Jared Diamond estudia las “grandes preguntas” del surgimiento y colapso de
las civilizaciones… con la ventaja de que no ser ni historiador, ni
politologo ni economista. Su último libro ha sido criticado en diversos
frentes, pero creo que aún así contiene elementos valiosos.

Easter Island, C’est Moi
By Terrence McNally, AlterNet

http://www.alternet.org/story/23413/

In his Pulitzer-prize winning book, “Guns, Germs, and Steel,” Jared Diamond
examined how and why Western civilizations developed the technologies and
immunities that allowed them to dominate much of the world. Now in
“Collapse: How Societies Choose To Fail Or Succeed,” Diamond probes the
other side of the
equation: What caused some of the great civilizations of the past to
collapse into ruin, and what can we learn from their fates? From the
Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American
civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya, and finally to the doomed Viking
colony on Greenland, “Collapse” traces the fundamental patterns of
catastrophe.

TERRENCE MCNALLY: What called to you about the new book, “Collapse”?

JARED DIAMOND: What called to me was a romantic interest going back to when
I was in my 20s and began reading Thor Heyerdahl’s books about the
settlement of Easter Island and the great stone statues and how they were
erected and why they were overthrown. It’s a question that’s been on my mind
for a long time.

Twenty years ago we really didn’t know why the islanders ended up in this
barren landscape overthrowing their statues. It also wasn’t clear why the
Maya had abandoned their great cities. But thanks to recent archeological
excavations we now have better understanding of these collapses. It’s now
possible to write a unified book on collapses.

TM: You put forth a five-point framework of factors that tend to contribute
to collapse. Could you tell us what they are, in terms of one of the actual
cases in the book?

JD: Let’s take a full five-factor collapse that involves a European society
(collapses happen not just to exotic people like Polynesians or Native
Americans, they happen to blue-eyed, blonde-haired Europeans like
Norwegians). The Vikings settled Greenland around C.E. 1000. They built
cathedrals and stone churches. They were literate, they wrote Latin and they
wrote in runes. But after about 500 years they were all dead. Still, the
Norse lasted longer in Greenland than Europeans have lasted in North America
today.

Number one: human environmental impacts. Many societies unwittingly destroy
the environmental resources on which they depend. The Greenland Norse
chopped down their forests in order to clear land for pastures and to have
firewood and construction timber, but that resulted in erosion that
gradually removed land that could have been used for productive pastures.

Number two: climate change. Today we’re causing climate change, but in the
past the climate has naturally gotten colder or hotter or rainy or drier. In
the case of the Greenland Norse, it got colder. If it’s colder, you grow
less hay to get your cattle through the winter and your cattle start dying.

The third factor was enemies. Most societies have enemies, and can fight off
their enemies until the society gets weakened for whatever reason. The Roman
Empire weakened and then was overrun by barbarians. In the case of the
Greenland Norse, as they weakened, their enemies, the Inuit or Eskimos,
probably played a role in exterminating them.

Factor number four: friends. The Greenland Norse depended upon Norway for
essential resources, particularly iron and timber, and for cultural
identity. Norway began to decline, and the trade from Norway to Greenland
was impeded by sea ice.

And number five: every society responds or fails to respond to its problems.
The Greenland Norse failed to respond successfully.

Kurt Unger, de nuestra División de Economía, acaba de publicar un paper en
NBER con importantes resultados.

El bottomline: los municipios con mayor migración están “creciendo” más
rápido que los de menos migración (gracias a las famosas remesas); y como
los de baja migración son más ricos, el resultado es convergencia entre
ambos grupos. Son buenas noticias: a pesar de sus políticos, el país avanza
con el sudor de su gente.

Regional Economic Development and Mexican Out-Migration
by Kurt Unger – #11432 (ITI LS)
http://papers.nber.org/papers/W11432

Abstract:
This paper shows evidence of positive effects in the economic
development of sending communities in Mexico due to migration. The principal
hypothesis of this study is that remittances, knowledge and experience
acquired by migrants during their migratory cycle, can be translated into
larger economic growth in the out migration municipalities. This result
presupposes that Government could create complementary incentives to take
advantage of profitable activities. Economic and migration data for each
municipality is used which allows to associate characteristics of
communities, migratory flows and the effects in profitable activities.

There are three sections. A first section describes the sending
municipalities according to migratory intensity and their urban /rural
nature. The second section analyzes the relation between remittances and
socioeconomic conditions of the communities. In a third section the effect
over time is estimated, relating per capita income growth and migratory
flows intensity.

The most relevant results are the existence of income convergence over time
between
high and low migration municipalities in the North and South of Mexico. As
well, we find a positive and significant relation between per capita income
growth and the percentage of households that receive remittances across
communities, both at the country level and
for the northern and southern regions separately.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/W11432

Good economics is about figuring out not well-understood markets… like the
market for music:

http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2005/06/should_music_co
.html

…it is difficult to judge how a given level of illegal downloads will
affect economic efficiency. First, the quantity of music sold in a given
year is not a very accurate indicator of how much value consumers receive
from music. Fans commonly experiment by buying a number of CDs, only a few
of which pay off and become favorites. Many or most of the products bought
are quickly regarded as disappointments and discarded.
(…)
Evaluating the efficiency consequences of illegal downloads is difficult for
a more fundamental reason. Most generally, we do not understand the demand
for music very well. We do not understand what most fans want from their
music. Just as book buyers are not always readers, the music market is not
always about the tunes. Sometimes it is about symbolic values.

It is a mystery why fans spend almost all of their music money on product of
very recent vintage. Until we untangle this puzzle, and we have not yet, we
will not understand how Internet music is likely to affect consumer welfare.
(…)
Most likely the music market is about more than simply buying “good music,”
as a critic might understand that term. People buy music to signal their
hipness, to participate in current trends, or to distinguish themselves from
previous generations. Buyers use music to signal their social standing,
whether this consists of going to the opera or listening to heavy metal.
Others value partaking in novelty per se. They find newness exciting, a way
of following the course of fashion, and the music market offers one handy
arena for this pursuit. For some people music is an excuse to go out and
mix with others, a coordination point for dancing, staying up late,
drinking, or a singles scene. Along these lines, many fans seem to enjoy
musical promotions, hype, and advertising as ends in themselves, and not
merely as means to hearing music. They like being part of the “next big
thing.” The accompanying music cannot be so bad to their ears as to offend
them, but the deftness of the harmonic triads is not their primary concern.

In other words, the features of the market that matter to the critic may not
be very special to consumers at all. Most of all, consumers seem to care
about some feature of newness and trendiness, more than they care about
music per se. So how much does it matter, from a consumer’s point of view,
if weaker copyright protection reshapes the world of music?

http://www.reason.com/0506/cr.vp.consumer.shtml

Consumer Vertigo
Virginia Postrel

(…)During the last couple of decades, the American economy has undergone a
variety revolution. Instead of simply offering mass-market goods, businesses of
all sorts increasingly compete to give consumers more personalized products,
more varied experiences, and more choice.

(…) Young, well-educated adults in particular have unprecedented freedom to
make whatever they want of their lives: to decide where to live, what to do,
whom to befriend, whom (or whether) to marry.

“Since graduation, we’ve struggled to make our own happiness,” Jenny Norenberg,
a young lawyer, writes in Newsweek. “It seems that having so many choices has
sometimes overwhelmed us. In the seven years since I left home for college,
I’ve had 13 addresses and lived in six cities. How can I stay with one person,
at one job, in one city, when I have the world at my fingertips?”

It’s all too much, declares the latest line of social criticism. Americans are
facing a crisis of choice. We’re increasingly unhappy, riddled with anxiety and
regret, because we have so much freedom to decide what to do with our money and
our lives. Some choice may be good, but we’ve gone over the limit. The result
is _The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies_, the title of Yale political
scientist Robert Lane’s 2000 book on the subject.

To these critics, providing too many choices is the latest way liberal societies
in general, and markets in particular, make people miserable. “Choices
proliferate beyond our pleasure in choosing and our capacity to handle the
choices,” writes Lane. Like cheap food and sedentary labor, the argument goes,
abundant choice is not something human beings are biologically evolved to cope
with. We’d be better off with fewer decisions to make.

“As the number of choices keeps growing, negative aspects of having a multitude
of options begin to appear,” writes Swarthmore psychologist Barry Schwartz in
The Paradox of Choice, published in January 2004. “As the number of choices
grows further, the negatives escalate until we become overloaded. At this
point, choice no longer liberates, but debilitates. It might even be said to
tyrannize.”

(…)At the heart of the anti-choice argument is a false dichotomy: We can have
a narrow range of standardized choices, or we can live with options that are
infinite, dizzying, and always open.

“Social ties actually decrease freedom, choice, and autonomy,” he writes.
“Marriage, for example, is a commitment to a particular other person that
curtails freedom of choice in sexual and even emotional partners.” (…)
There’s something deeply wrong with this understanding of choice. Freedom to
choose must include the freedom to commit.

Ultimately, the debate about choice is not about markets but about character.
Liberty and responsibility really do go together; it’s not just a platitude.
The more freedom we have to control our lives, the more responsibility we have
for how they turn out. In a world of constraints, learning to be happy with
what you’re given is a virtue. In a world of choices, virtue comes from
learning to make commitments without regrets. And commitment, in turn, requires
self-confidence and self-knowledge.

“We are free to be the authors of our lives,” says Schwartz, “but we don’t know
exactly what kind of lives we want to ‘write.’” Maturity lies in deciding just
that.

Las gráficas de este documento indican:

1. El 30 de enero Peña y Mendoza estaban “empatados” en las encuestas, y muy poca gente tenía una opinión favorable tanto de Mendoza como Peña (13% aprox)–síntoma de que casi nadie los conocía.

Y se pusieron a gastar… y ahora todo mundo los conoce… por lo que hoy…

2. El rendimiento marginal decreciente de la “imagen favorable” de Enrique peña ya ocurrió (tiene 43% de percepciones favorables)–pero suficiente para contar con 52% de la intención de voto.

3. El rendimiento marginal CRECIENTE de la “imagen desfavorable” de Ruben Mendoza–lo llevó a que ahora el 32% de la gente tiene una opinión desfavorable.

4. Según los encuestados, los principales atributos de los candidatos son:

Peña – propositivo, creíble, honesto
Mendoza – conflictivo y mentiroso
Polevnsky – inexperta

Candidatos bastante persuasivos, como se puede ver.

A menudo se critica a los economistas por no hacer estudios de caso. He
aquí un contraejemplo que puede interesarle a quién este haciendo economía
urbana… o una tesina de historia económica.

“Urban Colossus: Why is New York America’s Largest City?”

BY: EDWARD L. GLAESER
Harvard University
http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=732423
Date: June 2005

ABSTRACT:
New York has been remarkably successful relative to any other large city
outside of the sunbelt and it remains the nation’s premier metropolis. What
accounts for New York’s rise and continuing success? The rise of New York in
the early nineteenth century is the result of technological changes that
moved ocean shipping from a point-to-point system to a hub and spoke system;
New York’s geography made it the natural hub of this system. Manufacturing
then centered in New York because the hub of a transport system is, in many
cases, the ideal place to transform raw materials into finished goods. This
initial dominance was entrenched by New York’s role as the hub for
immigration. In the late 20th century, New York’s survival is based almost
entirely on finance and business services, which are also legacies of the
port. In this period, New York’s role as a hub still matters, but it is far
less important than the edge that density and agglomeration give to the
acquisition of knowledge.

¿Para que sirve hacer tantas regresiones? Para distinguir entre el efecto de la
misoginia y la hepatitis B…

The Search for 100 Million Missing Women
An economics detective story.
By Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt
http://www.slate.com/id/2119402/

“(…)In an essay in the New York Review of Books, Amartya Sen claimed that
there were some 100 million “missing women” in Asia. While the ratio of men to
women in the West was nearly even, in countries like China, India, and
Pakistan, there were far more men than women. Sen charged these cultures with
gravely mistreating their young girls—perhaps by starving their daughters at
the expense of their sons or not taking the girls to doctors when they should
have. Although Sen didn’t say so, there were other sinister possibilities. Were
the missing women a result of selective abortions? Female infanticide? A forced
export of prostitutes?

Sen had used the measurement tools of economics to uncover a jarring mystery and
to accuse a culprit—misogyny. But now another economist has reached a
startlingly different conclusion.

Emily Oster is an economics graduate student at Harvard who started running
regression analyses when she was 10 (both her parents are economists) and is
particularly interested in studying disease. She first learned of the “missing
women” theory while she was an undergraduate. Then one day last summer, while
doing some poolside reading in Las Vegas—the book was Baruch Blumberg’s
Hepatitis B: The Hunt for a Killer Virus—she discovered a strange fact. In a
series of small-scale medical studies in Greece, Greenland, and elsewhere,
researchers had found that a pregnant woman with hepatitis B is far more likely
to have a baby boy than a baby girl. It wasn’t clear why—it may be that a
female fetus is more likely to be miscarried when exposed to the virus.

Oster was suitably intrigued. She set out first to see if she could use data to
confirm Blumberg’s thesis. A vaccine for hepatitis B, she learned, had been
available since the late 1970s. She found good data on a U.S. government
vaccination program in Alaska. Before the vaccinations began, Alaskan natives
had a historically high incidence of hepatitis B as well as a high birth ratio
of boys to girls. White Alaskans, meanwhile, had a low incidence of hepatitis B
and gave birth to the standard ratio of boys to girls. But after a universal
vaccination program was carried out in Alaska, the Native Alaskans’ boy-girl
ratio fell almost immediately to the normal range, while the white Alaskans’
ratio was unchanged. A vaccination program in Taiwan revealed similar results.”