Daily Archives: April 19, 2005

The Papal Conclave: How do Cardinals Divine the Will of God?

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Este paper contiene y analiza un panel de datos sobre cónclaves recientes… 
 
Excelente cita: 

“The Germans are on his side as will be the Spanish tomorrow because Franchi has now sided with Pecci; Howard, who up to now has voted for Simeoni, will vote for Pecci tomorrow; as I’m sure Your Eminency is aware, Bilio declared to Barolini that if he were to be elected he would not accept, for he considers it a heavy burden; Monaco and Randi will continue to vote for Martinelli; Franzelin likes Monaco, but he is wasting his time: Your Eminency, you must accept the truth, God has chosen Pecci.”

The Papal Conclave: How do Cardinals Divine the Will of God?
J.T. Toman (University of Sydney)
Version: January 5, 2004
http://www.wcfia.harvard.edu/seminars/pegroup/toman.pdf

In modern times, the College of Cardinals have been locked in the Sistine Chapel with the purported aim to divine the Will of God in the election of the Pope. Between 20 and 60 percent of cardinals vote for the same candidate throughout the conclave, depending on the length of the conclave. For those cardinals that change their voting behavior, they are influenced by both the vote counts and the nightly conversations. However, in unifying the cardinals to one winner the dominant force is the observed vote counts.

Nascar republicans vs. trust fund democrats

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Más sobre red states vs. blue states:


http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/04/rich_state_poor.html

Rich Man, Poor Man; Rich State, Poor State

Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science is one of my favorite new blogs. It is primarily written by Andrew Gelman, a professor in the Departments of Statistics and Political Science at Columbia University.

A recent post looks at the difference between red and blue states and red and blue individuals. We all know that in the recent election poorer states tended to vote Republican while richer states tended to vote Democrat. On the basis of the famous maps many people jumped to the conclusion that poorer individuals were voting Republican (Nascar Republicans) while richer individuals were voting Democrat (trust fund Democrats). But the inference is a fallacy, the ecological fallacy. In fact, high-income individuals, as opposed to high-income states, vote Republican with greater likelihood than low-income individuals (the effect is not huge and it may be declining but it is significant).

It’s even true that rich counties tend to vote Republican with greater likelihood than poorer counties. Gelman links to this graph which nicely illustrates the ecological fallacy. The three lines show that within each state higher-income counties are more likely to vote Republican but when you look between states the correlation between income and voting Republican is negative. (Click to enlarge).

Efallacy

Libertades económicas y políticas

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Becker y Posner tocan un tema recurrente de economía y política:
  

  • Economic and Political Freedom: Does One Lead to the Other? BECKER
  • Democracy and Free Markets–Posner’s Comment

    •  

     
    Ambos sintetizan muy bien los argumentos de la literatura, pero Becker da un paso en falso cuando afirma:
     
    “The path from political to economic freedom, by contrast, is slower and more uncertain.(…) Mexico has had a free press and considerable political freedom for a century or so, but economic freedoms did not begin to evolve until the latter part of the 1980’s.“
     
    ¡Becker necesita un correctivo!
     

    Why Are We Worried About Income?

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    Para documentar nuestro optimismo de largo plazo…
     
    Why Are We Worried About Income? Nearly Everything that Matters is Converging
    Charles Kenny
    The World Bank, Washington, DC, USA
    World Development
    Volume 33, Issue 1 , January 2005, Pages 1-19
    http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2004.06.016

    Summary
    Convergence of national GDP/capita numbers is a common, but narrow, measure of global success or failure in development. This paper takes a broader range of quality of life variables covering health, education, rights and infrastructure and examines if they are converging across countries. It finds that these measures are converging as a rule and (where we have data) that they have been converging for some time. The paper turns to a discussion of what might be driving convergence in quality of life even as incomes diverge, and what this might mean for the donor community.

    Belief in a Just World and Redistributive Politics

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    Benabou y Tirole ofrecen un modelo de preferencias (ideológicas/religiosas/etc) endógenas.  Desconozco los méritos o novedad del modelo en si, pero creo que es un avance significativo que economistas de este calibre ya estén entrando en estos temas hasta ahora fuera del “mainstream”.

    Belief in a Just World and Redistributive Politics

    by Roland Benabou, Jean Tirole – #11208 (EFG PE)
    http://papers.nber.org/papers/W11208

    Abstract:

    International surveys reveal wide differences between the views held in different countries concerning the causes of wealth or poverty and the extent to which people are responsible for their own fate. At the same time, social ethnographies and experiments by psychologists demonstrate individuals’ recurrent struggle with cognitive dissonance as they seek to maintain, and pass on to their children, a view of the world where effort ultimately pays off and everyone gets their just deserts.

    This paper offers a model that helps explain: i) why most people feel such a need to believe in a “just world”; ii) why this need, and therefore the prevalence of the belief, varies considerably across countries; iii) the implications of this phenomenon for international differences in political ideology, levels of redistribution, labor supply, aggregate income, and popular perceptions of the poor.

    The model shows in particular how complementarities arise endogenously between individuals’ desired beliefs or ideological choices, resulting in two equilibria. A first, “American” equilibrium is characterized by a high prevalence of just-world beliefs among the population and relatively laissez-faire policies. The other, “European” equilibrium is characterized by more pessimism about the role of effort in economic outcomes and a more extensive welfare state.

    More generally, the paper develops a theory of collective beliefs and motivated cognitions, including those concerning “money” (consumption) and happiness, as well as religion.

    Easterly vs. Sachs

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    Easterly reseña (negativamente) a Jeffrey Sachs
    THE END OF POVERTY – Economic Possibilities for Our Time

    1. Easterly ataca:
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25562-2005Mar10.html
    Jeffrey D. Sachs’s guided tour to the poorest regions of the Earth is enthralling and maddening at the same time — enthralling, because his eloquence and compassion make you care about some very desperate people; maddening, because he offers solutions that range all the way from practical to absurd. It’s a shame that Sachs’s prescriptions are unconvincing because he is resoundingly right about the tragedy of world poverty.

    Social reformers have found two ways to respond to this complexity; Karl Popper summed them up best a half-century ago as “utopian social engineering” versus “piecemeal democratic reform.” Sachs is the intellectual leader of the utopian camp.

    To Sachs, poverty reduction is mostly a scientific and technological issue (hence the technical jargon above), in which aid dollars can buy cheap interventions to fix development problems.

    But Sachs’s anti-poverty prescriptions rest heavily on the kindness of some pretty dysfunctional regimes, not to mention the famously inefficient international aid bureaucracy.

    Sachs was born to play the role of fundraiser. And it’s easier to feel good about his sometimes simplistic sales pitch for foreign aid if it leads to spending more dollars on desperately poor people, as opposed to, say, wasteful weapons systems.

    The danger is that when the utopian dreams fail (as they will again), the rich-country public will get even more disillusioned about foreign aid.”

    =========================
    2. Y Sachs responde:

    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64541-2005Mar24.html
    William Easterly, who reviewed my book The End of Poverty (Book World, March 13), is notorious as the cheerleader for “can’t-do” economics. For years as a World Bank staffer, he watched failed programs during the era of World Bank “structural adjustment lending” and reached the erroneous conclusion that any bold effort to help the poorest of the poor would fail. He wrongly made the Bank’s shortcomings into a general theory. The World Bank has since moved on, but Easterly has not.

    Easterly’s simplistic approach fits well with many conservatives in Washington, who would rather blame the poor than help them. Somehow the world’s poorest people are made out to be our enemy. According to this upside-down worldview, the people dying of malaria are out for our money — all $3 per year that it would cost each person in the rich world to help Africa mount an effective control program!

    Easterly’s charge that I am utopian gets it backward. Easterly’s World Bank experience made him into a dystopian, seeing the worst in everything and expecting failure everywhere.