Thinking on the Margin

Saturday, September 15, 2007

Outside In

Ever wonder how to turn a sphere inside out? Watch this topology video to understand how.

See more great examples of mathematical visualizations here.

(HT Grey Matters)

Ten Years Ago Today

Ten years ago on September 15, 1997, Stanford grad students Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered the domain name google.com.

Friday, September 14, 2007

Order, Disorder, and Markets

Arnold Kling on spontaneous order:

One of the most important ideas of the late Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek was the concept of "spontaneous order." This can be a difficult concept to explain.
When spontaneous order exists, we take it for granted and make little effort to understand it. If your body is healthy, you do not need to think about how your muscles work, how your heart and brain function, or how your metabolic processes operate. You only notice it when order breaks down, and you are sick or in pain.

Similarly, when the economy is functioning properly, we do not notice all the behaviors that are required to make it work. We go to the supermarket and find grapes available, and we do not wonder why or how.

In theory a central grape distributor could be at work. A single entity could try to assemble all of the information that pertains to grape production and grape consumption. In addition, the grape-distribution czar would master all of the details of storage and transportation systems. Using this information, the czar would send instructions to all of the individuals involved in production, storage, and distribution, telling them what to do and where and when to do it.

In practice, there is no grape-distribution czar. Grapes make their way from distant lands to your neighborhood supermarket via a series of local decisions guided by prices and self-interest. No one person has all the information necessary to direct the distribution of grapes properly. But each participant, guided by prices, knows what to do. Their collective interaction results in grapes available at nearly all supermarkets nearly all the time. This is an example of spontaneous order.

Read the whole thing.

(HT Instapundit)

International Religious Freedom News

Glasses Off:

1. United Methodist Church Now a Legal Entity in Albania (Sep. 4)
2. Fourth Eritrean Tortured and Killed for Religious Beliefs (Sep. 7)
3. India: Anti-Conversion Bill Fails in Chhattisgarh State (Sep. 7)
4. Chechnya: Female Civil Servants Forced to Wear Islamic Headscarf (Sep. 10)

Grozny, Chechnya
Reuters reports that Ramzan Kadyrov, the current president of Chechnya, has issued a new edict requiring all female civil servants to wear an Islamic headscarf, saying that women were the root of all crime in the region, as their current clothing choices “invited” men to have sex with them. The new law is in violation of Russian laws which aim to keep the state separate from religion, and has raised fears that Kadyrov will try to turn Chechnya into a “private fiefdom”.

5. Kazakhstan: Presbyterian Church Investigated for “Treason” (Sep. 11)
6. India: Judge Rules that Bhagavad Gita Should Be National Religious Doctrine (Sep. 12)

Uttar Pradesh, India
AsiaNews reports that S.N. Srivastava, a judge for Uttar Pradesh’s Allahabad High Court, recently ruled that the Hindu poem Bhagavad Gita should stand as a national religious doctrine, and that the state must recognize it as such. This would include teaching the poem to members of non-Hindu faiths, which has sparked protests from members of minority religions in the area. Though the poem is a “part of Indian culture, it cannot be seen as a religious text for all faiths,” according to the chairman of the Global Council of Indian Catholics. Judge Srivastava has previously intervened in religious matters, declaring earlier this year that Muslims in the region were not to be considered a religious minority, and as such were ineligible for education subsidies.

Feature:
Ex-Muslims in Europe hope to offer adequate support for others who choose to renounce their religion, from the Associated Press

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The Virtues of Immigration

It helps people escape poverty...

If we insist on thinking of development as a matter of national growth, we may well consign most of the bottom billion, and their children and their grandchildren, to unrelenting poverty trapped within their UN-recognised national prisons. Our real moral concern should not be the Central African Republic, but its unfortunate denizens. The best thing for their prospects may simply be to get out--to leave for a place where growth has already commenced. The West's many attempts to jumpstart growth where the world's poorest already reside has yet to work. So why does the international community insist on betting the poor's lives on the gamble that it will, finally, some day?

... and it promotes freedom...

Does globalization create races to the bottom or the top? David Law suspects that in at least one area, the cycle is a virtuous one. In his view, countries now “compete for financial capital and human talent is by offering bundles of rights and freedoms that are attractive to investors and elite workers.” Moreover, he suggests that “states bid for elite workers by offering both pecuniary and non-pecuniary inducements that include more or less generous bundles of rights and freedoms. Countries that do not boast an attractive bundle of this kind must compensate by offering what this article calls a freedom premium, which amounts to a competitive disadvantage in the global market for human talent.”

... but Lou Dobbs will have none of it!

A Match Made on Earth

When Christians date outside the fold:

In an episode of "Seinfeld" that lays bare the characters' secular sensibilities, Elaine is shocked to learn that her on-again, off-again boyfriend, Puddy, is a believing Christian. "So is it a problem that I'm not really religious?" she asks him upon realizing their differing worldviews. "Not for me," he answers. "I'm not the one going to hell." Though Elaine herself acknowledges that she doesn't believe in an afterlife, she becomes increasingly angry with Puddy for not caring more about her eternal damnation. Finally, she explodes: "You should be trying to save me!"

Read the whole thing.

What sounds silly on Seinfeld is actually a very serious issue for many Christians. (See 2 Corinthians 6:14.) From the perspective of the economics of religion, the more value someone places on their faith, the more important it is for them to share that faith with their future spouse. This in turn means that being willing to date and marry outside one's faith in many religions is actually a signal that a person doesn't value their faith as much as they might claim.

One way to think about it is that a person indicates how much they value something based on what they're willing to give up to obtain it. (Hence Jesus' parable of the pearl of great value.) Christianity teaches that God should be the most important thing in the life of a believer. Anytime a Christian puts something else as a priority above their faith in God, it signals trouble for their faith.

Unfortunately, it is well documented that women tend to be much more religious than men on average. This creates a shortage of marriageable men:

For evangelicals who want to pair up with others of the same faith but don't manage to do so in their early 20s, trouble lies ahead, particularly for women. Evangelical churches now typically have a 60-40 split between women and men, which means that there are many more single evangelical women out there than their male counterparts. As Ms. Cockrel explains, "I have friends who wanted to marry a Christian guy, are still single, and are more and more open to dating non-Christians as they get older. They're tired of waiting."

This problem becomes more intense in places like Japan, where there the population is between 0.5% and 2% Christian and where the Christian women outnumber the men by a ratio of 3 or 4 to 1. It is similar to the shortage of black men for black women to marry.

I have several female Japanese friends who are committed Christians who face this very real dilemma. Their basic options are:

Don't get married.
Marry a foreigner.
Marry outside the faith. (Something they are unwilling to do.)

They are in a very tough situation indeed.

To many non-Christians, the Christian prohibition against dating outside the faith often seems narrow and exclusive. From the standpoint of marrying someone who shares your beliefs and values and will help raise your children to have the same, this is a very wise strategy. (Divorce rates are significantly lower for people who share a common faith.) The more a person values their faith, the more committed they will be to finding someone to share it with.

Here are some of my previous posts on the economics of religion:

Steven Landsburg Coming to GMU?

According to the GMU Econ Society's blog, he will be here on October 4th @ 6 PM.

Landsburg is the author of The Armchair Economist which was one of the first econ books I ever read. It played a significant role in helping spark my interest in the field.

Rumors About iTunes Movie Rentals

If true, this could be very cool:

If incorporated with the iTunes WiFi store, I think it could be huge-- be somewhere bored on your iPhone, click a few buttons, and be watching The Incredibles within minutes.

It would not only be a great reason to get an iPhone or i PodTouch, but also make a 24" iMac all the more appealing. It might even be a viable substitute for a TV and cable.

Smart Kids Study Economics

Of course, I already knew that.

The number of smart kids studying computer science peaked a few years ago and has dropped dramatically since. The number of new computer science majors today has fallen by half since 2000, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA. Merrilea Mayo, director of the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable at the National Academies, says the drop-off was particularly pronounced among women.

Meanwhile, elite schools are reporting that the number of economics majors is exploding. For the 2003–2004 academic year, the number of economics degrees granted by U.S. colleges and universities increased 40 percent from five years previously. Economics is seen by bright undergraduates as the path to a high-paying job on Wall Street or at a major corporation.

(HT Tyler Cowen)