The housing bubble vs. the financial crisis

In the mid-2000s many regular folks knew that something was weird in housing. Of course everyone was aware that there was a short term windfall to be made if you could flip. But there were normal discussions about the bubble, and when it would burst, or if the weird arguments by some economists and the real estate industry that there wasn’t a bubble were true. In contrast regular people weren’t aware of the possibility of a financial crisis. I recall saying stupid things about the “Great Moderation,” parroting what I’d heard smarter people who I assumed knew better say, in the summer of 2008. Or take a look at some of the comments when I mooted the possibility of a recession in mid-2007: “They’re practically glorified hiccups nowadays. I don’t get what the big deal is.”

With that in mind I looked at Google Trends for two queries, “housing bubble” and “financial crisis.” The top panel is search query, and the bottom panel is news query. The financial crisis query is what you’d expect:

The housing bubble query is more interesting:

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Loose vs. tight societies

ResearchBlogging.orgA new paper in Science, Differences Between Tight and Loose Cultures: A 33-Nation Study, is making the media rounds. Here’s NPR:

…The idea for this study really dates to the 1960s. Back then, an anthropologist decided to evaluate a few dozen obscure cultures and see if he could rank them on a scale from “tight” to “loose.” He defined tight cultures as having a lot of rules, which people violate at their peril. Loose cultures are more relaxed in their expectations, and more forgiving of people who deviate.

The Tightness Scale

“So for example, you might have been asked, how appropriate is it to curse in the bank or kiss in a public park, or eat or read a newspaper in a classroom? And we were able to derive scores of how constrained, in general situations, they are, versus how much they have latitude in different countries.”

“Some of the cultures that are quite tight in our sample include places like Singapore, Japan, Pakistan,” Gelfand says. “Whereas many loose societies include countries like New Zealand, the Netherlands, the United States.”

The abstract from the paper is a little harder to parse:

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Comments in the republic of Khan

So today I received an email from regular commenter German Dziebel:

Razib, what’s your relationship with the Discover Magazine? Up until now I thought of your blog as more or less a public forum, rather than a private franchise. Please clarify, so we don’t bicker about ethics in public.

I have no idea what German precisely means by “public forum” or “private franchise,” though I have a general sense. Discover Magazine pays me to blog. I also have an editor who I consult now and then. For example when I discussed traffic patterns to this website I asked if that would be OK, since I know that sort of information is often material sites like to keep somewhat private. When Marnie Dunsmore threatened to sue me for “stealing her ideas” I shot an email to the editor to notify him of her strange accusations. But in general my communication with Discover Magazine is limited to technical issues, as well as some exchanges of ideas and topics to post on (this isn’t formal, the editor knows the kind of stories and papers I dig, and will send me an email or point a tweet my way).

I like it that way. It gives me time to blog. There’s a lot of interesting stuff in my “task stack” which I never get to because of the pressures of time. When I began blogging in 2002 I did so with an assurance I wouldn’t have to spend too much time on technical or administrative crap with my co-bloggers. That didn’t totally work out, but it is an ideal which I like to aim for. This post is a violation of that ideal. I’m engaging in meta blather about comments policy and what not when I could be blogging, finishing the coffee I’m drinking right now, or watching the episode of South Park which I haven’t watched yet.

If I had to condense my summary for how I run these comments, I’d say I run this place as if I’m Sulla during the period in his life when he was the dictator of the Roman Republic. Since most of you probably don’t get the allusion, I will elaborate….

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"Gross national happiness" in numbers

Bhutan famously espouses “gross national happiness”:

The term “gross national happiness” was coined in 1972 by Bhutan’s former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, who has opened Bhutan to the age of modernization, soon after the demise of his father, King Jigme Dorji Wangchuk. He used the phrase to signal his commitment to building an economy that would serve Bhutan’s unique culture based on Buddhist spiritual values….

Apparently the nation has recent switched from absolute to constitutional monarchy:

Bhutan’s political system has developed from an absolute monarchy into a constitutional monarchy. In 1999, the fourth king of Bhutan created a body called the Lhengye Zhungtshog (Council of Ministers). The Druk Gyalpo (King of Druk Yul) is head of state. Executive power is exercised by the Lhengye Zhungtshog, the council of ministers. Legislative power was vested in both the government and the former Grand National Assembly.

On the 17th of December 2005, the 4th King, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, announced to a stunned nation that the first general elections would be held in 2008, and that he would abdicate the throne in favor of his eldest son, the crown prince….

From what I can tell the royal house of Bhutan seems genuinely sincere. More plainly paternalist than deiviously despotic.

Below are some Google Data trend lines comparing Bhutan to some of its smaller South Asian neighbors, as well as Sweden and Equatorial Guinea as comparisons at the high and low ends.

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The revolution swallowing Powell's Books?

A friend asked me today if I thought that Powell’s would be around a year from now. I had no idea what he was referring to. By that, I don’t mean that I didn’t know he was referring to Powell’s Books of Portland. I mean that I had no idea that Powell’s was in any trouble. I thought of Powell’s as an institution which could weather any shocks, its huge selection and special experience giving it an edge over other independent booksellers (and even over Barnes & Noble and Borders). The main Powell’s store covers a full city block, 1.6 acres. The total inventory of the company is at 4 million books (new, used, etc.). The downtown Portland location can be overwhelming and all consuming. And I have many fond memories of the Powell’s in the Hawthorne District from when I lived in Portland in 2002. In fact, between 2000-2005 I purchased quite a few books at the main location, as well as at Powell’s Technical. Despite not living in Portland for most of that period, I regularly visited, and always made a point to get lost at Powell’s when I came through town.

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The power of one (Nubian that is)

Maju pointed me to a new paper on the genetics of Sudanese today. My interest was piqued, then not so much when I looked more closely. Genetic variation and population structure among Sudanese populations as indicated by the 15 Identifiler STR loci:

Background
There is substantial ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity among the people living in east Africa, Sudan and the Nile Valley. The region around the Nile Valley has a long history of succession of different groups, coupled with demographic and migration events, potentially leading to genetic structure among humans in the region.

Results
We report the genotypes of the 15 Identifiler microsatellite markers for 498 individuals from 18 Sudanese populations representing different ethnic and linguistic groups. The combined power of exclusion (PE) was 0.9999981, and the combined match probability was 1 in 7.4 1017. The genotype data from the Sudanese populations was combined with previously published genotype data from Egypt, Somalia and the Karamoja population from Uganda. The Somali population was found to be genetically distinct from the other northeast African populations. Individuals from northern Sudan clustered together with those from Egypt, and individuals from southern Sudan clustered with those from the Karamoja population. The similarity of the Nubian and Egyptian populations suggest that migration, potentially bidirectional, occurred along the Nile river Valley, which is consistent with the historical evidence for long-term interactions between Egypt and Nubia.

Conclusion
We show that despite the levels of population structure in Sudan, standard forensic summary statistics are robust tools for personal identification and parentage analysis in Sudan. Although some patterns of population structure can be revealed with 15 microsatellites, a much larger set of genetic markers is needed to detect fine-scale population structure in east Africa and the Nile Valley.

The upside: nearly 500 individuals from a huge range of ethnic groups in Sudan. This is the level of population coverage you’d want. Most of the ethnic groups cover the sample size range from 10 to 50. The downside: only 15 microsatellite markers. About the same number as in the study which I critiqued earlier this week. This is just not a huge number. The authors did try very hard to prune the marker set to be ancestrally informative on this scale, but I think it’s pretty obvious that there are major shortcomings in their analysis. 15 STRs is probably useful for inter-continental genetic variation, but not for intra-continental differences. The paper is open access so you can read the whole thing, but I want to highlight a speculation which they offer based on their results:

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Toward evolutionary monism

Is there any substantive difference between natural, sexual, and artificial selection? Or is it just semantic sugar, useful for humans in our own cognitive bookkeeping? I lean toward the latter proposition. To some extent I would think that this is an irrelevant issue, selection is selection, but I have encountered folks who seem surprised at analogies between “artificial” and “natural” selection quite regularly. Of course Charles Darwin famously elided the distinctions across the two categories in his original works in the 19th century (this was later a subject of controversy, insofar as Darwin’s conflation of the properties of artificial and natural selection may have misled him in terms of the weight of factors shaping evolution in the wild).

These are the questions which bubble to the fore of my mind when I encounter reports such as Elizabeth Pennisi’s in Science, On the Trail of Brain Domestication Genes:

Researchers have proposed that bonobos evolved domesticated behavior to encourage group living. By isolating a group of 40 putative brain domestication genes in the prefrontal cortex and comparing their expression in humans versus chimps and bonobos, researchers found that the activity of that gene group in bonobos was clearly “domesticated” compared with chimps, they reported at the Biology of Genomes meeting.

The full piece is gated, so here’s the relevant section in the details:

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Twitpic, all your photos are ours

We’re in a brave new world when it comes to our conception of property. I’m on the skeptical side when it comes to the current aggregate long term utility of IP law (I think the value of property rights may be overwhelmed by the abuse which large corporations are inflicting upon the spirit of the laws). But I thought I’d pass on what everyone is talking about in relation to Twitpic, Why I abandoned Twitpic photo-sharing:

– 1. If someone wants to use my photo commercially, they need to ask Twitpic (but not me) and then credit Twitpic (but not me).

– 2. Twitpic can use or change my photos, in any, way without asking me first.

The financial rationale for this sort of behavior on the part of firms providing free services is pretty straightforward. If you want some level of control and ownership of what you produce, you’ll probably have to pay for services which grant you these liberties in the future, at least if you want to utilize the cloud.

For the record, I don’t mind if people somehow make money with my genotype. But I would be very skeptical of individuals who somehow assert exclusive ownership. When you grant exclusive rights to an idea, an abstraction, it isn’t surprising that individuals will begin to extract rents.