I begin my series on risk aversion, competition and gender with a review paper by Catherine Eckel and Philip J. Grossman in The Handbook of Experimental Economics Results. In their paper, Eckel and Grossman cover several papers that assess risk aversion. So what do we mean by risk aversion? We mean the tendency to avoid risk, to avoid a probability of winning or losing money relative to winning or losing some certain amount of money.  For example, do you put your money under your bed, in property, in bonds, or in stocks? The level of risk increases as you move from the one to the other, but the potential rewards increase too - leading to the well-known relationship between risk and reward.  Eckel and Grossman look at three methods used in economics to assess risk aversion - Abstract Gambles, Contextual Environment Experiments and Field Experiments. I deal with each in turn.

Abstract gambles are decisions where a subject has to choose the gambles that they prefer, these decisions may be hypothetical (I'm not a fan), low stakes gambles (normally with some good, like chocolates or sweets), or be gambles with money that they are given by the experimenter. For example, the subject could be given $8, then asked whether they would like to participate in a gamble in which the rewards are -$8, -$3, $0, +$3, +$8, or they could just stick with $8.  The subject could then leave with anywhere between $0 and $16.  The experimenter could then vary the probabilities with which these events are likely to occur to evaluate risk aversion. Contextual Environment Experiments are characterised by abstract gambles, except that the decisions are framed differently, i.e. in the gain domain (getting positive amounts of money) something could be framed as an 'investment', in the loss domain something could be framed as 'insurance' (paying money to avoid something occurring in the future).  Field survey and experiments, often coupled with laboratory gambles, evaluate subjects' behavior outside of the laboratory, either in some environment to which the subjects are accustomed, or in some experimental frame - seminal experiments evaluated subjects behavior in the laboratory compared to their behavior in an activity to which they are accustomed, in this case trading sports cards, or collecting coins, others simply report survey results and chart behavior.

Using abstract gambles with material incentives, the evidence indicates the following results, either men are less risk averse than women, meaning that men, particularly men from adolescence to about 40-years-old, choose more risky gambles than women do, or there are no statistically significant differences between men's and women's behavior.  There is no evidence that men are more risk averse than women for gains.  However, for losses, women are less risk averse than men, i.e. when faced with the option of losing money, women will take a risky gamble to lose a large amount of money, rather than lose money with certainty. 

In the contextual environment experiments, the frames change and behavior also changes as a consequence.  As described above, when framing losses as insurance and gains as investments men's and women's behavior does not differ significantly in one pair of studies (Schubert et al, 1999, 2000), whereas in another (Moore and Eckel, 2003) women are significantly more risk averse than men and similar to the evidence for abstract gambles, women are more risk-seeking for insurance, i.e. risk-seeking for losses, and similarly in another study (Gysler, Kruse and Schubert, 2002) after controlling for competence, knowledge and over-confidence women are more risk averse than men with their risk aversion decreasing in their levels of expertise.  A final study by Levy, Elron and Cohen (1999) with MBA students simulating a stock market shows women significantly more risk averse than men and making substantially less money as a consequence, this experiment is particularly interesting because the subjects supposedly gambled with their own money.

Lastly, for field work, a substantial amount of data corroborates the result that women, particularly single women, are more risk averse than men.  Several articles show that men hold more risky assets than women do - women tended to hold riskless, or relatively less risky, assets. Married women were also substantially less risk averse than single women throughout these data.

The results from these papers generally indicate that women are substantially more risk averse than men for gains, and women are more risk-loving than men for losses.  Eckel and Grossman do not try to explain why women behave so, but rather try to chart the result's empirical regularity.  We'll leave speculation about why women behave this way to later papers.

References 
Eckel, Catherine and Philip J. Grossman, 2008, 'Men, Women and Risk Aversion', in The Handbook of Experimental Economics Results, Charles R. Plott and Vernon L. Smith (eds), Elsevier Science & North-Holland.
Gysler, M., J. B. Kruse, and R. Schubert. (2002).  “Ambiguity and Gender Differences in Financial  decision Making:  An Experimental Examination of Competence and Confidence Effects.”  Center for Economic Research, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Working Paper.
Levy, H., E. Elron and A. Cohen (1999).  "Gender Differences in Risk Taking and Investment Behavior: An Experimental Analysis."  Unpublished manuscript, The Hebrew University
Moore, E. and C. C. Eckel (2003).  “Measuring Ambiguity Aversion.” Unpublished manuscript, Department of Economics, Virginia Tech.
Schubert, R.,  M.Gysler, M. Brown and H. W. Brachinger (1999). “Financial Decision-Making:  Are Women Really More Risk Averse?” American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings 89:381-385.
Schubert, R.,  M.Gysler, M. Brown and H. W. Brachinger (2000). “Gender Specific Attitudes  Towards Risk and Ambiguity:  An Experimental Investigation.” Center for Economic Research, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Working Paper.

Are girls as competitive as boys? Do boys take more risks than girls? Do female CEOs risk as much and compete as much as male CEOs? Or are these ill-posed questions, appealing to an idea of gender as deterministic, entirely nativist? Over the next while I'll be posting discussions of papers in economics, particularly experimental economics, in which the researchers try to grapple with the correlates of risk aversion and how gender seems a particularly persistent predictor of risk aversion: the evidence suggests that women behave substantially more risk aversely than men behave. But economists are also quite clever about all of this - they have recently begun to try to understand whether nurture, context, or other factors that tend to correlate with gender might be the underlying correlates of risk behavior.  I'll introduce these ideas as we look at the research.

I'll be dealing with results from several papers. Provisionally, the reading list comprises the following:
Sheryl Ball, Catherine Eckel and Maria Heracleous, 'Risk Aversion and Physical Prowess: Prediction, Choice and Bias', Working Paper, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Department of Economics
Alison Booth and Patrick J. Nolen, 2009, 'Gender Differences in Risk Behaviour: Does Nurture Matter?' University of Essex, Department of Economics Discussion Paper 672
Alison Booth and Patrick J. Nolen, 2009, 'Choosing to Compete: How Different Are Girls and Boys'  University of Essex, Department of Economics Discussion Paper 673
Catherine Eckel and Philip Grossman, 2008, 'Men, Women, and Risk Aversion: Experimental Evidence', The Handbook of Experimental Economics Results, Vol 1, Charles R. Plott and Vernon L. Smith (eds), Elsevier Science & North Holland
Uri Gneezy, Kenneth L. Leonard and John List, 2009, 'Gender Differences in Competition: Evidence for a Matrilineal and a Patriarchal Society' NBER working paper 13727 (forthcoming in Econometrica)

I will also refer to several other papers on general results about risk aversion and methods used to elicit these preferences, but I won't review these papers specifically. 

I've been thinking recently about Amazon's reviewing system. On the couple of times that I have reviewed something harshly, for example my review of The Shadow of the Wind in which I contradict a number of people, I've received a number of 'not helpful' votes. My problem with this rating system is the following - I think that liking something and finding something helpful are two distinct notions. But, I believe that people use the voting system to indicate dislike of something, regardless of whether it is helpful or not. I admit, I've felt the urge to click on that 'No' button when I disagree with a reviewer, but I realised that disagreeing with someone does not mean that I found the review unhelpful, and does not justify my choosing to vote 'No'. In fact, the converse could be true - I could disagree and therefore find a review helpful as it motivates me to think why I enjoyed a book, found a book interesting, or why I should go ahead and write a review of my own.

The problem, really, is one of incentives. Reviewers confront a problem: do they wish to tell their true opinion about a book and provide a service, or do they want to be highly ranked in the Amazon system, or can they do both? With the current system, you probably end up with people in the top ranks of reviewers being those who give books 5 stars regularly, with fans of the book always giving them many 'helpful' votes when they just liked the book. Which means, if you're competitive and want to rank well, there's an incentive to write five star reviews more regularly than critical or harsh reviews in case fans of a book disagree with you and destroy your ranking. Now this doesn't matter much to me, I'm small-fry in the world of Amazon reviewer rankings, but, as an economist, I can't help but think that people will turn the system into a competition over positional goods and that the incentives are inadequately geared towards truthful, systematic reviews of books. Honest and critical reviewers must either be non-competitive or have altruistic preferences, or be uninterested in, or indifferent to, their reviewer rank.

I have assumed that the two outcomes - being highly ranked and being truthfully critical - are mutually exclusive because of the potential for a critical reviewer to be swamped by the nays of fans. In fact my conclusions don't require this assumption, they probably need something weaker like an interaction of spitefulness and criticalness, which is likely to occur. I don't know if fans actually act spitefully, but the evidence in behavioral economics suggests they might. What could Amazon do to counteract this outcome? Currently, I don't know, but I think that the behavior stems from an asymmetry in the costs to reviewing and the costs to commenting. I would suspect that far more customers vote on whether they find a review helpful than write actual reviews. Therefore, maybe Amazon, to reinforce truth-telling, should only allow you to vote on a review if you yourself have written a review, say you get 5 votes per review you write. We'd then get a second order problem of review quality as everyone who wanted to vote might write poor reviews... Gosh what a nightmare.

One countervailing factor could be reputation. If a 'real name' reviewer has a reputation to uphold outside of the world of Amazon.com, then they might have the incentive to tell the truth about their opinion of a book because, if they don't, their reputation would be undermined and they could suffer pecuniary losses outside of Amazon. This is why I favour the 'real name' reviewers option, and why I would distrust anonymous reviewers.

But, here's the kicker, it isn't in Amazon's interest to get people to tell the truth about books, CDs, or DVDs. They are in the book-selling business, not the book-reviewing business. Thus, assuming there's a positive correlation between the number of stars a book receives in review and the likelihood that any person will buy it, the more people who write 5 star reviews of books, the more books Amazon will sell. Amazon's ranking system therefore fits its intentions perfectly - get people to compete over being top-ranked, which requires those people to write more 4 or 5 star reviews than fewer star reviews, which then compels people to buy more books.

I conclude then that trusting Amazon reviews, on aggregate, is probably not a good thing to do. I know that there are certain reviewers who write interesting and high quality reviews, for example Herbert Gintis's review page on Amazon.com is great, but I'm not sure if there are many Herbs out there, and therefore I'm not sure how many Amazon reviews I can trust. Amazon is in the book-selling business after all.

So, today the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Science in memory of Alfred Nobel, or the Nobel Prize in Economics, was awarded to Elinor Ostrom and Oliver E. Williamson.  All over the web you've had incredibly famous economists announcing that they knew nothing of Elinor Ostrom's work.  Astounding! Her book, Governing The Commons, is an incredibly important tract on how societies come up with novel, and socially determined, ways to deal with common property, or, in other words, to solve the prisoners' dilemma.  I was introduced to her work during my Honours at the University of Cape Town by two of my professors, Justine Burns and Malcolm Keswell, the work of which we cemented during my Masters at UCT.  They had been inclined to read her because of the influence of Samuel Bowles, who refers to Ostrom's work several times in his book Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution.  One of her papers also appears in a book for which Bowles is one of the editors, Moral Sentiments and Material Interests.  Bowles also refers comprehensively in MBIE to Oliver Williams, specifically his application of Ronald Coase's theories. Bowles has a soft spot for Coase and argues for a synthesis of Herbert Simon, Karl Marx and Ronal Coase in order for us better to understand how markets function in non-market ways.    Anyway, I just wanted to add my voice to the many stating how proud they are about the choice. I am most happy that Eugene "Efficient Markets' Fama didn't get it and that the 'markets aren't quite efficient' people did get it. 

Chris Dillow instructs us in his post 'Come Dine With Me: The Economics' that social preferences, or preferences that involve regard for the person with whom one interacts, are pervasive in the British Television show 'Come Dine With Me'. It's a fun hypothesis, and an even more fun forum in which to 'test' it, where a 'test' is a simply discussion of the incentives and the evidence of what people seem to do in several episodes of the show.

The structure of the game is as follows: there are four players, each player hosts a meal, each player rates the other players' meals after they have dined, the player with the highest score wins £1000 at the end.  Initially the game is more like an anonymous interaction because players do not have information about others,  but as it proceeds more information is revealed.  Players rate the host's meal out of ten.  As the goal is to win the game, a rational player should always rate other players' meals as a 0 out of 10 as that would dramatically increase their own chances.  If that occurred, the backward induction solution would be for all players to give zero and no player would win (assuming rationality and common knowledge of rationality). 

But players almost always give ratings higher than zero, which would indicate that either a) they are irrational, or b) there are norms that govern their behavior and their behavior is rational.  Dillow articulates how the correct option is most likely b) and that these players either have preferences over fairness, or, in my view, have a reference point about what constitutes an 'ok' number of points to give and that they add and subtract points from that reference point, rather than use zero as the be-all-and-end-all.  Take a look at the post if you've the time, it's an interesting informal application of social preference theory.

HT: Mark Thoma.

The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova 1/2
Based on the the history of Vlad Ţepeş and his fictional counterpart, Count Dracula, The Historian details the routes taken by three related people in their search for Dracula. We have the story of the narrator, an unnamed 16 year old girl; the narrator's father, Paul; and her father's doctoral supervisor, Bartholomew Rossi. Other characters feature: Helen Rossi, the illegitimate child of Batholemew; Professor Turgut Bora, a Turkish historian; and Anton Stoichev, a Bulgarian Historian. Kostova constructs what can best be called 'academic gothic' - some would find this book awfully slow-moving, but others would enjoy the theorizing, arguments about sources and their use in history, and other aspects of history as practice. But these positive aspects can be occasionally damaged by a tendency to over-write, and a need to get on with the action. We want a gothic tale about vampires! But, for those who want a horror story, steer clear of this book. If horror is what you want, look elsewhere.

The book takes you on tours of Oxford, Istanbul, and Budapest, and through the lands of Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, France, and Italy. Consequently, it's enjoyable for its travel writing aspect as Kostova marshals a strong vocabulary and illustrative mind to create the backdrop to the narrative. I also appreciated it for its aspirations to historical fiction and the classic gothic novel. The reason for all the traveling is that the main characters are trying to piece together the story of Vlad Ţepeş, or Count Dracula, to understand how he has managed to stay alive, how he has remained hidden, and what exactly he does to those who track him down. As his history creates its trail around Europe, so too do the characters find their way into various phases of his past.

What one also needs to understand when reading this novel is the legacy of the gothic novel, from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to Bram Stoker's Dracula. Kostova's novel differs from these books in that the idea or history of that which scares us (Dracula/Frankenstein) is that which the characters engage with and pursue, rather than the thing itself. Certainly, this may require an understanding of Dracula 'the man', but it also requires a recognition of history, architecture, art, bureaucracy, geography, Eastern European socialism vs. Western Capitalism, people, and how these overlap. Ultimately you have a readable, but sedate historical, and Victorian-style, novel recounting the retreading of paths in history, and their realisation in a theory finally vindicated. It is this conclusion that we yearn for from the first chapter and that we appreciate when it finally arrives.

I especially enjoyed reading The Historian during winter: rain splattering across the windows, and dark clouds lurking above. It is not a book to read during summer, too much of its ambience would be lost in summer's heat and light. I heard The Historian has been compared to The Da Vinci Code. The Historian was far better written and far more academically inclined that The Da Vinci Code. I read The Da Vinci Code and I deplore the loss of those irretrievable hours.

Understanding Society is a blog I recently began to read. I have been impressed with the author, Daniel Little, and his command of a several subjects within the social sciences. Little touches on topics that relate predominantly to philosophy (political, philosophy of science), and to sociology, anthropology, and economics. Little blogs the ideas he plans to discuss in a new book that he is writing, which I assume will be called Understanding Society.  I thought I'd comment on some of his posts by way of introduction to the blog.

In Wealth Inequality, Little touches on the challenges of inequalities in wealth (not just in income), i.e. property, assets, etc, that pervade US society and most contemporary capitalist economies. He provides additional related posts that on Poverty, Growth and Sustainability and on Social Mobility. In his discussion on social mobility he highlights the myth that Americans in the US believe of the US being the most mobile society, which is empirically false. In the US, a parent's socio-economic status, is a strong predictor of a child's socio-economic status, which, for those who believe in some kind of material equality can be problematic.  Little also assesses Popper's discussions of falsifiability and historicism in his post Revisiting Popper, another illuminating contribution in which he highlights the problem of tackling the condition of 'falsifiability' in the social sciences where so much varies, and little can be properly controlled.


In this post, Little discusses the notion of corporations as analysed by Charles Perrow in his book Organizing America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism. Why is this apt? Well, the supreme court in the US is trying to grapple with whether corporations should have free speech (in the same way that people do), and thus whether they should have unlimited ability to promote their speech as people do. I hope they resolve that corporations do not have free speech, but more on that another time. I found Little's discussion useful and enlightening.

Here, Little discusses Michael Polanyi's notion of 'tacit knowledge'. I have not yet read Polanyi, though his brother, Karl Polanyi, has been on my reading list for some time - I might have to give both brothers a chance now. Nevertheless, Little's post intersects well with two books I've been reading: Friedrich Hayek's The Fatal Conceit and Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft. Though Polanyi affiliated himself differently to Hayek (and would have affiliated himself differently to Crawford I suspect), his notion of tacit knowledge, which Little recounts and teaches well, is crucial to understand the operation of everyday business: people learn how to do things without `knowing' what they know. It's a kind of knowing 'how' rather than a knowing 'what'. More specifically, Little wants to interrogate (or wants others to get off their bums and interrogate) the extent to which social knowledge is tacit, is experienced, or somehow embodied (I assume). To what extent do individuals fail or succeed when expressing tacit social knowledge? For example, some think me tactless, when I think myself honest and in continuous pursuit of truth, am I simply failing in my understanding of tacit social knowledge?

Anyway, I have found the blog edifying and I have enjoyed the posts, though they often require more time to read and think about than your average blog.  I find that I disagree with the author, but I'd like to surround myself with clear thinkers who think differently to me in order to understand better my position. 

Matthew B. Crawford - Shop Class as Soulcraft

Matthew B. Crawford's appeal for a society that engages more with its material world caught my attention some time back in a recommendation that I saw.  My father retired from electrical engineering some time ago, and now does all kinds of DIY jobs for people.  Because I spend most of my time uninvolved with such work, but intrigued by the idea of finding what so fascinates my father, I picked up Shop Class as Soulcraft thinking that Crawford might provide me with some insights.  He did just that, and challenged my thinking with trenchant philosophy to boot. 

A word of warning, as much as Crawford's book is the telling of a gearhead opening his own shop, it is also, and probably more so, an academic philosopher's appeal to the academically-inclined and college-educated to give greater credit to those who are involved in manual labour, the trades, and the crafts.  He explains his case as an academic would using academic language, references, end notes, and the other mainstays of academia.  This book is not a memoir, neither is it just a story about the pleasures of construction.  Instead, it is a philosophical attack on the motives for college education rather than 'vocational training', in which he argues that college education is turning people into cogs, and that 'vocational' training is more cognitively challenging than received wisdom would have you believe.  Consequently, you should not buy this book if you are looking for a comfortable or easy read about restoring and repairing motorcycles.  Don't go in thinking it's a quick holiday read, or just a bit of fun - it'll require some serious work if you're unfamiliar with the debates, especially those in which the names of Marx, Smith, Heidegger, Polanyi, and others pop off of the workshop shelves.

With that in mind, I think that Crawford largely achieves what he sets out for himself. He argues that allowing workers to use their judgment provides them with greater happiness and provides non-monetary rewards. He asserts that giving workers objective standards, rather than the mealy-mouthed corporate speak of 'missions' and 'buy-in' allows workers to succeed or fail, and when they fail they better understand their success. He attacks college education for not including places where kids can go wrong, he argues that "The experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the educational process, at least for gifted students... A student can avoid hard sciences and foreign languages and get a degree without ever having the unambiguous experience of being wrong." (204) He laments the devaluation of genuine mastery, and is frustrated by "the easy fantasy of mastery [that] permeates modern culture." (17) He believes, probably like many conservatives do, that modern consumer culture, with its emphasis on immediacy and short-termism, damages humanity and, "If the modern personality is being reorganized on a predicate of passive consumption, this is bound to affect our political culture." (18) So he has many worries and many criticisms, and his proposed solution is what he calls 'progressive republicanism'.  He argues that it should be progressive because "the defenders of free markets forgot that what we really want is free men" and thus "It is time to end the confusion of private property with corporate property" (209).  Furthermore, he argues that many politicians fail the electorate because,  "Those who belong to a certain order of society - people to make big decisions that affect all of us - don't seem to have much sense of their own fallibility. Being unacquainted with failure, the kind that can't be interpreted away, may have something to do with the lack of caution that business and political leaders often display in the actions they undertake on behalf of other people." (203-4) I think that Crawford should have foreshadowed these rather radical statements earlier on, and that in the expectation of such conclusions many people might have read on to see exactly how he motivates such end results. 

Notwithstanding the credit he gives to those whose work requires a physical engagement with a physical world, Crawford seems to miss one large fraction of the working population with his 'switch it on and see it work' nostrum for the value of the trades.  Computer programmers have the same need, to 'switch on' (compile) their program and see it work.  Others appreciate their product because it works for them every day, each hour.  Yes, like poor craftsmanship there is poor programming, but good programming and database management have many similar characteristics to their physical brethren in the engineering, trades, and crafts. In my view, Crawford doesn't give programmers, and knowledge workers generally, sufficient credit for their good work, but derogates them for their poor work, and for the apathy and indolence of many of those who inappropriately do programming and IT work.

Additionally, when Crawford says, "Craftsmanship means dwelling on a task for a long time and going deeply into it, because you want to get it right." (20) By rights, then, many 'knowledge' tasks should be classified as 'crafts'.  Should I not, when I spend hours before a computer trying to engage with data, dwelling on it for many hours, be classified as a craftsman trying to craft or model the correct, or most true, set of regressions? For me this differentiates academia from consultancy or an equivalent (Crawford dislikes consultancy and management greatly) - the ability to spend hours pondering one question, or one set of questions, in order to provide a rigorous and honest answer. 

Though there may be a few shortcomings to the book, I think it was largely worth my while to read it and to engage properly with what Crawford sets out - an argument for smaller, responsible businesses and responsible, free workers, craftsmen and tradespeople, brought together in markets and allowed to engage in free exchange.  Though his dream seems Utopian, and there are occasional flaws in his reasoning, the ideas are nonetheless clearly set out and often beautiful. 

I thoroughly enjoyed this Financial Times article on about Jerry Morris, one of the first scientists to pick up a positive correlation between health and exercise.  Apart from the enjoyable reportage, the short biography, etc, what struck me was the simplicity in the setup for which Morris was able to detect a pattern.  I will describe it slightly differently, just to show how ideally it is suited to a quasi-experimental approach.

Take a group of a few thousand people of roughly the same socio-economic status. Assign about one half of the group to one job, the other half to another on the basis of some random criterion.  Observe that members of the one group live longer than the members of the other seemingly as a consequence of doing the one job and not the other.  Try to interrogate the differences between the jobs, isolate this difference, and voilà.  So this is what Morris had: take the two people who work on buses in England during the 40s: a bus conductor and a bus driver.  Both men (and they were all men I believe) were from the same socio-economic background (class) and basically didn't require any particularly different qualifications - driving itself being quite common.  But, for some reason, the risk of heart attack for a driver was roughly double that of a conductor. What, then, separates the activities of a conductor from a driver to explain this? A conductor walks all the time and climbs between 500 and 750 steps during his shift every day, whereas a bus driver remains sedentary. This was the only factor that could legitimately explain the differences in outcome and was set up so well as to be an experiment, what we call a 'natural experiment' or a 'quasi-experimental' setup.

So, as an empiricist, the article appealed to me on grounds factual, biographical, and technical.  What an intriguing tale.  Well done to Kuper for the entertaining read.  Well done to Morris for establishing the connection between vigorous exercise and health. Coincidentally, I also support Morris's idea that exercise needs to be made more easily accessible - pedestrianised areas to encourage walking, bicycle paths to encourage cycling, accessible and inexpensive swimming pools for swimming, that champion of full-body exercises, and, I believe, accessible public transport to and from which one can walk and access resources like parks, pools and gyms.  We shall see.

Moxyland by Lauren Beukes

Moxyland, from young SA author Lauren Beukes, takes the near future sci-fi of authors like Philip K. Dick, Neal Stephenson, and others and locates it in Cape Town, rather than the more traditional locales of such fiction - NYC, LA, London, Tokyo, etc. But this is a post-superdemic, corporatist, freedoms-limited-by-crazy SAPS Cape Town, not the liberal-outpost, 'Shwaa man', sea and sun, more-laid-back-than-thou Cape Town we know and love. In this mutant, infected, ugly step-sister of contemporary Cape Town there's enough Cape Town to identify it through the smog - references to Long Street, Obs, Delft, Roodebloem Rd, the taxi ranks & the parade (no more where Mandela spoke of freedom, but where street kids are learning graf art sponsored by corporate social investment who've done strange things to the paint). You arrive in Beukes's Cape Town and you enjoy the potholed, nano-injected ride

My sister recently announced that she is pregnant.  Our family is overjoyed for her, and interested to see all developments.  Anyway, when she told me she went on to say, 'So no sushi for me.' This immediately got my sceptical brain humming, so I compiled what I could of the research I found on the internet and emailed her.  The content of the email is below, slightly edited to be a blog post.

After our conversation about pregnancy I did some research on the sushi question.  It turns out that there are three main factors: 1) problems with raw fish, 2) increased mercury levels that are unhealthy for a foetus, and 3) vitamin/dioxin issues. 

On the first problem, eating any raw fish can be a problem because of the possibility of parasites & funnies.  Parasites are worse when you are pregnant because they could affect the foetus, but there is no 'increased vulnerability' to parasites because you're pregnant. Note this does not rule out all sushi. For example, California rolls contain steamed crab which, because it is cooked, should contain no parasites.  Similarly for other cooked fish sushi, like crispy prawn rolls.  The crucial thing is to stay away from the uncooked eel, salmon, tuna, and cod.  The second thing with raw fish is that it (and soft cheeses like brie or camembert) has a higher likelihood than other foods to contain things called 'Listeria monocytogenes'.  But again, eating cooked sushi means
you avoid this.  Also, you could eat sushi if the fish has been frozen at  -20 degrees or lower (as this should kill most of the bad stuff).

On the second problem, the thing is to stay away from all uncooked and cooked swordfish, mackerel, shark, and tile fish (not like you regularly eat these anyway) because these have higher mercury levels than other fish.  High mercury levels, for which you'd have to eat a substantial amount of these fish, can damage a foetus's development or cause mutations.  If you don't eat these fish, then this shouldn't be a problem.

On the third issue, salmon can contain funny substances (dioxins) that can be harmful to foetuses in large  quantities, which means that you shouldn't eat salmon more than twice a week.  The second thing is that raw fish and shellfish contain substances (thiaminases) that break down vitamin B which babies need for growth. Again  not a problem if you're getting Vitamin B in supplements or in other foods, but it motivates not eating raw sushi more than twice a month, no problems for cooked sushi.    

All of this said, I couldn't find comprehensive studies actually showing that eating sushi is 'bad' for you during pregnancy (or at least worse for you than eating much of the crap that is in supermarkets these days). A lot of the hullabaloo seems to emanate from urban legends propagated in the US.  I'd probably consult a qualified
dietician (not a nutritionist) and ask them to give you a properly researched answer before you stop eating your favourite food for 9 months.  The most comprehensive online article I read suggests that as long as you don't eat raw sushi more than twice a month you should be fine.  Millions of Japanese people seem to do ok eating sushi while pregnant and there are lots of healthy Japanese babies as far as I know. Also, another article I found suggested that a US government study said that the risks of disease from eating cooked fish are about 1 in 2 million, whereas for cooked chicken it's about 1 in 25 000. So yes, on those Japanese and lots of fish...

Anyway, on my recent flight to Cape Town, having divested myself of many books because of our move from Italy to London, I needed something to keep my going during the flight and during the layover in Qatar. I purchased Love, etc by Julian Barnes and The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (review to follow shortly). I finished Love, etc easily during the flight and thoroughly enjoyed it.

What does Love, etc offer? It's the sequel to Talking It Over - and it involves the same characters. Barnes decided to set it ten years on - Stuart, Oliver and Gillian are our main narrators, along with Gillian's mum, Stuart's 'bit of crumpet' who also happens to be Gillian's assistant, and one or two others. Apart from characters, expect symmetry. The idea behind Love, etc seems to be a symmetricality of narrative - creating symmetry in the ideas of marriage and infidelity, memory and recall, perception and interpretation, similar to those that pervaded Talking It Over. In Talking It Over, however, those ideas were new. I understand why Barnes would want to create symmetry with what happened to his characters - and what his character think and believe - in middle age. But, in Love, etc the techniques don't work as well, nor are the characters as likeable or as easy to sympathise with as they felt in Talking It Over.

Nevertheless, Love, etc is still an entertaining, amusing, and generally occupying book. Barnes fills it with wit, intelligence and clever commentary. The book generally pleased me, and I especially appreciated the diversion on a plane filled with Chinese pre-adolescents kicking the back of my chair, with air hosts and hostesses (what is the PC name for these people nowadays? air assistants? aircraft personnel?) who kept on bumping my knees with their trolleys, and with someone in front of me who insisted on always having their seat as far down as possible after the captain allowed them to do so. Love, etc was calmness and sanity in a sea of annoyance. So yes, perfectly suitable, funny and good, just not as good as Talking It Over.

Drake Bennett of the Boston Globe recently wrote an article on Happiness and its relationship to money, 'Happiness: A Buyer's Guide'.  Although several points he makes are accurate there are several failings in the article.  I try to document them below.

First, he describes how paying for things for other people makes us happy (i.e. increases our reported, or subjective, well-being), but he does not extend the notion of purchasing things for other people to doing things for them with your time or effort.  What I mean here is what about when you don't pay money, but instead expend time and effort to do something for or with someone else while not spending any money at all? If you admit that prosocial acts are inherently beneficial and increase your subjective well-being, might not the same or similar acts when you don't spend money result in similar effects?

This brings us to the second point, might not paying for prosocial acts and events crowd out the voluntary or 'free' ways of doing the same thing? Yes, I might feel better signing a check to an aid organisation, but in doing so I might decide not to dedicate my time and energy to the same organisation.  There is not discussion about which of these two acts might, in fact, make me happier.  There is no discussion of acts at a zero price.

Finally, suppose that I believe that I can increase my happiness by spending money on relational activities, but I believe I need more money to achieve these goals. Believing this, I choose to work more.  In working more, however, I have less time to dedicate to friends and family, to those very things that make me happy because of their relational benefits.  The article fails to acknowledge that you need to maintain your current level of work or income and change your spending to relational (rather than straight consumption) acts to increase your subjective well-being, otherwise you might substitute away from the things that sustain you in order to get more money to spend on those things. 

Maybe it takes thinking like an economist to consider these problems i.e. substitution, zero price, crowding out,. But these ideas were not discussed in the article.  They should have been.

In his column Think Again in the NYT, Stanley Fish has a new Op-Ed 'What Should Colleges Teach?' The main subject of his piece is composition - the craft of writing.  He discusses the recent publication of a report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, separating their criticisms into those that are useful and those that are simply political.  Regardless of whether you agree or not with his classification (I tend to), his essay deserves to be read. 

On writing, I lament students' inability to write, particularly students in the Commerce faculty where I lectured.  But the problem goes higher up.  Also, I regularly edit articles written by my fellow graduate students, and, though most of them are second language English speakers, they still compose and write poorly.  Why is their writing poor? Not because they are second language English speakers, but because stodgy, prolix, and opaque writing pervades the economics profession.  Consequently, there are few contemporary economics articles that are well-written, few articles written with style, written with grace, written with sufficient attention to grammar and composition, written with concrete and specific nouns and verbs.   

But remedies exist! Consider first Deirdre McCloskey's Economical Writing, second Joseph M. Williams's Style: Toward Clarity and Grace, then move on to other useful books like William Zinsser's On Writing Well, Strunk & White's The Elements of Style, Clare K. Cook's Line by Line, and finally Jane E. Miller's Guide to Writing About Numbers and her Guide To Writing About Multivariate Analysis. There are so many books out there that could help to make writing clearer, and that would therefore enable economists to express their thinking more clearly. I shan't throw stones at those outside of my discipline (*cough* post-structuralists and post-modernists *cough*), but I shall make a plea to all those involved in the economics profession, or those who happen to read this blog, to consider taking a look at books on writing, to consider editing their own work rigorously (as rigorously as they consider arguments for, say, a minimum wage, or an increase in the interest rate), and to consider that writing is thinking and therefore the clearer your writing becomes the clearer your thinking becomes. 

I learned this the hard way, thinking previously that 'academic' writing was highfallutin, was purposefully obscurantist, and contained many latinates.  I was wrong.  I wrote poorly. As my writing became clearer I realised that what I thought profound was not, what I arose through simplifying and clarifying my work, what may initially have seemed a commonplace, could turn out to be something intriguing and nuanced. So I try to follow a different path now. I simplify, clarify, and simplify again - that way my thinking, my results, and my interpretation become clearer and I can understand whether what I say is interesting or uninteresting, revolutionary or prosaic, telling or irrelevant.  I hope that it eventually pays off.

I enjoyed this short personal article by Huda Akil 'In Person: The Pursuit of Happiness' where she examines the personal experience of happiness and joy when playing in a sandpit with her granddaughter & she comments on how we know so little, theoretically, about happiness, joy, contentment.  The article isn't comprehensive, but still worthwhile. Akil comments on the understanding that we have of 'negative' emotions, mainly through research into depression, stress and pain - for which we understand the basic neural correlates.  But, she asks, why don't we have a similar understanding of 'positive' emotions? Where are the animal studies? the studies of hormones? of neural circuitry? This science, relating to positive psychology and affective neuroscience, is still in its infancy ('studies have been done' says the Passive Voice) and its researchers are doing their best to isolate factors that many affect these positive emotions.   And, most importantly, Akil says, 'Science will tell.'