Specialization is for insects

Cool music video post-of-the-day

If I was going to start a cover band, it would probably be for the Dandy Warhols.  They crack me up.  Here is the song "Bohemian Like You."  After watching the video you can watch the full "uncensored" version, but that version has some nudity, so it's probably not safe for work, and I won't link to it so you don't "accidentally" click on it.  Anyway, here are some of the lyrics:

So what do you do?
Oh yeah I wait tables too.
No I haven't heard your band,
Cause you guys are pretty new.
But if you dig on Vegan food,
Well come over to my work,
I'll have them cook you something that you'll really love,

Cause I like you,
Yeah I like you,
And I'm feeling so Bohemian like you.

Good sentence

"Intractable problems often have many contributing causes."

from a recent working paper by Abigail Wozniak on the causes of low employment among less skilled black men.

Cool music video post-of-the-day

"Robot Man", by The Aliens.  Do the robot.

Feminist Geometry

I really like the feministing.com blog.  I always learn a lot there, and I think it has made me a little more sensitive than the average hyper-rational social scientist to "women's issues."

Today I'm disappointed by what I am calling "feminist geometry" -- a pyramid that is wider at the middle than at the base.  The accompanying article is pretty good, though.

Economics Trivia

The "Pentagon Papers" (the top-secret reports about the Vietnam War) were given to the New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg, who received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard and discovered the Ellsberg paradox, which is generally interpreted as evidence of ambiguity aversion and as a violation of standard expected utility theory.

I learned this bit of trivia while reading Gentzkow-Shapiro's Journal of Economic Perspectives (JEP) paper titled "Competition and Truth in the Market for News." 

The JEP continues to be my favorite economics journal.

Supply and Demand or Spatial Mismatch?

This question continues to stump me.  Why did this happen?  From The Economist:

The conventional wisdom about ghettos—best expressed in William Julius Wilson's book “When Work Disappears”—is that inner cities decayed because factories moved away. But the jobs often moved only a couple of bus rides away. Noting that millions of blacks moved halfway across the country to find work during the “great migration” in the early 20th century, Mr McWhorter wonders why so many of their descendants failed to follow suit.

He offers two explanations. First, a huge expansion of open-ended welfare in the 1960s enabled mothers to subsist without work. Until the mid-1990s, welfare often paid better than an entry-level job. Second, the counter-culture taught young blacks that working for “chump change” was beneath their dignity.

I find these two explanations highly unsatisfactory, but I don't have any better explanations at the moment.

Blobbles

This cartoon (from The Tech, MIT's campus newspaper) cracks me up.  For the second day in a row I can't stop laughing at it.  Maybe it's because it's a metaphor for my thesis progress. 

Phenix City

One of the fun things about being a wannabe urban economist at the moment is all the new cities I discover.  For example, did any of you know there is a Phenix City in Alabama?  According to Wikipedia,

Phenix City was notorious during the 1940s and 1950s as being a haven for organized crime, prostitution, and gambling. As a result, the city had a negative reputation, and many people still associate this legacy with Phenix City. The Tragedy and the Triumph of Phenix City, Alabama by Margaret Ann Barnes chronicles these events.

In 1955, it won the All-America City Award from the National Municipal League.

How can a city that was "notorious for ... organized crime, prostitution, and gambling" during the 1950's win the "All-American City Award" in 1955?  I would hope it won the award in spite of those problems, not because of them.

Cool music video post-of-the-day

"2080", by Yeasayer.  The video is not by the band; it's a "fan video."  The band's name is growing on me.

Yeah, yeah, we can all grab at the chance and be handsome farmers,
Yeah, you can have twenty-one sons and be blood when they marry my daughters,
And the pain that we left at the station will stay in a jar behind us.
We can pickle the pain into blue ribbon winners at county contests.

Soft paternalism

The title is taken from a very interesting law review article by Colin Camerer, Matthew Rabin, and others.  I think that's the new philosophy of the Cambridge municipal government, as the Red Line of the "T" was down this morning, sending a hoard of people down Massachusetts Avenue in the early morning to wait for buses or to try (in vain) to hail taxicabs.  In the end, there was a "Walk-for-Hunger"-like scene as people decided to just walk to their Cambridge destination.  It was probably healthier for all of us in the end; from casual observation, it looked like almost all of us on the street could have used the exercise.