The Ambrosini Critique

(h/t /.)

This is just creepy:

“Talking” CCTV cameras that tell off people dropping litter or committing anti-social behaviour are to be extended to 20 areas across England.
…
Home Secretary John Reid told BBC News there would be some people, “in the minority who will be more concerned about what they claim are civil liberties intrusions”.
“But the vast majority of people find that their life is more upset by people who make their life a misery in the inner cities because they can’t go out and feel safe and secure in a healthy, clean environment because of a minority of people,” he added.

UPDATE: No seriously, what the deuce is going on in Europe? Didn’t we already try the fascism thing in Europe? That didn’t work out so well.

Behold!
Prediction #1: There will probably be from 350,000,000 to 500,000,000 people in America and its possessions by the lapse of another century. Nicaragua will ask for admission to our Union after the completion of the great canal. Mexico will be next. Europe, seeking more territory to the south of us, will cause many of the South and Central American republics to be voted into the Union by their own people.”

Prediction #7: There will be air-ships, but they will not successfully compete with surface cars and water vessels for passenger or freight traffic. They will be maintained as deadly war-vessels by all military nations. Some will transport men and goods. Others will be used by scientists making observations at great heights above the earth.

Prediction #9: Photographs will be telegraphed from any distance. If there be a battle in China a hundred years hence snapshots of its most striking events will be published in the newspapers an hour later. Even to-day photographs are being telegraphed over short distances. Photographs will reproduce all of Nature’s colors.

Prediction #29: To England in Two Days. Fast electric ships, crossing the ocean at more than a mile a minute, will go from New York to Liverpool in two days. The bodies of these ships will be built above the waves. They will be supported upon runners, somewhat like those of the sleigh. These runners will be very buoyant. Upon their under sides will be apertures expelling jets of air. In this way a film of air will be kept between them and the water’s surface. This film, together with the small surface of the runners, will reduce friction against the waves to the smallest possible degree. Propellers turned by electricity will screw themselves through both the water beneath and the air above. Ships with cabins artificially cooled will be entirely fireproof. In storm they will dive below the water and there await fair weather.

(h/t MR)

There’s something eminently cool about being able to lecture to a Secretary of Labor. I love the internets!

BTW, I realize my first reaction to the VT massacre is unusual. My first thought when I hear of such tragedies is wonder why someone with a concealed weapon didn’t stop the shooter. This was impossible in this case because on the VT campus, and most other school campuses, concealed weapons aren’t allowed.

I don’t think I’m ready to argue they should be allowed; I don’t think I’d take a gun on campus even if I could.

College campuses are suppose to be sanctuaries of learning where brutal realities like deep, homicidal depression remain abstractions, studied in the Psychology department by students in lab coats. Being free of reality, being caught up in abstractions, frees students to be creative, to try connecting dots that aren’t connected, or thought to be connected, in the mundane. Carrying a gun is a recognition of reality. Carrying a gun on campus would help destroy the purpose of the University.

We have a short economist arguing against a tax on height and a tall economist arguing for it. “Economic agents” maximize their own utility but economists don’t.

In any case, Mankiw’s paper is pretty interesting. The abstract:

Should the income tax system include a tax credit for short taxpayers and a tax surcharge for tall ones? This paper shows that the standard utilitarian framework for tax policy analysis answers this question in the affirmative. This result has two possible interpretations. One interpretation is that individual attributes correlated with wages, such as height, should be considered more widely for determining tax liabilities.
Alternatively, if policies such as a tax on height are rejected, then the standard utilitarian framework must in some way fail to capture our intuitive notions of distributive justice.

In a way, the controversy over the Stern report can be seen in the same light. If you believe, due to some ideas of cross-generation distributional justice, that we should do something about global warming but you believe our standard values of the discount rate are correct (i.e. 2%), then there must be something wrong with the standard utility models.

I don’t think its good enough to say “yep, the models are wrong… ignore the economists.” You have to come up with an alternative framework. Without a good alternative model, there isn’t a common ground for discussion. In this way, a model is just a mode of thought that we can use to think through an issue.

I sat next to Skyler in Econ Theory last year. Also, Skyler’s adviser does some cool work (too bad he moved to UCSD).

I think you will find more science in this documentary than in The Inconvenient Truth. Much of the the science you do see is questioned (wikipedia has a good write-up), but I came away from the film, at least the first half hour, knowing a little more about the mechanisms of anthropogenic global warming.

I learned:

• After WWII, there were 3 decades of cooling and followed by 3 decades of warming
• CO2 rose through the whole period
• CO2 trends seem to lag warming trends by about 800 years in the longer term scale
• It was much warmer in the middle ages than now, specifically in Greenland
• Greenhouse gas related global warming theories predict the upper atmosphere should get warmer than the ground… this doesn’t seem to be the case in the data
• There are competing theories of global warming, like solar variation
• Explicating theory and sharing data are much more effective ways to make your point than appealing to “scientific consensus”

Oh, and the last 40 minutes of the documentary has really entertaining conspiracy theories. Who’s to blame for the global warming conspiracy? The anti-humanist environmentalists! The capitalist hating commie pinko fags!! and the nuclear power loving Margaret Thatcher!!! And they all hate, hate starving children in Africa. Good stuff.

… but sometimes I don’t. What to do the other 3.55% of the time, I don’t know.

Top 100 historical figures. I mean… Napoleon at number two? and where the heck is Soseki?

I was playing around with wordpress’ search feature and I don’t think I’ve ever linked to gapminder which is just silly because its so damn cool and I use it when I’m teaching economics all the time.

So here’s a link and there’s a mini-review of the site here.