Books finished in March:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)
Body of Lies: A Novel
Euphoria
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine
Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery
The Intuitionist: A Novel
Ratings and old books are in the library.
I browsed through Vox.com’s archive after not having visited the site for a while, and they do have some good material (in addition to a fair amount that I do not find that attractive). Here is some of the recent stuff I liked best:
Reading The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
There was also a list of topics that were to be treated very carefully, such as “Theft, robbery, safe-cracking, and dynamiting of trains, mines, buildings, etc. (having in mind the effect which a too-detailed description of these may have upon the moron),” Sympathy for criminals, Attitude toward public characters and institutions, and The institution of marriage. The industry also enforced the code itself.
It is fascinating that this was official policy. Of course it should come as no surprise that some things were not exactly right in the US of that time. As regards film censorship, Norway has also set itself up for some serious ridicule (in 1980!).
Books finished in February:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)
The Rider
On Writing: 10th Anniversary Edition: A Memoir of the Craft
Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction
The Unknown Terrorist: A Novel
The Village Effect: How Face-to-Face Contact Can Make Us Healthier, Happier, and Smarter
Ratings and old books are in the library.
Two papers in The Economic Journal November 2014 deal with how childhood information may predict adult outcomes.
Frijters, Johnston and Shields consider the question Does Childhood Predict Adult Life Satisfaction? Using repeated surveys of people born in the UK in 1958, they are able to explain only 7 % of people’s adult life satisfaction with a very wide range of family and childhood variables. Interestingly, exploiting the panel dimension, they estimate that around 40 % of adult life satisfaction is a trait (i.e. fixed), so it is surprising that their first number is so low. It is as if type of childhood almost does not matter. Education and wages are predicted much better.
I do not know if information on time preferences would have helped, but Golsteyn, Grönqvist and Lindahl at least claim that Adolescent Time Preferences Predict Lifetime Outcomes in their article in the same issue. They find that Swedes who were future-oriented (had low discount rates) as children went on to obtain more education, better grades, higher incomes, and better health (obesity and mortality) as adults than their more impatient peers. The authors are admirably clear that they are not estimating causal effects.
Since I am doing some work using intelligence test data, I wanted to read something introductory material on that topic. Enter Intelligence: A Very Short Introduction
Deary takes the test collection called Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale III as a starting point. WAIS-III consists of 13 different tests, and strikingly,
“every single one of those 13 tests in the WAIS-III has a positive correlation with every other one. People who are better at any one test tend to be better at all of the others. There are 78 correlations when we look at all the pairings among the 13 tests. Every single correlation is positive – a good score on one of the tests tends to bring with it a good score on the others. There are no tests unrelated to any other one, i.e. there are noe near-to-zero correlations. There are no tests that are negatively related with other ones. Even the lowest correlation between any two tests is still a modest 0.3 (between picture completion and digit span). […]
The first substantial fact, then, is that all of these different tests show positive associations – people good at one tend to be good at all of the others. […]
The second important fact is that some sub-groups of tests in the WAIS-III collection associate higher among themselves than with others. For example, the tests of vocabulary, information, similarities, and comprehension all have especially high associations with each other. So, although they relate quite strongly to every test in the WAIS-III collection, they form a little pool of tests that are especially highly related among themselves. The same thing occurs with digit span, arithmetic, and letter-number sequencing. They relate positively with all of the other tests in the collection, but they relate especially highly with each other (pp. 7-8).”
In the WAIS-II tests, there are four groups of tests that correlate particularly strongly (called “group factors”), labelled: Verbal comprehension, Perceptual organization, Working memory, and Processing speed, ref. the figure below (p. 3).
Positive correlations between the four group factors are high. This has often been taken to imply that the skills required to do well on each have some common source, which has traditionally been called g (“general factor”). Strictly speaking, the fact that the different test scores are positively correlated does not imply that they have something in common or that “g” corresponds to anything real. Deary is at one point fairly clear about this, writing: “The rectangles in Figure 1 are actual mental tests – the 13 sub-tests – that make up the Wechsler collection. The four circles that represent the ‘group factors’ and the circle that contains g are optimal ways of representing the statistical associations among the tests contained in the rectangles. The things in the circles, the specific/group factor abilities and ‘g’, do not equate to things in the human mind – they are not bits of the brain (p. 11).”
Though he muddles it somewhat when continuing with “The names we pencil into the circles are our common-sense guesses about what seems to be common to the sub-groups of tests that associate closely. The circles themselves emerged from the statistical procedures and the data, not from intuition about the tests’ similarities, but the labels we give the circles have to be decided by common sense (p.11),” and later much more by going on to treat ‘g’ as a valid stand-alone explanatory concept, and writing e.g. “We already know from Chapter 1 that there is general ability and there are […] specific types of mental ability (p. 85).”
Nevertheless, the book seems to be a good exposition of intelligence testing and how psychologists have viewed and continue to view the results of these tests.
Books finished in January:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)
Augustus
Station Eleven: A novel
Infinite Jest
The History of White People
Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China
Good book about how times are changing in China, well told through various characters. But I am not that interested so stopped midway through.
Beijing changed very much.
Incredible story of Justin Yifu Lin from Taiwan, who defected and swam to China, left family, became economist, got Chicago phd, and became Chief Economist of the World Bank.
Ref to Norwegian sinologist Mette Hansgård Hansen who saw teachers imparting individualism.
Story of girl Gung who went to school. Created dating site.
Funny about Chinese tourists in Europe.
Truth chapter-about the propaganda department. Propaganda important for Mao. We hear about the judgement of Mao having been 77% correct and 30% wrong. Under Deng: Studied western PR and spin policies to improve propaganda. Censorship, no mention of Tiananmen e.g. Freedom of speech and the press guaranteed in the constitution, “but regulations gave government broad powers to imprison editors and writers for “harming national interests” and other offenses (p. 122)”. Parallel realities-public and real.
Recommended for those interested in China.
Ratings and old books are in the library.
I have always liked time use surveys and would love to use them more, for example to write posts like this one at Vox. Now I have recently begun working a little with some such Norwegian surveys, so here is a little about recent developments in how young Norwegians spend their leisure time.
(Apologies for the unsatisfying look of some of the graphs, they are simply lifted from an online resource.)
Percent spending time on various leisure activites an average day, 1970-2010.
In short, since 1970 fewer of us are reading an average day (turquoise), while more area watching television (light blue), and recently using internet (included in “Other” (dark brown)).
A bit more detailed look on average time for 1991-2005 confirms that television time is increasing; 
and although there might be somewhat of a Harry Potter effect for the youngest in the beginning of the 2000’s, time spent reading is quite consistently going down, 
including time spent on newspapers,
magazines, 
and even cartoons. 
Is that a bad thing? Well, that depends, but if it is passive television entertainment that crowds out reading, I would not be surprised if that had some long term consequences.
Books finished in December:
(Warning: reviews are unpolished and quickly written.)
Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
Blood in the Cage: Mixed Martial Arts, Pat Miletich, and the Furious Rise of the UFC
The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea (Modern Library Chronicles)
Share risks and rewards. European monarchs created chartered companies to pursue their dreams of imperial expansion.” Ex east India Company, Virginia Company. Limited liability was key. “[T]he three big ideas behind the modern company: that it could be an “artificial person,” with the same ability to do business as a real person; that it could issue tradable shares to any number of investors; and that those investors could have limited liability (so they could lose only the money they had committed to the firm).”
1.
Violent history, now different. Slavery, war, etc.
Merchants and monopolies. State monopolies inefficient. In Europe at least internal competition.
Unlimited liability. De Medici innovative-separate partnerships and profit sharing arrangements.
Northern Europe: copies much from Italy,but most imp contribution was guilds and chartered companies. Corporate bodies started, immortal. Towns, guilds, etc.
2.
Royal charter-exclusive trading rights. Joint stock company. Start to buy shares, and limited liability. East India company troubled initially, but managed. Exclusive rights to sell tea in the American colonies-Boston tea party. Monopolies, criticism from Adam Smith. Courts. Government of big organizations and many people.
3. A prolonged and painful birth 1750-1862
Reinvigorate the idea of the company. Partnerships most common, but unlimited liability a problem. State competition to have the least regulation in order to attract companies. Railways changed things.
Recommended for the historical parts.
Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces
The old “Castle doctrine” (A man’s house is his castle) is now broken, no knock warrants and raids have become common. Maybe too rosy view of self-governing communities depending on mores, etc before. General Patten revealed as mad, wanted to shoot and leave dead rebellious citizens.
The name SWAT was originally “Special Weapons Attack Team”, but was changed to “Special Weapons And Tactics” because that sounded less aggressive.
Two-sidedness of the commerce clause governing federal power over the states – civil liberties and Nixon’s crime on war and drugs. Villain Nixon-hid statistics, ordered easy arrests, could “stick it to the left” with his Supreme Court nominees.
Swat proliferation, started for exceptional cases of hostage taking and emergencies. Civil asset forfeiture. Drug raids became source of revenue. Impunity. Extreme increase in swat raids, and not even in cases of violent crime, mostly for drug raids. Swat more problematic in small places, not enough training and personnell.
States decriminalizing medical marihuana, but people still targeted by federal authorities-FDA.
Often wrong door, botched raids, accidental deaths. Also poker raids. And raids under the guise of food inspection etc. Bizarre: Shaquille O’Neill and Steven Seagal joining in raids for tv shows. Military equipment more and more common.
Cable tv and cop series->violence.
Police unions a problem. Advocates cameras and liability for police officers. Public needs to start caring; some positive signs.
Recommended.
The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality
How income and affluence present in daily life
“The objective is to unveil the importance that differences in income and wealth, affluence and poverty play in our ordinary lives as well as the importance that they have had historically”
1. Inequality between individuals in a community
2. Inequality in income between countries
3. Inequality globally. Increasingly important
-essay-Vignettes
Focus on disposable rather than marketable income.
1. Study of distribution important historically. Among social classes-workers capitalists landowners. Pareto started with individuals. Iron law-80/20. Kuznets theory of change, inverted u. Later augmented K curve.
Good and bad inequality. Keynes quote, view of capitalists as savings machines. Social monopoly vs incentives.
Atkinson welfare measure-equally distributed, equivalent income. But dependent on adding utilities. And higher u functions-Sen. Pareto criterion, but almost impossible to satisfy in the real world. Rawls: “Injustice is simply inequalities that are not in the benefit of all”, and in particular the poor.
Measurement of inequality. First about finding technical measure satisfying certain axioms. Gini. Lack of data, fiscal records often about taxes and without income and consumption, use hh surveys, but these also often not available.
Top income share, gini, etc. Between and within inequality decomposition.
Vignette 1.1. Pride and prejudice contains economics, love-wealth trade-off. Same today, but stakes do change. Anna Karenina, ratio between possible incomes w different husbands, like England stakes changes in Russia. 1.3. Richest ever, consider amount labor that could buy locally with yearly income-modern richer-Carnegie-Gates-Rockefeller. But locally khodorkovsky richer, and Slim even more. 1.5 Was socialism egalitarian? Yes, but lack of incentives, nothing exported, political inequalities, privileges, priority for goods, behavior of elites stood out. 1.7 Who gains from fiscal redistribution? The poorest, but not upper middle. 1.8 several countries in one? In Soviet Union as different as South Korea and Ivory Coast. Rich territories wanted out. In Yugoslavia regional income ratio as big as 8:1, Slovenia vs Kosovo. Raises questions about china, eu, Nigeria. 1.9. China unity survive? Soviet dissolved. Am inequality distributed more broadly, soviet regionally, like in china. Some regions (5+6?)-gang of maritime cities and provinces . 10:1. But language similar and history shared. But ethnic cleavages. 1.10 Pareto and Kuznets. Functional vs interpersonal. Recent tensions between “inequality” and “poverty”. Pareto controversial, anti-socialist. Pareto constant. Human history is history of aristocracies, some elites always in top.
2. Unequal nations
Used to be small, big started with industrial rev until 1950’s. Two methods: unweighted and weighted by population. Same previously, now more diverging last 30 years. More nations and comparability in space and time are problems-construct the new nations and use PPP. Intercountry inequality increased. But when use weighted measure, dampened, though absolute differences still huge, so poor countries need to grow at extremes just to keep up, since so low base.
Neoclassical economics: globalization->convergence, because of fdi, copy easier, specialization, can use good ideas. But we have seen divergence-have not seen much foreign investment, technology does not come free (ref e.g. IP rights).
2.1 Marx. Real wages actually started to rise around publication of Das Capital. Global inequality used to be driven by class, now by location. Third world solidarity has plummeted. 2.2. GDP is about averages. Within nation inequality needed. First divide a nation into 20 income groups, ventiles, convert income by PPP, find position of each venture in the global income distribution. Brazil extreme, covers almost from top to bottom, many countries, ex India where richest ventile is poorer than poorest of US. With percentiles a little overlap. Citizenship is fate.
2.2. How much income inequality determined at birth? Place of birth explains more than 60% of variability in global inequality. With income class of parents as well, more than 80% explained. Portion left for effort small.
2.4 Migration. A rational response to inequality. Income inequalities rising, so also migration pressure. Both push and pull factors. Integration issues. Mexican wall going to be longer than Berlin Wall.
2.5. Hraga. People who burn their papers. Frontex costs as much as what the travelers pay. Lampedusa-“the camp of identification and expulsion”. What to do with the dead bodies? Algeria did not want them. Rethorical question: “can these separate, and unequal worlds coexist…?”
2.6. Three generations of Obamas.
2.7. Globalization has not decreased inequality. And deglobalization in the beginning of 1913-38 did not increase inequality. WWII: divergence- some countries grew much positive or negative. Great Depression: rich countries lost, many others not much affected.
3. Unequal world
Inequality among citizens in the world. Do not have the data globally for before. But recent years, 1988 onwards, have good household surveys for most countries. The world extremely unequal, high gini around 0.70. Decile ratio about 80:1. In dev countries seldom above 10:1. Probably not more unequal since late 80’s. Forces for greater inequality: rising within countries and divergence of incomes between countries. Force for smaller inequality: fast growth of china and India, faster than works average. Trilemma: globalization, increasing between-country inequality, restricted migration. 3.2. Talk of global middle class exaggerated. 3.3. Eu gini about the same as in US, but structure different: more inequality between nations in eu. Social policies should target countries in eu, poor people individually in US. Positive to free circulation of people within EU-cause to believe that poor countries will catch up. 3.5. Capitalist European football system.
Rawls migration: not concerned with global inequality, takes peoples as given, and differences in their preferences; Burdened and ordered countries.
Wants EU to help Africa.
Key challenges: “how to bring Africa up, how to peacefully bring China in, and how to wean Latin America of its self-obsession and bring it into the real world, and doing all if these while maintaining peace and avoiding ideological crusades.”
A Daughter’s Memoir of Burma
Ratings and old books are in the library.
Via Andrew Gelman, a great slideshow about “How Americans Die” from Bloomberg. We see the development of American mortality 1968-2010 broken down in several different ways. It was new to me how important AIDS was as a mortality factor on the population level between the mid-80’s until the mid-90’s and that it affected black men the most. Also, “suicide […] has recently become the number one violent cause of death.” Go have a look.
Ø-blog 
