voluntaryXchange

GDP Grade for the 4th Quarter

Sorry for the delay - Friday's announcement that real GDP grew at a 1.1% rate in the 4th quarter grades out at:

• A "D" using my standard scale, which is tougher than most college classes.
• A "C" using a curve that corresponds to actual grades student get.

FWIW: I don't give pluses and minuses for the advance announcement, but if this was a final revision I'd be inclined to bump each of these up to a plus.

Cross Your Fingers

Myself and several others were brought in to the School of Business at Southern Utah University to help upgrade our collective research in a push for AACSB accreditation (I pretty much crapped out in that role, but we got a couple of cool blogs out of the deal).

Our review team is here currently, and they will give us an exit briefing late this afternoon.

For those not in the know, U.S. colleges and schools of business are accredited by nationwide boards. The top one in the U.S. is the AACSB. We are currently accredited by a lesser organization called ACBSP that was OK when we were less effective. In terms of baseball, this is like going from AAA to the majors, or - if you prefer - like football in the U.K where the top teams in lower divisions get promoted to higher divisions. It doesn't mean that we can beat our betters, only that we can be competitive with them.

BTW: We are proud that, if accredited, we will be just about the smallest school of business to earn that distinction.

Clearheadedness On Development

Read William Easterly's speech to the Asian Development Bank.

It doesn’t help the poverty trap story that 11 out of the 28 poorest countries in 1985 had NOT been in the poorest fifth back in 1950. They had gotten into poverty by declining from above, rather than being stuck in it from below, while others escaped. If the identity of who is in the poverty trap keeps changing, it must not be much of a trap.

I agree in principle with just about everything he says, but I was stunned when he said that $2.3 trillion has been spent on international development over the years. To me, that seems too low.

Via Econlog via Tim Worstall.

P.S. Back when I was a much hotter researcher, I thought I had a good chance at a job that was close to my "dream job". Then I found out that Easterly was on their short list and I knew I didn't have a chance at that one. (No, it was not Easterly's current school of NYU - I was never that good).

Oldest Corporation Sold

Controlling interest in what I regard as the oldest corporation in the world has been sold.

The Canadian department store chain carrying monikers like The Bay and Zellers was sold to U.S. investor Jerry Zucker last week.

The Bay is the company better known as The Hudson Bay Company. It's a department store now, but when it was founded in 1670 it was given wide latitude to exploit and colonize the region that drained into Hudson's Bay. King Charles II brother was initially put in charge, and this region was often known as Prince Rupert's Land.

The definition is really squishy, but my criteria for a corporation are that it has to be incorporated, be reasonably contiguous historically, have ownership shares with limited liability, not be a family business, and not be something that could judged to be a collective. The latter is the rub - lots of "corporations" spent much of their history as collective organizations of workers and owners with a specific task or location. There are older family businesses that The Bay and there are older corporations that fall into the collective definition.

One Way to Celebrate

A Scottish football team got promoted last year, had a big party, and 9 months later the wives of 11 of the players are either pregnant or new mothers.

For those not familiar with "promotion", in Scottish football (and other leagues) there are divisions of different quality. Each year, one or more of the top teams from a lower division are promoted to the next higher division, and an equal number of teams are demoted. The team in this case, Brechin, is currently in last place in its new division.

I'm not sure how much embellishment there is to this story, so blame The Sunday Mail - I just repeat what I hear.

Moral Hazard Averted

It's a very minor thing, but it makes me feel good: I used 35 cents for a classroom demonstration on conservation of value Friday afternoon. It was still where I left it on a student's desk when I went back in that room 71 hours later. One student in a Monday morning class had even told another professor not to pocket it because she knew I had left it there.

Antrhopogenic Warming Takes Another Hit

Increases in cosmic rays have been positively associated with increased cloudiness.

This is important because cloudiness is nonlinearly related to global warming - in smaller amounts clouds decrease warming by reflecting sunlight, while in larger amounts they increase warming by acting as an insulator (folks like me who live in the desert are experienced with the absence of this effect).

This suggests that there is a heretofore unknown avenue for non-anthropogenic non-linear global warming and cooling.

I wonder why this wasn't dreamed up for the Kyoto Protocol. Oh yes, that's right, it's because they don't know everything about anything except what they need to impose on others.

Via New Scientist.

Bryan Caplan Makes Me Think About Religion

Arnold Kling has another post at Tech Central Station about the work of his co-blogger Bryan Caplan.

It's entitled "Stuck On 1968", and its about the locking in of the liberal mindset around the set of beliefs available at that time.

I was interested in the more general thesis though

Caplan, in a book that eventually is to be published by Princeton University Press, argues that most people do not work very hard to arrive at worldviews that are logically consistent and factually supported, because the reward for rational beliefs is too small. He writes: "we should expect people to...believe whatever makes them feel best. After all, it's free...

Kling connects this to politics, but to me it speaks to religion (as did Arnold's recent article about folk Marxism). If I can extend the argument a bit:

...People are insulated from the consequences of their beliefs [because they have] a low probability of influencing the outcome ...

Now I don't want to criticize people's broader beliefs, but even the faithful will admit that their religions have lots of contradictions that they can't explain - say like being against suicide but in favor of homicide bombers.

The economics of this then becomes rather interesting. If a religion provides explanations of events cheaply then it may get people to consume it more readily - either by being more faithful, or by being more willing to accept or convert. This jibes fairly well with practical experience that religions offer lots of answers while science seeks questions that are unanswered. So a faith that attempts to provide more answers may actually do better in terms of size; I think this would be supported if we went out and looked at things like pages in scriptural texts, or availability of books in specialty bookstores.

UPDATE (I didn't quite finish this before I posted it).

Continuing that thought, we should observe that faiths that are more interested in growth should more heavily promote the availability of cheap and readily available information for those seeking answers. I am not an expert on either, but contrast the Mormon faith (which is predominant where I live), and the Jewish faith (with which I have considerably more personal history than the typical non-Jew). Clearly these are on opposite ends of the spectrum on proselytization. They are also on opposite ends of the spectrum as far as free or cheap advice and direction goes. My Mormon friends describe their faith as a lifestyle, and it is certainly one in which there is a ready supply of free advisement about minute details of daily existence. Contrast this with Judaism, which is known for its more general propositions, and the obscurity of more specific positions in the Talmud. You could extend this to religious booksellers as well: my guess is that there are more LDS oriented bookstores in my corner of southwestern Utah than there are Jewish oriented bookstores in Manhattan.

OK ... now I've put my head in the noose ... but  ... if this ticks you off, can you name a faith that isn't aggressively proselytic that provides a large volume of answers, or one that is proselytic that doesn't?

Giffen Goods Don't Exist - Or Do They??

Arnold Kling points out that the Bush administration announced and the Washington Post reported on a plan to reduce health care expenditures by subsidizing them.

That will be neat trick - sort of like George Carlin noting that if he could really move his seat back forward (as asked to on airplanes) he'd be in pornos.

Folk Marxism and Religion

Arnold Kling has coined a great term - folk economics - in this Tech Central Station piece entitled "Folk Beliefs Have Consequences".

So tell me, does this sound like any religions you know?

But folk Marxism is not limited by this economic classification scheme. All sorts of other issues are viewed through the lens of oppressors and oppressed...

Under folk Marxism, the oppressed class has inherent moral superiority to the oppressor class ... Class membership trumps individual character in determining moral standing ... It should be no surprise that this belief has failed to improve the lot of those regarded as "oppressed." It inverts Martin Luther King's call to judge people by the content of their character.

It's unfortunate, but it doesn't seem that most religions and faiths around the world have followed the "We're not worthy" mantra of Wayne and Garth. Rather, "you're not worthy" seems to be commonplace.