Amanuensis

Dowden on Africa and China

2009-11-09T10:06:00.000+01:00

Richard Dowden's recent Times article is entertaining and contains some truth.I found the following paragraph particularly amusing though disturbing:

There is a widespread perception that saintly Britain had adopted this poor little girl called Africa and was busy saving her from hunger, war, disease and poverty. Suddenly big, greedy China, flashing huge deals and cheap goods, has seduced the girl and is leading her astray, even raping her. And to make it worse for Britain, ungrateful Africa sometimes feels that although Chinese intentions may not be entirely honourable, China at least treats her like a grown up.

Take a look at the article, it's worth a read. I continue to reflect on the moral dangers of trading with China for countries in Africa, and the extent to which, if trade makes these countries more successful, they will come to believe that politically mirroring China will also bring them success. I hope that this does not happen. I believe that the SA-China campaigns to block the UN Vote on Zimbabwe typifies this danger.

Carnival of the Africans

2009-11-05T11:19:00.001+01:00

I am late to this party, many apologies. The most recent Carnival of the Africans, the 12th, was hosted by Mike Meadon over at Ionian Enchantment. One of my recent posts on risk aversion is in the carnival, so take a look at it if you haven't read it yet (and I promise more are coming, I am simply working quite hard on a paper at the moment which prevents regular blogging for some reason, not all of us are Tyler Cowen). Other posts from the blog that I found interesting are the following: Jacques Rousseau's discussions of whether Faith Kills and on the relevance of Blasphemy Day (basically what's the point of being an offensive non-believer? it doesn't assist the cause and alienates people - here I think it's necessary to separate acts which are political (say PZ Myers and the cracker - though it's debatable about the offence vs. politics here) and those that are just out to offend); two posts on psychic-related stuff - one by Tim at Reason Check on a psychic claiming to have contacted Michael Jackson (LOL!) and another by Angela the Skeptic Detective about a surprisingly boring psychic fair in Durban. Finally, Mike himself explains some things about the human immune system, the understanding of which seems to have been evaded by many people of late. Those are my picks (read, I managed to read them) from this month's carnival. Take a look at the whole thing though for the link love.

Books

2009-10-30T18:55:00.001+01:00

I've decided to return to my previous system of short reviews of several books, rather than lengthy reviews of books one-by-one.

Non-fiction

Fareed Zakaria - The Post-American World - [Audiobook]
I can't say much about this book, except, 'Wow, you really didn't expect the financial crisis, did you?' That said, Zakaria makes interesting and enlightening points about the US's relationships with China and India, and the potential changes in international relations that are likely to occur as a consequence of these new powers flexing their political muscles during the 21st century. But, Zakaria's economics was much more conservative than I expected them to be, advocating Chicago-style policies, without much discussion of more social support, the nuances of alleviating poverty and inequality, or the ways in which interactions between more powerful developed countries and less powerful developing countries could affect the development paths of the 'rest' - his perceptions of socialism, communism and even social democracy seemed a bit jaded and biased. Though the evidence indicates that many countries that did not grow for most of the 20th century are growing and will continue to grow in the 21st century, but this does not mean that their growth will be slower, or that it will favour specific echelons in their societies, or that new problems, particularly with inequalities in power, wealth and rights won't plague these countries, particularly China and Russia. Nevertheless, I still learnt a fair amount from this book, though not enough to warrant the overall defence of capitalism Zakaria advocates, his approach required more nuance.

Joseph J. Ellis - Founding Brothers - [Audiobook]
Ellis takes a strongly episodic approach to the American revolution in Founding Brothers. He begins the book with an episode after the revolution - the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr. Burr shot Hamilton, after which Hamilton died. The episode illustrates a larger conflict between the Federalists and the Republicans, and how their beliefs about the intentions of the revolutionary generation affected their beliefs about the direction of the fledgling American union. We see this time and again throughout the book, manifested particularly in the animosity between Jefferson and Hamilton, in both parties' attacks on John Adams, on the name-calling (both Washington and Adams were accused of being 'monarchists'), and on myriad other events during the years immediately subsequent to the revolution.

For me, the most interesting of the larger episodes Ellis recounts is that of the evolution of the friendship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Initially close as a consequence of their time spent together in the Continental Congress during which time Adams supervised Jefferson, closer still after their time together in Europe, then diverging after their return to America: Adams staunchly support of Washington (and therefore tacitly supported Hamilton) and was sceptical of the French revolution believing that it would come to no good, whereas Jefferson believed that the American Revolution were one and the same, that Washington had concentrated too much power in the presidency and that Hamilton, through Washington, was in the process of making the Union a slave of banking interests, and thus vicariously a tool of the British Empire. However, after much impugning of character, after both their presidencies, and after tragedy had befallen them both, after Jefferson came as close as he would to apologising for his conduct, they became friends once more, dying within hours of each other on the 50th anniversary of signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1826, during the presidency of John Adams's son, John Quincy Adams.

But I found a few problems with the book. First, for someone unfamiliar with the American revolution a lot of the content and context would be missed - you need to know at least the background, surrounding structure, and consequences of the revolution to understand the episodes that Ellis recounts, though I understand this because of my own reading, others unfamiliar with the information might not. Second, as in Ellis's other book on the American revolution, American Creation, Ellis tends to try to create a myth around the evidence, rather than letting the evidence do as much speaking for itself as it can. Not that I expect a history book to be without argument or without discussion, but I prefer a history in which I hear less of the author's voice and more of the voices of those involved - letters, essays, speeches from their pens and mouths. Ellis writes quite forgivingly about his founding brothers, taking their good qualities with their bad, and relating how he believes much might not have been achieved without the synthesis, the sum greater than the parts, that they created in the American union. However, his picture still lacks some of the nuance of social history - to what extent was Washington actually indispensable? Did the history really revolve around him? What about all the Americans working and supporting the many politicians who made their names? What was their relevanceo to the founding? To the American constitution's development? To the development of democracy? So expect a detailed picture of the main players, indeed the founding brothers, and their families and acquiantances, expect biographical details without greater details of the times, locations and social context. For those look elsewhere.

David McCullough - John Adams - [Audiobook]
I loved this audiobook and I came to appreciate the personality and character of John Adams while listening to it. For those of you who don't know, John Adams was the second president of the United States, succeeding George Washington, and preceding Thomas Jefferson. As the man succeeding Washington he had to deal with the relative mess left by Washington and the machinations of Hamilton, and the blooming anti-Federalist sentiments spurred by Jefferson, Madison, and the Republicans. McCullough captures well the challenges that Adams faced, articulating how his flaws impeded him and how his virtues enabled him to achieve the highest office in the land.

McCullough introduces us to Adams during the lead-up to the revolution, and then backtracks to when Adams was the oldest child of John Adams Sr., a boot maker and town alderman. John Adams Jr. studied well and went on to attend Harvard College under the supervision of such luminaries as John Winthrop and others, after which he went on to study the law. His decision to study law, rather than to become a teacher as he had intended dramatically altered his path as it gained him access to thinkers and practitioners who were on both sides of the revolutionary perspective: Tories and those in favour of opposing the British. Adams's simultaneous high quality education, his dedication to ethical and godly behaviour, his determination to be purely and incorruptibly independent in thought and deed (causing many problems later when the States became dominated by parties), his dedicated marriage to Abigail and its proto-feminist equality of intellect (she was basically his sole advisor during his presidency when he realised that his cabinet ministers were Hamilton's toadies), make Adams a phenomenally interesting man to read about. Moreover, because of the close relationship between John and Abigail, the book is as much her biography as his, except that she would not have been allowed to be the second president of the United States.

The book is supported substantially by the primary sources that the Adams family left to historians, based predominantly on the exhaustive of letters between John and Abigal, the vast collection of letters between Adams and Jefferson, Adams and so many others - Benjamin Rush, Elbridge Gerry, John Jay, The Warrens, his son John Quincy Adams (6th President of the US), several Dutch friends, to name a few. McCullough draws heavily on letters written by others too, particularly Abigail and Thomas Jefferson. In addition, McCullough recreates the context of the revolutionary colonies and then the republican United States. He provides every day details ranging from Abigail's continuous demand that John buy needles and cloth when in Philadelphia, to the worries about money, land and children.

Although John's relationship with Abigail forms the backbone of the book, his relationship with his children paints on odd picture of a the role of the rotestant father tied to duty. John believed that his life was not his own and that doing duty to God and to country were far more important than his family. His attitude led to conflict with Abigail, but also to later conflict and remonstrances from his children, particularly Thomas who never seemed to forgive his father for being distant, for being against nepotism and for arguing against any form of speculative investment (Thomas lost several thousand dollars to speculation, thousand dollars of which belonged to his brother John Quincy). Thomas died an alcoholic, leaving his wife and children to the care of his extended family. Sadly, Charles too, after insufficient success as a lawyer turned to the bottle. Nabby, the Adams's eldest child married Colonel Smith, John Adams's one-time secretary. But Col. Smith too favoured speculation and lost substantial amounts of money, losing John Adams's favour in the process. John Adams, informed greatly by his religious background I would suspect, believed that people should have pride in their work, should work determinedly, and should always avoid mummery with money and speculation particularly - simply using money to make money, rather than doing something constructive with your time and abilities was immoral in John Adams's mind. Consequently, apart from his sometimes warm, sometimes cool relationship with his son John Quincy, John Adams ended up having fairly poor relationships with his children. It seems as though this tragedy hurt him, but that he wished his children to understand that a person's life was not their own, but rather given to duty and to God. Adams's work ethic was heroic, he religiously rose at 5am, worked many hours every day, reading late into the night by candlelight. Anything less, he seemed to feel, would not be upholding his duties.

I could go on about the many lists of events, triumphs, tragedies, failures, and renewals in John Adams's life. In fact, with a biography like this, where I really felt compassion and appreciation for the person being written about, it is difficult to determine whether the biography itself is worthwhile. However, I believe that David McCullough's presentation of the narrative does lend one to appreciate John Adams, but it also enables us to see Adams's flaws and his understanding of these flaws. McCullough therefore writes good popular biographical history - allowing us access to the inner life of the main character of the history, while illuminating us about their many quirks and foibles. I recommend this book because it allowed me access to the history of a man who so evidently felt passionately and worked devotedly on behalf of his country and its union.

Thomas Paine - Common Sense - [Audiobook]
I read Common Sense because it is referred to in all the books I've read recently on the American Revolution. Almost all of these books argue that revolutionary sentiments were not sufficiently high to justifyrevolution prior to Paine writing and publishing Common Sense, but after he published it sentiments tended far more towards independence than they had before. The change enabled the continental congress to vote on independence, rather than favouring re-integration with Great Britain alongside greater colonial power in parliament. Paine's work should also be seen as part of a larger project within The Enlightenment in which philosophers and commentators grappled with the problems of liberty, representation, science and the role of the state. I strongly recommend reading this as a way to access the
prevailing sentiments in the colonies that were to become the United States.

Fiction
Alice Sebold - The Lovely Bones -
In The Lovely Bones, Sebold tells the story of an adolescent girl, Susie Salmon who is raped and murdered, and then ascends to heaven. The story is told from Susie's perspective, as she observes people on earth, and the novel spans several years after Susie's death.

Susie details her parents' relationship after her death - her father's obsession with finding her murderer, and her mother trying simply to 'get on with life'. Susie shows too the development of her sister, Lindsey, from an awkwardly gifted, yet beautiful younger sister to someone reconciled with her sisters death. She charts the growth of her brother, Buckley, from someone confused by the sudden disappearance of a sister who had always been there, to someone who knows and understands. She describes the path taken by the boy she liked in school, Ray Singh, as he moves on from being the intelligent and considerate outsider. Susie portrays too the life of her friend, Ruth, a school misfit convinced that ghosts exist, that she is watched, and uncertain whether she is attracted to men or women.

Though one of the main ideas behind the novel, that Susie's murderer continues to live down the road from her parents, could detract from the novel, it doesn't because the novel is not, ultimately, a detective novel or a whodunnit of any sort. Rather, you should take this novel as an interesting confessional or detail-oriented and compassionate portrait of family life after death.

There are several intriguing facets to The Lovely Bones seen mainly in Susie's contemplations and actions: from trying to cross over from heaven to earth and touching those who live on earth in an urge to manipulate what occurs on earth, to lamenting what she has missed because she was killed while remonstrating herself for those things she did not do while alive, to accepting where she is and releasing her attachment to those on earth. Sebold achieves a fairly innovative novel, which I found enjoyable to read. It won't change your world, but you'll gain a sense of a family's suffering after death and how that family strives for resolution, written in a way that feels compassionate and new. Don't be deceived into thinking it's the novel of the century as some reviews would have you believe, but rather that it's fairly slow-moving, thorough and enjoyable if you don't have crazy expectations.

Stella Gibbons - Cold Comfort Farm -
Written in 1932, Cold Comfort Farm is a satirical take on the Victorian novel and the heroins that populated the work of Jane Austen, the Brontes, Elizabeth Gaskell, and others. Gibbons plays up the polarity of rural vs. urban, illuminates the machinations required to make a love overcome class barriers, while making a laugh of it all. Reading Cold Comfort Farm, you get a sense of the doomy and gloomy become spirited and bright, with a manipulative nudge, spit and polish, hard work, and determination. Flora Post, the protagonist, takes on the curse of the farm, the will of her dreadfully backward, suspicious and superstitious family and turns their lives on their head, changing the lives of the surrounding quasi-nobility and villagers in the process. The book must be read to be believed, and you'll laugh your way through it, especially if you know and understand 19th century English fiction. Have a read, it's easy and enjoyable.

Paul Auster - The New York Trilogy
I find it difficult to comment on Auster's trilogy, mainly because the books, though creating a unified whole, also seem to jar, to rub against each other oddly. That said, they constitute a masterpiece of post-modern literature, consistently playing with the notion of authorship, the position of the author in the novel, the nature of autobiogrpahy and biography, and embedding post-modern theorizing and playfulness in a well-known genre: the detective novel.

I thoroughly enjoyed the first and third parts of the trilogy, becoming slightly annoyed by the second part while I read it, but then understanding its relevance to the whole once I reached the end of the novel. It would not have worked without the annoying, but still well-written, second section. My annoyance derived from the post-modern ploys that Auster adopted to achieve his end result, the relevance of which I understand, but I remained annoyed by them. But don't let this detract from the novel too much, the first and third sections are sublime. The third section takes the first two, builds on the structure they provide, and makes the entire novel into something enchanting and truly worthwhile. If you struggle a bit in the middle of the book, champion onward - you will be rewarded by a well-plotted literary detective novel that achieves several 'Ahah!' moments. Enjoy them.

Tracy Chevalier - Burning Bright 1/2
I expected more of Burning Bright, having been told that Chevalier wrote Girl With a Pearl Earring, which I've yet to read, but I have been told is good. I was not to be satisfied. In the book, Chevalier tries to depict London during the Romantic era, playing too with the ideas beloved by the Romantics, for example the beauty of the rural and the corruption of the urban. But her execution of these ideas is clumsy, and they almost lose relevance as a consequence, which the Romantics themselves would have lamented - Coleridge twists in his grave.

The plot progresses as follows. A family from the good rural areas up North, move down to London when opportunity calls. But they are led astray by the allures of the city - they end up poorer than they began, tales of woe hound them, one of the few thins to make their lives seem worthwhile is the assistance they are given by one Mr. William Blake, their neighbour in Lambeth. William Blake meets the two main characters of the book - a boy and a girl - for whom he tries to explain the nature of innocence and experience, an ongoing conversation in which Blake expounds on how everyone has some innocence and some experience in them, and that each person but finds themselves somewhere on the continuum. Rah rah! Enter caddish lad, all suave atop a military horse, who navigates a lady's innocence and makes her more experienced. Ho hum. The book had a lot of potential, there was so much that could be done with the character of William Blake and the people who surrounded him, but it was not to be.

Instead, somehow, Chevalier manages to take the good bits, peel many of them away, and trivialize what remains by turning it into something puerile and arbitrary. If you've read Songs of Innocence and Experience, then you'd know that Blake plays with the these notions deliberately, plays with ideas of religion, of youth, of age, of creation and destruction. Yes, these come through in Chevalier's story, but so obviously and clumsily that they are far less appreciable than in William Blake's poetry. I'd recommend that instead of reading this book, reading a biography of William Blake, read some of his poetry, and maybe read a bit about the history of London at the time.

Annie Dilard - The Maytrees
Rarely do I read a book that conjures images as vividly and imaginatively as those that Annie Dillard conjures in The Maytrees. A love story, the book charts the love of a couple living in Provincetown on the Eastern Coast of the United States: they give birth to a child, they rift, but where does love go? What happens to love? Does it vanish? remain? transform? Can you love more than one person at a time? What of children?

I consistently read passages of The Maytrees out to my wife, astounded by Dillard's ability to characterize moments and sensations perfectly, for example, "They shook hands and hers felt hot under sand like a sugar donut," (7) or "Lou saw the sun spread like a gull for its landing on the sea." (105) Both are beautiful comparisons and evoke the exact image, the exact sensation to make me, as a reader, feel and see what the author makes the characters feel and see in these moments.

The Maytrees is stately, it carried me on the ebbs and flows of its prose as it would a piece of driftwood, and I had to give in to the rhythms of it, let it speak to me slowly, occasionally overwhelmed, occasionally feeling as though I sat atop a wave and was glimpsing an horizon beyond the book. Ok, I'm over-writing now, but I simply wanted to say I thought the book beautiful, poignant, poetic. It will not suit everyone, not that much 'happens'. Much is shown for us to interpret and relay, but I believe that if you appreciate Dillard's writing style, I have but read The Writing Life, The Maytrees will reward you with equally good steadily unfurling beauty and truth about love.

Raymond E. Feist - The Serpentwar Saga and The Conclave of Shadows Trilogy
I've read these books a number of times. Having recently been moving country, staying in a friend's living room, finding an apartment,
moving, getting internet, signing contracts, getting work, etc, I needed something non-literary. I fly through these books when I read
them and they satisfy a strange urge for reading about heroes, battles, magic, etc. Feist does epic battles, multiple-world-spanning wars, and bad philosophy about gods and people well. The Serpentwar Saga probably contains one of my favourite books of his Rise of a Merchant Prince, in which the main character, Rupert Avery, tries to set up a trading empire. Feist details how Roo fails, has the chutzpah to try something phenomenal, triumphs, then loses a huge amount of money in the next book because of a war, after which he starts up again in an attempt to regain his wealth amidst the ashes of a burnt-out kingdom. Thrilling stuff. Just what I needed while dealing with admin and getting back into a working paper on risk aversion.

Gender and Risk: Reviews of the Evidence

2009-10-22T17:24:00.001+02:00

I begin my series on risk aversion, competition and gender with a review paper by Catherine Eckel and Philip J. Grossman in The Handbook of Experimental Economics Results. In their paper, Eckel and Grossman cover several papers that assess risk aversion. So what do we mean by risk aversion? We mean the tendency to avoid risk, to avoid a probability of winning or losing money relative to winning or losing some certain amount of money. For example, do you put your money under your bed, in property, in bonds, or in stocks? The level of risk increases as you move from the one to the other, but the potential rewards increase too - leading to the well-known relationship between risk and reward. Eckel and Grossman look at three methods used in economics to assess risk aversion - Abstract Gambles, Contextual Environment Experiments and Field Experiments. I deal with each in turn.

Abstract gambles are decisions where a subject has to choose the gambles that they prefer, these decisions may be hypothetical (I'm not a fan), low stakes gambles (normally with some good, like chocolates or sweets), or be gambles with money that they are given by the experimenter. For example, the subject could be given $8, then asked whether they would like to participate in a gamble in which the rewards are -$8, -$3, $0, +$3, +$8, or they could just stick with $8. The subject could then leave with anywhere between $0 and $16. The experimenter could then vary the probabilities with which these events are likely to occur to evaluate risk aversion. Contextual Environment Experiments are characterised by abstract gambles, except that the decisions are framed differently, i.e. in the gain domain (getting positive amounts of money) something could be framed as an 'investment', in the loss domain something could be framed as 'insurance' (paying money to avoid something occurring in the future). Field survey and experiments, often coupled with laboratory gambles, evaluate subjects' behavior outside of the laboratory, either in some environment to which the subjects are accustomed, or in some experimental frame - seminal experiments evaluated subjects behavior in the laboratory compared to their behavior in an activity to which they are accustomed, in this case trading sports cards, or collecting coins, others simply report survey results and chart behavior.

Using abstract gambles with material incentives, the evidence indicates the following results, either men are less risk averse than women, meaning that men, particularly men from adolescence to about 40-years-old, choose more risky gambles than women do, or there are no statistically significant differences between men's and women's behavior. There is no evidence that men are more risk averse than women for gains. However, for losses, women are less risk averse than men, i.e. when faced with the option of losing money, women will take a risky gamble to lose a large amount of money, rather than lose money with certainty.

In the contextual environment experiments, the frames change and behavior also changes as a consequence. As described above, when framing losses as insurance and gains as investments men's and women's behavior does not differ significantly in one pair of studies (Schubert et al, 1999, 2000), whereas in another (Moore and Eckel, 2003) women are significantly more risk averse than men and similar to the evidence for abstract gambles, women are more risk-seeking for insurance, i.e. risk-seeking for losses, and similarly in another study (Gysler, Kruse and Schubert, 2002) after controlling for competence, knowledge and over-confidence women are more risk averse than men with their risk aversion decreasing in their levels of expertise. A final study by Levy, Elron and Cohen (1999) with MBA students simulating a stock market shows women significantly more risk averse than men and making substantially less money as a consequence, this experiment is particularly interesting because the subjects supposedly gambled with their own money.

Lastly, for field work, a substantial amount of data corroborates the result that women, particularly single women, are more risk averse than men. Several articles show that men hold more risky assets than women do - women tended to hold riskless, or relatively less risky, assets. Married women were also substantially less risk averse than single women throughout these data.

The results from these papers generally indicate that women are substantially more risk averse than men for gains, and women are more risk-loving than men for losses. Eckel and Grossman do not try to explain why women behave so, but rather try to chart the result's empirical regularity. We'll leave speculation about why women behave this way to later papers.

References
Eckel, Catherine and Philip J. Grossman, 2008, 'Men, Women and Risk Aversion', in The Handbook of Experimental Economics Results, Charles R. Plott and Vernon L. Smith (eds), Elsevier Science & North-Holland.
Gysler, M., J. B. Kruse, and R. Schubert. (2002). “Ambiguity and Gender Differences in Financial decision Making: An Experimental Examination of Competence and Confidence Effects.” Center for Economic Research, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Working Paper.
Levy, H., E. Elron and A. Cohen (1999). "Gender Differences in Risk Taking and Investment Behavior: An Experimental Analysis." Unpublished manuscript, The Hebrew University
Moore, E. and C. C. Eckel (2003). “Measuring Ambiguity Aversion.” Unpublished manuscript, Department of Economics, Virginia Tech.
Schubert, R., M.Gysler, M. Brown and H. W. Brachinger (1999). “Financial Decision-Making: Are Women Really More Risk Averse?” American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 89:381-385.
Schubert, R., M.Gysler, M. Brown and H. W. Brachinger (2000). “Gender Specific Attitudes Towards Risk and Ambiguity: An Experimental Investigation.” Center for Economic Research, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Working Paper.

Gender and Risk: Introduction to the Series

2009-10-22T12:21:00.001+02:00

Are girls as competitive as boys? Do boys take more risks than girls? Do female CEOs risk as much and compete as much as male CEOs? Or are these ill-posed questions, appealing to an idea of gender as deterministic, entirely nativist? Over the next while I'll be posting discussions of papers in economics, particularly experimental economics, in which the researchers try to grapple with the correlates of risk aversion and how gender seems a particularly persistent predictor of risk aversion: the evidence suggests that women behave substantially more risk aversely than men behave. But economists are also quite clever about all of this - they have recently begun to try to understand whether nurture, context, or other factors that tend to correlate with gender might be the underlying correlates of risk behavior. I'll introduce these ideas as we look at the research.

I'll be dealing with results from several papers. Provisionally, the reading list comprises the following:
Sheryl Ball, Catherine Eckel and Maria Heracleous, 'Risk Aversion and Physical Prowess: Prediction, Choice and Bias', Working Paper, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Department of Economics
Alison Booth and Patrick J. Nolen, 2009, 'Gender Differences in Risk Behaviour: Does Nurture Matter?' University of Essex, Department of Economics Discussion Paper 672
Alison Booth and Patrick J. Nolen, 2009, 'Choosing to Compete: How Different Are Girls and Boys' University of Essex, Department of Economics Discussion Paper 673
Catherine Eckel and Philip Grossman, 2008, 'Men, Women, and Risk Aversion: Experimental Evidence', The Handbook of Experimental Economics Results, Vol 1, Charles R. Plott and Vernon L. Smith (eds), Elsevier Science & North Holland
Uri Gneezy, Kenneth L. Leonard and John List, 2009, 'Gender Differences in Competition: Evidence for a Matrilineal and a Patriarchal Society' NBER working paper 13727 (forthcoming in Econometrica)

I will also refer to several other papers on general results about risk aversion and methods used to elicit these preferences, but I won't review these papers specifically.

Did you find this review helpful?

2009-10-19T17:53:00.001+02:00

I've been thinking recently about Amazon's reviewing system. On the couple of times that I have reviewed something harshly, for example my review of The Shadow of the Wind in which I contradict a number of people, I've received a number of 'not helpful' votes. My problem with this rating system is the following - I think that liking something and finding something helpful are two distinct notions. But, I believe that people use the voting system to indicate dislike of something, regardless of whether it is helpful or not. I admit, I've felt the urge to click on that 'No' button when I disagree with a reviewer, but I realised that disagreeing with someone does not mean that I found the review unhelpful, and does not justify my choosing to vote 'No'. In fact, the converse could be true - I could disagree and therefore find a review helpful as it motivates me to think why I enjoyed a book, found a book interesting, or why I should go ahead and write a review of my own.

The problem, really, is one of incentives. Reviewers confront a problem: do they wish to tell their true opinion about a book and provide a service, or do they want to be highly ranked in the Amazon system, or can they do both? With the current system, you probably end up with people in the top ranks of reviewers being those who give books 5 stars regularly, with fans of the book always giving them many 'helpful' votes when they just liked the book. Which means, if you're competitive and want to rank well, there's an incentive to write five star reviews more regularly than critical or harsh reviews in case fans of a book disagree with you and destroy your ranking. Now this doesn't matter much to me, I'm small-fry in the world of Amazon reviewer rankings, but, as an economist, I can't help but think that people will turn the system into a competition over positional goods and that the incentives are inadequately geared towards truthful, systematic reviews of books. Honest and critical reviewers must either be non-competitive or have altruistic preferences, or be uninterested in, or indifferent to, their reviewer rank.

I have assumed that the two outcomes - being highly ranked and being truthfully critical - are mutually exclusive because of the potential for a critical reviewer to be swamped by the nays of fans. In fact my conclusions don't require this assumption, they probably need something weaker like an interaction of spitefulness and criticalness, which is likely to occur. I don't know if fans actually act spitefully, but the evidence in behavioral economics suggests they might. What could Amazon do to counteract this outcome? Currently, I don't know, but I think that the behavior stems from an asymmetry in the costs to reviewing and the costs to commenting. I would suspect that far more customers vote on whether they find a review helpful than write actual reviews. Therefore, maybe Amazon, to reinforce truth-telling, should only allow you to vote on a review if you yourself have written a review, say you get 5 votes per review you write. We'd then get a second order problem of review quality as everyone who wanted to vote might write poor reviews... Gosh what a nightmare.

One countervailing factor could be reputation. If a 'real name' reviewer has a reputation to uphold outside of the world of Amazon.com, then they might have the incentive to tell the truth about their opinion of a book because, if they don't, their reputation would be undermined and they could suffer pecuniary losses outside of Amazon. This is why I favour the 'real name' reviewers option, and why I would distrust anonymous reviewers.

But, here's the kicker, it isn't in Amazon's interest to get people to tell the truth about books, CDs, or DVDs. They are in the book-selling business, not the book-reviewing business. Thus, assuming there's a positive correlation between the number of stars a book receives in review and the likelihood that any person will buy it, the more people who write 5 star reviews of books, the more books Amazon will sell. Amazon's ranking system therefore fits its intentions perfectly - get people to compete over being top-ranked, which requires those people to write more 4 or 5 star reviews than fewer star reviews, which then compels people to buy more books.

I conclude then that trusting Amazon reviews, on aggregate, is probably not a good thing to do. I know that there are certain reviewers who write interesting and high quality reviews, for example Herbert Gintis's review page on Amazon.com is great, but I'm not sure if there are many Herbs out there, and therefore I'm not sure how many Amazon reviews I can trust. Amazon is in the book-selling business after all.

Reasons I'm Happy With My Education

2009-10-12T23:10:00.001+02:00

So, today the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Science in memory of Alfred Nobel, or the Nobel Prize in Economics, was awarded to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson. All over the web you've had incredibly famous economists announcing that they knew nothing of Elinor Ostrom's work. Astounding! Her book, Governing The Commons, is an incredibly important tract on how societies come up with novel, and socially determined, ways to deal with common property, or, in other words, to solve the prisoners' dilemma. I was introduced to her work during my Honours at the University of Cape Town by two of my professors, Justine Burns and Malcolm Keswell, the work of which we cemented during my Masters at UCT. They had been inclined to read her because of the influence of Samuel Bowles, who refers to Ostrom's work several times in his book Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution. One of her papers also appears in a book for which Bowles is one of the editors, Moral Sentiments and Material Interests. Bowles also refers comprehensively in MBIE to Oliver Williams, specifically his application of Ronald Coase's theories. Bowles has a soft spot for Coase and argues for a synthesis of Herbert Simon, Karl Marx and Ronal Coase in order for us better to understand how markets function in non-market ways. Anyway, I just wanted to add my voice to the many stating how proud they are about the choice. I am most happy that Eugene "Efficient Markets' Fama didn't get it and that the 'markets aren't quite efficient' people did get it.

Dilow on Fairness

2009-09-30T10:21:00.001+02:00

Chris Dillow instructs us in his post 'Come Dine With Me: The Economics' that social preferences, or preferences that involve regard for the person with whom one interacts, are pervasive in the British Television show 'Come Dine With Me'. It's a fun hypothesis, and an even more fun forum in which to 'test' it, where a 'test' is a simply discussion of the incentives and the evidence of what people seem to do in several episodes of the show.

The structure of the game is as follows: there are four players, each player hosts a meal, each player rates the other players' meals after they have dined, the player with the highest score wins £1000 at the end. Initially the game is more like an anonymous interaction because players do not have information about others, but as it proceeds more information is revealed. Players rate the host's meal out of ten. As the goal is to win the game, a rational player should always rate other players' meals as a 0 out of 10 as that would dramatically increase their own chances. If that occurred, the backward induction solution would be for all players to give zero and no player would win (assuming rationality and common knowledge of rationality).

But players almost always give ratings higher than zero, which would indicate that either a) they are irrational, or b) there are norms that govern their behavior and their behavior is rational. Dillow articulates how the correct option is most likely b) and that these players either have preferences over fairness, or, in my view, have a reference point about what constitutes an 'ok' number of points to give and that they add and subtract points from that reference point, rather than use zero as the be-all-and-end-all. Take a look at the post if you've the time, it's an interesting informal application of social preference theory.

HT: Mark Thoma.

Book Review - The History by Elizabeth Kostova

2009-09-19T14:19:00.001+02:00

The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova 1/2
Based on the the history of Vlad Ţepeş and his fictional counterpart, Count Dracula, The Historian details the routes taken by three related people in their search for Dracula. We have the story of the narrator, an unnamed 16 year old girl; the narrator's father, Paul; and her father's doctoral supervisor, Bartholomew Rossi. Other characters feature: Helen Rossi, the illegitimate child of Batholemew; Professor Turgut Bora, a Turkish historian; and Anton Stoichev, a Bulgarian Historian. Kostova constructs what can best be called 'academic gothic' - some would find this book awfully slow-moving, but others would enjoy the theorizing, arguments about sources and their use in history, and other aspects of history as practice. But these positive aspects can be occasionally damaged by a tendency to over-write, and a need to get on with the action. We want a gothic tale about vampires! But, for those who want a horror story, steer clear of this book. If horror is what you want, look elsewhere.

The book takes you on tours of Oxford, Istanbul, and Budapest, and through the lands of Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, France, and Italy. Consequently, it's enjoyable for its travel writing aspect as Kostova marshals a strong vocabulary and illustrative mind to create the backdrop to the narrative. I also appreciated it for its aspirations to historical fiction and the classic gothic novel. The reason for all the traveling is that the main characters are trying to piece together the story of Vlad Ţepeş, or Count Dracula, to understand how he has managed to stay alive, how he has remained hidden, and what exactly he does to those who track him down. As his history creates its trail around Europe, so too do the characters find their way into various phases of his past.

What one also needs to understand when reading this novel is the legacy of the gothic novel, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Bram Stoker's Dracula. Kostova's novel differs from these books in that the idea or history of that which scares us (Dracula/Frankenstein) is that which the characters engage with and pursue, rather than the thing itself. Certainly, this may require an understanding of Dracula 'the man', but it also requires a recognition of history, architecture, art, bureaucracy, geography, Eastern European socialism vs. Western Capitalism, people, and how these overlap. Ultimately you have a readable, but sedate historical, and Victorian-style, novel recounting the retreading of paths in history, and their realisation in a theory finally vindicated. It is this conclusion that we yearn for from the first chapter and that we appreciate when it finally arrives.

I especially enjoyed reading The Historian during winter: rain splattering across the windows, and dark clouds lurking above. It is not a book to read during summer, too much of its ambience would be lost in summer's heat and light. I heard The Historian has been compared to The Da Vinci Code. The Historian was far better written and far more academically inclined that The Da Vinci Code. I read The Da Vinci Code and I deplore the loss of those irretrievable hours.

Little's 'Understanding Society'

2009-09-16T10:04:00.001+02:00

Understanding Society is a blog I recently began to read. I have been impressed with the author, Daniel Little, and his command of a several subjects within the social sciences. Little touches on topics that relate predominantly to philosophy (political, philosophy of science), and to sociology, anthropology, and economics. Little blogs the ideas he plans to discuss in a new book that he is writing, which I assume will be called Understanding Society. I thought I'd comment on some of his posts by way of introduction to the blog.

In Wealth Inequality, Little touches on the challenges of inequalities in wealth (not just in income), i.e. property, assets, etc, that pervade US society and most contemporary capitalist economies. He provides additional related posts that on Poverty, Growth and Sustainability and on Social Mobility. In his discussion on social mobility he highlights the myth that Americans in the US believe of the US being the most mobile society, which is empirically false. In the US, a parent's socio-economic status, is a strong predictor of a child's socio-economic status, which, for those who believe in some kind of material equality can be problematic. Little also assesses Popper's discussions of falsifiability and historicism in his post Revisiting Popper, another illuminating contribution in which he highlights the problem of tackling the condition of 'falsifiability' in the social sciences where so much varies, and little can be properly controlled.

In th is post, Little discusses the notion of corporations as analysed by Charles Perrow in his book Organizing A merica: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism. Why is this apt? Well, the supreme court in the US is trying to grapple with whether corporations should have free speech (in the same way that people do), and thus whether they should have unlimited ability to promote their speech as people do. I hope they resolve that corporations do not have free speech, but more on that another time. I found Little's discussion useful and enlightening.

Here, Little discusses Michael Polanyi's notion of 'tacit knowledge'. I have not yet read Polanyi, though his brother, Karl Polanyi, has been on my reading list for some time - I might have to give both brothers a chance now. Nevertheless, Little's post intersects well with two books I've been reading: Friedrich Hayek's The Fatal Conceit and Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft. Though Polanyi affiliated himself differently to Hayek (and would have affiliated himself differently to Crawford I suspect), his notion of tacit knowledge, which Little recounts and teaches well, is crucial to understand the operation of everyday business: people learn how to do things without `knowing' what they know. It's a kind of knowing 'how' rather than a knowing 'what'. More specifically, Little wants to interrogate (or wants others to get off their bums and interrogate) the extent to which social knowledge is tacit, is experienced, or somehow embodied (I assume). To what extent do individuals fail or succeed when expressing tacit social knowledge? For example, some think me tactless, when I think myself honest and in continuous pursuit of truth, am I simply failing in my understanding of tacit social knowledge?

Anyway, I have found the blog edifying and I have enjoyed the posts, though they often require more time to read and think about than your average blog. I find that I disagree with the author, but I'd like to surround myself with clear thinkers who think differently to me in order to understand better my position.

Book Review - Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford

2009-09-15T16:21:00.001+02:00

Matthew B. Crawford - Shop Class as Soulcraft

Matthew B. Crawford's appeal for a society that engages more with its material world caught my attention some time back in a recommendation that I saw. My father retired from electrical engineering some time ago, and now does all kinds of DIY jobs for people. Because I spend most of my time uninvolved with such work, but intrigued by the idea of finding what so fascinates my father, I picked up Shop Class as Soulcraft thinking that Crawford might provide me with some insights. He did just that, and challenged my thinking with trenchant philosophy to boot.

A word of warning, as much as Crawford's book is the telling of a gearhead opening his own shop, it is also, and probably more so, an academic philosopher's appeal to the academically-inclined and college-educated to give greater credit to those who are involved in manual labour, the trades, and the crafts. He explains his case as an academic would using academic language, references, end notes, and the other mainstays of academia. This book is not a memoir, neither is it just a story about the pleasures of construction. Instead, it is a philosophical attack on the motives for college education rather than 'vocational training', in which he argues that college education is turning people into cogs, and that 'vocational' training is more cognitively challenging than received wisdom would have you believe. Consequently, you should not buy this book if you are looking for a comfortable or easy read about restoring and repairing motorcycles. Don't go in thinking it's a quick holiday read, or just a bit of fun - it'll require some serious work if you're unfamiliar with the debates, especially those in which the names of Marx, Smith, Heidegger, Polanyi, and others pop off of the workshop shelves.

With that in mind, I think that Crawford largely achieves what he sets out for himself. He argues that allowing workers to use their judgment provides them with greater happiness and provides non-monetary rewards. He asserts that giving workers objective standards, rather than the mealy-mouthed corporate speak of 'missions' and 'buy-in' allows workers to succeed or fail, and when they fail they better understand their success. He attacks college education for not including places where kids can go wrong, he argues that "The experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the educational process, at least for gifted students... A student can avoid hard sciences and foreign languages and get a degree without ever having the unambiguous experience of being wrong." (204) He laments the devaluation of genuine mastery, and is frustrated by "the easy fantasy of mastery [that] permeates modern culture." (17) He believes, probably like many conservatives do, that modern consumer culture, with its emphasis on immediacy and short-termism, damages humanity and, "If the modern personality is being reorganized on a predicate of passive consumption, this is bound to affect our political culture." (18) So he has many worries and many criticisms, and his proposed solution is what he calls 'progressive republicanism'. He argues that it should be progressive because "the defenders of free markets forgot that what we really want is free men" and thus "It is time to end the confusion of private property with corporate property" (209). Furthermore, he argues that many politicians fail the electorate because, "Those who belong to a certain order of society - people to make big decisions that affect all of us - don't seem to have much sense of their own fallibility. Being unacquainted with failure, the kind that can't be interpreted away, may have something to do with the lack of caution that business and political leaders often display in the actions they undertake on behalf of other people." (203-4) I think that Crawford should have foreshadowed these rather radical statements earlier on, and that in the expectation of such conclusions many people might have read on to see exactly how he motivates such end results.

Notwithstanding the credit he gives to those whose work requires a physical engagement with a physical world, Crawford seems to miss one large fraction of the working population with his 'switch it on and see it work' nostrum for the value of the trades. Computer programmers have the same need, to 'switch on' (compile) their program and see it work. Others appreciate their product because it works for them every day, each hour. Yes, like poor craftsmanship there is poor programming, but good programming and database management have many similar characteristics to their physical brethren in the engineering, trades, and crafts. In my view, Crawford doesn't give programmers, and knowledge workers generally, sufficient credit for their good work, but derogates them for their poor work, and for the apathy and indolence of many of those who inappropriately do programming and IT work.

Additionally, when Crawford says, "Craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it, because you want to get it right." (20) By rights, then, many 'knowledge' tasks should be classified as 'crafts'. Should I not, when I spend hours before a computer trying to engage with data, dwelling on it for many hours, be classified as a craftsman trying to craft or model the correct, or most true, set of regressions? For me this differentiates academia from consultancy or an equivalent (Crawford dislikes consultancy and management greatly) - the ability to spend hours pondering one question, or one set of questions, in order to provide a rigorous and honest answer.

Though there may be a few shortcomings to the book, I think it was largely worth my while to read it and to engage properly with what Crawford sets out - an argument for smaller, responsible businesses and responsible, free workers, craftsmen and tradespeople, brought together in markets and allowed to engage in free exchange. Though his dream seems Utopian, and there are occasional flaws in his reasoning, the ideas are nonetheless clearly set out and often beautiful.

The Man Who Invented Exercise

2009-09-12T09:31:00.001+02:00

I thoroughly enjoyed this Financial Times article on about Jerry Morris, one of the first scientists to pick up a positive correlation between health and exercise. Apart from the enjoyable reportage, the short biography, etc, what struck me was the simplicity in the setup for which Morris was able to detect a pattern. I will describe it slightly differently, just to show how ideally it is suited to a quasi-experimental approach.

Take a group of a few thousand people of roughly the same socio-economic status. Assign about one half of the group to one job, the other half to another on the basis of some random criterion. Observe that members of the one group live longer than the members of the other seemingly as a consequence of doing the one job and not the other. Try to interrogate the differences between the jobs, isolate this difference, and voilà. So this is what Morris had: take the two people who work on buses in England during the 40s: a bus conductor and a bus driver. Both men (and they were all men I believe) were from the same socio-economic background (class) and basically didn't require any particularly different qualifications - driving itself being quite common. But, for some reason, the risk of heart attack for a driver was roughly double that of a conductor. What, then, separates the activities of a conductor from a driver to explain this? A conductor walks all the time and climbs between 500 and 750 steps during his shift every day, whereas a bus driver remains sedentary. This was the only factor that could legitimately explain the differences in outcome and was set up so well as to be an experiment, what we call a 'natural experiment' or a 'quasi-experimental' setup.

So, as an empiricist, the article appealed to me on grounds factual, biographical, and technical. What an intriguing tale. Well done to Kuper for the entertaining read. Well done to Morris for establishing the connection between vigorous exercise and health. Coincidentally, I also support Morris's idea that exercise needs to be made more easily accessible - pedestrianised areas to encourage walking, bicycle paths to encourage cycling, accessible and inexpensive swimming pools for swimming, that champion of full-body exercises, and, I believe, accessible public transport to and from which one can walk and access resources like parks, pools and gyms. We shall see.

Book Review - Moxyland by Lauren Beukes

2009-09-11T16:20:00.001+02:00

Moxyland by Lauren Beukes

Moxyland, from young SA author Lauren Beukes, takes the near future sci-fi of authors like Philip K. Dick, Neal Stephenson, and others and locates it in Cape Town, rather than the more traditional locales of such fiction - NYC, LA, London, Tokyo, etc. But this is a post-superdemic, corporatist, freedoms-limited-by-crazy SAPS Cape Town, not the liberal-outpost, 'Shwaa man', sea and sun, more-laid-back-than-thou Cape Town we know and love. In this mutant, infected, ugly step-sister of contemporary Cape Town there's enough Cape Town to identify it through the smog - references to Long Street, Obs, Delft, Roodebloem Rd, the taxi ranks & the parade (no more where Mandela spoke of freedom, but where street kids are learning graf art sponsored by corporate social investment who've done strange things to the paint). You arrive in Beukes's Cape Town and you enjoy the potholed, nano-injected ride

[Spoiler Alert]

So yes, Beukes does the cyberpunk thing well - corporates in control, government serving them & not the people, heavy restraints on freedoms, cellphones and computers pervasive with a little bit of VR gaming and avatars thrown in for good measure. Beukes freshens the cyberpunk genre with her use of SIM cards as the ID document, credit card, vehicle of punishment, all-in-all lifeline, and in her idea of using nanotech to genetically modify people so that they become walking ads and artwork.

But the notion of corporates 'watching you', and the eventual denouement of 'yes they're really watching you more than you think' was a bit stale. I've read that before. You won't be surprised by the plot, there's not much new there. You mustn't let that get you down - the new, funny, interesting and cool stuff is bonded to the architecture, to thescaffolding of the plot as it unfolds: the characterisation of Lerato, Kendra, Toby & Tendeka; the Nguni, Cape Malay and so-called coloured names instead of the US-Nippon-Sino melds you so often see in
cyberpunk; the familiar-mutated landscape; the Cape Town art/model-scene gone wrong (I'm thinking Michael Stevenson & the Goodman Gallery with legalized drugs, more corporates, more models, nano implants, and pretension skyrocketing); the polarisation of Rural vs Connected; the gross & crazy inequality and how Connected vs. Non- makes this all the more apparent, all the more alienating.

Don't go in expecting to be blown away by an untold story - that's not going to happen. But don't hold that against the book. The novelty's in the unweaving, the style, and the characterization. The book feels like the synthesis of bits of Orwell, with a character or two from Bret Easton Ellis, and various cyberpunk & sci fi authors, Gibson, Dick, Stephenson, Cory Doctorow come to mind. Expect a typical cyberpunk story, but take pleasure in the SA- and CT-specific minutiae, appreciate the 3rd world take on a genre so typically 1st world, endure some of the ways txt msg speak invades speech and writing, laugh at the occasional silliness. It's a good book, a good quality SA product to be exported to the SIM-toting, cyberpunk-reading masses in the rest of the world; many of the sci-fi junkies out there will lap it up and love its uniqueness - Charlie Stross likes it, so you could too

Post-script 1: My wife, Amy, just finished reading Moxyland and was surprised by how much she liked it. Amy had never read sci-fi before and loved it, so my compliments to Beukes for drawing my wife into a sci-fi novel, I had tried before with little success.

Post-script 2: I wonder if someone could convince Jessica Tiffin to resurrect her 3rd year English lit sci-fi elective at UCT and teach this book... Hmm... <schemes>

Sushi & Pregnancy

2009-09-11T15:40:00.001+02:00

My sister recently announced that she is pregnant. Our family is overjoyed for her, and interested to see all developments. Anyway, when she told me she went on to say, 'So no sushi for me.' This immediately got my sceptical brain humming, so I compiled what I could of the research I found on the internet and emailed her. The content of the email is below, slightly edited to be a blog post.

After our conversation about pregnancy I did some research on the sushi question. It turns out that there are three main factors: 1) problems with raw fish, 2) increased mercury levels that are unhealthy for a foetus, and 3) vitamin/dioxin issues.

On the first problem, eating any raw fish can be a problem because of the possibility of parasites & funnies. Parasites are worse when you are pregnant because they could affect the foetus, but there is no 'increased vulnerability' to parasites because you're pregnant. Note this does not rule out all sushi. For example, California rolls contain steamed crab which, because it is cooked, should contain no parasites. Similarly for other cooked fish sushi, like crispy prawn rolls. The crucial thing is to stay away from the uncooked eel, salmon, tuna, and cod. The second thing with raw fish is that it (and soft cheeses like brie or camembert) has a higher likelihood than other foods to contain things called 'Listeria monocytogenes'. But again, eating cooked sushi means
you avoid this. Also, you could eat sushi if the fish has been frozen at -20 degrees or lower (as this should kill most of the bad stuff).

On the second problem, the thing is to stay away from all uncooked and cooked swordfish, mackerel, shark, and tile fish (not like you regularly eat these anyway) because these have higher mercury levels than other fish. High mercury levels, for which you'd have to eat a substantial amount of these fish, can damage a foetus's development or cause mutations. If you don't eat these fish, then this shouldn't be a problem.

On the third issue, salmon can contain funny substances (dioxins) that can be harmful to foetuses in large quantities, which means that you shouldn't eat salmon more than twice a week. The second thing is that raw fish and shellfish contain substances (thiaminases) that break down vitamin B which babies need for growth. Again not a problem if you're getting Vitamin B in supplements or in other foods, but it motivates not eating raw sushi more than twice a month, no problems for cooked sushi.

All of this said, I couldn't find comprehensive studies actually showing that eating sushi is 'bad' for you during pregnancy (or at least worse for you than eating much of the crap that is in supermarkets these days). A lot of the hullabaloo seems to emanate from urban legends propagated in the US. I'd probably consult a qualified
dietician (not a nutritionist) and ask them to give you a properly researched answer before you stop eating your favourite food for 9 months. The most comprehensive online article I read suggests that as long as you don't eat raw sushi more than twice a month you should be fine. Millions of Japanese people seem to do ok eating sushi while pregnant and there are lots of healthy Japanese babies as far as I know. Also, another article I found suggested that a US government study said that the risks of disease from eating cooked fish are about 1 in 2 million, whereas for cooked chicken it's about 1 in 25 000. So yes, on those Japanese and lots of fish...

Book Review - Love, etc by Julian Barnes

2009-09-02T16:50:00.000+02:00

Love, etc by Julian Barnes

Some time ago I read Julian Barnes's Talking It Over. Published in the early 90s it made a fair dent on contemporary literature by simultaneously maintaining entertainment and fun, with the interesting and semi-postmodern gimmick of switching between narrators. I reviewed (in the earlier days of my reviews - it was brief indeed) Talking It Over in December of 2008 - take a look if you want to get the gist.

Anyway, on my recent flight to Cape Town, having divested myself of many books because of our move from Italy to London, I needed something to keep my going during the flight and during the layover in Qatar. I purchased Love, etc by Julian Barnes and The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (review to follow shortly). I finished Love, etc easily during the flight and thoroughly enjoyed it.

What does Love, etc offer? It's the sequel to Talking It Over - and it involves the same characters. Barnes decided to set it ten years on - Stuart, Oliver and Gillian are our main narrators, along with Gillian's mum, Stuart's 'bit of crumpet' who also happens to be Gillian's assistant, and one or two others. Apart from characters, expect symmetry. The idea behind Love, etc seems to be a symmetricality of narrative - creating symmetry in the ideas of marriage and infidelity, memory and recall, perception and interpretation, similar to those that pervaded Talking It Over. In Talking It Over, however, those ideas were new. I understand why Barnes would want to create symmetry with what happened to his characters - and what his character think and believe - in middle age. But, in Love, etc the techniques don't work as well, nor are the characters as likeable or as easy to sympathise with as they felt in Talking It Over.

Nevertheless, Love, etc is still an entertaining, amusing, and generally occupying book. Barnes fills it with wit, intelligence and clever commentary. The book generally pleased me, and I especially appreciated the diversion on a plane filled with Chinese pre-adolescents kicking the back of my chair, with air hosts and hostesses (what is the PC name for these people nowadays? air assistants? aircraft personnel?) who kept on bumping my knees with their trolleys, and with someone in front of me who insisted on always having their seat as far down as possible after the captain allowed them to do so. Love, etc was calmness and sanity in a sea of annoyance. So yes, perfectly suitable, funny and good, just not as good as Talking It Over.

Book Reviews - Changing my format

2009-09-02T16:47:00.000+02:00

I'm going to try a new format with book reviews for a while. A friend of mine recommended some time ago that I try to dedicate individual posts to individual books, rather than doing the summary posts that I've done for the past while. Consequently, I've decided to try that for a while to see how it goes. I have a bit of a backlog of books so you'll see a number of posts on books for the next while, but following that I'll try to review books immediately after I've read them, rather than some time afterwards. I hope that I'll have clearer and more enjoyable reviews as a consequence.

Also, apologies for the lack in posting I was away and out of internet contact, then finishing with an editing job (which just about quashes all creativity), and spending time with family while my sister and her husband are down from Johannesburg while my wife and I are in Cape Town. So more posts will follow soon, I promise.

Boston Globe - Happiness: A Buyer's Guide

2009-08-26T10:01:00.001+02:00

Drake Bennett of the Boston Globe recently wrote an article on Happiness and its relationship to money, 'Happiness: A Buyer's Guide'. Although several points he makes are accurate there are several failings in the article. I try to document them below.

First, he describes how paying for things for other people makes us happy (i.e. increases our reported, or subjective, well-being), but he does not extend the notion of purchasing things for other people to doing things for them with your time or effort. What I mean here is what about when you don't pay money, but instead expend time and effort to do something for or with someone else while not spending any money at all? If you admit that prosocial acts are inherently beneficial and increase your subjective well-being, might not the same or similar acts when you don't spend money result in similar effects?

This brings us to the second point, might not paying for prosocial acts and events crowd out the voluntary or 'free' ways of doing the same thing? Yes, I might feel better signing a check to an aid organisation, but in doing so I might decide not to dedicate my time and energy to the same organisation. There is not discussion about which of these two acts might, in fact, make me happier. There is no discussion of acts at a zero price.

Finally, suppose that I believe that I can increase my happiness by spending money on relational activities, but I believe I need more money to achieve these goals. Believing this, I choose to work more. In working more, however, I have less time to dedicate to friends and family, to those very things that make me happy because of their relational benefits. The article fails to acknowledge that you need to maintain your current level of work or income and change your spending to relational (rather than straight consumption) acts to increase your subjective well-being, otherwise you might substitute away from the things that sustain you in order to get more money to spend on those things.

Maybe it takes thinking like an economist to consider these problems i.e. substitution, zero price, crowding out,. But these ideas were not discussed in the article. They should have been.

Stanley Fish on Writing

2009-08-25T22:47:00.001+02:00

In his column Think Again in the NYT, Stanley Fish has a new Op-Ed 'What Should Colleges Teach?' The main subject of his piece is composition - the craft of writing. He discusses the recent publication of a report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, separating their criticisms into those that are useful and those that are simply political. Regardless of whether you agree or not with his classification (I tend to), his essay deserves to be read.

On writing, I lament students' inability to write, particularly students in the Commerce faculty where I lectured. But the problem goes higher up. Also, I regularly edit articles written by my fellow graduate students, and, though most of them are second language English speakers, they still compose and write poorly. Why is their writing poor? Not because they are second language English speakers, but because stodgy, prolix, and opaque writing pervades the economics profession. Consequently, there are few contemporary economics articles that are well-written, few articles written with style, written with grace, written with sufficient attention to grammar and composition, written with concrete and specific nouns and verbs.

But remedies exist! Consider first Deirdre McCloskey's Economical Writing, second Joseph M. Williams's Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, then move on to other useful books like William Zinsser's On Writing Well, Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, Clare K. Cook's Line by Line, and finally Jane E. Miller's Guide to Writing About Numbers and her Guide To Writing About Multivariate Analysis. There are so many books out there that could help to make writing clearer, and that would therefore enable economists to express their thinking more clearly. I shan't throw stones at those outside of my discipline (*cough* post-structuralists and post-modernists *cough*), but I shall make a plea to all those involved in the economics profession, or those who happen to read this blog, to consider taking a look at books on writing, to consider editing their own work rigorously (as rigorously as they consider arguments for, say, a minimum wage, or an increase in the interest rate), and to consider that writing is thinking and therefore the clearer your writing becomes the clearer your thinking becomes.

I learned this the hard way, thinking previously that 'academic' writing was highfallutin, was purposefully obscurantist, and contained many latinates. I was wrong. I wrote poorly. As my writing became clearer I realised that what I thought profound was not, what I arose through simplifying and clarifying my work, what may initially have seemed a commonplace, could turn out to be something intriguing and nuanced. So I try to follow a different path now. I simplify, clarify, and simplify again - that way my thinking, my results, and my interpretation become clearer and I can understand whether what I say is interesting or uninteresting, revolutionary or prosaic, telling or irrelevant. I hope that it eventually pays off.

Huda Akil - On Happiness

2009-08-21T08:44:00.001+02:00

I enjoyed this short personal article by Huda Akil 'In Person: The Pursuit of Happiness' where she examines the personal experience of happiness and joy when playing in a sandpit with her granddaughter & she comments on how we know so little, theoretically, about happiness, joy, contentment. The article isn't comprehensive, but still worthwhile. Akil comments on the understanding that we have of 'negative' emotions, mainly through research into depression, stress and pain - for which we understand the basic neural correlates. But, she asks, why don't we have a similar understanding of 'positive' emotions? Where are the animal studies? the studies of hormones? of neural circuitry? This science, relating to positive psychology and affective neuroscience, is still in its infancy ('studies have been done' says the Passive Voice) and its researchers are doing their best to isolate factors that many affect these positive emotions. And, most importantly, Akil says, 'Science will tell.'

Ionian Enchantment - Skeptic's Circle #117

2009-08-20T11:31:00.001+02:00

Mike, at Ionian Enchantment, hosted the 117th Skeptic's Circle: The Chiropractic Edition. Though I have not yet managed to read or listen to everything that he linked to, of those I've read or listened to I can recommend the following posts on chiropractic: Ben Goldacre's 'We are more possible than you can powerfully imagine'; Harriet Hall in Chiropractic and Deafness: Back to 1895' assesses whether chiropractic can do anything for deafness - it can't; Sam Homola, a retired chiropractor, discusses 'The Problem with NUCCA'; Simon at Adventures in Nonsense asks 'Will trading standards now take on the General Chiropractic Council?' These articles are all themed on the problems of chiropractic and its claims for 'cures'. Chiropractic does not have the right to claim these cures, it lacks the evidence. Anyway, take a look at Skeptic's Circle #117 and please support Simon Singh (read this).

Post Script:
In reading these posts (and others), I've seen that some people who argue in favour of chiropractic often seem to claim that sceptics arguing against chiropractic are 'happy with the status quo'. That's just silly. Sceptics who attack chiropractic argue that there is insufficient evidence to warrant the claims that chiropractors make about chiropractic. This does not imply that sceptics are employed by evil corporations out to get chiropractors, or that sceptics think that deaths during surgery, in medical randomized control trials, or iatrogenesis in general are 'good', but rather that anything, including chiropractic, claiming to 'treat', 'assist', 'help', 'cure', 'aid', 'remove', 'alleviate', or '[insert 'cure' type claim here]' the symptoms of, or the causes of, a disease should have evidence for its claims. These sceptics are not claiming that the cures we have are 'the best treatments ever', but rather that they are the ones we have evidence for, and, further, that as more effective, lower cost, generally better treatments with evidence for their efficacy emerge we will adopt those treatments. Chiropractic does not have the evidence to claim that it is more effective, lest costly to administer, or generally 'better'.

Another issue with statistics demands attention: if we use a test for a treatment effect, and we use a 10% level of statistical significance, about 10 times out of 100 we will get 'evidence' suggesting that a treatment works, which is why replication and reproducibility are so important in science generally and in randomized control trials specifically. Without replication we cannot know whether our sample wrongly presents false positives. Alternatively, practitioners or researchers of chiropractic could, perhaps, misunderstand the application of a false discovery rate. I'll leave my post script at that.

Books Pt. 2: Fiction and Memoir

2009-08-19T18:26:00.001+02:00

Many apologies. This post has been sitting in ScribeFire for some time awaiting final my final editing process and late editions before I published it. The process was confounded by our travels to Florence, Rome, packing up house in Siena, and our trip to South Africa via London. Anyway, here is Part 2: Fiction and Memoir, the second installment of my post on recent books I've read begun almost a month ago in Pt 1: Non-fiction.

Fiction & Memoir
Jill Ker Conway - The Road from Coorain (Memoir)
Jill Ker Conway details her childhood and youth in this, the first, of her memoirs. From her childhood growing up on a struggling farm in Australia, to her father's death, to the transformation of her mother from a sylph-like, charming wife and mother to a strange, manipulative woman, to attending university in Sydney to study history, to first love, to traveling to Europe with her mother, Ker Conway captures each period with warmth, honesty, and empathy.

Ker Conway first draws you into the nature of her life by detailing the Australian landscape, which must be seen as the mise en scène for what she lives and believes, for how she studies history, and for the ways in which she engages with feminism, femininity, and love. We view the landscape of her family farm invigorated with rainfall, later ravaged by drought, and yet later anchoring for Ker Conway to her past, to Australia, to her 'soul', and to her work.

I find this a strange book to review. I so thoroughly enjoyed it, as did my wife Amy. Ker Conway details the perceptions, beliefs, and actions towards women in Australia in the 50s-70s that I found her narrative far more convincing as a life lived than I have certain feminist tracts. I count myself a feminist so this was an odd experience. Ker Conway made me see particular characteristics about patriarchal society and Australian, or maybe Anglo-centric, patriarchy particularly that enlivened my feminist sensibilities. Do not let my discussion put you off the book, Ker Conway does not hate men, nor does she rant against oppression, but as a social historian she characterizes the society she lives in so well that I could not help be engaged by the polemic underlying the narrative of her life, a polemic which evidently energizes and motivates Ker Conway.

Moreover, as you are told in the blurb, Ker Conway is an extraordinary woman. She became the first female vice-president of a University in all of Canada, she went on to become the first female president of Smith College in Massachusetts, USA. She documents these triumphs in her later memoirs. But, this background of her life lived on an Australian farm, with the stresses of a mother whose potency languished unchanneled, and the strangeness of a society that so easily excludes - or remonstrates - bright and driven women, gives us access to the travails she overcame, and her unique take on attachment, history, and feminism. I strongly recommend The Road from Coorain.

A point of clarity: do not confuse my discussion of Ker Conway's father's death and her mother's harshness for the anguish and distress recounted in the 'pity lit' style memoirs (like, say, Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes). First, Ker Conway describes how imaginative and challenging her mother was when Ker Conway was a child, how through her mother she was educated and given a critical faculty allowing her to engage with the world as an academic historian, she also accounts for her own complicity in her mother's devolution, and she describes the revelatory moments well, honestly and empathetically. What remains important are Ker Conway's engagement with landscape, family history (embedded in the history of Australia), and the role of women. I found it to be a truly fantastic memoir, better than many others I have read.

Jill Ker Conway - True North (Memoir)
Having read The Road from Coorain and having thoroughly enjoyed it, and having passed it on to my wife who enjoyed it too, we both wanted to unveil the rest of Jill Ker Conway's life, what the United States held for her, who the man was who added his 'Conway' to her 'Ker', and the rest of the unfolding tale of her apotheosis as a female in the male-dominated academia of the 60s and 70s. I was not disappointed (my wife has still to read it). But, there is a caveat to anyone intending to read this book: The Road from Coorain coheres around the detailed landscape of Australia and how that landscape in its geographic, material, social, familial and academic manifestations sculpted Ker Conway.

In True North, Ker Conway cannot write about any one landscape because they change too regularly: from Harvard, to Oxford, Rome, Paris, Toronto, Vancouver, Brisbane, Sydney, and finally Smith College, Massachusetts, there is no one shaping geography. Instead, Ker Conway charts her paths to and through these places to find a location independent of 'place' for her and John. She realises a particular and special route, which is why I recommend the book.

What made the book all the more empassioning for me was Ker Conway's descriptions of learning, studying, and reading. It isn't all that often that I get to read about the sensations and joys of studying, of being challenged by interesting and dynamics people, and of finding a partner who engages you in multiple arenas intellectually, yer retaining a stron emotional connection to you. As someone who 'married young', who is probably bound for academia, and whose partner is bound for academia I found these intimate descriptions uplifting and enjoyable, even though honesty requires that she revealed the oddities and dark times as much as she revealed the good, the love-sustaining, and the wonderful.

Furthermore, what intrigued me was Ker Conway's engagement, as a feminist, with notions of things like 'gender studies' which she characterizes as taking an incorrect path in their progenitors' and propagators' needs to separate from the traditional disciplines of history, sociology, anthropology, etc as if 'gender studies' are independent of the other humanities. Kery Conway, instead, argues (or rather portrays her thinking and feelings about) how feminist and social thinking should be embedded in all the social sciences so that it is something about which all people learn and which they must confront, rather than something apart which people can more easily avoid. I find this strikingly appropriate.

Ken Follett - World Without End
Amy and I both read Pillars of the Earth some time ago, we saw this in an English language bookstore here in Siena and both read it. Amy read it some time ago, I decided to give it a go more recently. It fits well into my 'ripping yarn' (or should that be 'guilty pleasure') category.Follett tells a tale of a British landscape of political intrigue among barons and bishops, of personal losses and triumphs, of genius and innovation, of the ravages of the Black Death, and of a long-lived love.

While holding to historical accuracy for architecture, landscape, labour, etc the book's protagonists often seem anachronistic: the man and woman treating each other as an ideal(?) modern couple would, mutual respect, division of labour, and understanding the paths that each took to realising eventual love. Did such things occur in England during the bubonic plague and the reign of Edward III? I'm not so sure.

You don't need to have read Pillars of the Earth to understand the goings on in World Without End. Everything you need to know is fairly well-established in World itself. As others comment, Pillars and World define the category 'historical thriller', rather than just 'historical fiction'. Follett doesn't try to be highbrow, but gets the setting right, throws in sufficient intrigue right at the beginning to get you hooked, and then pulls you on. I think, though, that there was one phase in the book where Follett lost track of the tale a bit and needed to weave the strands together more tightly (towards the beginning of section with the Black Death). Nevertheless, the book was most enjoyable in how it tracked the lives of its characters from youth to late middle-age, their bumps, dips, loves, and frustrations.

I read the hard cover of World Without End while journeying to and from London for a conference. I received several furtive glances, probably because the glancers were uncertain at the wisdom of carrying such a weighty tome during my journey. Little did they know I was enthralled by the intrigue, violence, and passion! Or at least so I tell myself.

Donna Leon - Death at La Fenice
A fun traipse through Venice, with death, droplets of personal history, and a decent characterization of the city. Leon characterizes a fair number of Italians well, playing on the stereotypes while ensuring that she keeps her main character gruff, stoic, and Venetian enough to count.

Vice-commissario Guido Brunetti investigates the strange death of the musical genius Helmut Wellauer at the famous La Fenice opera house in Venice. In the 'official' blurb, Brunetti's described as 'suave and pithy', I'd say pithy, yes, suave, no. Leon unveils a story showing that method and perseverance should get you to your end, or at least should get Brunetti there. Brunetti shows a deft hand at dealing with his superior, with Italian bureacracy and social mores generally, and with his suspects and interviewees. Leon builds a detective story about stories, rather than about crime scene evidence, sudden inspired insights, or malign criminals failing to cover their tracks. It was a fun, swift read, enjoyable all the more if you've spent sufficient time in Venice to know streets, places, and some of the city's strangeness. Leon doesn't overly romanticize this beautiful city, but sets it down in the mud of the lagoon reminding the reader of the strange smells, the occasional dankness, and the damp as much as she does of its architecture and history.

Death and La Fenice is Leon's first book with Brunetti as the detective-protagonist. She has written a series of detective novels based in Venice with Brunetti as her main character, and supposedly certain characters he meets in this novel crop up later. Were I feeling like something bite-sized and quick, I'd definitely pick up one of the later ones in an airport shop or train station. This one was left with us by a travelling relative, and I agree it's suitably engaging travel/holiday reading.

In its category of detective fiction, it's a cut above most of those I've read. Hence the 4 stars.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon - The Shadow of the Wind
I became bored reading this. I put it down just over half way through. I found it over-written, stylised in a manner not to my tastes, and ultimately executed and plotted in such a way that the ideas were stifled. I think that the author was trying to make too obvious a point about living in Fascist Spain (darkness, shadows, terror, secret love), and that its embodiment in the power of the evil, demented and covetous Fumero was laughable. The self-doubting hero-detective protagonist was also just a bit too cookie-cutter.

Some of the ideas in the book are fantastic - who couldn't like the idea of the cemetery of books? - but then I felt like I was reading a book that wanted to be a movie, and not really a book. This was strange because the book is 'meant' to be a book about books (which was why I was given it as a gift in the first place, I love books about books, such as Fadiman's Ex Libris and Lewis Buzbee's The Yellow-lighted Bookshop). Because I became enchanted by some of the ideas I tried to champion onward - not such a good idea. I can see why this book might work as an introduction to magical realism, or maybe as a kind of faux magical realism, but it doesn't make the transition to mature ideas, mature writing, or mature execution that characterize that genre - Rushdie's Midnight's Children and Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude come to mind, or maybe even Esquivel's popular Like Water for Chocolate.

I have seen some reviewers try to compare Zafon to a hybrid of Borges, Marquez and Eco, but if Zafon was trying to be this Hybrid, then he was rather a Shadow of the Hybrid, reaching neither the gentleness with
tone, nor the verve with language that these authors attain. All of which said, I think this book comes down strongly to personal preference. If you like long, flowery descriptions of things, in addition to a plot that slowly unfolds (unfolds is apt, one fold, next fold, then the next fold, like a large, sheet, packed away for months being deliberately unfolded) then you'll probably enjoy this novel. It's understandable why people compare it to The Da Vinci Code, another novel that unfolds 'mysteriously'. If you're not into that, then rather steer clear. To me the novel wasn't bad, it just wasn't anything better than average.

Poetry & Verse
Ted Hughes - Tales from Ovid
My wife and I read this slowly, being sure to read the entire book out loud. During our semi-nightly ritual of reading out loud to one another, which mostly involves me reading to Amy, I found myself shivering with the visceral, accurate, and beautiful writing that Hughes engages to re-tell these most famous of stories: Ovid's Metamorphosis.

I was introduced to this book some time back by a dear friend of mine who loved Hughes's translation of the story of Echo and Narcissus and read it while studying Classics. That was indeed one of my favourites in the collection, accompanied too by the stories of Arethusa, of Venus and Adonis (and Atalanta), of Actaeon, of Arachne, and of so many others. Amy also studied classics and we resolved some time ago to purchase the book and read it out loud, which was a fantastic experience. I almost cannot imagine these stories read silently.

Hughes represents forcibly Ovid's core theme of metamorphosis: the fact that men and gods are vulnerable to change and flux. Furthermore, Hughes also captures the morals of the stories well in his physical and robust language - you feel Arachne's pride as she takes on Minerva, you internalise the urgent, visceral need that Narcissus feels for himself, you experience the change of body to water as Arethusa tries to evade Alpheus and the metamorphose. Ovid's original stories contain violence, rape, murder, and vengeance and Hughes's presentation of these acts is vivid and transformative. Again, in the story of Arethusa you cannot help but understand the sense of pursuit, of intent to fulfil passionate ravishment, the urge to penetrate, to touch, to clutch. Reading this book is unlike reading a novel, and unlike reading most contemporary poetry. The stories are long and require concentration, but the translation (itself a metamorphosis, oh how clever) and re-creation are superb. I cannot recommend the book enough to those interested in classic literature and 20th century poetry.

Two Sceptic-worthy Videos

2009-08-19T13:37:00.001+02:00

Good times. I was nudged to watch the following two videos by 3quarksdaily a blog I've just recently begun to read.

Homeopathy and Nutritionists vs Real Science

Comment: Funny, funny, funny.

Panel Discussion: Dawkins, Tyson, Druyan, Stenger & Grother on 'Science and the Public':

Comment: I had not watched anything with Tyson in it before and I was incredibly happy to hear his views on things, his understanding of the methods of science education (as someone who hasn't studied physics), and his general cutting insight into how things work once you have an education in scientific thinking. One error though - I don't think Physics is the only discipline in which this can be achieved. I believe, strongly, that good social scientists ingrain in their students a bullshit detector which forces the students to search for evidence, gather their understanding of perfect models, and to add complicating factors and methods. One of the errors of some social scientists thought, and economists in particular, is their belief that the 'perfect model' (analogous, I suppose, to the frictionless pulley) is something to which we should aspire, or something attainable in its perfection. For example, perfect competition is unattainable, but it serves as an interesting thought experiment and disciplines your thinking as an economist when considering problems of asymmetric information, industrial organisation, and a host of other problems. But we shouldn't cling to some of its normative predictions as Ayn Rand worshipers tend to do as if it does or should reflect reality. Social scientists, seem, therefore, to be less humble about their perfect models, and its something I hope that we move away from in the future. Druyan uses the word 'spiritual' far too often and I don't know what she means by it. Dawkins is good as always. Stenger doesn't say too much, but still interesting when he does, funny too.

Attacking Corruption

2009-08-13T17:24:00.001+02:00

I thought that the news about Zambia's former president, Frederick Chiluba, going on trial for corruption was good. Now, The Guardian reports, charged with theft of public resources, Chiluba will likely be convicted tomorrow and probably face 5 years in jail. Assuming a fair trial and that every procedure was adhered to, this is really fantastic news. An African country taking a former president to court, accepting that he was guilty, judging him, and then allowing him to be punished (we hope), is a phenomenal achievement of that country's justice system. I will watch the continued reporting of this with care and with hope. I believe, morally, that other African states should follow Zambia's example and leave no stone unturned when it comes to corrupt officials. Economically, I am less convinced that specific types of corruption do much to impede growth. Nevertheless, I hope that investors respond to the conviction and support Zambia during the current crisis and in future endeavours to investigate and convict corrupt officials.

Health Care, Insurance, Credit Markets

2009-08-12T09:29:00.001+02:00

I arrived back in South Africa last week having travelled from Italy via London. Ensconced in my parents' warm home, sheltered from the rain, my mum told me of the misfortune that has plagued the family of our domestic worker (later corroborated in discussions with Lettie herself). Lettie, our family's domestic worker, works three times a week for my parents at their home. My parents, through their business, employ Lettie's daughter. My parents have at various times also employed Lettie's nephew, her son, and other family members, in addition to assisting with job applications, references, loans, gifts, etc.

Lettie lives in Philippi a poor area on the fringes of the Cape Town. A few month's ago, Lettie heard from a friend that her son had a child with a young lady who also lived in Philippi. Lettie hadn't known about this because her son had been embarrassed and had not wanted to tell her. Lettie went along to the house, saw a child in soiled swaddling and covered in flies. She took the child home to look after it. Lettie is now looking after her grandchild while her son studies, in the hope that he will finish and be able to get a decent job. So, problem number 1: a new dependent.

Lizzie, Lettie's daughter (actually her niece, but Lettie's sister passed away and Lettie basically adopted her), who works as a cleaning lady at my mother's office, contracted TB some months ago. The disease makes her terribly ill, and the drugs to counter the disease have incredibly harsh side effects. Consequently she misses work and works less productively when she does work. Nevertheless, my parents ensure that she maintains her job because she does try to work hard and when well she works effectively. So, problem number 2: TB.

Last week, a 4-year-old boy (whose grandmother spoils him, Lettie assures me) was playing with matches. The matches burnt down several shacks/homes in the vicinity. The neighbours want to hold the grandmother responsible, but the grandmother cannot pay for the houses that burnt down because she is too poor. Apart from the clothes on their backs, Lizzie and her boyfriend lost everything to the fire. Additionally, the smoke from the fire exacerbated her TB and she's had to go into hospital because she was coughing up so much blood. The doctor said that they will probably have to remove her left lung. So, problem number 3: fire.

I could wax lyrical on the extent to which I think government needs to act in these three areas: 1) family planning and household structures, 2) health care, and 3) household insurance for the poor. Leaving that aside, discussing these things with Lettie (and my folks) clarifies for me some of the potential effects of what I do. When I stare at a screen looking at Stata output from a regression including a dummy variable for a 'negative shock', any of the above problems could count as a negative shock. Moreover, the work that I've been doing more recently assesses the extent to which people within a household, or the genetic or legal relatives of its members, are often unable to deal with financial crises because the risks that they face are often correlated. In response to a hypothetical question like 'Who would you turn to in a financial crisis?' the strongest responses are for entirely unrelated people who are not household members. This is exactly what has happened in this situation - government has not stepped in (or maybe does not know that it should), and so my parents in their private capacity as genetically unrelated, but morally invested, individuals feel the need to do something. I have no idea where this research will go, but the example before me delivers the message forcibly: where government fails, those who have better social networks are probably those who will survive a crisis.

Note: I understand that government has provided health care for Lizzie at Groote Schuur, but we can discuss the extent to which this care is effective and efficient another time.

Carnival of the Africans #9

2009-07-28T22:22:00.001+02:00

Mike, of Ionian Enchantment, hosts the most recent Carnival of the Africans. There are several posts worthy of your interest. First up, Angela, the Skeptic Detective, tells us of a new twist in the vaccine-autism debate (and, yes, the people claiming that vaccines cause autism still do not have evidence to support their position). Second, Tim Beck at Reason Check has two interesting posts: Sangomas at University and Conspiracy Theorists and Creationists. Third, I thought it worthwhile to leap (or maybe just make a small jump) in defence of Koos Kombuis: George Claassen of Prometheus Unbound tells us that Kombuis believes in fairies. Maybe he does. But Kombuis also wrote The Complete Secret Diaries of God which was enormously entertaining and poked all kinds of fun at conventional religious practices. So, I forgive Koos for his dalliance with fairies. I was also fortunate enough to have three posts featured in the carnival: the use of randomized controlled trials in social science, the importance of evidence-based sex education, and how La Repubblica (an Italian newspaper) got happiness economics wrong.