Anti-social claiming of parking spots in South Boston (before snow has started)

A social norm in South Boston that allows people to reserve public parking spots that they have dug out of the snow is unraveling, the Globe reports: Claiming a spot before shoveling? That’s not Southie

"The trash barrels, plastic crates, and lawn chairs lining the streets of South Boston yesterday morning were hardly unusual in a neighborhood famous for its you-shovel-it, you-own-it moral code in claiming curbside parking in snow storms. But there was a difference yesterday: The place-holders were out before a flake had fallen.
Even though commuters woke up hearing forecasts for up to a foot of snow during the day, the fact that so many had staked out spots without earning them by shoveling first was too much for some longtime residents.
“That was not the original idea,’’ said Kelly Watts, a 40-year-old lifelong resident, as she frowned at a wicker stool saving a spot of dry pavement on Emerson Street near Tynan Elementary School. “We would never have done that growing up. Claiming a spot you haven’t even dug out? That’s just lazy.’’
Laying claim to curbside parking is practiced around the city, but in Southie, where residents defied mayoral orders to stop - and an army of garbage trucks he sent to dispose of place-holders - it’s considered a birthright.
Protocol has long held that shoveling is a required down payment, but increasingly drivers are snatching up spaces in advance, knowing they will be harder to come by after the snow falls. Residents say the preemptive strikes are exposing rifts.
“Whoever did this is new Southie,’’ said Eddie Phillips as he walked his dog past a claimed spot on N Street near East Broadway shortly after noon.
By then, a gallery of household items lined the streets - a plastic recylcing bin on N Street, a turned-over trash can on P, lawn chairs weighted with bricks on West Ninth.
Each makeshift marker rested on bare asphalt, untouched save a preventive dusting of salt. The anticipated storm hadn’t arrived.
“You would never have seen this in the old days. Not in a million years,’’ said Phillips, a 66-year-old who said neighbors used to stick together, not selfishly scramble to get theirs. “Back in the day, you’d shovel your spot out, then you’d shovel your neighbor’s out, then you’d save it for him so he’d have it when he got home. That’s old Southie.’’ "
...
"When she first arrived in South Boston, she respected the sanctity of parking barrels and paint cans. But then people started stealing her hard-dug spot, so she took someone else’s. Retribution was swift.
“My car got boxed in so badly I couldn’t wedge out,’’ the 49-year-old recalled with a sigh. “I went back to following the rules.’’
Paybacks like the kind Medina got led Mayor Thomas M. Menino in 2005 to declare war on the claiming of parking spaces, and he ordered city workers to remove all the markers. Furious South Boston residents, led by the late Councilor James M. Kelly, revolted.
Menino compromised, with a rule that allowed the practice as long as the markers were cleared from the street 48 hours after the end of a snow emergency.
Even with many residents dismayed now at the claiming of spots before snow has fallen, the deck furniture and picnic coolers that show up on the street go undisturbed.
“You move it, you might find it tossed through your windshield,’’ said Kevin Watts, 38."

Dispute resolution by kidnapping in Yemen

Al Jazeera reports: Abductions rife in lawless Yemen

"The government of Yemen has had to deal with years of severe internal conflicts in the north and south, crippling it from implementing an effective legal system throughout the country.
As a result, the people of Yemen have developed the practice of taking the law into their own hands.
For numerous tribes - the ancient old method of abduction - especially of children - continues to be a common way to settle disputes among one another.
Some Yemenis even accuse the government of being guilty of the same practice."

Iran's nuclear program, and incentives

A new paper argues that Iran's leaders have succeeded in making Iran's nuclear program a protected transaction, that may not respond well to ordinary incentives:
Emerging sacred values: Iran’s nuclear program by Morteza Dehghani, Rumen Iliev, Sonya Sachdeva, Scott Atran, Jeremy Ginges and Douglas Medin, Judgment and Decision Making, Vol. 4, No. 7, December 2009, pp. 930–933

In a small survey, they find that Iranians who don't think Iran should give up its nuclear program "no matter how great the benefits" react more negatively to deals that involve monetary incentives.

HT: Luke Coffman

Job search in Japan

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports: In Bleak Economy, Japanese Students Grow Frustrated With Endless Job Hunt (subscription required)

"The recruiting system, which began in the early 1950s as a response to labor shortages, has caused years of tension between corporations and universities, which complain that it disrupts study."
...
"Japan is not unique in effectively forcing college students to look for jobs before graduation, but Mr. Slater says the system does demand that they start early. "They must begin figuring out what they want to do by second year," he says, "and it becomes really heavy-duty in third."
A voluntary code adopted by Japan's largest business lobbying group, the Keidanren, in 2007 does not allow companies to start recruiting graduates before October, but the code is widely flouted, say critics, with recruitment beginning as early as the summer before students' senior year."
...
"Recruitment is being pushed back earlier into the third and even the second year, says Mr. Hori, the Waseda student. "I'm as afraid as anyone of not being able to get work, but university just becomes a waste of time."
Those who miss out on recruitment the first time around are instantly relegated to the back of the pack, students agree. "You don't belong anywhere if you don't get a job straight after you graduate," says Yumi Nishikawa, also a fourth-year student at Sophia. "If you fail, you're stigmatized." "

For some background on this market, apparently not yet out of date, see

Roth, A.E. and X. Xing, "Jumping the Gun: Imperfections and Institutions Related to the Timing of Market Transactions," American Economic Review, 84, September, 1994, 992-1044.(the section on the Japanese market, focusing on the period 1970-1990 is also here.)

The market for lawyers, a modest proposal

Ashish Nanda at the Harvard Law School has a modest proposal for how the jobmarket for new associates at large law firms should be organized, particularly in light of some of the problems that have been exposed in the current recession: Lawyers Should Be Recruited Like Doctors

"The current oversupply of new associates has sent law firms scrambling to implement short-term adjustments, such as secondments and deferrals. But the legal profession needs more than temporary half-measures. The new-associate recruitment market is fundamentally broken, and it has been for some time. Incremental changes are not going to address its underlying problems. The market needs a structural fix -- a centralized matching authority, like the one that the medical profession has been using for more than half a century. "

HT: Guhan Subramanian

Jerusalem summer school in economic theory

The 21st Jerusalem Summer School in Economic Theory will be on market design writ large, namely Political Economy, from June 25-July 6, with an all star cast of lecturers.

The market for history professors

Robert Townsend of the American Historical Association reports on A Grim Year on the Academic Job Market for Historians.

"The number of job openings in history plummeted last year, even as the number of new history PhDs soared. As a result, it appears the discipline is entering one of the most difficult academic job markets for historians in more than 15 years."

Townsend concludes:

"While it is small comfort to candidates on the current job market, it is worth noting that the near perpetual sense of crisis in history employment over the past 20 years had very little to do with a diminishing number of jobs, or even the growing use of part-time and contingent faculty.
More than half of the full-time history faculty in U.S. colleges and universities have retired and been replaced over the past 20 years, while the number of full-time faculty employed in history has grown steadily.
Among the 604 departments that were listed in the Directory in 2000 as well as in 2009, the number of full-time history faculty (at the assistant, associate, or full professor level) grew by 7.6 percent—from 8,772 to 9,436 over the decade. Other federal surveys conducted over the past two decades have shown similar growth in the number of full-time jobs for historians in academia as a whole, at both two- and four-year colleges and universities.
This hiring has been buoyed by significant growth in the number of undergraduate students taking history classes. According to the most recent figures from the federal government, the number of new bachelor’s degrees in the discipline recently reached the highest point in 35 years.3
The use of part-time and adjunct faculty in the discipline undoubtedly siphoned off some potential full-time job lines for historians, but that does not appear to be the most important causative factor for the problems of the history job market. The primary problem today, as it was a decade ago, seems to lie on the supply side of the market—in the number of doctoral students being trained, and in the skills and expectations those students develop in the course of their training."

For a dissenting view on this latter paragraph, see Marc Bosquet's column: At the AHA: Huh?

Bosquet, the author of How the University Works (here is the introductory chapter) advocates more stringent licensing of who can teach history to undergraduates, to increase the demand for Ph.D.s in full time positions, by displacing graduate student teaching fellows and part time faculty.

As an economist, I was struck by several things about Bosquet's book, the first of which was in the foreword by AAUP president Cary Nelson. Nelson speaks of the need for theory to help understand the situation of university employees: "There is no escaping the great challenge...to bring theory to bear on the thirty-five-year employment crisis that has defined professional life for so many humanities graduate employees and Ph.D.s."
He then enumerates the failure to do so of "Every body of theory with broad implications for understanding our own practices...", naming each such body of theory in turn "Psychoanalytic criticism...Marxist theory...feminist theory," concluding "The one institutional site where one might have hoped for a theorized account of the job system was the Modern Language Association."

It's humbling (and perhaps illuminating) to note that nowhere do these scholars look to economics for a theory of employment...

Sex ratio and competition, in China and American colleges

With more than 120 boys born for every 100 girls in China, parents of boys know that their sons will face a competitive marriage market. Shang-Jin Wei of Columbia and Xiaobo Zhang of the International Food Policy Research Institute argue that this accounts for a substantial portion of the high savings rate in China, as parents anticiipate that wealthier sons will marry more successfully, and that this spills over to the general economy:

The Competitive Saving Motive: Evidence from Rising Sex Ratios and Savings Rates in China
NBER Working Paper No. 15093 June 2009

Abstract: While the high savings rate in China has global impact, existing explanations are incomplete. This paper proposes a competitive saving motive as a new explanation: as the country experiences a rising sex ratio imbalance, the increased competition in the marriage market has induced the Chinese, especially parents with a son, to postpone consumption in favor of wealth accumulation. The pressure on savings spills over to other households through higher costs of house purchases. Both cross-regional and household-level evidence supports this hypothesis. This factor can potentially account for about half of the actual increase in the household savings rate during 1990-2007.

And here's a summary by Wei at VOX: The mystery of Chinese savings

In the meantime, there's a shortage of boys on many American college campuses: this NY Times report suggests that this has changed the dating equilibrium in ways that concern not only savings behavior, but also sex . (The story doesn't explicitly mention savings behavior, the Times is a family newspaper): The New Math on Campus

An unexpectedly repugnant transaction: singing "My Way" in the Philippines

A NY Times story on karaoke in the Philippines is full of interesting and unexpected detail: Sinatra Song Often Strikes Deadly Chord "The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.” " ... [While Karaoke sometimes leads to violence elsewhere] "the odds of getting killed during karaoke may be higher in the Philippines, if only because of the ubiquity of the pastime. Social get-togethers invariably involve karaoke. Stand-alone karaoke machines can be found in the unlikeliest settings, including outdoors in rural areas where men can sometimes be seen singing early in the morning. And Filipinos, who pride themselves on their singing, may have a lower tolerance for bad singers. Indeed, most of the “My Way” killings have reportedly occurred after the singer sang out of tune, causing other patrons to laugh or jeer. “The trouble with ‘My Way,’ ” said Mr. Gregorio, “is that everyone knows it and everyone has an opinion.” Others, noting that other equally popular tunes have not provoked killings, point to the song itself. " ... "Defenders of “My Way” say it is a victim of its own popularity. Because it is sung more often than most songs, the thinking goes, karaoke-related violence is more likely to occur while people are singing it. The real reasons behind the violence are breaches of karaoke etiquette, like hogging the microphone, laughing at someone’s singing or choosing a song that has already been sung. “The Philippines is a very violent society, so karaoke only triggers what already exists here when certain social rules are broken,” said Roland B. Tolentino, a pop culture expert at the University of the Philippines. But even he hedged, noting that the song’s “triumphalist” nature might contribute to the violence." ... "But in karaoke bars where one song costs 5 pesos, or a tenth of a dollar, strangers often rub shoulders, sometimes uneasily. A subset of karaoke bars with G.R.O.’s — short for guest relations officers, a euphemism for female prostitutes — often employ gay men, who are seen as neutral, to defuse the undercurrent of tension among the male patrons. Since the gay men are not considered rivals for the women’s attention — or rivals in singing, which karaoke machines score and rank — they can use humor to forestall macho face-offs among the patrons. In one such bar in Quezon City, next to Manila, patrons sing karaoke at tables on the first floor and can accompany a G.R.O. upstairs. Fights often break out when customers at one table look at another table “the wrong way,” said Mark Lanada, 20, the manager. “That’s the biggest source of tension,” Mr. Lanada said. “That’s why every place like this has a gay man like me.”"

RepoMen (the movie)

Joshua Gans points me to the trailer for the upcoming movie RepoMen. It touches on both repugnance and organ transplantation:

Synopsis
In the futuristic action-thriller Repo Men, humans have extended and improved our lives through highly sophisticated and expensive mechanical organs created by a company called The Union. The dark side of these medical breakthroughs is that if you don’t pay your bill, The Union sends its highly skilled repo men to take back its property…with no concern for your comfort or survival. Jude Law plays Remy, one of the best organ repo men in the business. When he suffers a cardiac failure on the job, he awakens to find himself fitted with the company’s top-of-the-line heart-replacement…as well as a hefty debt. But a side effect of the procedure is that his heart’s no longer in the job. When he can’t make the payments, The Union sends its toughest enforcer, Remy’s former partner Jake (Academy Award® winner Forest Whitaker), to track him down. Now that the hunter has become the hunted, Remy joins Beth (Alice Braga), another debtor who teaches him how to vanish from the system. And as he and Jake embark on a chase across a landscape populated by maniacal friends and foes, one man will become a reluctant champion for thousands on the run.

Australia to Lift Ban on Xenotransplants

Australia to Lift Ban on Animal Transplants

"Australia will join some 14 other countries -- including Japan, New Zealand and the United States -- in allowing xenotransplantation, the transplanting of animal organs and cells into humans to substitute for human organ donors and to treat diseases like diabetes.
The Australian moratorium was introduced in 2004 based on concerns that research in the area could prompt animal viruses, particularly pig viruses, to jump the species gap into humans.
The World Health Organization has called on countries to establish regulatory control and surveillance mechanisms before allowing xenotransplantations."

HT: Steve Leider

Unraveling in college football

We're used to hearing of career decisions by very young basketball players, but there's been a tradition in football of waiting until players' adult weights could be estimated. But now (multiple readers point out to me), the Trojans of USC have recruited 13 year old quarterback David Sills to their entering class in 2015.

Unraveling has a fine sporting tradition.

Ingredient lists, and farmed fish

Consumer protection laws work in strange ways, but one thing they do fairly well is to require that ingredients be listed on processed food. On a recent morning, drinking coffee imported from a warm place and eating smoked salmon from a cold place, I looked at the ingredient list on the front of the package of salmon, which read: "Atlantic Salmon, Salt, Hardwood Smoke." On the back of the package, this:

"Synthesized carotenoids are added to the feed of this farmed salmonoid to achieve the color that wild salmonoids develop from eating carotenoids found in their natural diet."

Some years ago, when I hosted a conference on sustainable fisheries , the fishermen present insisted that the conference dinner should be at a restaurant that served only wild fish...

Market Design conference at the NBER, October 8-9 2010

Susan Athey and Parag Pathak have circulated the following email.

The National Bureau of Economic Research workshop on Market Design is a forum to discuss new academic research related to the design of market institutions, broadly defined. The next meeting will be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Friday and Saturday, October 8-9, 2010.

We welcome new and interesting research, and are happy to see papers from a variety of fields. Participants in the past meeting covered a range of topics and methodological approaches. Last year's program can be viewed at: http://www.nber.org/~confer/2009/MDs09/program.html

The conference does not publish proceedings or issue NBER working papers - most of the presented papers are presumed to be published later in journals.

There is no requirement to be an NBER-affiliated researcher to participate. Younger researchers are especially encouraged to submit
papers. If you are interested in presenting a paper this year,
please upload a PDF or Word version by September 1, 2010 to this link http://www.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfp?id=MDf10

Preference will be given to papers for which at least a preliminary draft is ready by the time of submission. Only authors of accepted papers will be contacted.

For presenters and discussants in North America, the NBER will cover the travel and hotel costs. For speakers from outside North America, while the NBER will not be able to cover the airfare, it can provide support for hotel accommodation.

Please forward this announcement to any potentially interested scholars. We look forward to hearing from you.

Would Professor Moriarty have invented an eBay, a Paypal or a Craigslist?

Professor Moriarty was, of course, Sherlock Holmes' nemesis (or was it the other way around)? I ask the question in the title of this post because a much more modern criminal mastermind has just been sentenced. Here's the headline from the London Telegraph: Mastermind behind 'eBay for criminals' is facing jail

"Renukanth Subramaniam, from north London, established the website DarkMarket, which threatened every bank account and credit card holder in Britain and caused tens of millions of pounds of losses.
It was described as a "one-stop shop" for fraudsters buying and selling stolen details such as PIN numbers, account balances, answers to account security questions and passwords for social networking websites.

"The site even offered criminal users a secure payment system, training and advertising space to sell equipment used to clone bank and credit cards.
DarkMarket operated for almost three years as a “criminals only” forum, with more than 2,500 members at its peak, who could buy up to 10 credit card numbers along with other personal information for around £30.
It was shut down after a two-year global investigation in which undercover agents from the FBI and the Serious Organised Crime Agency infiltrated the site by posing as criminals.
A spokesman for Soca called it “one of the most pernicious online criminal websites in the world” and estimated that its victims lost tens of millions of pounds.
Officials said there was a code of “honour amongst thieves” on the site.
There was a secure payment system between criminals – described by Judge John Hillen as a "PayPal for criminals". "

See my earlier post: More on Darkmarket, the Craigslist of Crime

Mentoring (and a pet peeve: maybe women should be athena-ed?)

There are lots of reasons to think that young employees of many kinds may benefit from mentoring, and, because networks of various sorts may be important, employees from underrepresented populations may particularly benefit if their mentor can help them connect.

This is the idea behind the recent NBER report Can Mentoring Help Female Assistant Professors? Interim Results from a Randomized Trial
by Francine D. Blau, Janet M. Currie, Rachel T.A. Croson, Donna K. Ginther

Abstract: "While much has been written about the potential benefits of mentoring in academia, very little research documents its effectiveness. We present data from a randomized controlled trial of a mentoring program for female economists organized by the Committee for the Status of Women in the Economics Profession and sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the American Economics Association. To our knowledge, this is the first randomized trial of a mentoring program in academia. We evaluate the performance of three cohorts of participants and randomly-assigned controls from 2004, 2006, and 2008. This paper presents an interim assessment of the program’s effects. Our results suggest that mentoring works. After five years the 2004 treatment group averaged .4 more NSF or NIH grants and 3 additional publications, and were 25 percentage points more likely to have a top-tier publication. There are significant but smaller effects at three years post-treatment for the 2004 and 2006 cohorts combined. While it is too early to assess the ultimate effects of mentoring on the academic careers of program participants, the results suggest that this type of mentoring may be one way to help women advance in the Economics profession and, by extension, in other male-dominated academic fields. "

On a less serious note, I've always wondered whether "mentor" was the right word for an advisor for female professors, particularly if the advisor is also female. The reason is that Mentor is a male character in Homer's Odyssey who only appears to give advice in the beginning of the story. In fact, the goddess Athena is giving the advice, disguised as Mentor (presumably because advice from someone with a grey beard was given more weight in those days than from someone advising while female, however divine). So maybe, nowadays, female professors should be athena-ed?

The fertility biz: too many hazardous twins?

The NY Times reports on the complicated incentives in the fertility business that often lead to the birth of twins, despite the increased hazard that attend low birthweight babies: The Gift of Life, and Its Price .

"...leaders of the fertility industry and government health officials say that twins are a risk that should be avoided in fertility treatments. But they also acknowledge that they have had difficulty curtailing the trend.
Many fertility doctors routinely ignore their industry’s own guidelines, which encourage the use of single embryos during the in-vitro fertilization procedure, according to interviews and industry data. Some doctors say that powerful financial incentives hold sway in a competitive marketplace. Placing extra embryos in a woman’s womb increases the chances that one will take. The resulting babies and word of mouth can be the best way of luring new business." (emphasis added)
"Doctors are also often under pressure from patients eager for children, who have incentives to gamble as well. Frequently, they have come to IVF as a last resort after years of other treatments, are paying out of pocket, and are anxious to be successful on the first try. And many do not fully understand the risks. "

A subsequent report, Grievous Choice on Risky Path to Parenthood, indicates that more multiple births result from intrauterine insemination than from in vitro fertilization, but that

"While less effective than IVF, intrauterine insemination is used at least twice as frequently because it is less invasive, cheaper and more likely to be covered by insurance, interviews and data show."

The story goes on to suggest that IU may not in fact even be cheaper, when subsequent care for compromised low-birthweight babies is taken into account.

Earlier, the Times invited several commentators to discuss the issue: Eight Is Enough
"A woman in Southern California has given birth to eight babies, the world’s second live-born set of octuplets. With advances in fertility treatment, multiple births are becoming more common, but how many are too many? What are the costs of delivering and caring for premature babies? And what about the emotional costs? We asked several experts to give us their thoughts.
Jeffrey Ecker, perinatologist
Felice J. Freyer, medical writer at The Providence Journal
Mark I. Evans, a doctor who specializes in reproductive genetic services
Ellie Tesher, the author of “The Dionnes” "

A famous experiment in game theory

In an earlier post I wrote about Nagel's guessing/beauty contest game: a famous experiment in game theory .

Who knew how famous. Here's the cartoon version.

One way to think about the game is as a model of a certain kind of unraveling.

Law clerks at the Supreme Court

Some guest Volokh Conspirators have an interesting post on the history of law clerks at the Supreme Court: Disenclerking the Supreme Court.

"During this period [1940's], some Justices seem to have forged closer bonds with their clerks than with their colleagues on the Court. A Frankfurter comment is noteworthy in this regard: “They are, as it were, my junior partners—junior only in years. In the realm of the mind there is no hierarchy. I take them fully into my confidence so that the relation is free and easy.” Law clerks made perfect colleagues, it seems, or at least better colleagues than the other Justices.
In the 1960s, Associate Justices still had only two clerks each, but a rising flood of petitions and appeals soon led most Justices to hire a third. In 1972, Justice Powell requested an additional clerk, pleading his own lack of background in criminal and constitutional law. Soon, they were all entitled to have four clerks.
The importance of the clerks over the past few decades is highlighted by J. Harvie Wilkinson’s comment that “Justice Powell often said that the selection of his clerks was among the most important decisions he made during a term.” It is nowadays taken for granted that clerks play a large role in the opinion-writing process. One Justice reportedly told a clerk who asked for elaborate guidance in drafting an opinion, “If I had wanted someone to write down my thoughts, I would have hired a scrivener.”


They cite their sources: "...we rely heavily on Todd C. Peppers, Courtiers of the Marble Palace: The Rise and Influence of the Supreme Court Clerks (2006), and Artemus Ward & David Weiden, Sorcerers’ Apprentices: 100 Years of Law Clerks at the Unite States Supreme Court (2006)."


Here are some papers on the market for law clerks, which is one of the best places to observe exploding offers.

In this recession year, there are unusually many applicants for appellate clerkships, and the ABA Journal reports Deluged with Clerkship Apps, Some Federal Judges Don’t Look at All of Them
" Although the Online System for Clerkship Application and Review allows judges to sort applications by characteristics such as law school and law journal experience, a number of judges prefer to look only at applications from individuals who come recommended by others they know or review mailed applications only..."
"Slightly more than 400,000 applications were made for 1,244 clerkships, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. However, many applicants submitted dozens of applications."

Kant on compensation for organ donors

The Jerusalem Post has a column making the case for compensation of organ donors: Recompense for organ donors.

It begins with the following interesting paragraph:
"No one can be sure exactly how long there have been organ transplants, or their ethical ramifications, but they were already mentioned in Kant’s Lectures on Ethics two centuries ago. He gave the specific example of selling teeth. Kant was against them; he felt they violated his “practical imperative” to treat others as an end and not merely as a means to an end. An organ, in Kant’s view, was part of a human being, and so selling one (and, presumably, giving one) to someone else would turn a person into a means only.
Kant may have been against them, but today we are for them. Organ donations today save people’s lives, not only their bites, and massive efforts are invested to encourage people to make donations."

To my surprise when I looked at Kant's lectures, he was actually thinking of live donation, since he considers the case "if someone were to sell his sound teeth as a replacement for the decayed dentition of somebody else." This is followed immediately by his judgements on the improperness of suicide, or selling oneself into slavery. So, I'm left uncertain about how Kant would feel regarding the contemporary debate about compensation for live kidney donation.