Kasparov on Syria & Putin

People, I love Twitter. Feast your eyes:

Putin & al-Assad get what they wanted: status quo of them in charge, massacring all opposition. WMD are bait & Kerry/Obama eating the hook.
— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) September 14, 2013

You also have to look big picture. North & South Korea are watching. China & Taiwan, Putin and all dictators see they have a free hand.
— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) September 14, 2013

Kerry & Lavrov deal: Putin will supply al-Assad with weapons to kill rebels and Obama will supply al-Assad & UN with lots of papers!
— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) September 14, 2013

We have finally found Obama's red line! Now if Syria doesn't comply, US has right to go to UN, where can be blocked by... Putin! A circle!
— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) September 14, 2013

Perfect! They will bury al-Assad under tons of paperwork! RT @lmldias: @Kasparov63 Death by bureaucracy!
— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) September 14, 2013

Maybe Lou Reed was wrong about Robert Christgau?

Here is a great Christgau piece on the Moldy Peaches from back in the day.

You should consider following Kimya Dawson on Twitter. She's a NSFW force of nature.

 And of course the Peaches' back catalog is a must.

Context for the title of this post can be found here (also NSFW).

Endogeneity & Furiousity

This morning, Tim Harford tweeted me over to this post by Owen Barder, along with the message that it,  "should make me furious".

It didn't.

The post complains that, "we (the US) waste our food aid budget". It shows that, in 2010, We sent $5 million in official food aid to Cambodia, but $3.5 million of that was actually paid out to US shippers.

The implication is that we have a fixed food aid budget that is exogenous, and if we could just stop wasting it on shipping (by sourcing the food closer to Cambodia, for example) the aid would be more effective.

Another way to look at the situation though, is to realize that the food aid budget is actually endogenously created in the sausage factory that is Congress.

US shippers and farmers aren't going to lobby for a food aid budget if they don't benefit from it. If shippers and farmers don't lobby and give contributions then the food aid budget will be smaller.

How much smaller? That of course is an empirical question, but given that Cambodians don't vote or lobby (as far as I know at least), zero is not a crazy guess as to the size of the food aid budget without the support of US shippers and farmers.

After all, when you ask the American people where to cut the budget, their first instinctive thought is "foreign aid", which many on them imagine is a large chunk of US expenditures instead of the pittance that it is.

Why does the OECD allow these freight costs to be counted as "aid"? That is a separate question, but in the elaborate kabuki dance of special interest money, it appears to be necessary that money flows not be plainly labeled.

A budget item simply giving money to shippers and farmers is perceived as unlikely to survive, so we call it aid and our pals go along with it. Either because other countries are doing the same thing, or because the OECD knows that calling a spade a spade might end up reducing, rather than increasing the actual amount of aid that is delivered.

We all know that the most effective use of $5 million in aid money is to simply give the money to the people who need the aid. The best our political system can do is, from the $5 million, get $1.5 million in in-kind aid delivered. And then of course the political system of the receiving country takes over, so the amount that actually gets to the intended recipients is going to be a fraction of that measly $1.5 million.

Yet we as a people continue to demand that our political system run more and more of our economy.

Lincoln Logs

I don't watch SNL, I just rely on Twitter to tell me what's good, and this is GOOD!

The Culture that is Sweden: Lunch Lady Edition

A school chef in a town in Sweden has gotten a cease and desist order because her food is BETTER THAN WHAT IS SERVED IN OTHER SCHOOLS!

I am not making this up.

Apparently she produced a 15 item veggie buffet and fresh baked bread, while staying on budget.

No more.

The horror doesn't end here though,"Her traditional Easter and Christmas smörgåsbords may also be under threat."

McKayla is not impressed

more here

Eyes wide shut

A big trend in economics these days is the Randomized Control Trial (RCT), often referred to by its enthusiasts as the "gold standard" of evidence. An intervention is tested by randomly assigning it across a chosen sample and computing the average treatment effect. An analogy is often made to clinical trials in medicine, but there is (at least) one important difference. Most drug trials are "double blind", where participants do not know if they are in the "control" group or the "treatment" group.  By contrast, most RCTs are not double blind. Participants know what group they are in.

And, as a fascinating new paper points out, this knowledge can produce "pseudo-placebo effects" in RCTs. That is to say, the expectation of receiving the treatment can cause people to modify their behaviors in a way that produces a significant "average treatment effect" even if the actual intervention in not particularly effective.

The paper illustrates the point by undertaking two different RCTs on cowpea seeds in Tanzania. One is a traditional study where the control group knows they are getting traditional seeds and the treatment group knows they are getting modern seeds. The second is double blind; neither group knows what seed it is getting.

The traditional RCT shows a significant  over 20% increase in yields from the modern seed. But the double blind RCT shows that virtually all of that improvement comes from changed behavior, not from any inherent effectiveness of the modern seed.

Specifically, the average treatment effect in the double blind RCT was zero! And when the harvests in the control groups across the two RCTs were compared, the blind control group showed a significant over 20% increase over the traditional RCT control group which knew they were getting the traditional seeds. This is the "pseudo-placebo" effect and it explains the entire average treatment effect in the traditional RCT.

Wow!

In other words, the significant effect found in the traditional RCT was not due to better seeds, it was due to actions taken by the farmers who thought they were getting better seeds (they planted them in larger plots with more space between the plants on better quality land). These farmers' expectations were wrong (in post experiment surveys, over 60% of them said they were disappointed in the yields), and the significant effect in the traditional RCT would not survive over time because the farmers, having adjusted their expectations downward would stop taking the actions that produced the "success".

People, can I get a "YIKES"?

Hat tip to Justin Sandefur.

Low voltage

Obama motors is having trouble with their signature product.  Chevy sold 603 Volts in January. Their sales target for 2012 (45,000) has been dropped. Last year they sold around 8,000 Volts.

More info is here, and the hat tip goes to Mark P.

Has the $7,500 tax credit for buying one of these bad boys expired? Or has America run out of Volt-less rich people?

Or maybe people don't want their cars to double as fireplaces?

White Girl Problems

Okay, I'm not proud of this.

But if I need a pick me up, no more than twice a day or so (no, really), I just crank up Twitter and watch #whitegirlproblems . It's extremely rewarding. Some are likely serious, some are certainly not. But rewarding.

In five minutes, you will laugh out loud at least five or six times.

Things like:

I prayed for your forehead last night.

Pulled up to a stop light, blaring Lil' Wayne, & 2 black guys just broke up laughing.

If only I could unf**k you

So pale.... so pale

Kindle wouldn't connect to wi-fi, so I had to buy an actual book

Too busy to work on job applications

It's art, actually.

@MayorEmanuel

I had never seen this article, in the Atlantic, about one of my two favorite twitter feeds, @mayoremanuel. (The other is @shitmydadsays, which has also pretty much gone silent; woe!)

A HuffPo story back at the height of the magic.

Anyway, I actually miss @mayoremanuel. A lot. Prof. Sinker talks about it.

The bane of my existence

It's not the Fed, or my tax bill, or the lack of a local Whole Foods, it's grading. And right now, it's the grading time of the year.

This person definitely gets it in their post, "The 5 stages of grading".

An excerpt:

"Bargaining. This stage usually begins as an earnest attempt to buckle down and grade. The instructor might say, “If I grade five papers, I can watch one episode of House,” or, “For every page I grade, I get to eat a piece of candy.” This process starts well, but as the instructor progresses the amount of work required to achieve the reward generally becomes smaller and smaller..."

You'll have to excuse me now, grades are due in on Monday so I'm off to buy a big bag of Reese's cups!

Ziggy Stardust & the Spider from Slazenger?

There is a parody of this going around the interwebs; I can't understand why.

Answering your questions about thesis defenses

Yes, people, they really do involve snakes. Please read the whole thing, but here is one crucial part:

Q: Would someone who wrote a bad thesis and defeated a large snake get the same grade as someone who wrote a good thesis and defeated a small snake?

A: Yes.

The men were here to get your Belgian things

This is a great story (hat tip to Interfluidity).

From Euro Intelligence (I know, I know):

"The political situation in Belgium is becoming increasingly dramatic. After negotiations have broke down twice, the king asked for a new round of consultations to find a compromise over institutional reforms, possibly the last chance before organising new elections. Many expect that new elections would nothing but radicalise the positions, Le Monde reports. According to polls, the separatist NVA would get more than 30% of the votes in Flanders. French-speaking socialists now evoked a plan B, where Wallonia and Brussels would form a new Belgium. The Flemish response was that if they want to keep the heritage they can also keep the whole of the Belgian debt."


So Bolivia has managed to hold together but Belgium might not?

How fast could Evo learn Flemish?

Just in case you were wondering how awesome the 2010 Nobel Peace is

Hugo Chavez doesn't like it!

So that makes it *extra* awesome.

Never play soccer with a politician

Pay close attention around the 35 second mark of this lovely video:

Markets in Everything: Mexican Century Bonds Edition

This is a pretty amazing turn of events. Mexico is selling 100 year government bonds and the expected yield is around 6%!

I admit that I am impressed with Mexico's macro management over the last 10 years, but a 6%, 100 year bond?? I don't think I'd be that bullish on Mexico.

I would suggest to our own government though that borrowing long now, rather than short is a good idea.

Words of wisdom from Matt Taibbi

"In the Tea Party narrative, victory at the polls means a new American revolution, one that will "take our country back" from everyone they disapprove of. But what they don't realize is, there's a catch: This is America, and we have an entrenched oligarchical system in place that insulates us all from any meaningful political change. The Tea Party today is being pitched in the media as this great threat to the GOP; in reality, the Tea Party is the GOP. What few elements of the movement aren't yet under the control of the Republican Party soon will be, and even if a few genuine Tea Party candidates sneak through, it's only a matter of time before the uprising as a whole gets castrated, just like every grass-roots movement does in this country. Its leaders will be bought off and sucked into the two-party bureaucracy, where its platform will be whittled down until the only things left are those that the GOP's campaign contributors want anyway: top-bracket tax breaks, free trade and financial deregulation."


Full and excellent article is here.

Not a fan?

words of wisdom from Tyler:

If the GSEs had such a small role in the crash, why do they need the biggest bailout?

hot links

1. Does Comic Sans have to choke a font?

2 Sometimes a bagel is just a bagel.

3. Precise Modern Lovers Order.