Restaurants in Paris

The average French worker is just as productive as the average American worker.  But the former works about 30 per cent fewer hours per year than the latter.  As a result, France is only about 70 per cent as rich as the United States.  Why do the French work so much less?  Edward Prescott, who won the Economics Nobel in 2004, reckons it is largely because of high taxes.  Olivier Blanchard of MIT has a more nuanced view: lower working hours in France, and elsewhere in Europe, are caused by a combination of high taxes and restrictive labour market regulations.  Edward Glaeser and Alberto Alesina, couple of Harvard economists, stress the role of the unions in restricting work hour.  They further argue that fewer hours at work, and thus higher leisure time, reflect the society’s choice: basically the French choose to take longer vacations than Americans, even if this means they drive smaller cars and live in smaller houses.  A cruder version of this is the argument, familiar to anyone who has ever had a drink with a Parisian, that the American society may be richer, but the French have égalité.  Well, the events of the past few weeks seriously question that notion.

On monogamy

I’ve often wondered why the Europeans adopted monogamy.  Some might say this is just another example of the Enlightenment values.  But that to me is ducking the question.  The Enlightenment values, something about individual freedom, are not guaranteed by monogamy — patriarchy dominated in the West until very recently, and Pakistan allowed its women to vote before Switzerland did.  If you’re happy to lord it over one wife, why should you shrink from lording it over a harem?  So it’s not the Enlightenment that caused the West to adopt monogamy.  In fact, it’s not even clear that the Enlightenment values even necessarily endorse monogamy: if a bunch of individuals want to live in a hippy commune then surely that’s their business.

China in history

I was watching a documentary on whether Zheng He’s Chinese fleet discovered the world in 1421 (http://www.1421.tv/).  I haven’t read the book, so can’t really do a full blown review, just some thoughts instead.

A bad book on the CIA

These days, the CIA has been in news a lot, over 9/11, Iraq, torture, fights for the Bush Administration, fights against the Administration.  So I thought I’d check out The Company: a novel of the CIA, the book that according to the Economist should have been doing to the Company what the Godfather did for the mob.  Another reviewer said this is the definitive novel of the Cold War, while its authour, Robert Litell, was compared with Le Carre.  Tall claims, and in my opinion, largely off the mark.

On increasing returns

Standard economic theory is based on the assumption of diminishing marginal returns.  This means that, for example, if you keep drinking coke, the fifth can probably won’t give you as much satisfaction as the fourth one, which wouldn’t have given you as much as the third one, and so forth.  This also means that if you kept pouring in more machines without increasing your workers, your marginal machine wouldn’t give as much output.