Beard me up, Shariq

As this Deutche Welle video shows, there's a big boom in the business of beard enhancement in Istanbul.  Facially (hair) challenged Muslims come from all over to make men of themselves, by having hair from the backs of their heads transplanted to their rosy cheeks.

All to overcome the discrimination against the beardless in places like Kuwait and Qatar.

Wait til' the ObamaCare-crats get wind of this.

When even the Marxists can't deny it...

Student of Samuel Bowles and co-founder of the Union for Radical Political Economists, Herb Gintis, is honest enough to report his research findings;

My colleagues and I found dramatic evidence of this positive relationship between markets and morality in our study of fairness in simple societies—hunter-gatherers, horticulturalists, nomadic herders, and small-scale sedentary farmers—in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Twelve professional anthropologists and economists visited these societies and played standard ultimatum, public goods, and trust games with the locals. As in advanced industrial societies, members of all of these societies exhibited a considerable degree of moral motivation and a willingness to sacrifice monetary gain to achieve fairness and reciprocity, even in anonymous one-shot situations. More interesting for our purposes, we measured the degree of market exposure and cooperation in production for each society, and we found that the ones that regularly engage in market exchange with larger surrounding groups have more pronounced fairness motivations. The notion that the market economy makes people greedy, selfish, and amoral is simply fallacious.

That means that capitalism (a free market) is nice.

Stream of coiniousness

As Penelope Cruz's character said to Javier Bardem's in Vicky Cristina Barcelona when he had to remind her that she'd once stabbed him, 'That.'

The Central Bank of Ireland has said it regrets an error on a new commemorative coin that misquotes James Joyce.

The 10 euro coin features an image of the writer and a quote from his groundbreaking novel, Ulysses, which contains an extra word.

Joyce, one of Ireland's most famous writers, wrote: "Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read."

However, the coin contains a surplus "that" in the second sentence.

Why bother apologizing for only one surplus word?

There are guys who'd pay for the privilege

Malawi doesn't seem to get the point;

Malawi has accused US singer Madonna of "bullying state officials" after she reportedly complained about her treatment on a visit to the country.

She probably thought they'd like it.

Peer Review

The economists (Xiadong Liu, Eleonora Patacchini and Yves Zenou, at least) are catching up with the world's parents);

Data has been collected on US students in grades 7-12 from a nationally representative sample of roughly 130 private and public schools in years 1994-95. The most interesting aspect of the data is the friendship information, which is based upon actual friend nominations. It is collected when individuals were at school where students were asked to identify their best friends from a school roster (up to five males and five females). As a result, one can reconstruct the whole geometric structure of the friendship networks.

We find that:

• For juvenile delinquency, students are mostly influenced by the aggregate activity of their friends (local-aggregate model).

This indicates important social-multiplier peer effects in delinquent activities.

• For education, both the social-multiplier and social-norm effects matter, even though the magnitude is higher for the social norm effect.

This indicates that students tend to conform to the social norm of their friends in terms of effort in education (local-average model).

As Thomas Sowell finds himself repeating in his numerous books, This may seem obvious, but...it is amazing how often the obvious is disregarded in public policy. The three economists spell it out;

The idea is to remove the criminal that reduces total crime in a network the most ....the removal of the key player can have large effects on crime because of the feedback effects or ‘social multipliers’ at work. As the fraction of individuals participating in a criminal behaviour increases, the impact on others is multiplied through social networks.

Keep away from bad companions, kids!

For education policy, our results show that the local-average model is at work. This suggests that one should change the social norm in the school or the classroom. One should try to implement the idea that it is ‘cool’ to work hard at school.

An example of a policy that has tried to change the social norm of students in terms of education is the charter-school policy. The charter schools are very good in screening teachers and at selecting the best ones. In particular, the ‘No Excuses policy’ (Angrist et al. 2010, 2012) is a highly standardised and widely replicated charter model that features a long school day, an extended school year, selective teacher hiring, strict behaviour norms, and emphasises traditional reading and math skills.

The main objective of these policies is to change the social norms of disadvantage kids by being very strict on discipline. This is a typical policy that is in accordance with the local-average model since its aim is to change the social norm of students in terms of education. 

Another way to do that is to allow parents to easily remove their children from dysfunctional schools and deny those schools taxpayer funds.

As William of Occam knew, the best ideas are usually the simplest ideas.

El último sueño

Sara Montiel, the Spanish actress who starred opposite Gary Cooper and Burt Lancaster in Vera Cruz, won't be needing to wake up early anymore;

One of the country’s most gossiped-about actresses, she was an unmistakable metaphor of the real Spain of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

After the success of El último cuplé she began to star in a series of musical melodramas – and to name her price: “A million dollars a movie.” She also chose all her own songs, costumes and even her timetable: “Because I refused to get up early again. In Mexico and the US I had to get up at 5.30 and six in the morning. Never again!”

Si.  No más.

Oh, you noticed too

A Brit remembers how it was back then;

...when Margaret Thatcher won power in May 1979, it was against the backdrop of perhaps the gloomiest decade in modern British history.

Shorn of its empire, Britain now cut a very miserable figure on the world stage. For at least two decades we had been falling behind our rivals, and now the contrast was painful to see.

Britain's average inflation rate for the 1970s was 13%. West Germany's was just 5%. Our unemployment rate was 4%. Theirs was only 2%. Our major cities seemed shabby and seedy, our newspapers were full of strikes and walkouts, almost every week seemed to bring some new atrocity in Northern Ireland.

Over the course of the 1970s, two Prime Ministers, Edward Heath and James Callaghan, had been broken by the trade unions, while a third, Harold Wilson, descended into paranoia. Foreign papers talked of Britain as the Sick Man of Europe. Callaghan himself told his Labour colleagues: "If I were a young man, I would emigrate."

Which Thatcher reversed almost as an act of will. After her, taxes were lower, productivity higher and foreign capital flocked to Britain.

And, oh yeah, she helped Ronald Reagan defeat the Soviet Union.