Kurt Johnson

Some fun maps are here: they distort the size of each country based on relative population, tourism, immigration, emigration, etc. One cool thing to add would be an animation feature to cycle through population over time (or other variables with longitudinal data) as it’s kind of clunky to click from map to map.

See it here. Found via Every Day Should Be Saturday.

Steve Jobs, Commencement @ Stanford. It’s one of the best commencement speeches I’ve heard/read - well tailored for the audience, I think - and it touches on things I’m thinking about as I consider what to do after business school.

Here’s a pile of links I’d bookmarked for myself; realistically I’m not going to be able to write insightful commentary on most of them but thought I’d share anyway.

WSJ Opinion - An American has a stroke while visiting London and contrasts US and UK healthcare.

Cafe Hayek - A six part series on income inequality (this links to part 6).

Brad Setser comments on Bernake’s global savings glut theory (re: savings rates, asset inflation and low interest rates).

Cafe Hayek - The “Beef - it’s what’s for dinner” type ads are actually a congressionally organized mandatory program - beef producers are required by law to contribute to this advertising.

Calculated Risk has many, many excellent posts on the housing market. This is the latest -http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2005/06/when-bubble-will-burst.html

Arnold Kling at Econlog finds some interesting data on economic success of immigrants.

Also fromEconlog, commentary on “[T]he more things improve the louder become the exclamations about their badness.”

Tyler Cowen’s followup to Freakonomics: Why does crack precipitate so much more crime than other drugs? - http://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/23/looking-forward/

Tyler Cowen - Do immigrants depress wages?

Tyler Cowen - The economics of urban decline.

Intelligent commentary on the estate tax (as opposed to mine) -
Tyler Cowen, The Becker-Posner Blog (1 , 2)

Tyler Cowen - Some interesting technical research on effective advertising; how do people remember their actual experience with a product vs. what advertising has told them? “[C]onsumers cannot recall whether a memory orginates from a genuine consumption experience or from exposure to advertising…advertisers will concentrate their efforts on past customers, because experienced consumers will be more likely to trust that their positive feelings toward the brand are genuine.”

Zimran Ahmed - Deterrence, Game Theory, and the Geneva Convention

Zimran Ahmed - A sweet graph of US marginal tax rates. I know I’ve been consulting too long when I admiringly say “sweet graph” after seeing a chart that efficiently communicates a clear message.

Zimran Ahmed - Measured IQ has increased significantly over time. What are the implications?

Always Low Prices - What is the effect of passing ‘living wage’ laws?

Ed Felten - Dissecting how a worm spreads across the internet

Two great Coyoteblog posts on teaching -
The teacher salary myth
Great Moments in Mediocrity:

Energy Outlook gives the most readable explanation of gasification that I’ve seen to date. This will become more important as petroluem and natural gas prices continue to rise (they are structurally very unlikely to go down over the long term) and the US refocuses on using some of it’s enormous domestic coal reserves.

I’ve mentioned this to a couple of people in conversation but never had a link handy until now.

Check out the articles here and here (quoted below).

The ancient game of Buzkashi [aka Bozkashi] has been played in northern Afghanistan since the days of Ghengis Khan, the Mongol warrior whose army swept across Asia in the 13th century. It is a fierce game of competition played on the steppes of Asia by expert horsemen. The Mongols lived and died in the saddle. Today, it is played in the Afghan provinces of Maimana, Mazar-i-Sharif, and Kataghan. As a rule, women are not allowed to watch.

The carcass of an animal is used. Goats are preferred, but small calves will do if goats are in short supply. A carcass is soaked in cold water for 24 hours before the game. This is done so the carcass will remain intact and not be torn to pieces as hundreds of chopendoz horsemen independently compete to grab and carry the carcass to the winning circle. Usually, a the carcass is beheaded, its four legs are cut off from the knee, and its insides emptied before soaking. Sand is sometimes packed inside for extra bulk….

Some outstanding photos are here and here. I learned about it first from P.J. O’Rourke’s hilarious travelogue All the Trouble in the World. He characterized Bozkashi as a game where one team of horsemen compete against another team in a kind of capture-the-flag with a calf carcass. However prize money went to the winning individual, not the winning team; teamwork was undermined by individual gamesmanship for the cash prize - all in all a pretty neat sports metaphor for central asian politics.

Since this isn’t an anonymous blog I’m exercising restraint on controversial topics. However I can’t hide a little satisfaction at seeing Greenpeace get a little of their own disobediance thrown back at them. If they want to exercise their free speech rights outside on the street, fine…but when they break the law and invade private property they’ve lost their claim (real or imagined) to the moral high ground.

The London Times carries this story about Greenpeace protesters invading the IPE’s oil trading floor with noisemakers and placards in an attempt to disrupt trading for the afternoon. If you haven’t seen a big open outcry trading floor (Chicago Merc, Nymex, whatever) you should make it a point to visit one before they get too civilized and/or pushed out by electronic exchanges - listening to the interactions and seeing the pace of commerce on the floor is surreal.

“WHEN 35 Greenpeace protesters stormed the International Petroleum Exchange (IPE) yesterday they had planned the operation in great detail.

What they were not prepared for was the post-prandial aggression of oil traders who kicked and punched them back on to the pavement.“We bit off more than we could chew. They were just Cockney barrow boy spivs. Total thugs,” one protester said, rubbing his bruised skull. “I’ve never seen anyone less amenable to listening to our point of view.”
…..

“Protesters conceded that mounting the operation after lunch may not have been the best plan. “The violence was instant,” Jon Beresford, 39, an electrical engineer from Nottingham, said.

“They grabbed us and started kicking and punching. Then when we were on the floor they tried to push huge filing cabinets on top of us to crush us.”

They made their way to the trading floor, blowing whistles and sounding fog horns, encountering little resistance from security guards. Rape alarms were tied to helium balloons to float to the ceiling and create noise out of reach. The IPE conducts “open outcry” trading where deals are shouted across the pit. By making so much noise, the protesters hoped to paralyse trading.

But they were set upon by traders, most of whom were under the age of 25. “They were kicking and punching men and women indiscriminately,” a photographer said. “It was really ugly, but Greenpeace did not fight back.”

Mr Beresford said: “They followed the guys into the lobby and kept kicking and punching them there. They literally kicked them on to the pavement.”

Better luck next time - I’ve heard the Iraqi insurgency is not recycling their used VBIEDs - maybe Greenpeace should try disrupting their workplaces.

An interesting new commentary on, among other things, markets and public policy. Via Larry Lessig’s blog:

The Posner/Becker Blog

From PoliticalMoneyLine via the Washington Post, the ratio of people in various (self described) careers giving money to the Kerry Campaign vs the Bush Campaign:

Professors - 11:1
Actors - 18:1
Authors - 34:1
Journalists 93:1
Corporate CEOs, presidents, and chairmen - 1:5

The disparity is expected but the magnitude of it is pretty surprising to me.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10265-2004Jul23_3.html