The Ambrosini Critique

(that title was fun)

Here’s Leonardo lamenting stupid people:
It seems to me that men of coarse and clumsy habits and of small
knowledge do not deserve such fine instruments nor so great a
variety of natural mechanism as men of speculation and of great
knowledge; but merely a sack in which their food may be stowed and
whence it may issue, since they cannot be judged to be any thing
else than vehicles for food; for it seems to me they have nothing
about them of the human species but the voice and the figure, and
for all the rest are much below beasts.

and just the other day he said this about studying things you don’t like:
Just as eating against one's will is injurious to health, so study
without a liking for it spoils the memory, and it retains nothing it
takes in.

(BTW, I subscribe to this cool service that sends a diary entry a day to my RSS reader.)

(h/t Fey Accompli)

• The author speaks: Greg Clark on public radio. He does a great job summarizing the main ideas in his book.
• Farewell to Alms: evidence for IQ as the most important economic driver? Arnold Kling makes the connection, but I’m not so sure.
• Clark has an editorial, “England’s success may be in our genes“, in the London Times. I just spoke to the Professor and he assures me that he did not pick the headline and he quickly reminded me of his Irish ancestry
• I’m told there’s a glowing review in the Financial Times, but I wouldn’t know because its behind a pay wall. From the blurb: “Gregory Clark’s A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World is fully as absorbing, as memorable and as well written as Mr Diamond’s remarkable bestseller. It deserves to be as widely read.”

BTW, I think I know why you might see harsh critiques like Warsh’s… Check out this book review by Prof. Clark:

Because the function of a book review is to direct busy readers towards good books and away from bad ones, a good book review and a kind book review are often incompatible. This is one of those unfortunate occasions. Even though Richard Day notes promisingly in the preface that “I felt my mission to have been that of providing a better characterization of economic change” (p. x), no economic historian is going to benefit from delving into this book.
The first problem of the book is that it is a book only in the sense that its pages have consecutive numbering. The volume is composed of 12 essays, based mainly on previously published papers and essays written between 1967 and 1998. These essays cohere about as well as the collection of objects you find in the typical California yard sale. Here you can read, in no particular order, essays on both technological changes and sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta, 1940 to 1957, and on global human development since the origin of the earth. Had Cambridge University Press mixed up the order of the chapters on the way to the printer, only the author would have noticed. Had one of the chapters been deleted by mistake, no purchaser would have been angrily demanding their money back at the bookstore.
The second problem of the book is that even if the reader decided to try applying Day’s methods of economic dynamics in economic history, after reading the book they would not have any idea how to do that. It is not a cookbook for the methods of economic dynamics. The examples are laid out at too abstract a level. There is page after page of diagrams, all with time on the horizontal axis, where curves swoop, dive, arc, and ascend like dolphins at play. But where exactly these curves came from is not laid bare. The analogy would be trying to teach people to cook haut cuisine by showing them a list of ingredients and pictures of the final dishes. A model of “Economic Development and Migration” (chapter 8 ) may highlight the “complexity and interdependence of the building blocks of the economic system and the complex multimode, multiphase structure of development that evolves” (p. 156). But how that complexity is modeled will remain a mystery to the average reader. Even if the mission stated in the preface succeeded and you got the religion, no reader could figure out how to worship the new dynamic god in future academic work.
But average readers, I think, will not be persuaded by the material presented here to abandon their static friends and family and go off in search of dynamism. They will not get “teched up” in Recursive Programming and the other tools of the Economic Dynamist that the new god demands, because Day never actually demonstrates the value added from such techniques. He may be able to predict labor inputs in the Mississippi delta in 1940–1957 using a dynamic model of production (chapter 4), but has he done so any better than alternative static models? That question is not addressed. He models the green revolution in the Punjab in dynamic terms (chapter 5), but again with no reference to any alternative ways of modeling these changes. As with calibration methods in macroeconomics, or computable general equilibrium models in economic history, showing that your model can roughly reproduce the paths observed in the data is not proving that you have produced the final, best description of reality. Theories can only be judged relative to other, competing theories, and this book never considers such alternatives.
Thus sadly while economic dynamics and economic history have many of the same interests and issues, this book largely fails to speak to historians.

Ouch.

(h/t fellow-econ-grad-student-that-would-rather-remain-nameless)

(h/t Chicago Boyz)

Sabernomics thinks both Jason and I are right:

The most interesting aspect of this study is that the discrimination that exists shrinks in QuesTec ballparks, when umpires are being monitored.

The good news is that the effect of the bias is very small, a little less than one pitch per game. And I don’t think there is much that can be done to alter this (except more QuesTec), as it is probably the result of something deeply rooted in the human psyche. I don’t believe that umpires set out to make calls along racial lines, it just happens.

MR has the scoop.

Great article about Bonobos over at Skeptic Magazine:

I understand the frustration of field workers with the image of bonobos as angels of peace, which is not only one-dimensional, but incorrect. On the other hand, anyone who objects to the occasional hyperbole (such as “chimpanzees are from Mars, bonobos are from Venus”), should realize that no one would ever have heard of the species — and no reporter would have considered them for a piece in The New Yorker — if they’d been described as merely affectionate. Possibly, one or two decades from now a new image of the bonobo will emerge, one more complex than what we have today. This is already happening thanks to detailed studies of their socio-ecology, observations that nuance the dynamics of female dominance, and video-analyses of their natural communication.

Everybody knows humans are violent like Chimps and garsh dern it, why can’t we be all sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, like the Bonobos? We’re so damned violent, right?

Well, no. The violent crime rate in the U.S. is 0.161%*. This means if you followed a band of 15 Americans around for 28 years, you’d only have a 50-50 chance of seeing someone get raped, beaten up, murdered or otherwise violently crimed. That sounds more like the docile Bonobos than the red in tooth and claw Chimps.

*which is a relatively violent place… there’s three times as many rapes and four times as many murders as the world average

On the heals of the racism in basketball study a couple of months ago, a new study shows strike zones have different dimensions depending on the mix of races between umpire and pitcher. This is yet more proof that we live in a deeply biased society and we haven’t yet extracted the stain of racism from our collective conscious… or something.

Except, one thing. The effect is really, really, very small. Those racist umpires call one extra strike every 2.5 or 3 games for pitchers of their own race… That’s right, this effect accounts for 0.34% 1% more strikes called by The Man for The Man. Woopty-doo…

Inspired by Political Calculations, I thought I do some math.

The strike zone is defined as “that area over homeplate the upper limit of which is a horizontal line at the midpoint between the top of the shoulders and the top of the uniform pants, and the lower level is a line at the hollow beneath the kneecap. The Strike Zone shall be determined from the batter’s stance as the batter is prepared to swing at a pitched ball.” Home plate is 17 inches across and let’s say the average height is 24 inches (this actually seems high to me… most batters crouch down at the plate). This gives an area of 408 square inches.

The racist strike zone is 0.34% bigger than that, i.e. 409.4 square inches*. I’ll assume that racists are equally racist in all directions. This means the area of the racist strike zone equals 17 inches plus the racist dimension times 24 inches plus the same racist dimension or (17 + kkk)*(24 + kkk) = 409.4. Using the trusty quadratic equation, solve for kkk. I get about kkk=0.14 inches. That is the racist umpire is able to discern, from a couple feet away, a distance less than a tenth the size of a regulation baseball.

This seems very unlikely.

The trouble with my analysis is that it assumes racism manifests itself with each call ball or strike — its an analysis on averages, when all it takes is a couple of outliers to turn the course of a game. The authors point out that Umpires could selectively call strikes in important situations. There’s at least two objections to this, though. First, important situations can’t always be discerned ahead of time. The crucial pitch in the 7th inning was only crucial because the team lost in the bottom of the 9th by not getting the game winning hit, but that would only have been a game winning hit if their star black player didn’t strike out in the 7th and hit in a run instead. How could that racist bastard behind the plate know which pitches and which at-bats he needs to be selective on?

The second possible objection to this selective calls theory stems from the fact that it has an important and testable implication. Do “blown calls,” which fans and telecasters can often identify, occur more often with mixed raced pitcher and umpire combinations? I haven’t noticed that trend… but then again I can’t spot the difference from 3 feet away between two balls thrown 0.14 inches from each other, either.

(h/t Jason)

*Of course, these results would be more strikingly small when you consider the fact that the strike zone is actually three dimensional.

Save your work more than once a week. Windows likes to download updates and restart your computer in the middle of the night without asking. Also, OpenOffice doesn’t have its auto-save and restore features turned on by default.

Oh, and also, don’t be a dumb-ass.

That is all.

I didn’t hear about this story when it happened:

AT&T delivered less than [Pearl Jam]’s full performance during its Lollapalooza webcast. The powerhouse telco turned off the audio during the song “Daughter” while singer Eddie Vedder was railing against President George Bush.

Now, I swear I wrote a post a while back opposing Net Neutrality on free market principles. I can’t seem to find that post, now. But the basic idea was that if the industry thinks it needs to provide different services for different customers, I didn’t see why Congress should get in its way. Obviously, more services, meant more choice, more innovation and happier web users. Right!?

Well, the Peal Jam incident or, as Lessig puts it, The Jamming the Pearl incident makes me think twice. If the telco market was competitive at the local level, if consumers got to choose between services and vote with their feet when they saw something better or needed to leave a particularly bad service, Net Neutrality would be a no-go. But we don’t live in that world and maybe this additional regulation would improve efficiency.

Now, I could argue that in the best possible world, telcos would be unregulated, unleashing competition and all its virtues. Instead of instituting yet another regulation, we could do away with them all.

But I realize, given the vested interests, this perfect world is politically unfeasible. So, bowing to political realities, I’m forced to support more regulation instead of none, right?

If so, am I a “second best” economist? Or should I, in my capacity of an economist, inform people about the most efficient outcome (i.e. no regulation, more competition)*, in which case, be a “first best” economist and, in my capacity as a pragmatist, lobby my Congress people to support Net Neutrality, in which case, be a “second best” voter?

Are economists pragmatists when giving policy advice or idealists? If its the former, do we have any special ability or training to analyze and give advice about political realities?

*Assuming the IO folks are with me on this one.