Economics – Page 139 – artdiamondblog.com

Hunter-Gatherers Use Division of Labor

(p. D4) The division of labor in hunter-gatherer communities is complex and sophisticated, and crucial to their economic success, researchers report.
A paper in the journal Philosophical Transactions B looks at two hunter-gatherer groups: the Tsimane game hunters of lowland Bolivia, and the Jenu Kuruba honey collectors of South India.
“In contrast to the simple cave man view of a hunter-gatherer, we found that it requires a tremendous amount of skill, knowledge and training,” said Paul Hooper, an anthropologist at Emory University and one of the study’s authors.
. . .
When Jenu Kuruba men go in search of honey, Dr. Hooper said, “there’s one man who specializes in making smoke to subdue the bees, another that climbs the trees, and others that act as support staff to lower combs.”

For the full story, see:
SINDYA N. BHANOO. “Observatory; Nothing Simple About Hunter-Gatherer Societies.” The New York Times (Tues., OCT. 27, 2015): D4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 26, 2015.)

The academic article mentioned in the passage quoted above, is:
Hooper, Paul L., Kathryn Demps, Michael Gurven, Drew Gerkey, and Hillard S. Kaplan. “Skills, Division of Labour and Economies of Scale among Amazonian Hunters and South Indian Honey Collectors.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences 370, no. 1683 (Oct. 2015), DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2015.0008.

“Racist” Woodrow Wilson Adopted “White Supremacy as Government Policy”

(p. A25) In 1882, soon after graduating from high school, the young John Davis secured a job at the Government Printing Office.

Over a long career, he rose through the ranks from laborer to a position in midlevel management. He supervised an office in which many of his employees were white men. He had a farm in Virginia and a home in Washington. By 1908, he was earning the considerable salary — for an African-American — of $1,400 per year.
But only months after Woodrow Wilson was sworn in as president in 1913, my grandfather was demoted. He was shuttled from department to department in various menial jobs, and eventually became a messenger in the War Department, where he made only $720 a year.
By April 1914, the family farm was auctioned off. John Davis, a self-made black man of achievement and stature in his community at the turn of the 20th century, was, by the end of Wilson’s first term, a broken man. He died in 1928.
Many black men and women suffered similar fates under Wilson. As the historian Eric S. Yellin of the University of Richmond documents in his powerful book “Racism in the Nation’s Service,” my grandfather’s demotion was part of a systematic purge of the federal government; with Wilson’s approval, in a few short years virtually all blacks had been removed from management responsibilities, moved to menial jobs or simply dismissed.
My grandfather died before I was born, but I have learned much about his struggle — and that of other black civil servants in the federal government — from his personnel file.
. . .
Consider a letter he wrote on May 16, 1913, barely a month after his demotion. “The reputation which I have been able to acquire and maintain at considerable sacrifice,” he wrote, “is to me (foolish as it may appear to those in higher stations of life) a source of personal pride, a possession of which I am very jealous and which is possessed at a value in my estimation ranking above the loss of salary — though the last, to a man having a family of small children to rear, is serious enough.”
And the reply he received? His supervisor said, simply, that my grandfather was unable to “properly perform the duties required (he is too slow).” Yet there had never been any indication of this in his personnel file.
Wilson was not just a racist. He believed in white supremacy as government policy, so much so that he reversed decades of racial progress. But we would be wrong to see this as a mere policy change; in doing so, he ruined the lives of countless talented African-Americans and their families.

For the full commentary, see:
GORDON J. DAVIS. “Wilson, Princeton and Race.” The New York Times (Tues., NOV. 24, 2015): A25.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the title “What Woodrow Wilson Cost My Grandfather.”)

The Yellin book praised in the passage quoted above, is:
Yellin, Eric S. Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2013.

See also:
Patler, Nicholas. Jim Crow and the Wilson Administration: Protesting Federal Segregation in the Early Twentieth Century. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2004.

While Woodrow Wilson Was President of Princeton, “No Blacks Were Admitted”

(p. A1) PRINCETON, N.J. — Few figures loom as large in the life of an Ivy League university as Woodrow Wilson does at Princeton.

. . .
But until posters started appearing around campus in September, one aspect of Wilson’s legacy was seldom discussed: his racist views, and the ways he acted on them as president of the United States.
The posters, put up by a year-old student group called the Black Justice League, featured some of Wilson’s more offensive quotes, including his comment to an African-American leader that “segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you,” and led to a remarkable two days at this genteel (p. A17) campus last week.
. . .
Perhaps best known for leading the United States during World War I and for trying to start the League of Nations, Wilson as president rolled back gains blacks had made since Reconstruction, removing black officials from the federal government and overseeing the segregation of rank-and-file workers.
Raised in the South, he wrote of “a great Ku Klux Klan” that rose up to rid whites of “the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant Negroes.”
During Wilson’s tenure as president of Princeton, no blacks were admitted — “The whole temper and tradition of the place are such that no Negro has ever applied,” he wrote — though Harvard and Yale had admitted blacks decades earlier. Princeton admitted its first black student in the 1940s.

For the full story, see:
ANDY NEWMAN. “At Princeton, Woodrow Wilson, a Heralded Alum, Is Recast as an Intolerant One.” The New York Times (Mon., NOV. 23, 2015): A1 & A17.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 22, 2015.)

Only 5% of Gender Pay Differential Is Likely Due to Discrimination

(p. A17) Full-time employment is technically defined as more than 35 hours. This raises an obvious problem: A simple side-by-side comparison of all men and all women includes people who work 35 hours a week, and others who work 45. Men are significantly more likely than women to work longer hours, according to the BLS. And if we compare only people who work 40 hours a week, BLS data show that women then earn on average 90 cents for every dollar earned by men.
Career choice is another factor. Research in 2013 by Anthony Carnevale, a Georgetown University economist, shows that women flock to college majors that lead to lower-paying careers. Of the 10 lowest-paying majors–such as “drama and theater arts” and “counseling psychology”–only one, “theology and religious vocations,” is majority male.
Conversely, of the 10 highest-paying majors–including “mathematics and computer science” and “petroleum engineering”–only one, “pharmacy sciences and administration,” is majority female. Eight of the remaining nine are more than 70% male.
Other factors that account for earnings differences include marriage and children, both of which cause many women to leave the workforce for years. June O’Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, concluded in a 2005 study that “there is no gender gap in wages among men and women with similar family roles.”
. . .
Ms. O’Neill and her husband concluded in their 2012 book, “The Declining Importance of Race and Gender in the Labor Market,” that once all these factors are taken into account, very little of the pay differential between men and women is due to actual discrimination, which is “unlikely to account for a differential of more than 5 percent but may not be present at all.”

For the full commentary, see:
SARAH KETTERER. “The ‘Wage Gap’ Myth That Won’t Die; You have to ignore many variables to think women are paid less than men. California is happy to try.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Oct. 1, 2015): A17.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated on Sept. 30, 2015.)

The O’Neill book mentioned above, is:
O’Neill, June E., and Dave M. O’Neill. The Declining Importance of Race and Gender in the Labor Market: The Role of Employment Discrimination Policies. Washington, D.C.: AEI Press, 2012.

Sense of Purpose, Not Greed, Is Reason Multimillionaires Keep Working

(p. 10) I’ve often wondered why the so-called Masters of the Universe, those C.E.O.s with multimillion-dollar monthly paychecks, keep working. Why, once they have earned enough money to live comfortably forever, do they still drag themselves to the office? The easy answer, the one I had always settled on, was greed.
But as I watched the hours slowly drip by in my cubicle, an alternative reason came into view. Without a sense of purpose beyond the rent money, malaise sets in almost immediately. We all need a reason to get up in the morning, preferably one to which we can attach some meaning. It is why people flock to the scene of a natural disaster to rescue and rebuild, why people devote themselves to a cause, no matter how doomed it may be. In the end, it’s the process as much as the reward that nourishes us.

For the full commentary, see:
TED GELTNER. “ON WORK; Bored to Tears by a Do-Nothing Dream Job.” The New York Times, SundayBusiness Section (Sun., NOV. 22, 2015): 10.
(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated on NOV. 21, 2015.)

For Movies, Film Option Survives Digital Advance

(p. B1) Faced with the possible extinction of the material that made Hollywood famous, a coalition of studios is close to a deal to keep Eastman Kodak Co. in the business of producing movie film.
The negotiations–secret until now–are expected to result in an arrangement where studios promise to buy a set quantity of film for the next several years, even though most movies and television shows these days are shot on digital video.
Kodak’s new chief executive, Jeff Clarke, said the pact will allow his company to forestall the closure of its Rochester, N.Y., film manufacturing plant, a move that had been under serious consideration. Kodak’s motion-picture film sales have plummeted 96% since 2006, from 12.4 billion linear feet to an estimated 449 million this year. With the exit of competitor Fujifilm Corp. last year, Kodak is the only major company left producing motion-picture film.
. . .
Film and digital video both “are valid choices, but it would be a tragedy if suddenly directors didn’t have the opportunity to shoot on film,” said Mr. Apatow. director of comedies including “Knocked Up” and “The 40 Year-Old Virgin,” speaking from the New York set of his coming movie “Trainwreck,” which he is shooting on film. “There’s a magic to the grain and the color quality that you get with film.”

For the full story, see:
BEN FRITZ. “Movie Film, at Death’s Door, Gets a Reprieve.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., July 30, 2014): B1 & B8.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the article was dated July 29, 2014.)

Price Theory Paradox When Gas Prices Fall

(p. A3) When gas prices fall, Americans reliably do two things that don’t make much sense.
They spend more of the windfall on gasoline than they would if the money came from somewhere else.
And they don’t just buy more gasoline. They switch from regular gas to high-octane.
A new report by the JPMorgan Chase Institute, looking at the impact of lower gas prices on consumer spending, finds the same pattern as earlier studies. The average American would have saved about $41 a month last winter by buying the same gallons and grades. Instead, Americans took home roughly $22 a month. People, in other words, used almost half of the windfall to buy more and fancier gas.
. . .
Professors Hastings and Shapiro showed that households adjusted their gas consumption much more sharply in response to changes in gas prices than in response to equivalent changes in overall income. In the fall of 2008, for example, as gas prices fell amid a broad economic collapse, consumers responded as if the decline of gas prices were the more important event, significantly increasing purchases of premium gas.
Moreover, this behavior was prevalent: 61 percent of the households made at least one irrational gas purchase. People “treat changes in gasoline prices as equivalent to very large changes in income when deciding which grade of gasoline to purchase,” they wrote.

For the full commentary, see:
Binyamin Appelbaum. “When Gas Becomes Cheaper, Americans Buy Fancier Gas.” The New York Times (Thurs., OCT. 20, 2015): A3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated on OCT. 19, 2015, and has the title “When Gas Becomes Cheaper, Americans Buy More Expensive Gas.”)

The Hastings and Shapiro article mentioned above, is:
Hastings, Justine S., and Jesse M. Shapiro. “Fungibility and Consumer Choice: Evidence from Commodity Price Shocks.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 128, no. 4 (Nov. 2013): 1449-98.

Professors Oppose Diversity by Discriminating Against Conservatives

(p. A23) One of the great intellectual and moral epiphanies of our time is the realization that human diversity is a blessing. It has become conventional wisdom that being around those unlike ourselves makes us better people — and more productive to boot.
Scholarly studies have piled up showing that race and gender diversity in the workplace can increase creative thinking and improve performance. Meanwhile, excessive homogeneity can lead to stagnation and poor problem-solving.
Unfortunately, new research also shows that academia has itself stopped short in both the understanding and practice of true diversity — the diversity of ideas — and that the problem is taking a toll on the quality and accuracy of scholarly work. This year, a team of scholars from six universities studying ideological diversity in the behavioral sciences published a paper in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences that details a shocking level of political groupthink in academia. The authors show that for every politically conservative social psychologist in academia there are about 14 liberal social psychologists.
Why the imbalance? The researchers found evidence of discrimination and hostility within academia toward conservative researchers and their viewpoints. In one survey cited, 79 percent of social psychologists admitted they would be less likely to support hiring a conservative colleague than a liberal scholar with equivalent qualifications.

For the full commentary, see:
Arthur C. Brooks. “Academia’s Rejection of Diversity.” The New York Times (Sat., OCT. 31, 2015): A23.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date OCT. 30, 2015.)

The Behavioral and Brain Sciences article mentioned above, is:
Duarte, José L., Jarret T. Crawford, Charlotta Stern, Jonathan Haidt, Lee Jussim, and Philip E. Tetlock. “Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 38 (Jan. 2015) DOI: http://dx.doi.org.leo.lib.unomaha.edu/10.1017/S0140525X14000041

Haiti Stagnates Under Crony Capitalism

(p. A13) A May 2015 World Bank “systematic country diagnostic” on Haiti is instructive.
. . .
As the World Bank report notes, Haiti suffers from crony capitalism that holds back economic growth.
. . .
The record of Haiti’s elected politicians, since the transition to democracy at the beginning of the 1990s, is dismal. The political class still uses its power for personal aggrandizement, as the infamous dictators François Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude did for almost 30 years.
Just as discouraging is that after more than two decades of going to the polls, Haitians have yet to taste economic freedom, and emigration has become the only option for those who hope to get ahead by hard work. The World Bank reports that between 1971 and 2013 gross domestic product per capita “fell by .7% per year on average.”
. . .
The World Bank authors gently speculate that there is “little competitive pressure.” They observe this “could be the result of high legal or behavioral entry barriers” and this “could facilitate tacit agreements among families/groups to allocate markets among themselves, which may harm productivity and incentive to innovate.”
This is polite jargon for collusion, which Haitians already know. They also know that absent the political will to open markets to competition, elections won’t matter much.

For the full commentary, see:
MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY. “Diagnosing What Ails Haiti’s Economy; The World Bank fingers cronyism, of which Bill Clinton was for years a symbol.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Oct. 12, 2015): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated on Oct. 11, 2015.)

The World Bank report mentioned in the passages quoted above, is:
HAITI: TOWARDS A NEW NARRATIVE SYSTEMATIC COUNTRY DIAGNOSTIC, May 2015.

Skills Gap Is Bigger Labor Market Problem than Technology Progress

(p. A17) Technology disrupting the workforce is not a new phenomenon and it has never proved a lasting impediment for those eager to work. The invention of, say, the internal-combustion engine put buggy-whip makers and carriage assemblers out of business, but it created many more jobs in the manufacture, advertising, sales and maintenance of automobiles. Other technologies, from the cotton gin to the airplane, expanded job opportunities and created goods and services that made the hard work worthwhile.
What is unique about today’s digital revolution is the suspicion, fanned by progressives, that for the first time technology threatens to make obsolete not only some jobs–as assembly-line robotics has, for instance–but human labor itself.
. . .
That poor schooling, and not some intrinsic human limitation, is the real barrier to full employment seems to be borne out by what economists call the “skills gap.” More than nine million Americans are currently looking for work, but 5.4 million job openings continue to sit unfilled, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Most of the largest increases have been in health care or professional and business services.
In a recent study by the large U.S. online job site, CareerBuilder, more than half the employers surveyed had positions for which they could not find qualified candidates: 71% had trouble finding information-technology specialists, 70% engineers, 66% managers, 56% health-care and other specialists, and 52% financial operations personnel. Nearly half of small and medium-size employers say they can find few or no “qualified applicants” for recent vacancies, according to the latest survey by the National Federation of Independent Businesses.
With the Labor Department conceding that help-wanted postings have “remained at a historically high level,” this is the time not to rail against technology but to use it to make education more effective: gearing coursework to the learning styles of individual students, identifying and remedying disabilities early on, and providing online access to the best classes in the world.

For the full commentary, see:
LEWIS M. ANDREWS. “Robots Don’t Mean the End of Human Labor; The left frets about the impact of technology, but new jobs will be created. The real problem is bad schools.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Aug. 24, 2015): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated on Aug. 23, 2015.)

Inflation of the Co-Authorship Bubble

Source of graphic: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A1) . . . , there has been a notable spike since 2009 in the number of technical reports whose author (p. A10) counts exceeded 1,000 people, according to the Thomson Reuters Web of Science, which analyzed citation data. In the ever-expanding universe of credit where credit is apparently due, the practice has become so widespread that some scientists now joke that they measure their collaborators in bulk–by the “kilo-author.”

Earlier this year, a paper on rare particle decay published in Nature listed so many co-authors–about 2,700–that the journal announced it wouldn’t have room for them all in its print editions. And it isn’t just physics. In 2003, it took 272 scientists to write up the findings of the first complete human genome–a milestone in biology–but this past June, it took 1,014 co-authors to document a minor gene sequence called the Muller F element in the fruit fly.
. . .
More than vanity is at stake. Credit on a peer-reviewed research article weighs heavily in hiring, promotion and tenure decisions. “Authorship has become such a big issue because evaluations are performed based on the number of papers people have authored,” said Dr. Larivière.
. . .
Michigan State University mathematician Jack Hetherington published a paper in 1975 on low temperature physics in Physical Review Letters with F.D.C. Willard. His colleagues only discovered that his co-author was a siamese cat several years later when Dr. Hetherington started handing out copies of the paper signed with a paw print.
In the same spirit, Shalosh B. Ekhad at Rutgers University so far has published 32 peer-reviewed papers in scientific journals with his co-author Doron Zeilberger. It turns out that Shalosh B. Ekhad is Hebrew for the model number of a personal computer used by Dr. Zeilberger. “The computer helps so much and so often,” Dr. Zeilberger said.
Not everyone takes such pranks lightly.
Immunologist Polly Matzinger at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases named her dog, Galadriel Mirkwood, as a co-author on a paper she submitted to the Journal of Experimental Medicine. “What amazed me was that the paper went through the entire editorial process and nobody noticed,” Dr. Matzinger said. When the journal editor realized he had published work crediting an Afghan hound, he was furious, she recalled.
Physicists may be more open-minded. Sir Andre Geim, winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics, credited H.A.M.S. ter Tisha as his co-author of a 2001 paper published in the journal Physica B. Those journal editors didn’t bat an eye when his co-author was unmasked as a pet hamster. “Not a harmful joke,” said Physica editor Reyer Jochemsen at the Leiden University in the Netherlands.
“Physicists apparently, even journal editors, have a better sense of humor than the life sciences,” said Dr. Geim at the U.K.’s University of Manchester.

For the full story, see:
ROBERT LEE HOTZ. “Scientists Observe Odd Phenomenon of Multiplying Co-Authors.”The Wall Street Journal (Mon., Aug. 10, 2015): A1 & A10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the title “How Many Scientists Does It Take to Write a Paper? Apparently, Thousands.”)