Marginal Revolution

Home court advantage in basketball

Tyler Cowen

We all feel the Celtic ouch and perhaps some of us delight in it.  Matt writes:

Kevin Drum notes two smart responses to the question of why home court advantage is so big, with one hypothesis pointing to the refs and another pointing to the idea that there are actually lots of differences from arena-to-arena.

Of course if the arena is the difference you would expect shooting guards, who need a good feel for the lights and angles of the basket, to have a bigger relative advantage at home than do the dunking big men.  That should be easy enough to test.  And maybe a look at Lakers-Clippers or Nets-Knicks history can clear up the importance of arena by holding geographic area constant. 

I wonder if a third component of home court advantage has to do with sleep.  People sleep better at home, if only because they don't have to go to such great lengths to get sex.  I recall reading that Larry Bird became a truly great player only once he...um...calmed down a bit.

I loved this question, and answer

Tyler Cowen

Question for the day: what do libertarianism and the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics have in common? Interest in the two worldviews seems to be positively correlated: think of quantum computing pioneer David Deutsch, or several prominent posters over at Overcoming Bias, or … oh, alright, my sample size is admittedly pretty small.

...My own hypothesis has to do with bullet-dodgers versus bullet-swallowers.

And it ends with this:

So who’s right: the bullet-swallowing libertarian Many-Worlders, or the bullet-dodging intellectual kibitzers?  Well, that depends on whether the function is sin(x) or log(x).

Read more here and can you guess who the pointer is from?

The Storm

Alex Tabarrok

The storm ravaged the city’s architecture and infrastructure, took hundreds of lives, exiled hundreds of thousands of residents. But it also destroyed, or enabled the destruction of, the city’s public-school system—an outcome many New Orleanians saw as deliverance....The floodwaters, so the talk went, had washed this befouled slate clean—had offered, in a state official’s words, a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reinvent public education.” In due course, that opportunity was taken:...Stripped of most of its domain and financing, the Orleans Parish School Board fired all 7,500 of its teachers and support staff, effectively breaking the teachers’ union. And the Bush administration stepped in with millions of dollars for the expansion of charter schools—publicly financed but independently run schools that answer to their own boards. The result was the fastest makeover of an urban school system in American history.

That's from The Atlantic just over a year ago.  Guess what?  It's working. The storm is coming.

New site about prediction markets

Tyler Cowen

Here you will find regular updates on prediction markets, with the blog-like news function here.  You'll see there that the CFTC is requesting public comments on how to regulate "event contracts."  The site is launched by these people.

I thank Chris F. Masse for the pointer.

Predictions about religion

Tyler Cowen

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

That's from David Brooks.

Does the high oil price reflect a bubble?

Tyler Cowen

Paul Krugman writes (and here):

The only way speculation can have a persistent effect on oil prices, then, is if it leads to physical hoarding — an increase in private inventories of black gunk. This actually happened in the late 1970s, when the effects of disrupted Iranian supply were amplified by widespread panic stockpiling.

But it hasn’t happened this time: all through the period of the alleged bubble, inventories have remained at more or less normal levels.

I've never been one to push the bubble hypothesis to explain the high price of oil but I find this an unusual argument to make against bubbles.  Isn't it easy enough to argue that the relevant hoarding is of oil in the ground rather than oil in strategic reserves or panic stockpiles?  We have lots of state-owned oil companies and maybe their way of speculating is simply to remain sluggish in their exploration and extraction activities, at least for the time being.

I think of a bubble as a market price which is above the fundamental value of the asset, largely for psychological reasons.  But with a commodity like oil the fundamental value of the asset depends on the marginal unit and thus how much oil is supplied.  Fundamental value, at least at the margin, adjusts to the price and in that sense the bubble hypothesis can seem tautologically false if we apply the traditional definition of a bubble. 

The key question, in my view, is how much more the oil-producing nations could bring to the market if a) their state-owned oil companies were not incompetent, and b) they did not tolerate this incompetence as an implicit form of speculation and collusion.  I will not offer an estimate here (I genuinely don't have one) but b) does leave some room for bubbly-like phenomena, whether or not stockpiles of pumped oil are high.  Note that in b) collusion and speculation work together and a) tosses incompetence into the mix.  The whole foul brew is probably easier to sustain in times of rising demand and thus oil price explanations are not going to be very simple, or easily separable, by the nature of the problem.

Addendum: Read Arnold Kling, here and here.

Hedge funds in everything

Tyler Cowen

AdultVest, Inc., the Beverly Hills-based investment bank, which concentrates its practice exclusively on adult industry investments, mergers, and acquisitions, announced today it had been selected by Alternative Investment News as one of four funds nominated for the "Hedge Fund Launch of the Year" award.

Here is the link.  That's from John DePalma, who also points our attention to this Dilbert cartoon.

Questions for liberals (and some libertarians)

Tyler Cowen

Robin Hanson, citing the work of Arthur Brooks, asks:

• Would you or I be happier if we let ourselves think more conservatively, such as by attending church more and believing we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps?
• Would society be happier if we encouraged more conservative thoughts?

Robin answers that he would rather "believe whatever is true even if that makes me unhappy."  But there is always adjustment on some truthful margin that can be made.  Robin could play up the relatively conservative thoughts he already believes in and do more of the church-like activities he already partakes in, even if he does not go to church per se.  So these results probably should influence our behavior even though of course we should reject the deliberate pursuit of untruth.

Here are Bryan Caplan's thoughts on the Brooks book.

In case you were sleeping

Tyler Cowen

In December, the Fed had $775B worth of Treasury securities. That stock will soon have dwindled to $300B, give or take. The difference, about $475B, represents an investment by the central bank in risky assets of the US financial sector. $475B is an extraordinary sum of money. It is as if the Fed borrowed more than $1500 from every man, woman, and child in the United States, and invested that money on our behalf in Wall Street banks that private financiers were afraid to touch. For bearing all this risk, if things work out well, taxpayers will earn about what they would have earned investing in safe government bonds.

...If the Fed were to blow through the rest of its current stock of Treasuries, it would have invested more than $2500 for every man, woman, and child in America. Public investment in the financial sector would have exceeded the direct costs to date of the Iraq War by a wide margin.

Here is much more; the Interfluidity post focuses in fact on the implications of paying interest on reserves.  The sad thing is: if I had my finger on the button, I would not have reversed these loans.  Ouch!

The Post-American World

Tyler Cowen

The American political system has lost the ability for large-scale compromise, and it has lost the ability to accept some pain now for much gain later on.

That is from Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World, a book remarkably full of common sense.  It's #7 on Amazon and a good overall guide to globalization and why it matters that America no longer dominates the world, either economically or culturally.

Hail Emily Oster!

Tyler Cowen

The paper is titled "Hepatitis B Does Not Explain Male-Biased Sex Ratios in China"; here is the abstract:

Earlier work (Oster, 2005) has argued, based on existing medical literature and analysis of cross country data and vaccination programs, that parents who are carriers of hepatitis B have a higher offspring sex ratio (more boys) than non-carrier parents. Further, since a number of Asian countries, China in particular, have high hepatitis B carrier rates, Oster (2005) suggested that hepatitis B could explain a large share (approximately 50%) of Asia's missing women". Subsequent work has questioned this conclusion. Most notably, Lin and Luoh (2008) use data from a large cohort of births in Taiwan and find only a very tiny effect of maternal hepatitis carrier status on offspring sex ratio. Although this work is quite conclusive for the case of mothers, it leaves open the possibility that paternal carrier status is driving higher sex offspring sex ratios. To test this, we collected data on the offspring gender for a cohort of 67,000 people in China who are being observed in a prospective cohort study of liver cancer; approximately 15% of these individuals are hepatitis B carriers. In this sample, we find no effect of either maternal or paternal hepatitis B carrier status on offspring sex. Carrier parents are no more likely to have male children than non-carrier parents. This finding leads us to conclude that hepatitis B cannot explain skewed sex ratios in China.

We should hold up Emily Oster as a role model of a truth-seeker.  If the abstract does not make it clear, Emily Oster first won her fame by reporting the opposite result about sex ratios.  Here are our previous posts on Emily Oster.

A more general lesson, of course, is simply how difficult it is to get at truth.  This is a well-defined data set with a (more or less) well-defined answer.  Most policy questions aren't so tractable.

"As a child, Peter Leeson was pirate-obsessed."

Tyler Cowen

That's the first sentence of the article, read more, from The Boston Globe.

Why aren't more people going to college?

Tyler Cowen

Brad DeLong writes:

Altonji, Bharadwaj, and Lange do not know.

The whole post is interesting, but from this I can only conclude that Altonji, Bharadwaj, and Lange have never taught Introduction to Composition to a large group of freshman in a public university in the United States.  Anyone who has taught such a class -- or for that matter talked to anyone who has -- will have some inkling why more people are not going to college.  Herein lie the roots of growing inequality -- on the bottom side at least -- and don't let anyone induce you to take your eye off the ball by playing switcheroo and bringing up the (separate) topic of the growing wealth of the top one percent.

Economists who have endorsed John McCain's economic plan

Tyler Cowen

Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Robert Lucas, Robert Mundell, Vernon Smith, Michael Boskin, John Cogan, Steven Davis, Francis X. Diebold, Martin Eichenbaum, Martin Feldstein, Kevin Hassett, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Glenn Hubbard, Anne Krueger, Deepak Lal, Burton Malkiel, Paul W. McCracken, Allan Meltzer, Tim Muris, June O'Neill, Michael E. Porter, Kenneth Rogoff, Richard Roll, Harvey Rosen, George Shultz, Beryl Sprinkel, John Taylor, and Arnold Zellner.

I was sent that list in an email.  The opening of the statement reads:

We enthusiastically support John McCain's economic plan. It is a comprehensive, pro-growth, reform agenda. The reform focuses on the real economic problems Americans face today and will face in the future. And it builds on the core economic principles that have made America great.

His plan would control government spending by vetoing every bill with earmarks, implementing a constitutionally valid line-item veto, pausing non-military discretionary government spending programs for one year to stop their explosive growth and place accountability on federal government agencies.

No, I don't do endorsements but if I were tempted to (and I'm not) I would this year be even more suspicious than usual.  I feel that the candidates are trying to trick me and the one who isn't -- Hillary Clinton, whose negatives are too transparent to my eyes -- has been trying to trick everyone else. 

I'll put the rest of the letter in the first comment, but in the meantime my advice -- at least for this year -- is to vote on the basis of foreign policy.

True beyond the shores of Harvard

Tyler Cowen

Blog post of the day, from Brad DeLong, excerpt:

Somebody last week--was it Jan de Vries? John Ellwood? Somebody else? I forget who, but it is not original to me--said that the right model for Harvard over the past century is Yugoslavia. Remember the story of the Yugoslavian socialist worker-managed firm? If you add another worker to the firm, that worker gets a pro-rata share of the firm's value added. The firm's value added has a component attributable to the firm's capital stock, a component attributable to the ideas embedded in the firm, a component attributable to the firm's market position, and a component attributable to the workers. Hire another worker, and only the last of these goes up: the first three do not, and so average compensation falls.

This means that a worker-managed firm is likely to shrink whenever it gets good news that makes it more productive--the larger is the value added due to ideas, capital, or market position, the more expensive does it become for the existing workers to replace workers who leave, let alone hire enough workers to expand. While a competitive market capitalist firm responds to good news about its productivity and value to society by increasing employment, a Yugoslavian-model market socialist firm responds to good news about its productivity and value to society by shrinking. On this analysis, the very success of Harvard over the past two generations together with its degree of worker management has created enormous internal pressures not to expand, the better to share out the surplus among the existing stakeholders.

Division of labor in the Babylonian Talmud

Tyler Cowen

This reminds me of Leonard Read's "I, Pencil," but of course it came much earlier:

Ben Zoma once saw a crowd on one of the steps of the Temple Mount. He said, Blessed is He that discerneth secrets, and blessed is He who has created all these to serve me. [For] he used to say: What labours Adam had to carry out before he obtained bread to eat! He ploughed, he sowed, he reaped, he bound [the sheaves], he threshed and winnowed and selected the ears, he ground [them], and sifted [the flour], he kneaded and baked, and then at last he ate; whereas I get up, and find all these things done for me.

And how many labours Adam had to carry out before he obtained a garment to wear! He had to shear, wash [the wool], comb it, spin it, and weave it, and then at last he obtained a garment to wear; whereas I get up and find all these things done for me. All kinds of craftsmen come early to the door of my house, and I rise in the morning and find all these before me.

Credit goes to Stephen Dubner.

Ezra Klein on Kindle

Tyler Cowen

At the end of the day, the true advances won'€™t come in the Kindle, but in the content. Just as the capabilities of the device will shape what authors decide to do with it, so too will the decisions of authors shape the evolution of the device. The Kindle a€™s homepage already features videotaped testimonials from such literary luminaries as Toni Morrison, Michael Lewis, James Patterson, and Neil Gaiman. But what the Kindle, and Amazon, need is not their kind words, but more of their written words, composed with an eye toward the possibilities offered by electronic text. Just as the early television shows were really radio programs with moving images, the early electronic books are simply printed text uploaded to a computer. Amazon could use its unique position to change that.

Here is more.  Here is Megan McArdle on Kindle: "Best thing since sliced bread."  Here is me on Kindle, before and after trying it.

The best sentence I read today, circa 6:36 a.m.

Tyler Cowen

Nixon, who became vice president at age 40, was well described as “an old man’s idea of a young man.”

That is from this review of Nixonland, a book which is rapidly approaching the top of my pile. 

Department of Uh-Oh

Tyler Cowen

Until recently, nearly all the thinking about the risks of space-rock strikes has focused on counting craters.  But what if most impacts don't leave craters?  This is the prospect that troubles Boslough.  Exploding in the air, the Tunguska rock did plenty of damage...

That is Gregg Easterbrook in the latest Atlantic Monthly, June issue, "The Sky is Falling," not yet on-line.  Here are previous MR posts on the asteroid problem.

What are the benefits of being full professor?

Tyler Cowen

Dan Drezner, who just won the title (congratulations!), gives a list.  Oddly he leaves off the most important (only?) benefit, namely that no one can tell you any more that you won't make full professor.  I know that sounds silly but in essence you choke off the ability of your university to send you one very particular negative status signal.  Nor can they hold that threat over your head.

Sometimes I think this is also a benefit of being married.  Let's say you and your significant other are not married.  In that case proposing, and having that proposal turned down, often causes couples to split up.  By marrying you remove this scenario as the source of a possible split.

There are advantages to sitting at the very top and very bottom of status distributions; it is often the in-between spots that are problematic.

The Man Who Loved China

Tyler Cowen

That's the new Simon Winchester book and it concerns Joseph Needham, who wrote the famous series on the history of science in China and focused the attention of the scholarly world on the question: why no capitalism in China?  This books offers a love story, a story of a quest, a story of science, a tale of politics, and did you know that Needham (unwittingly) was the guy who taught the Unabomber to use explosives?

Here is one short bit from the book:

In 1989, more than half a century after they first met, Needham and Lu Gwei-djen were married in Cambridge.  She died two years later, whereupon Needham invited three other women to marry him.  All politely declined.

Definitely recommended.  The subtitle is "The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom."  Here is one review.

Letter to the NEJM

Alex Tabarrok

The issue of off-label prescribing is heating up again.  A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine by Randall Stafford made the case for greater regulation.  I am concerned that the benefits of off-label prescribing are not fully appreciated.  Dan Klein and I wrote a letter to the NEJM - which they declined to publish - in response.  Here's the letter:

Dear NEJM,

R.S. Stafford writes that off-label prescribing “permits innovation in clinical practice … offers patients and physicians earlier access to potentially valuable medications and allows physicians to adopt new practices based on emerging evidence.”  Nevertheless, he calls for greater FDA regulation.

In contrast, we argue that the efficacy of off-label usage suggests that less FDA regulation of first or on-label usage would increase innovation and offer patients earlier access to new medications. 

Off-label prescribing is regulated by the judgments of doctors, medical researchers, industry, the patient community, and patients.  This system offers patients a more nuanced approach to care than a top-down approach.  We should extend this approach to new drugs as well as to new uses for old drugs.

Our perspective is bolstered by a large survey of physicians which demonstrates strong support for off-label prescribing and considerable support for reducing FDA regulations on new drugs.

Daniel Klein
Alexander Tabarrok
George Mason University

Where do the kept women go?

Tyler Cowen

Zubin Jelveh reports:

If you're a married woman living in the New York City area, there's a better than 50 percent chance that you don't work, according to a recent analysis of Census data by economists affiliated with the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank.

More specifically, only 49 percent of white high school-educated married women in their prime working ages were holding down jobs in the New York area as of the 2000 Census. To put that in perspective, there are roughly 2 million woman over 15-years-old who are married in the New York area.

The national average for this particular demographic is 67 percent. At the other end of the spectrum is Minneapolis where almost 80 percent of these married women are employed -- that's larger than the percentage of working men aged 25 and older in the U.S.

And why is this?

Surprisingly, the economists argue, the most important specific thing seems to be traffic.

And if you do work in these traffic-heavy areas, you are likely to work more hours.  But is it all causal?

With all due respect to The Walker Art Center, if I wanted to be a kept woman I would not start my quest in Minneapolis.  High density, as you find in Manhattan, means lots of fun things to do in your copious free time as a kept woman and also a higher degree of income inequality and thus the hope of snaring a rich man.  There's a reason why they didn't set Sex in the City in Paramus and most of the women there will be working even when the traffic gets worse.

Assorted links

Tyler Cowen

1. It hurts to be poor

2. The Bastiat Prize for free-market journalism

3. The 1949 Phillips machine restored

4. Dilbert starts the Economics Party

Russia fact of the day

Tyler Cowen

By 2015, Moscow will boast the 10 tallest office buildings in Europe—and already prime office rents in Moscow are going above $2,000 a square meter, 50 percent higher than the most prestigious skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan.

Here is more, interesting throughout, and thanks to John Bailey for the pointer.

Addendum: Don't forget this part -- about corruption -- either:

Indeed, by some estimates, Russia's GDP growth should have been closer to 14 percent—after all, Russia is the world's largest energy exporter at a time when prices have tripled during the last half decade.

I hate perfume

Tyler Cowen

I really, really do.  All perfume, and yes that means yours too.  But I loved the book Perfumes: The Guide, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez.  If you are rating this book along the single dimension of how skillfully it informs the reader, it is one of the best non-fiction books I have read, ever.

Plus it has good sentences like:

Nobody ever died from wearing Mitsouko, but lots of babies were born as a result of it.

And:

Fragrances for men are mostly identical crap, designed to trap you and give you away as a lout.

Recommended.

Bryan Caplan on the McCain/Clinton gas tax relief plan

Tyler Cowen

You'll find his contrarian take in The New York Times this morning.  It's a second best, public choice argument: according to Bryan we are usually too nasty to energy companies in bad times, so sending them some excess profits is a bit of needed TLC.  McCain's plan of course is better in his eyes because it doesn't include the punitive windfall profits tax.  And without a gas tax holiday we might be tempted to do something worse.  Excerpt:

...even a “giveaway” to the oil industry sets a positive course for the future. During the last crisis, the industry was a scapegoat for scarcity. Politicians scrambled to stop oil companies from profiting from the crisis, even though temporarily high profits end shortages by giving businesses an incentive to figure out how to increase output.

Stephen Colbert dissents.  And here's Bryan's own summary of Bryan.  I don't know the data on the average rate of tax paid by energy companies, compared to other endeavors, but looking at that would be one place to start.

The Fermi paradox revisited

Tyler Cowen

I am still thinking about Nick Bostrom's stimulating essay (and Robin Hanson's precursor essay).  Nick of course is worried about finding signs of alien life, which would suggest that life has arisen many times, leading to the question "where are they?" and the fear that life dies out pretty easily.  For Nick it is cheerier, from our point of view at least, to think it is very hard for life to get underway in the first place.

In pondering the Fermi question, I often wonder if I am not simply missing the party, so to speak.  Most people already *do* think they see signs of an alien presence of some kind, of course defining that concept broadly to include The Gods.  So how can we say we don't see "them"?  Maybe I, the agnotheist, don't see "them" (Him?) but surely most other people think they do.

Doesn't that make the Fermi paradox go away in a snap?  No one cites Blind Boy Blake and screams "He doesn't see them!".

Another way of putting it is to say we don't take David Hume's Dialogues on Natural Religion seriously enough.  We really have just one data point, so who can say what "they" look like, or what kind of "display" they would have made for us?

Alternatively, I am struck by the tension between the Fermi paradox with the "We are probably living in a simulation" claim.  Both are popular with the same group of people because they are nerdy ways of making you believe something weird; in reality the two conundrums don't fit together.  If you take the simulation option seriously, you again see the creators all around you, albeit in disguised or cloaked form.  Of course you had to use Bayesian inferential reasoning to see them, but what's wrong with that?  Better than a telescope, some would say.  And since most people believe in God, the creators might even consider their artwork to be already "signed."  (I'll note rapidly in passing that the arguments against the simulation hypothesis also strike at the Fermi worries, but establishing that would take lots of work.)

Either way, it seems we see "them," or ought to think we see them, even if that turns out to be a visual mistake of sorts.

Addendum: I liked Michael Goodfellow's point:

After that first species gets control, it makes all the rules.  If it shells over all the stars, no other life can even develop, since all the planets are frozen solid.  If it wants to let biological evolution continue, it can do that, by avoiding stars with fertile planets.  It can prevent any other technology from arising (by monitoring all the planets where life is evolving.)  It can guide or change any life that it does find.

This may seem horrible to you -- little robots putting all the stars out!  Spreading like a weed and killing or preventing any new life from developing.  But you're looking at it the wrong way...The first species out there gets to decide the future, for every species that follows.  For lack of any other evidence, let's hope it's us.

Splendid, but I part company at the last sentence.  There is some other evidence (of the Bayesian sort) and I think the most logical assumption is -- whether you believe in God or space aliens -- to think of ourselves as their product, one way or another.

Or to put it yet another way, what's the principle of individuation here?  Isn't "seeing us" and "seeing them" more or less the same thing?

Hail David Hume!

In case you hadn't heard

Tyler Cowen

Charity workers have gathered at Myanmar's embassy in Bangkok, Thailand, with vehicles, emergency food supplies and medicine, waiting for their visa requests to be approved.

Here is more.  And more here.

Fragments of Wisdom

Alex Tabarrok

... it is important that presidential candidates fear economists...

Brad DeLong, writing about why what a politician says about a minor policy like the gas-tax matters. Of course it is even better if the public are informed and on the gas-tax they seemed to have made the right decision.

Does the CPI understate inflation?

Tyler Cowen

You're hearing this a lot these days, most of all from Kevin Phillips.  David Leonhardt sets the record straight.  Here is one excerpt:

During the 1980s and 1990s, though, did you ever stop and marvel at what a small share of your paycheck you were spending at the supermarket? I didn’t. I also didn’t really notice that gas cost less in the late 1990s than it had in the 1980s. Yet lately, every time my wife or I pass a new benchmark for filling up our tank — $40, $50 and now $60 — we have a conversation about it.

Price increases are simply more noticeable — more salient, as psychologists would say — than price decreases. Part of this comes from the notion of loss aversion: human beings dislike a loss more than they like a gain of equivalent size. If you have to sell your house for less than you bought it for, you’re really unhappy. You hate that ground chuck now costs $2.83 a pound, but you didn’t notice that oranges are 31 percent cheaper than they were a year ago.

...The price of major appliances has been flat over the last year. Furniture is 1 percent less expensive. A decade ago, a basic four-door Toyota Corolla LE cost $16,018, according to the company. The 2009 basic model costs $16,650, and it’s a safer, more powerful, more fuel-efficient car than its predecessor.

To top it all off, most people don’t buy any of these items very often. “People tend to remember things they do frequently,” says Stephen Cecchetti, an economist at Brandeis University who studies inflation. “And what do you buy more frequently than gas and food?”

It has electrolytes!

Alex Tabarrok

Yes, you really can buy it now.  Brawndo.  The line between irony and reality grows ever finer.

A Public Choice theory of Chinese food

Tyler Cowen

Seth Roberts, citing Jennifer 8 Lee, writes:

Why did Chinese immigrants to America start so many restaurants? Because Chinese cuisine is glorious, right? Well, no. Chinese immigrants started a lot of laundries, too, and there is nothing wonderful about Chinese ways of washing clothes. As Jennifer Lee explains in this excellent talk, the first Chinese immigrants were laborers. They were taking jobs away from American men, and this caused problems. Restaurants and laundries were much safer immigrant jobs because cooking and cleaning were women’s work.

By the way, here is some work on immigrant complementarity with native labor.  George Borjas rebuts.

What I've Been Reading

Tyler Cowen

1. Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights, by Bill Ivey.  The concrete discussions of cultural issues are consistently interesting and thoughtful; the overall talk of cultural rights which frames the book is not even well-developed enough to be called absurd.  The book is best on copyright and least interesting on the NEA, which Ivey once ran.  Most of all the book reflects a creeping horror that the internet will make its entire series of debates irrelevant.

2. Apples are from Kazakhstan: The Land that Disappeared, by Christopher Robbins.  A substantive travel book about you-know-where; it is both fun and full of substance.  Recommended.

3. The Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve: A History, by Robert L. Hetzel.  This is a very serious treatment of what is, from a historical point of view, an understudied topic.  Recommended; note that while the monetarist point of view is not heavy-handed, it may not appeal to everybody.

4. Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century.  A lengthy and thoughtful volume on how WMD are *the* problem of the future, though I found it didn't get me further to thinking through my views.  A good start, however, for those who don't buy the premise.

5. 1001 Buildings You Must See Before You Die.  One of the best books for browsing I have seen, though don't expect much from the index.  I was most surprised by the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in New Caledonia, have any of you been there?