The Oscar goes to......

Before Sunday, British bookie already closed the bet for Helen Mirren to win the Oscar. Before the closure, you had to bet 66 British pounds to win 1 pathetic pound. They still couldn't have enough gamblers to bet on other actresses to cover their potential losses. Guess what? Ms. Mirren did win.

Unlike college basketballs, Oscar is much easier to predict. The awards are not determined by a small panel of judges, but by thousands of academy members. The group is not too bad as a proxy to the true population taste. I guess the book keepers just need to do a little telephone survey and calculate the statistics.

That might also be why betting on the Oscar is not as popular as betting on sports.
(Picture: imbd.com)

Hard to think about anything else

We are asked to present a trade-related paper in Prof. McCalman's class. I pick Dani Rodrik's provocative "Industrial Policy for The Twenty-First Century". Provocative is an adjective used by Prof. McCalman, but I think Rodrik would rather call it "part and parcel of today's broader, conventional agenda of development."

After browsing through the paper, I couldn't get the thoughts out of my head. It is not a conventional economics paper. There isn't any model or mathematics. Instead it cuts right into the economic meanings of government intervention in development.

The economic success of East Asia is often compared to the failure in Latin America. Economists have been trying to solve the mystery and prescribing medicines to developing countries. Yet I don't see any academic piece as powerful as Rodrik's. As a libertarian, I seldom believe government should play any role in economic development. But Rodrik does have insightful analysis that provides foundations for the necessity of government intervention.

Since my presentation is only open to our class, you are not going to know my full critique of this paper. But if you have too much time to kill, read it. It will probably change your perspectives of this world. As Robert Lucas' famous quote says, "Once one starts to think about [economic development], it is hard to think about anything else."

(Picture: Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University)

God bless the Internet

I have heard of MIT's OpenCourseWare before, but when I read an article in today's Wall Street Journal, it evoked my interests again. Since I became a TA for undergrad's econometrics class, I have been constantly thinking about whether our department is demanding enough in terms of course intensity. So I checked out MIT's OpenCourseWare and found that MIT's econometrics class was taught by Joshua Angrist, the phenomenal econometrician and labor economist. Wow!

It turns out that the course is indeed more rigorous than the one we are teaching. I now can refer the website to those more knowledge-hungry students and re-educate myself as well. God bless the Internet and, well, MIT.

(Picture: MIT OpenCourseWare)

No union zone

A fellow graduate student from environmental studies came to my office hours the other day. Without much hesitation, she politely asked me why I didn't sign up for TA union. I still hadn't recovered from the fact that she wasn't one of my students, but managed to tell her that I am against unions in general. She must be shocked because she seemed to be ready to pull out a form for me to sign up on the spot but had to stop at my answer. Anyway, she gathered her composure and told me, "Do you know that you are still entitled to all the benefits even if you are not a member?"

I don't like being patronized, but didn't have a quick response at the time. I simply said yes and she walked away. Later in the week, one of my classmates told me that she encountered the same rep and was sort of forced to sign up.

It is all good that people stand up and fight for their own rights as long as they don't become a monopoly. Any student who has taken econ 1 will tell you that a labor union is a monopoly in labor supply. The problem with our monopoly union is that they deprive me of getting a better deal with the university. Without the union, many good TAs like me will be better off. (I am bragging here but it is students who say I am a good TA.)

Why is that? As the same econ 1 student would tell you, the price will go up if there is a shortage in supply. With economics becomes a more and more popular major, economics department simply can't find enough TAs to help professors in larger and larger undergrad classes. Good TAs would have a niche in bargaining benefits were not for the union's intervention. And they think they are doing you a favor?

The deeper question about TA union is with their existence in the first place. Honestly, no one forces you to become a graduate student or a TA. You are simply weighing the costs and benefits of different career paths. You know what is on the table when you decide to do graduate studies. You can walk away from the deal any time. If universities do not offer competing benefits for graduate TAs, they will not get enough TAs to do the job. That is a fact and the balance of power was there long before the union. TA unions are not helping TAs, at least not those good ones.

A few words for the union officials: It is good that you find a cause in your life, but fighting for TA benefits is definitely too small a battle for people like you. Take it to the streets, Max Weber would tell you.

(Picture: www.uawhonda.com)

Cool heads and warm hearts on global warming

The most often cited evidence for global warming is the "Hockey Stick" graph shown here. Climatologists who believe in the heating up of this planet have constructed the temperature time series and concluded that industrialization has caused global warming. Many people are convinced by advocates, such as Al Gore, that if we don't do anything about global warming right away, the human race is doomed.

There are many ways to approach this issue, but the "cool heads with warm hearts" method should be adopted here. Being trained as both an engineer and an economist, I believe in science and logical reasoning. Science is evolved around skepticism. Whenever we see some so-called conclusive evidence, we must always ask how the researchers get the data and what their methodology is. I don't know how they collect earth temperature in year 1000 when people didn't even have a measure for temperature. Even if there is a scientific way to do it, extrapolation is inevitable. With extrapolation, scientists are able to manipulate the results anyway they want. Such disbelief makes it hard for me to agree with the inconvenient truth from the get-go.

That being said, I still think global warming is an issue that needs more resources devoted to. Paul Samuleson said it in the best way it can be, "because the uncertainties are so one-sided, with a small probability of very substantial damages, it might be rational to pay a 'risk premium' in terms of taking additional steps today to slow climate change. Just as individuals find it rational to sacrifice a little income today to buy fire detectors to lower the chance of a catastrophic fire, so might societies find it prudent to sacrifice some of their national incomes today to rescue the chance of catastrophic global warming in the centuries to come."

I am willing to sacrifice a little bit of today's income to buy some insurance for my future generations. I just don't like liberals' all-out war on fossil fuels or even on economic development. The political motivations hiding behind a well-meaning social issue disgust me.

(Picture: Silflay Hraka)