Gmail bleg

We are going Google here in Michigan-land and my university email switched over this weekend.

I will reserve judgement for now, but in the meantime I have a question:

Does anyone know how to delete an attachment from an email without deleting the email itself?

Addendum:

I am informed that Google's view is "don't delete, buy more space". Consistent with this, there is no way to do it in Google.  I have been pointed to two external programs that can do it; you can read about them here and here.

I am also told that there is some way to continue using the outlook interface on top of gmail, but that sounds above my pay grade.

Shame on Google for purveying software lacking critical features. They lost a fan today.

Read More

Alfred Hitchcock, the Birds, and Tippi Hedren

Lots of Hollywood history I did not know.

I was sorry to learn that Hitchcock was such a jerk.

Read More

Book: Crimea, The Last Crusade by Orlando Figes

I picked up Crimea, The Last Crusade at a used bookstore on Tottenham Court Road in London. The Crimean War was a bit of history that I knew next to nothing about, an omission well remedied by this book.

The book is written as serious popular history. The author has read widely in both the primary and secondary literature, and there are many pages of notes at the end. Still, the style was a bit less academic than I care for, both in the sense of detailed documentation and in the sense of explicit discussion of the literature in the text. I suspect for many readers this is a feature rather than a bug.

As suggested by the title (which is different in the American version I linked to above), the author emphasizes the religious nature of the conflict, which included Muslims, protestants and Catholics on one side and the orthodox on the other. The book is a good reminder that people used to take these differences quite seriously, and that at one time orthodox Christianity seemed just as exotic as Islam to many protestants.

Figes also does a fine job of interweaving political history with social history, both in the sense of discussing broader social trends on the home fronts of the combatants and in the sense of including sources such as sermons (odd and a bit scary to read Anglican ministers in England getting all worked up about the "heathen" orthodox) and letters written by soldiers on the front.  Also interesting was his detailed treatment of English Russophobia, and the shifting relationships between England and France.

I was also glad to finally learn a bit of the history of Florence Nightengale and the Charge of the Light Brigade, terms I think most everyone has heard but for which I had never before had any real context or understanding.

Recommended.

Read More

Movie: The Dark Knight Rises

I found that the NYT review got me more stirred up than the movie.  The review has too much about current politics and, I think, a complete misreading of the politics of the movie itself, which is right-populist in much the same way as Law and Order. The line police are always good and noble, while politicians, police upper management (commissioner Gordon excepted and even he is a bit ambiguous here), rich people and lefty populists are all (Batman excepted), bad, or at least ineffectually wimpy. Not a vision that has much empirical plausibility or normative appeal, but people seem to like it.

They should have assigned A.O. Scott to review this one.

Still, putting aside the politics (what!), it is a very enjoyable film.  I assumed, given the length, that I would be bored at times, and conscious not of the movie but of the outside world, but I never was. And can you ever have too much Gary Oldman or Michael Caine?

I do wish they had done more with the catwoman character. Perhaps that bit ended up on the cutting room floor. She was interesting in her conflicted loyalties, but the potential depth was not really exploited in the film.

Still, this is recommended, and is about as good as it gets for summer fluff

Read More

Assorted links

1. The Atlantic on archery in Bhutan. Charlie will like this one.

2. TSA grope and pillage.

3. Tyler Cowen remembers my colleague Miles Kimball in his graduate school days.

4. WSJ on changes in the first class cabin.

5. The American Men's Studies Association comes to Ann Arbor in April, in case you are looking for an excuse to visit.

Hat tip on #2 to a Facebook friend.

Read More

Economic ignorance; left and right

Or, the data dissuade Dan Klein from his case of partisan differentiation disorder.

Read More

Paper: Borghans and Schils (2012)

The Leaning Tower of Pisa
Decomposing achievement test scores into cognitive and noncognitive components
Lex Borghans, Maastricht University
Trudie Schils, Maastricht University
Draft version July 11, 2012

Abstract

Test scores on achievement tests depend on both cognitive and noncognitive skills. The predictive power of achievement tests is therefore potentially due to all components. The question of this paper is whether it is possible to disentangle cognitive and noncognitive factors from the performance on the test. Using data from the international achievement test PISA, we decompose the test scores into two factors. We investigate the development of the performance of students during the test, utilizing the (randomized) difference in the order of the test questions in the various test booklets. We document that performance substantially drops during the test and that this performance drop differs between types of students and countries. The estimated size of the drop is very stable over the years, while correlation between this drop and the test scores is small. This suggests that the decline in test scores during the test picks up something else than just cognition. The size of the decline in test scores during the test is related to personality traits, mainly to agreeableness, and to motivational attitudes towards learning. It also predicts outcomes in later life such as income and smoking in addition to the pure test score. The motivation effect can explain 19 percent of the variation in the average test scores between countries.

I saw this paper at the NBER summer institute last week and thought it was pretty cool.

Read More

Are property rights enough?

I thought this was one of the most interesting things I read in reason in recent months. I reminded me of a debate I heard about in graduate school about segregation. The question in that debate was whether getting rid of legal segregation and discrimination would have sufficed to improve the position of African-Americans in the US or whether it would require social change in addition to legal change. I thought the right answer in the debate was that you had to have both, that a strict libertarian ending of only the legal restrictions would have accomplished something, but might not have changed the social equilibrium.

The reason piece addresses the same question but in a less specific context. Another way to think about the reason debate, which is not how the participants frame it, is about the boundary between liberarianism and classical liberalism and which one is better and/or more likely to lead to a truly free society.

Read More

Pac 12 Media Day

The media picked Washington to finish 3rd in the PAC-12 north, behind Oregon and Stanford.

Read More

Zinn = Barton = rubbish?

The Atlantic on cult pop historians of the left and right.

Rand and Chomsky play the same game to some extent.

I have always found, at least since I clued in to why reading history is interesting (hint: it is not about being able to recite lots of facts) that one of the most useful bits of it is how reluctant historical figures are to fit into the political categories of the moment. They had different ideas, and different concerns. And from that one can learn, or be reminded, how transitory and arbitrary are many current political configurations.

Read More

Miracles of technology

On Fox News just now "Alba's company makes chemical-free products".

Good trick, that, making products without chemicals.

Oh, and she was on the show (giggle) promoting a law that would harm her company's competitors (giggle), a fact that went unmentioned.

I have no idea about the law, but shouldn't the conflict of interest at least have come up?

Read More

Our architect

The story of David Osler, the fellow who designed our home in Ann Arbor, which we really, really like.

Note that Osler's father-in-law, Emil Lorch, is the same Lorch that Lorch Hall, home of the Michigan economics department, is named after. Our building was originally home to the architecture faculty, now located on north campus.

Read More

A modest clicker proposal

One of my pet peeves at seminars and conferences is speakers who zoom back and forth among their slides as they try to figure out what they want to say next. To combat this minor evil, I propose a clicker that delivers a mild electric shock (or emits some obnoxious noise) whenever the speaker moves both forward and backward through his or her slides with a given small time interval.

I offer this idea free of charge to product developers everywhere.

Read More

Game design bootcamp

Wow ... I am a bit envious of the students who got to participate in Michigan's game design bootcamp featuring Sid Meier (of Civilization), Brian Reynolds (Alpha Centauri) and others.

Game design (though I was thinking more of board games back then) was one of the handful of careers I thought about, along with architecture and marketing, on the way to becoming an academic economist.

Turns out too that Sid and his three kids are all UM alums. Go Blue!

Read More

Assorted links

1. The unused, but quite pretty, City Hall subway station in NYC.

2. Improvements at Frita Batidos in Ann Arbor.

3. The Taj Mahal from many angles.

4. The Daily Mail on the dangers of potty prodigies.

5. Some wistful thoughts from the University of Chicago magazine on the occasion of the move of the Seminary Co-op Bookstore out of the seminary basement. The Co-op is one of the best things - maybe the best thing - about Hyde Park.

Hat tip on #3 to Jackie Smith and on #4 to Charlie Brown.

Read More

J. P. Patches, RIP

The Seattle Times has a fine obituary. I like this bit:

Former Sonics guard Slick Watts once said, "In most big cities, the famous people are the sports stars, but in Seattle, J.P. was the man."

And some memorabilia:

Addendum: there is some social history in the check list.  Can you imagine a similar television personality in the present day advocating either praying or milk drinking (what about the lactose intolerant!) or eating all your food (on the way to being an obese adult!) like this?

Hat tips: Julie Anne Kempf and Jeff Simon, on Facebook

Read More

Movie: Safety Not Guaranteed

We saw Safety Not Guaranteed last week at the State Theater in Ann Arbor along with a surprisingly full house.

This is a sweet little indie with a fun story, some pretty good acting, and lots of beautiful Pacific Northwest scenery (though my sense from the credits is that much of it was filmed in the Seattle suburbs, rather than near the ocean as is suggested in the movie).

The NYT liked it too.

Recommended.

Read More

Made-in-China uniforms fiasco

Another teachable moment. Unfortunately the lesson learned is one pretty much everyone already knows, which is that our political class consists largely short-sighted, ignorant, opportunistic, jingoistic nitwits.

Read More

More on Bloomberg

Will Wilkinson writes the post on the Bloomberg sugary soda ban I wish I had written.

This is a response to only one JW.

Read More

On gun control

Americans honor those who die in mass shootings via the strange ritual of repeating their (usually not very well thought out) opinions about gun control. In that spirit, I thought I would share mine.

First, I do not think that individuals, in general, have a right to bear arms. I think the fundamental right is to self-defense. This is a right that those on the left really ought to like, as it is all about allowing the vulnerable to protect themselves from thugs of various sorts.

I know that, at this point, I have already lost some Europeans. The sorry spectacle of Tony Martin, the fellow in England who shot the 10th person to rob his farm being sent to prison was actually defended by some. If you think the weak should just take it and take it and take it until such time as some government officials arrive, even if they never do, then we part ways right here.

Returning to my original stream of thought, in my view, the right to self-defense is limited in several senses. First, the response should be proportionate to the rights violation. If someone walks on your lawn, you do not get to shoot them, or even hit them, even though they have violated your rights. Second, you must make reasonable efforts to call in the proper authorities, and you must hand over the situation to them when they appear, assuming they actually do arrive and manage to do more than just shoot your dog and seize your cell phone for having the audacity to record them (your employees, doing their jobs) when they do appear. Third, your right to do harm ends when the rights violation ends. You are not allowed to shoot someone in the back while they run away, even if they just tried to kill you.

In addition, I think people have the right to use technology to aid them in exercising their right to self-defense. The right to self-defense would not be very useful for the weak if they were not allowed to use technology to assist their efforts. This right, too, is limited in my view. The key limit is that ex ante restrictions may be imposed to prevent the technology doing more harm than good. I think we can all agree that, for example, individuals may not possess nuclear or (more serious than mace or pepper spray) chemical weapons. They would have a fine deterrent effect, and end many rights violations, but those benefits surely do not exceed the likely expected costs of misuse. I think that many of the thoughtful subset of those who advocate gun control of various sorts think that guns fall into the same category as nuclear weapons.  I think their implicit claim about how a well-done empirically-based cost-benefit analysis would come out is incorrect, but that is an empirical question.

My framework would allow, and I would support, a law that gun owners be required to take a non-trivial course in how to use a gun, and pass a test of some sort indicating that they do indeed know how to safely own, maintain and use a gun. In this sense, I think that guns are like cars. People can use them, but because of the danger of misuse - cars are very effective weapons too - we restrict their use to individuals who have demonstrated the ability to drive, some knowledge of the rules of the road, and who do not misuse the car, for example by driving drunk. In a similar spirit, I have no problem with lifetime bans on gun ownership for individuals who use a gun to commit a crime.

That's what I think. My sense is that my view is quite different from both the common blue team view and the common red team view. I also think that focusing the discussion on what constitutes legitimate self-defense, and on empirical cost-benefit analyses, is useful to advance the discussion beyond the bumper sticker level.

I end with some remarks about the evidence and about the implicit cost-benefit analysis that underlies my view (and which reflects only a passing, rather than a deep, knowledge of some of the relevant literature). First, I think simple comparisons to Canada are not very useful. Canada is full of Canadians. They are different in their social capital and in their history in ways the challenge the meaningfulness of comparisons. There are also more  guns around in Canada than a lot of Americans think. Second, the socially optimal number of mass shootings (like the socially optimal number of most bad things) is non-zero. Third, the number of mass shootings with even very strict gun control will be non-zero. This affects the cost-benefit calculation associated with gun control of various sorts. Fourth, my sense is that we do not have very good evidence on the deterrent effects of guns. There is a literature, and some data, on this, but my sense is that the data are not that good and that both for that reason and because of the partisan nature of the issue, the estimates vary widely. Estimates based on the number of actual instances  where an individual scares away a criminal by brandishing (or more) a gun, which is what we mostly have, are, moreover, a lower bound on the extent of actual deterrence, which includes those crimes not attempted in a world without gun control but attempted in the world where it exists. Finally, the thermostat model does not apply here, as usual. What matters is not the amount of control in some naive sense but its design.

I welcome pointers to the (serious) literature (i.e. not your favorite partisan website, not the NYT editorial page, etc.) in the comments.

JW and JW can think of this as my response to their facebook post and tweet, respectively.

Read More