca). From the blurb:
   The son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Alfred Kazin was born in Brooklyn. His memories of his parents and childhood, movingly evoked in these journals, serve to bracket a life spent in a different world altogether. ... Kazin candidly reflects on his four marriages, his feelings about the Holocaust, his criticism of American society, the pleasure and stimulation of reading good writers..., his need to pray, his travels abroad and within the United States, and more. I'll start it "real soon now".
3. The Last Book I Read. Flatland by Edwin Abbott [The copyright is expired, so you can find it on the internet, too]. It is a speculative novel, first published in 1884, about a hero who lives in what he and his fellow citizens perceive to be a "universe" of just two dimensions. The hero miraculously visits lineland, which is composed only of one-dimensional beings and finds it impossible to convince them there is another dimension. Then he miraculously is taken on a tour of space-land, where there are 3-dimensions. He is completely awed by the experience and is completely unable to explain the third dimension to his fellow citizens.
   Earlier, I wrote about how the possibility that we live in a 4-dimensional 'brane of an 11-dimensional universe has had a big impact on me. I can see a lot of parallels between our lives in this setting and the lives of the Flatlanders. I didn't much like the superficial socionomological commentary, but the mathematics and dimensional philosophical problems were fascinating.
   Before Flatland, I read Trade-offs, by Harold Winter, which I reviewed favourably.
4. Five Books that have Meant the Most to Me. This is pretty similar to my previous answer. The first three are the same, but the last two have changed.
   1. The Economic Way of Thinking (Canadian Edition) by Paul Heyne and John Palmer. Paul's U.S. edition had a big impact on me. It was a real treat to do the Canadian adaptation.
   2. Capitalism and Freedom by Milton Friedman. It helped me understand economics better than a four-year undergrad degree did.
   3. Industrial Concentration: The New Learning by Goldschmid, Mann, and Weston. This book played a major role in converting me from the Bainsian paradigm to the Chicago/UCLA approach to industrial organization.
   4. The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. As I have said several times, this book (and the associated DVD series from PBS's Nova) have nudged me away from being a committed atheist by raising very intriguing questions about the nature of the universe. For more on string theory and Brian Greene, see this interview in Seed Magazine.
   5. How to Lie with Statistics by Darrell Huff. I know it's trite and trivial, but we bought several cases of this book and gave them to journalists back in the days when we ran a two-week course to teach them some economics. I wish everyone could develop just a bit more intuition about probabilities and statistics.
   5b. Okay, I'm cheating. The Joyless Economy, by Tibor Scitovsky. It is quite dated, now, but it opened my eyes to the possibility that the rational maximizing paradigm cannot quite explain everything about human interactions. It made me feel uncomfortable.
5. And now I'm supposed to Tag 5 people. Here are the new tag-ees [apologies if you were already tagged and I missed your answers; "no tag-backs!"]
   1. Craig Newmark of Newmark's Door. Craig introduced me to blogs, and his is the first one I read each weekday morning.
   2. Skip Sauer, co-blogger and founder of The Sports Economist.
   3. Kevin Brancato, co-blogger and founder of Always Low Prices [and major blogger of Truck and Barter]. He just finished his PhD defence, and it will be interesting to see what else he has been doing with his time (besides working and blogging).
   4. Tom Hanna of Tom's Rants.
   5. Stephen Ayer of Disinterested Party.
   Update: I just realized that Phil Miller of Market Power hasn't responded to my first tag. Maybe he'll respond if I re-tag him.
   

The Locusts of Private Foreign Investment

From The Smart Economist [see the blog ad to the right to sign up for their free newsletter]

MUENTEFERING ON PRIVATE-EQUITY INVESTMENT

Franz Muentefering, Chairman of the German ruling Social Democratic Party, launched an attack to foreign investors who seek what he described as "short-term gains" by comparing private-equity firms to the biblical plague of locusts that descended on Egypt, stripping it of vegetation.

- True, private-equity firms can be ruthless, but they strip underperforming company managers of their jobs, rather than the economic flora in foreign countries.

The MIT Weblog Survey

It looks as if I'm the second oldest person writing a blog (and who has taken the survey). Funny, I still feel like a 27-year-old.

Are Transaction Costs THIS High? The U.S. Supremes Blow It

In a very anti-market, anti-property rights decision, the U.S. Supremes have ruled that a city may use eminent domain to claim people's property for use by private developers.

It was a decision fraught with huge implications for a country with many areas, particularly the rapidly growing urban and suburban areas, facing countervailing pressures of development and property ownership rights.

The 5-4 ruling represented a defeat for some Connecticut residents whose homes are slated for destruction to make room for an office complex. They argued that cities have no right to take their land except for projects with a clear public use, such as roads or schools, or to revitalize blighted areas.

As a result, cities have wide power to bulldoze residences for projects such as shopping malls and hotel complexes to generate tax revenue.

Since when did it become so difficult for developers to buy options? Since when did it become so costly to negotiate land amalgamations? I know there are potential hold-out problems, but the cost of them will likely prove to be far less than the costs of this decision, which gives developers massive incentives to try to buy off local politicians. And I don't really see how this decision is consistent with the U.S. Constitution.

As Tyler Cowen says, "This is just awful." Phil Miller calls it "A Sad Day, Indeed." Cafe Hayek calls it "lamentable," with this analogy:

the Supreme Court (well, five of its members) ruled that local governments can seize property from private citizen A and give it to private citizen B if it, the government – the gaggle of force-specialists – declares publicly a belief that such seizures will create jobs and increase the amount of money the force-specialists will succeed in forcibly extracting from non-force-specialists.

Suppose that a majority of this very same group of nine black-robed worthies were to declare that I, a private citizen, can poke a gun in my neighbor’s nose and demand that he sell his house to me so that I can give or sell it to someone else. The only condition demanded of this ‘court’ is that I proclaim with as much sincerity as I can muster that my seizure of this house will ‘improve the neighborhood’ and generate more income for me -- more income that I promise, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die, to spend wisely on further efforts to improve the neighborhood.

Would you – would anyone – respect such a ruling of this ‘court’?

Update: Check out Julian Sanchez on the decision. Also see Eugene Volokh for a different perspective. And Kip Esquire has two interesting pieces here and here.
Tom Luongo, in an excellent piece, calls it "Viagra for City Government". I note that he misspelled "gubmnt".

Now, more than ever, it is clear just how much the U.S. needs Posner or Easterbrook on the Supreme bench.

MRIs in Canada - -More Bureaucratic Inefficiency

From The National Post ($ required, link courtesy of Jack):

Some Ontario hospitals are operating their magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines at only 40% of capacity even as thousands of sick people languish on waiting lists for the much-needed diagnostic scans, according to a new study obtained by CanWest News Service.

“What it means is that for the hours they [MRI machines] are working, they are not putting through a big volume of patients,” the author of the government-commissioned report, Dr. Anne Keller, said in an interview. “I was amazed at how inefficient some places were.”

Dr. Keller said that while lack of funding or personnel shortages are major reasons for the inefficiencies, there are also situations where there “is not optimal business management.”

Dr. Keller’s report, commissioned by the province’s Wait Time Strategy agency, is the most comprehensive examination of MRI and CT utilization ever undertaken in Ontario.

At the same time, the department of defence is sending soldiers to private clinics for MRIs [See The National Post, June 21, Canada, page 8, subscription required]:

The Department of National Defence spent $1.3-million last year to send military personnel to private clinics for MRI exams and other diagnostic tests, newly released documents show.

The Canadian Forces can legally use private clinics, where waiting times for MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) tests are measured in hours, not weeks, because it operates its own health system outside of the Canada Health Act.

For more on the use of private health care by the military and by the RCMP, see this.

My prediction: the gubmnt will insist on inserting yet another layer of oversight bureaucrats to increase the capacity utilitization of Ontario's MRI machines.

My solution: privatize MRI and CT clinics. Let private entrepreneurs determine the optimal rate of capital utilization. Private MRI and CT clinics are in plazas and mini-malls in many cities in the United States on a nearly walk-in basis. They have considerably lower waiting times than we have in Ontario, and, as I posted earlier, they even advertise in Canada for clients.

Why Do the Israeli-Palestinian Talks Seem Stalled?

The Main Stream Media will tell you it is because Israel has refused to talk about anything until the Palestine Authority eliminates all terrorist strikes against Israel (an understandable goal). But the MSM do not mention the intransigence of the PA:

The meeting Tuesday, June 21, between Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon and Palestinian chairman Mahmoud Abbas – their first since the February Sharm al-Sheikh summit - went badly, as all the parties admitted. There was an attempt to present the failure as emanating from Sharon’s impossible demand of Abbas to crack down on terrorism, countered by the Palestinian leader’s complaint that he would if he could, but lacks the necessary strength. Israeli Labor spokesmen later criticized Sharon for failing to offer Israeli concessions to buy the embattled Palestinian leader more popular backing.

But, all in all, DEBKAfile’s Palestinian and intelligence sources claim the published account is misleading. Nothing was settled between the Israeli and Palestinian sides because the interchange was dominated by a flat refusal by Abbas flanked by prime minister Ahmed Qureia and other cabinet ministers to budge on any of the points raised by the Israeli side. Instead they pressed hard on their own. The atmosphere of the talks dropped to freezing before they broke up.

The above quotation is taken from this source, which details the points raised by Israel on which the PA refused to budge. [h/t to Joy Wolfe]