Steven Landsburg has a blog

It's called The Big Questions. Assuming he keeps up a regular stream of posts it's sure to be a good one. He's an entertaining and thought provoking economist.

George Soros launches a $50 million effort to purge economics of its free-market zeal

Newsweek

George Soros is announcing a $50 million effort to speed things along. This week Soros is gathering some of the leading practitioners of the market-skeptic school, who were marginalized during the era of "free-market fundamentalism," among them Nobelists Joseph Stiglitz, George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Sir James Mirrlees. He's also creating an "Institute for New Economic Thinking" to make research grants, convene symposiums, and establish a journal, all in an effort to take back the economics profession from the champions of free-market zealotry who have dominated it for decades, and to correct the failures of decades of market deregulation. Soros hopes matching funds will bring the total endowment up to $200 million. "Economics has failed not only to predict and explain what happened but has also failed to protect society," says Robert Johnson, a former managing director at Soros Fund Management, who will direct the new institute. "That's what the crisis revealed. The paradigm has failed. There is no guidance."

Read it here.

Fat fairness (updated)

Fat rights lobbiests argue for fairness in pricing. By their logic car companies should sell obese people SUVs at a discount.

Is it enough to argue that you can't tell whether obesity is a pre-existing condition therefore it's not fair to charge the obese more for health insurance?

You can't tell whether my lack of productivity is due to a pre-existing condition. Pay me the same as everyone else. (Yes, I'm just kidding.)

Addendum added Oct 27. I've stumbled on this written on October 26th by the health economist Uwe E. Reinhardt:

It sounds like a great idea until one thinks about exactly how such an idea would be implemented in practice – especially in a country with a tort system such as ours. I wish both had given us their thoughts on that problem.

To take account of smoking in setting premiums is easy. Life insurers already do it, and even under community rating within mandated health insurance it would be relatively easy to charge higher premiums to smokers. I would favor it.

But consider obesity. Presumably an insurance company would somehow ascertain an applicant’s biomass and then somehow determine how much of any overweight is due to avoidable unhealthy behavior, and how much is rooted in genetic factors.
...
And even if that could be easily and cheaply done in practice, before long tort lawyers would bring class-action suits, citing the growing body of scientific literature suggesting that many behavior patterns — including unhealthy lifestyles — are rooted in very early cognitive development and subsequent education....

Add to that list environment factors beyond the individual's control, such as access to nearby grocery stores selling healthy foods at prices comparable to those in richer neighborhoods. See my essay at Daily Episcopalian.

Addendum 2, Oct 30. The technology could exist soon for your mobile phone to send your insurer information about your eating and exercise habits. Insurers could offer two kinds of policies, one where you consent to being monitored and another where you do not. Those who do not reveal themselves to be prone to unhealthy habits and would pay more. The insurer in this case is not insisting you reveal. They are only giving you the opportunity to reveal.

Oh, and isn't Reinhardt caught in an inconsistency between approving of charging higher premiums for smokers and not for those who have bad eating behavior? Arguably you can't help it that you like tobacco either. You may think, oh, but we know tobacco is bad for you and society frowns on it. But we're coming to that point with food abuse, too. Eat all you want, just don't base my premiums on how much you eat.

Another reason to brush your teeth

It's all here. If you are a short A-framed male with an asymmetric face.

Controlled experiment: King Abdullah University of Science and Technology

John Gravois of the UAE state-sponsored The National, writing on the birth of KAUST. Long article. Here's a snippet:

Built in just 1,000 days from a seaside stretch of desert, the new university has already staked out one of the most ambitious research agendas in academia, and it has drawn its inaugural cohort of 71 professors from some of the world’s great universities. At a time when other research institutions are watching their finances dwindle, Kaust’s founding endowment of at least $10 billion – supplied by King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud himself – immediately places it among the wealthiest handful of universities on the globe, in the rarefied company of Harvard, Yale, Stanford and Princeton.
...
But the successful construction of an ivory tower – or, as the case may be, an ivory gated compound – is only a first step. “The question is whether it will actually translate into something more permanent and durable in Saudi Arabia itself,” says Bernard Haykel, a Princeton historian who has studied the Kingdom extensively. The rest of Saudi Arabia’s education sector remains under the purview of the religious establishment, an influential bloc that is sceptical of the new university – if not overtly hostile to its approach. How much can Kaust push the limits of Saudi society from behind a security perimeter?

Arab education lag "alarming"

The Economist

Arab countries now spend as much or more on education, as a share of GDP, than the world average. They have made great strides in eradicating illiteracy, boosting university enrolment and reducing gaps in education between the sexes.

But the gap in the quality of education between Arabs and other people at a similar level of development is still frightening. It is one reason why Arab countries suffer unusually high rates of youth unemployment. According to a recent study by a team of Egyptian economists, the lack of skills in the workforce largely explains why a decade of fast economic growth has failed to lift more people out of poverty.

The most rigorous comparative study of education systems, a survey called Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) that comes out every four years, revealed in its latest report, in 2007, that out of 48 countries tested, all 12 participating Arab countries fell below the average. More disturbingly, less than 1% of students aged 12-13 in ten Arab countries reached an advanced benchmark in science, compared with 32% in Singapore and 10% in the United States. Only one Arab country, Jordan, scored above the international average, with 5% of its 13-year-olds reaching the advanced category.

Other comparative measures are equally alarming. A listing of the world’s top 500 universities, compiled annually by Shanghai Jiao Tong University, includes three South African and six Israeli universities, but not a single Arab one. The Swiss-based World Economic Forum ranks Egypt a modest 70th out of 133 countries in competitiveness, but in terms of the quality of its primary education system and its mathematics-and-science teaching, it slumps to 124th. Libya, despite an income of $16,000 a head, ranks an even more dismal 128th in the quality of its higher education, lower than dirt-poor Burkina Faso, with an average income of $577.

There are some universities in the UAE that have the potential to break into the world's top 500. Which ones are your picks?

In which Amazon changes price in response to changes in demand

Instapundit:

OKAY, SO I WROTE ABOUT these Sony noise-cancelling headphones a couple of weeks ago, but now I see that they’re vastly cheaper in white. Go figure.

UPDATE: Okay, it’s $39.95, which is 20 bucks less than I paid, and 25 bucks less than they’re asking for the ones I bought now. And the only difference is color.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Geez, that was fast. They’ve already raised the price — in less than half an hour. This is like some kind of Heisenberg-pricing, where if I point it out, it changes . . . .

Posted at 8:27 pm by Glenn Reynolds