The Age of Erotic Capital? Legal Protection for the Ugly?

over a lifetime and assuming today’s mean wages, a handsome worker in America might on average make $230,000 more than a very plain one.

The Economist reviews three books on beauty;
Beauty Pays: Why Attractive People are More Successful. By Daniel Hamermesh
The Beauty Bias: The Injustice of Appearance in Life and Law. By Deborah Rhode
Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital. By Catherine Hakim

We of course recommend Hamermesh!

Chapter 8. Legal Protection for the Ugly
Fairness and Public Policy
What Kinds of Protection Are Possible?
How Have Existing Policies Been Used?
Is It Possible to Protect the Ugly?
What Justifies Protecting the Ugly?
What Justifies Not Protecting the Ugly?
What Is an Appropriate Policy?
Protecting the Ugly in the Near Future

If you’ve ever had a child, we want to know about your experience.

Please help Betsey and Wolfers by doing the survey.

A bit of a background on the music industry

British-Asian singer-songwriter, Jay Sean.

Income of an escort in Singapore

If you have youth, glamourous looks and finesse, we want you. Join us in entertaining our world wide clientele. Do not hesitate to contact us immediately. Selected applicants can expect to earn between US$10K to US$15K per month

Our Requirements: Age: 18-23 Height: 5’5" & above.

Not bad, given that 'the average monthly earnings in Singapore in the first quarter of 2008 is $4,316'

HOT from Singapore

THE controversial legislation which allows reimbursement of living kidney donors was passed in Parliament yesterday after a heated debate.

Even after Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan assured the House that the new law did not seek to legalise organ trading, not all were convinced.

When the final vote on the amendments to the Human Organ Transplant Act (Hota) was taken, four MPs abstained and one said 'no'.

The four were Madam Halimah Yacob (Jurong GRC), Ms Denise Phua (Jalan Besar GRC), opposition Hougang MP Low Thia Khiang and Non-Constituency MP Sylvia Lim.

The dissenter was Mr Christopher de Souza (Holland-Bukit Timah GRC), who objected on the grounds that the Bill lacked details to ensure donations would be 'not-for-profit, transparent and devoid of abuse'.

'While I agree with the principle of reimbursement...the framework in the Bill could be the subject of abuse,' he said.

All in, a dozen MPs spoke passionately on the Bill over the past two days.

They were all for three of the four changes - lifting the age limit on cadaveric donors, allowing recipients to swop donors for a better match, and increasing penalties for organ trading. But most were uncomfortable about allowing reimbursement of living kidney donors. Their main fear was that people would exploit it to induce donors to sell their kidneys, opening the back door to organ trading.

They were also worried about an uneven playing field, with the rich finding it easier than the poor to obtain kidneys.

Questions they posed: Should there be caps on payments? Should foreign donors be excluded from receiving reimbursements? What role does the Government play to safeguard against abuses?

-Kidney payment gets nod

Related;
Legal Kidney Selling in Singapore and the International Economy

Organ Selling in Singapore: The Sad Real Story

Human Organs for Sale, Legally, in … Which Country?

Kidney Exchange

Brother, can you spare a kidney?

Singapore debate legalising organ trading

Explainer of the Day

Gasoline prices

Murketing

The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are
Rob Walker

Can Terrorists be bribed?

A recent book event at World Bank, featuring Fukuyama amongst others;

Terrorism, Economic Development and Political Openness, edited by Philip Keefer and Norman Loayza.

Cross-national evidence identifies a nuanced role for economic development in reducing terrorist activity. Chapters by Blomberg and Hess support policy maker conclusions that poverty drives terrorism, finding that higher incomes impede terrorist activity. Krueger and Laitin, on the other hand, find little economic foundation for terrorist origins. Why the different conclusions? Krueger and Laitin investigate the overall effects of income across all countries. In “From (No) Guns to Butter,” Blomberg and Hess argue that the effects may differ between richer and poorer countries. Looking at these two groups of countries separately, they find that higher incomes significantly reduce the threat of terrorism in poorer countries, while the opposite holds in richer countries. Pooling all countries, the two effects would cancel out. The aggregate result may then mask the important role of economic development to offset terrorist threats to poorer countries. Because of methodological and data challenges, however, we must recognize that the issue is not yet resolved.

In contrast to the lack of conclusive evidence on whether the poverty of nations is a determinant of terrorism, the evidence is more uniform that individual poverty does not make people more likely to support or participate in terrorist activity. In a survey of 6,000 Muslims from 14 countries, the poorest respondents were the least sympathetic to terrorism (Fair and Haqqani 2006). Krueger and Laitin, Laitin and Shapiro, and Llussá and Tavares, in this volume, review evidence showing that individual terrorists are neither poor nor uneducated.

The second question of concern to this volume’s contributors is whether weak governance and closed political systems foment terrorism. Results in Krueger and Laitin and Blomberg and Hess, though using substantially different approaches, coincide in finding that terrorism is more likely to originate in countries that exhibit closed political systems. Their findings lend strong support to policy maker assertions that good governance and political responsiveness to citizens are fundamental deterrents of terrorism.

Krueger and Laitin and Blomberg and Hess also agree that the economic characteristics of countries affect whether they will be the target of terrorist activity. This leads to a provocative dichotomy. The origins of terrorism seem to be in countries that suffer from political oppression; the targets are countries that enjoy economic success....

The conclusion that terrorists are driven not by personal poverty, but by the political and economic climate of the countries from which they come raises new questions. Why should the social environment be more important than individual income? Why are terrorist organizations more common in countries with difficult political climates? In their chapter, Laitin and Shapiro provide reason to believe that the answer lies in the challenges of constructing a terrorist organization. Even though terrorism is not a purely ideological phenomenon, terrorist organizations depend on ideologically motivated, educated recruits. Unlike, for example, trench warfare, terrorism requires individual initiative and the exercise of judgment. Close monitoring by terrorist leaders of their “employees” is not possible. Ideological commitment helps solve part of this contracting problem. So also does an emphasis on recruiting well-educated individuals, who are most likely to come from more prosperous families.

Laitin and Shapiro emphasize that terrorism is not simply the direct outcome of irrational behavior. Terrorism is a complex strategy to achieve economic and political goals, having roots in distinct cultural and religious differences and using ideological commitment to sharpen its organization. Their conclusion is not surprising and could extend to the role of cultural and religious factors in social conflict throughout history. The One Hundred Years War is just one example of prolonged conflict in the West in which religious motivations were intertwined with other serious economic and political differences.

Their argument explains why terrorists themselves are rarely poor and why terrorist organizations are most likely to emerge in politically closed countries. On the one hand, terrorist organization is difficult and requires individuals with substantial human capital, which is more prevalent in families rich enough to educate their children well. On the other hand, to persuade such well-educated, relatively prosperous individuals to join a terrorist organization in democratic countries is difficult: the ideological payoffs are fewer and peaceful alternatives to terrorist methods are more abundant and effective. This also explains the paradox that individual poverty is less associated with terrorist activities than national poverty. National incomes and the political responsiveness of national governments are closely related: political environments that are repressive enough to facilitate terrorist recruitment are less likely to attract substantial investment and entrepreneurial activity.

Related;
The Riddle of Terrorism
Economics and Terrorism: What We Know, What We Should Know and the Data We Need

Terrorism and Civil War
Kto Kogo?: A Cross-Country Study of the Origins and Targets of Terrorism

Silly regulation?

Bmi, Britain's third largest airline, will fly near-empty "ghost flights" in order to keep valuable take-off and landing slots at Heathrow.

The company admitted it would continue flights, despite an expected slump in passenger numbers, in order to avoid losing the multimillion-pound slots.

Government "use-it-or-lose-it" rules mean airlines must use 80 per cent of their scheduled slots, or forfeit them.

The rise in fuel prices and an expected slump in passengers after the summer break will force many airlines to cancel flights. However, bmi said it will go to extreme lengths to ensure it does not lose any of its coveted slots.

Tim Bye, deputy chief executive of bmi, said the airline would prefer to cancel uneconomic flights, especially midday flights from London to Scotland and northern England, but were forced to fly the routes eight of ten times to avoid losing the slots.

"We have to keep flying to preserve our slots," he said. "What might have been a marginal service in most winters will become even worse, partly because of the price of fuel and partly because of the drop-off in demand that the general economic cycle will bring. Economic pressures will drive the demand down even more than airlines would normally expect."

Should we make condoms a free good?

via Presentation Zen

Assorted

When the going gets tough, central banks hope for a miracle

Fed Chief Bernanke Has How Many Friends On Facebook?

Sacking Mugabe

Deterring Suicide Bombers

Can Art Be Rated From 1 to 1,000?

Why Children Are Not ‘Little Adults’

Older Americans May Be Happier Than Younger Ones

Ohne Muslime kein Europa

Toynbee to Huntington: Globalization Gone Too Far?

Ellis on the American Creation

He said the founding had two tragedies and five triumphs. The tragedies were slavery and the plight of the native Americans. The first he called a Shakespearean tragedy, meaning it could have been avoided by human agency. The second he called a Greek tragedy, meaning it couldn't.

His best insights into slavery were that none of the founders tried to justify slavery as being consistent with the ideals of the founding and that everyone expected the slavery phenomenon to die a natural death to be followed by the expulsion of the Negro. No one foresaw a multiracial coexistence. Ellis argued that the the unforeseen invention of the cotton gin ignited the Southern economy and increased the demand for slaves.

Blog of the Day

The Wisdom of the Whores

The Drukard's Walk

A great talk from Authors@Google;
The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
by Leonard Mlodinow

Related;
Numbers Guy Interview: Leonard Mlodinow;

WSJ: If you can pick an index-outperforming stock 51% of the time, how many picks do you need to make to have better than a 99% chance of outperforming the index? (We’ll assume your picks are uncorrelated and that the magnitude of any outperformance or underperformance is the same.)

Mr. Mlodinow: Consider a stock analyst versus an index fund in a kind of stock-picking World Series. The law of large numbers says if you play a best-of-X series you can be confident that the best team will win — if X is large enough. But for small X, say, a best-of-seven series, there is a surprisingly large chance that the lesser team will win. So in sports just because one team is superior doesn’t mean it will win the series.

The same uncertainty applies to the market. For example, suppose the stock picker has a 51/49 edge over the index fund, meaning he or she will outperform it, in the long run, in 51% of the years in which they compete. How long is the long run in this case? The mathematics shows that in order to justify 99% confidence that the stock picker will outperform the index fund more often than it underperforms it, the contest would have to go on for about 13,700 years...

WSJ: After a particular drug is on the market, it will cause a particularly serious adverse effect to happen to one of every 3,000 patients in an epidemiological, i. e., post-hoc analysis. In retrospect, how many patients must be tested in the randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled, clinical trial to achieve 95% confidence that the side effect will show up?

Mr. Mlodinow: You need roughly 14,000 patients. Here is how you get that: The process is governed by the binomial distribution, which can be approximated by the normal distribution. The chance of an adverse reaction in any one patient is one in 3,000. Since you want a 95% confidence interval for one (or more) reactions, you want enough patients so that 1.00 is 1.64 standard deviations (or more) below the mean. With 14,000 patients the mean number of adverse reactions will be about 4.6 and the standard deviation is about 2.2, which gives you what you require. (I have rounded my answer to the nearest 1,000).

Correction: To achieve 95% confidence that the side effect will show up, you need 8,985 patients receiving the drug. This blog post misstated the number as 14,000. See the comments of this post for more details.

WSJ: Might we need to proceed irrationally in our lives to succeed? In other words, if we really believed that so much of success was the result of luck, wouldn’t a lot of us just give up trying?

Mr. Mlodinow: Some theorize that this is the evolutionary reason that we like to assume we are in control, even when we clearly aren’t. That may be so, but I don’t mourn the role of luck, I celebrate it. All else equal, it is a lot more fun not knowing how your book will do, or how your life will turn out, than it would be if everything could be determined by a logical calculation. Moreover, the fact that luck matters means you can help yourself by being persistent. A failure doesn’t mean you are unworthy, nor does it preclude success on the next try. As Thomas J. Watson, the highly successful IBM pioneer, said, “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate.”

Podcasts

The Black Death;

In October 1347, a Genoese trading ship arrived at the busy port of Messina in Sicily. Readying to dock, it would have nosed in among many similar ships doing similar things. But this ship was special because this ship had rats and the rats had fleas and the fleas had plague. Within four years, over a third of the population of Europe lay dead. This was the Black Death and its terrible progress was captured by the Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio who declared “in those years a dead man was then of no more account than a dead goat”.

The Black Death devastated Europe, changed its economics and broke up its society, but did the disease also bring subtler transformations in its art, its religion and its intellectual outlook?

Hanson on Signalling

Your Lawmakers at Work

The Same Old Song on High Gas Prices;

In one of the more pointed exchanges, Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, seized on the record $40.6 billion profit of Exxon Mobil in 2007. She pounded on the company’s senior vice president, J. Stephen Simon, demanding to know if gas prices would be lower if the company earned a few billion dollars less.

At another point, Ms. Waters brazenly suggested that perhaps the American oil industry should be nationalized, acknowledging that it was an “extreme step” but one that might be necessary if outsize profits and exorbitant gasoline prices continued.

“Thank you for being here today,” Ms. Waters told the executives. “If you feel a little bit beaten up on, we all feel beaten up on, so just share the pain. We get our behinds kicked every day in our districts about what is going on.”

Authors and Books

Can't Remember What I Forgot: The Good News from the Front Lines of Memory Research
by Sue Halpern


Why Popcorn Costs So Much at the Movies: And Other Pricing Puzzles
by Richard B. McKenzie



Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe
by Arianna Huffington


Mergers & Acquisitions
by Dana Vachon

NAMA

A simple guide — NAMA Negotiations

Non-agricultural market access negotiations

Bryan Caplan on Fox

Special Announcement- Offering Free Advertising

Dear Spammers/anonymous advertisers,

Instead of posting anonymous comments advertising your business/affiliation, I will post on a blog post your business if you'd care to email me.

regards
MJ