The American Time Use Survey and Economic Imperialism?

So, the current locus of collective action for social scientists seems to be the petition and drive to save the American Time Use Survey (petition details here). I don’t know too much about the data itself, but it seems like an incredibly useful font of information – what little research I’ve read based off time-diary studies (for example, this 2005 book on Honduran immigrants by Leah Schmalzbauer) has been extremely enlightening, replicating some of the nuance of ethnography with a much larger n. One question this debate forces us to ask, however, is what can we learn from the ATUS?

Stiglitz on the True Cost Iraq War: “$3 Trillion”

Aida Edemariam of the Guardian talks to author Joseph Stiglitz about the true cost of the Iraq war:

Some time in 2005, Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, who also served as an economic adviser under Clinton, noted that the official Congressional Budget Office estimate for the cost of the war so far was of the order of $500bn. The figure was so low, they didn’t believe it, and decided to investigate. The paper they wrote together, and published in January 2006, revised the figure sharply upwards, to between $1 and $2 trillion. Even that, Stiglitz says now, was deliberately conservative: “We didn’t want to sound outlandish.”

So what did the Republicans say? “They had two reactions,” Stiglitz says wearily. “One was Bush saying, ‘We don’t go to war on the calculations of green eye-shaded accountants or economists.’ And our response was, ‘No, you don’t decide to fight a response to Pearl Harbour on the basis of that, but when there’s a war of choice, you at least use it to make sure your timing is right, that you’ve done the preparation. And you really ought to do the calculations to see if there are alternative ways that are more effective at getting your objectives. The second criticism – which we admit – was that we only look at the costs, not the benefits. Now, we couldn’t see any benefits. From our point of view we weren’t sure what those were.”

I didn’t plan on including such large excerpts of a news story in this blog, but this story felt too important and well-composed to chop out just a tiny excerpt. More on how Stiglitz did it after the cut.

A Funny (but Insightful) Critique of Freakonomics

The Economists’ Voice – “Freak-Freakonomics”: Israeli economist Ariel Rubinstein gives his answer to Freakonomics.

A sample quote:

“In this way, Levitt discovered dozens of deceitful teachers. The [Israeli Defense Force's] intelligence units and credit card companies use similar algorithms. What have we learned about Levitt? He is a smart guy with connections in the municipality. What is the connection to economics? None. Like early imperialists, who conquered other nations in search of natural resources, economists like Levitt (and myself) have swaggered off into other fields in search of interesting questions.”

Rubinstein goes on to scold Levitt for using some shoddy facts as well – apparently 4 million of the 7 million children that ‘went missing’ from tax forms when social security numbers were required for all children claimed as deductions actually returned in short order, most likely the parents had not yet filed paperwork to get SSNs for their children and thus had to wait til the next year to claim them again. And so on.

I’ve read a number of critiques of Freakonomics, but I missed this one from 2006. Some challenge the underlying findings on methodological grounds(for example, the contentious link between legalized abortion and decreases in violent crime), others the data itself (like the above ‘missing children’), and others year question the value of ‘theory-free’ empiricism. But Rubinstein’s critique is one of the punchiest, and I recommend it if you have 10 minutes to spare and some nagging questions about Freakonomics.

The Economics of Abundance/The Scarcity of Attention?

Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business:

There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. Free shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.

I highly recommend the linked article above on the economics of “free”. The article has a nice breakdown of different sorts of free economies, including:

• “Freemium”, where premium users subsidize free content for the rest (a model that has failed for most newspaper websites, for example)
• “Cross-subsidies”, which covers the classic Gillette razor-blade model (give away the razor to convince people to pay for the blades)
• “Zero marginal cost”, such as online music which is not free to generate but is (virtually) free to copy and distribute
• “Gift economy”, which the articles categorizes open source software under. 
• “Advertising”, which covers traditional television and radio content paid for by advertising sponsors

Hello (academic blogging) world!

About myself: My name is Dan Hirschman and I am a (budding) Sociologist. My interests range over a variety of topics but lately I have been very interested in Economics (both as a way of understanding the world and as a social phenomenon). I’m also interested in the Free Software/Open Source movement, Fair Trade coffee, and other examples of ‘ethical consumption’. My earlier work (of which there is very little) mostly focused on immigration from Latin America to the United States. I am also interested in the rhetoric of research, and in particular quantitative methodology. Lastly, I’ve spent a lot of time recently pondering the 2008 presidential race and learning how to cook.

About this blog: The idea of a commonplace book came to me from the delightful A Series of Unfortunate Events, by Lemony Snicket. This blog will hopefully serve as a sort of commonplace book for my thoughts on the above subjects. In particular, I hope to use it to motivate myself to read a bit more carefully, and post little book and article reviews as reminders to myself at least.