La circulación de periódicos más importantes en los Estados Unidos está en franco declive.  Una parte puede deberse a la recesión pero tampoco puede negarse una tendencia de largo plazo.  Todos los diarios, salvo el WSJ, sufrieron caidas en los últimos 12 meses.  Hay quienes se preocupan por la influencia desmedida de los medios.  Justificadas o no, la mucha o poca influencia de la prensa va en declive.  La lección subyacente es clara: el poder de mercado de un medio (impreso, televisivo, electrónico) no puede durar por siempre.  Imagino que la historia es bastante similar para las “grandes cadenas” noticiosas (ABC, CNN, Fox, etc.).

La gráfica es de The Economist.  Más comentarios sobre el significado de estas tendencias en The Atlantic Wire.

La Revista Política y Gobierno del CIDE celebra su XV aniversario con la publicación de dos volúmenes temáticos sobre “ELECCIONES EN MÉXICO”.
Editores especiales:
Ulises Beltrán, BGC y Asociados / CIDE
Allyson Benton, CIDE

Moderadora:
Joy Langston, CIDE (editora de P&G)
Panelistas:
Federico Estévez, ITAM
Alejandro Moreno, ITAM
Leo Zuckermann, CIDE

Fecha y lugar:
Jueves 22 de octubre, 7pm
Piso 51 Torre Mayor
Ave. Paseo de la Reforma 505

*Nota: vestimenta formal (ni jeans ni tenis, pues :-)

This picture appears on the homepage of Charter Cities, Paul Romer’s project to change the world, one city at a time.

The FAQ of the website elaborates a bit more:

Q: Why are these students studying under streetlights?
A: They don’t have electricity at home, so they go to the airport to study for exams. See the news report describing their situation.

Q: Why do you display this picture on your home page?
A: All too often, the picture associated with the challenge of development is one of a starving child. This kind of picture may be helpful in motivating giving, but it does not necessarily lead to careful thinking about the forces that hold so many people back. There are, to be sure, desperate cases of people who are truly helpless. But images of extreme deprivation often obscure the fact that many of the world’s poorest residents attempt to help themselves, only to be stymied by bad rules.

Q: What kinds of rules keep people from having light in their homes?
A: Here are some simple examples of rules that can keep people in the dark: 

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  • Electricity is provided only by a government-owned firm.
  • Government employees can’t be fired, regardless of how poorly they do their jobs.
  • The low subsidized price of electricity for the lucky consumers who have access is determined by political considerations.

Under good governance, the people who want electricity in their homes can easily match up with the utilities that want to provide it to them.

There is more info at the chartercities.org website.
This is Paul Romer conference on: “A Theory of History, with an Application” (1 hr video)
And this a shorter TED talk (18min):

Some economists are strangely upset that Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist, got the economics Nobel prize this year. Even Steve Levitt admitted that he was rather unfamiliar with her work. I am glad she got the award, and I am also glad that I knew her work–Williamson and Ostrom being familiar figures in the public choice literature I studied at GMU.

In case you missed it, there is a continuum theme in the Nobel awards given to Ronald Coase, Douglass North, James Buchanan, and now Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom–the overarching importance of rules and institutions. The Economics Nobel committee makes this case here. Of course, other things matter as well, but if you don’t change the rules it will be difficult to expect any substantive change in behavior. Admittedly, Mancur Olson, Gordon Tullock, and Oliver Hart, who have not received the Nobel, also belong in this tradition.  Paul Romer puts it better than many others:

Skyhooks versus Cranes: The Nobel Prize for Elinor Ostrom

Most economists think that they are building cranes that suspend important theoretical structures from a base that is firmly grounded in first principles. In fact, they almost always invoke a skyhook, some unexplained result without which the entire structure collapses. Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics because she works from the ground up, building a crane that can support the full range of economic behavior.

When I started studying economics in graduate school, the standard operating procedure was to introduce both technology and rules as skyhooks. If we assumed a particular set of rules and technologies, as though they descended from the sky, then we economists could describe what people would do. Sometimes we compared different sets of rules that a “social planner” might impose but we never said anything about how actual rules were adopted. Crucially, we never even bothered to check that people would actually follow the rules we imposed.

A typical conclusion was that rules that assign property rights and rules that let people trade lead to good outcomes. What’s the skyhook? That people will follow the rules. Why would they respect the property rights of someone else? We had no idea. We might have had in mind something like this: police officers will arrest people who don’t follow the rules. But this is just another skyhook. Who are these police officers? Why do they follow rules? This is not an idle concern. Elinor showed that there are lots of important cases where people follow rules about ownership without police officers. One of the central challenges in understanding failures of economic development is that in many places, police officers don’t follow the rules they are meant to enforce.

Elinor’s fieldwork, followed up by her experimental work, pointed us in exactly the right direction. To understand BOTH why we don’t need police officers in some cases AND why police officers don’t follow the rules in other cases, we have to expand models of human preferences to include a contingent taste for punishing others. In reaching this conclusion, she arrived at a point similar to that reached by Avner Greif (whom the Nobel committee correctly cites.) They, more than anyone else in the profession, spelled out the program that economists should follow. To make the rules that people follow emerge as an equilibrium outcome instead of a skyhook, economists must extend our models of preferences and gather field and experimental evidence on the nature of these preferences.

Economists who have become addicted to skyhooks, who think that they are doing deep theory but are really just assuming their conclusions, find it hard to even understand what it would mean to make the rules that humans follow the object of scientific inquiry. If we fail to explore rules in greater depth, economists will have little to say about the most pressing issues facing humans today – how to improve the quality of bad rules that cause needless waste, harm, and suffering.

Cheers to the Nobel committee for recognizing work on one of the deepest issues in economics. Bravo to the political scientist who showed that she was a better economist than the economic imperialists who can’t tell the difference between assuming and understanding.

This is Bryan Caplan (one of the great professors I had at GMU) citing Chomsky, and reflecting on the social value of postmodernism… simply hilarious!

“I stumbled across an atypically insightful essay by Noam Chomsky, “What Is Wrong With Science and Rationality?,” in the colorfully-named collection Market Killing. You can read a nearly complete version of the essay here. Chomsky pushes two theses in this essay.

First, postmodernism makes no sense:

[T]o take part in a discussion, one must understand the ground rules. In this case, I don’t. In particular, I don’t know the answers to such elementary questions as these: Are conclusions to be consistent with premises (maybe even follow from them)? Do facts matter? Or can we string together thoughts as we like, calling it an “argument,” and make facts up as we please, taking one story to be as good as another? … What seems to be under discussion here is whether we should abide by these ground rules at all (trying to improve them as we proceed). If the answer is that we are to abide by them, then the discussion is over: we’ve implicitly accepted the legitimacy of rational inquiry. If they are to be abandoned, then we cannot proceed until we learn what replaces the commitment to consistency, responsibility to fact, and other outdated notions. Short of some instruction on this matter, we are reduced to primal screams.

Second, postmodernist philosophy makes it hard to persuasively communicate your substantitive views to a broad audience:

And it is hard for me to see how friends and colleagues in the “non white world” will learn more from the advice given by “a handful of scientists” who inform then that they should not “move on the tracks of western science and technology,” but should prefer other “stories” and “myths”–which ones, we are not told, though astrology is mentioned.

I think Chomsky’s basically right on both counts. Which puts me in a quandary. As long as postmodernism remains a delusion of the left, I’m afraid I’ve got to admit it has a socially useful function: It serves as a barricade between leftist intellectuals and their target audience. There is no surer way to turn off a crowd of anti-globlization protestors than to make them listen to some windbag go on and on about “What Derrida said Foucault should have said Sartre meant to say.“

Llevo más de 4 años bloggeando–primero en blogspot, sin estadísticas–y desde hace 3 meses aquí en wordpress, que ofrece tracking stats de todo tipo.  Estos son las más notas consultadas en los últimos 3 meses.

1. Curso de verano 2009  241
2. Elección 2009: primeras reacciones  131
3. Solicitud de Visa para Canadá  115
4. Género y la elección 2009  64
5. Elección 2009: resultados MR por género  57
6. Elección 2009: Género y RP  55
7. About  54
8. Función de utilidad  51
9. Elección 2009: corte de caja  44
10. El paquete fiscal 2010  40

It was a delight to have Jon Elster, a scholar of the highest stature, here at CIDE.  One thing that left me puzzled during his lectures, however, was that his methodological views seemed to be very different when he considered the status of social science in general, than the framework he actually applied in his own research. For instance, in his paper on the excessive ambitions of social science, Jon Elster criticizes both, rational choice models and statistical analysis. These are some notable quotations:

Cohorts after cohort of students are learning –and many of them subsequently hired to apply or teach– useless theories. Their efforts and talents would have been vastly more useful to society had they been harnessed to more productive purposes.

Rational-choice models may (…) help us explain, predict or shape behavior. Although simple and robust models may do this in a rough-and-ready sense, the sophisticated models that are the pride of the profession do not.

My claim is that much work in economics and political science is devoid of empirical, aesthetic or mathematical interest, which means that it has no value at all. I cannot make any quantitative assessment of the proportion of work in leading journals that fall in this category. I am firmly convinced, however, that the proportion is non-negligible and important enough to constitute something of a scandal.

I suggest that a non-negligible part of empirical social science consists of half-understood statistical theory applied to half-assimilated empirical material (the emphasis is Elster’s).

If many applications of rational-choice theory and statistical theory are wasteful or harmful, why do they persist? (…) I shall discuss two possible mechanisms: mind-binding and pluralistic ignorance.

Controversial (excessive?) as they may be, let’s assume that the jury is out on the above assertions. On the other hand, Elster’s paper on democracy and justice discusses the issues of compulsory voting and turnout under a rational choice framework, backed up with cross-country statistical evidence (the emphasis in what follows is mine):

As I just argued, it would be a danger sign if a large majority of the citizens chose not to exercise their right to vote. And in fact, why should they exercise it? The cost of voting, although small, is not zero. The benefit of voting, if measured by the chance of casting the decisive vote, is essentially zero. (…) modern game theory can be used to show that his conclusion is correct. If voters are rational and self-interested, only a small number will vote.

(…) compulsory voting might trigger a norm of fairness, in the following sense. (…) When voting is made compulsory, their estimate of the likelihood that others will vote goes up, and hence they are more likely to vote as well.  The alternative explanation is that the fear of sanctions provides a full account of the higher turnout under compulsory voting. In general, these sanctions are not severe and enforcement levels are low. Yet from an expected-utility point of view, even a small perceived risk of a small fine for non-voting might exceed the small cost of voting. Also, voters might not know how small the risk is, and they might not be rationally motivated to find out.

To my knowledge, there has been no systematic attempt to find out whether the effects of compulsory voting are due mainly to a stronger feeling of civic duty induced by the law or mainly to the deterrence effect of sanctions. I suspect that cost-benefit analysis fails to capture the psychology of voting, but I have no clear and clean alternative explanation to propose.

I want to pursue some further implications of the fact that voting is a collective action problem. To overcome a free-rider problem, institutional designers may use either the stick or the carrot – punish non-compliers or reward compliers.

The important point is that the requirement of compulsory voting tends to have two distinct effects. On the one hand, it consolidates democracy, by increasing turnout. On the other hand, it promotes justice, by improving the match between the outcome of elections and the popular will. When voting is voluntary, poor citizens are somewhat less likely to vote than the better-off. The tendency varies across countries, and is not always very strong, but it can be substantial. The impact of education on voting is even more substantial. In addition to findings by political scientists, evidence in favor of the correlation is provided by the strong resistance of right-wing parties to compulsory voting, as well as to many measures intended to facilitate voluntary voting.

So, the question is, which version of Jon Elster are we supposed to believe?