The Ambrosini Critique

… that is all.

Oh, and:

• The second installment of the AFtoA symposium at MR
• An interview with Prof. Clark at gnxp
• Kling on institutions

This and the rest of Clark’s lectures on world economic history are hosted at CESifo.

(h/t comment on Rodrik’s site)

Micheal Moore, in his entertaining and heart wrenching dramedy Sicko, mentions the fact that the U.S.A. ranks 37th in the World Health Organization’s health care rankings. Megan McArdle (fka Jane Galt and fka Economist blogger) points to the criticisms of John Stossel¹, but also, she comes up with a pretty good mechanism for ranking health care systems:

[O]ne would hope that the WHO rankings would reflect, to a first approximation, where you’d rather get sick. Does anyone really think that they’d rather be the average consumer of health care in Colombia, than in Columbus, Ohio?
But what about the worst off, you might say? What about them? The WHO table isn’t even a good ranking of where I’d prefer to be poor. I’d far rather be an uninsured day laborer in San Francisco, than in the Dominican Republic. For that matter, I’d rather be uninsured anywhere in the United States than an average citizen in Costa Rica.

This is about right. We should survey experts familiar with various health care systems to ask them where, if they were poor², they’d rather be sick. We could be more specific and ask where the experts would like to be treated for various conditions or illnesses.

1. who you might know from such shows as Good Morning America and 20/20 [↩]
2. by developed world standards… this actually biases the survey against America [↩]

The Social Darwinism pseudo-thesis of Farewell to Alms has generated the most heat, but the book’s discussion of the causes and timing of the Industrial Revolution generates the most light. To that point, NotSneaky nominates this as “the best and most accurate review” of Clark’s book:

I learned several very important insights from this book. I will list a few:
1- The typical dating of the transition out of the Malthusian equilibrium is probably off by a century or two. This is so because the high productivity growth sectors had a very low weight in output (because productivity increases in the largest sector – agriculture – were low). Weighting growth by the sectoral weights of a later date reveals a break in productivity trends somewhere back in the 17th century. To me this is interesting because I think that what was key was the emergence of activities much less intensive in land and so more scalable. But at low levels of income people spend most of their income in food, thus trapping the economy in an agricultural-centered process, where the Malthusian mechanism of population growth causing declines in income more chance to work. This opens up other explanations for the Industrial Revolution that remain to be explored.

2- It is hard to argue that the lack of diffusion of the industrial revolution in the XIX century was any of the usual suspects in today’s most wanted list: poor institutions, lousy finance, lack of human capital. Within the British empire (e.g. in India) property rights were secure, financial markets were pretty open and efficient and there was quite massive transfers of managerial know-how through out-migration of British managers and skilled workers. The slow spread of the industrial revolution in the XIX century is an important puzzle to which the current development debate – which gets most of its intuitions from the post 1960 datasets needs to propose a convincing explanation. Contrary to Dani’s opinion, I do find Clark’s evidence of the textile industry in the XIXth century interesting, even if today cars in South Africa or textiles in China are produced with world-class productivity. It points, in my mind, to some other missing factor that is not a usual suspect.

Sorry gnxp, the genetic (or more likely cultural) drift suggested in the book is not its most important contribution. It is suggestive and it will be interesting to see how people pick up this thread¹, but Clark’s lasting contribution is his annoying habit of knocking down theories. Defenders of human capital or institutional explanations of the Industrial Revolution, and growth in general, will have no choice but to address Clark’s data and reasoning.

1. I’ve been reading Richerson and Boyd for theories on cultural transmission. [↩]

This and the rest of Clark’s lectures on world economic history are hosted at CESifo.

(h/t comment on Rodrik’s site)

Brad Fitzpatrick has thoughts on the social graph:

What I mean by “social graph” is a the global mapping of everybody and how they’re related… Currently if you’re a new site that needs the social graph (e.g. dopplr.com) to provide one fun & useful feature (e.g. where are your friends traveling and when?), then you face a much bigger problem then just implementing your main feature. You also have to have usernames, passwords (or hopefully you use OpenID instead), a way to invite friends, add/remove friends, and the list goes on. So generally you have to ask for email addresses too, requiring you to send out address verification emails, etc. Then lost username/password emails. etc, etc. If I had to declare the problem statement succinctly, it’d be: People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site., but also: Developing “Social Applications” is too much work.

Facebook’s answer seems to be that the world should just all be Facebook apps… [but a] centralized “owner” of the social graph is bad for the Internet.

He then goes on to describe the, somewhat technical, goals of a more open social graph.

For more fun social networking neologisms, here’s Jon Udell (my must-read tech writer) with examples of lifebits which the social graph would help stitch together:

Today we can, and often do, put serious effort into these acts of personal publishing [i.e blogs]. But the infrastructure to which we commit our words, sounds, and images doesn’t take our effort seriously. There’s no guarantee that anyone will be able to access an item at the published address in a year, never mind ten or a hundred. And there’s no guarantee that the effects of these acts of personal publishing — the reactions they provoke, the influences that flow from them, the reputations they create for us — can be measured.

In the hosted lifebits scenario such guarantees will exist, because we’ll pay for the service that makes them. At the core of that service is an archive that provides price-tiered levels of assurance that your stuff will be stable over time, that access will be granted in exactly the ways you specify, and that you can monitor that access.
…
Today when I [write emails], I transmit a message from my email system to yours. If I want to maintain a coherent archive of my email, there are all sorts of challenges. Over time I use a succession of personal and business email systems. And at any given point I use several different ones concurrently, to separate personal from business correspondence. I know a few people who have kept their email archives intact over time, but for most those archives are scattered across a variety of local and (nowadays) cloud-based repositories.

In the hosted lifebits scenario, an email message can be a kissing cousin to a blog posting or a comment. I write it, commit it to my archive at a stable URL, notify you of its existence at that URL, and optionally transmit a copy of the message. That last step is optional because this model decouples two aspects of email that have always been inseparable: notification and transmission.

Its a bit funny to me that Jon — a guy all about loose coupling and decentralization — is advocating a hosted service and Brad — a designer of a proprietary social network site, i.e. a closed network — is advocating a distributed system. Nevertheless, that Jon and Brad are talking about these things makes me think these things are getting close to reality and soon.¹²

1. BTW, Kevin take good notes. There will be an exam. [↩]
2. Yes, I have footnotes on my blog now. [↩]

… geek post incoming.

• Of course there was the MR book symposium… read the comments
• For a more critical discussion read this thread on Rodrik’s site
• Kling primes the institutions debate
• More on the obesity study… yes, I think its related
• Jason dives in

(h/t MilkandCookies via swong)

Actually, a sentence from the Dilbert blog is almost always the funniest I’ve read in any given day: “On the other hand, when you have a Hoover doing a Clinton on your Johnson five nights a week, it sets the bar high.”