If you are ethically-minded, this is cool stuff to argue–for or against.

The Future of Tradition
By Lee Harris
(Lee Harris is the author of Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of
History)
http://www.policyreview.org/jun05/harris.html

…the transgenerational duty to one’s grandchildren may be put in these
simple
terms: Members of each generation are committed to making sure that the
ethical baseline of their society does not move in a manner that their
visceral code instantly tells them is wrong. How much philosophical thought
is given in explaining this wrong, or in disputing its validity – all that
is irrelevant to the theory of tradition contained here.

But, once again, we confront the practical problem: How does a society go
about ensuring that the ethical baseline will be maintained at all costs,
and even when it is most tempting to depart from it in a downward direction?
Through appeals to enlightened self-interest, or through sermons and
philosophical tracts?

…

For us, it is imperative that an eight-year-old boy should have esteem for
himself, for the person that he is. We do not want him thinking, “I wish I
could be like John”; instead, we demand that he think, “I’m just fine the
way I am. I don’t need to model my behavior on anyone else.” But our
insistence on creating self-esteem in an eight-year-old boy comes with a
high price tag – by refusing to encourage the boy’s dissatisfaction with
himself as he is, we are inadvertently taking from him the primary human
motivation to change oneself for the better. By pumping him full of
self-esteem, we rob him of the will to set himself transformative projects
and goals. Totally at peace with what he is, he ceases to have any reason to
become something more – and certainly no reason at all to become what he
could be.

The contemporary gospel of individual self-esteem is at odds with the
universal tradition of mankind – a tradition that the German poet, Rilke,
summed up in the concluding lines of a poem addressed to the torso of
Apollo, whose heroic perfection Rilke saw as a challenge to our own far from
perfect status quo – “Du must dein Leben andern.” You must change your life.

…You must change yourself, as Rilke’s poem tells us, but into what? A
tolerant person? A wise person?

…

This is how those fond of abstract reasoning can destroy the ethical
foundations of a society without anyone’s noticing it: They throw up for
debate that which no one before ever thought about debating. They take the
collective visceral code that has bound parents to grandchildren from time
immemorial, in every culture known to man, and make of it a topic for
fashionable intellectual chatter.

…The intelligentsia have no idea of the consequences that would ensue if
middle America lost its simple faith in God and its equally simple trust in
its fellow men. Their plain virtues and homespun beliefs are the bedrock of
decency and integrity in our nation and in the world. These are the people
who give their sons and daughters to defend the good and to defeat the evil.
If in their eyes this clear and simple distinction is blurred through the
dissemination of moral relativism and an aesthetic of ethical frivolity,
where else will human decency find such willing and able defenders?

Even the most sophisticated of us have something to learn from the
fundamentalism of middle America. For stripped of its quaint and antiquated
ideological superstructure, there is a hard and solid kernel of wisdom
embodied in the visceral code by which fundamentalists raise their children,
and many of us, including many gay men like myself, are thankful to have
been raised by parents who were so unshakably committed to the values of
decency, and honesty, and integrity, and all those other homespun and corny
principles. Reject the theology if you wish, but respect the ethical
fundamentalism by which these people live: It is not a weakness of
intellect, but a strength of character.

If voting has signalling purposes, voting by mail “may” reduce total
turnout… but increase the share of informed voters…

“Theory and Evidence on the Role of Social Norms in Voting”
BY: PATRICIA FUNK
Stockholm School of Economics
Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE)
http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=627347
Date: March 2005

ABSTRACT:
This paper investigates social norms and voting behavior. I argue that
social norms create incentives for signaling, i.e., voting for the purpose
of being seen at the voting act. Empirical evidence on signaling can be
gained by looking at the introduction of optional postal voting in
Switzerland. Even though the possibility of mail voting reduced voting costs
substantially, it didn’t increase turnout. Consistent with my model’s
predictions, voter turnout decreased more in the smaller communities, but in
the meantime, the share of cooperators (=interested voters) was more
positively affected there. Therefore, modern voting tools may decrease
average turnout, but nevertheless, increase the quality of the voting
outcome. Current models predict the opposite, but ignore the effect of
different voting systems on the incentive for signaling.

(This is her model:)

If voting is only possible by going to the polls, potential signaling
benefits thus originate from being seen (or not being seen) at the voting
both. However, in small communities, people know each other and gossip about
who was observed at the booth and who wasn’t. Therefore, total signaling
benefits are assumed to decrease in community size (and) a nonpositive
relationship between voter turnout and community size.

(…) It can be shown that the introduction of postal voting has a
non-positive impact on turnout in small communities and a non-negative
impact on turnout in large communities (third result). The intuition behind
result three is that the introduction of postal voting has two
countervailing effects: a cost-reduction effect (with a positive effect on
turnout) and a reduced signaling effect (with a negative effect on turnout).

As for the latter, imagine a small community, where voting is only possible
at the polls. Due to the strong social pressure and the high signaling
benefits, a large share of defectors goes to the polls e.g. to avoid social
sanctions from non-voting. As soon as postal voting is allowed, cheating
becomes easy and defectors don’t vote anymore. In large communities, on the
other hand, signaling was less rewarding (or necessary) under the old voting
system, so that the cost-reduction-effect of mail voting dominates.

These predictions from the signaling model stand in contrast to the
predictions of standard models of voting, which only consider the modern
voting tools’ effect on the voting costs.

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.