2. What restaurant staff should never do, parts one and two

3. The solution to H1N1? Bum shaking not hand shaking.

4. Measurement error in the GRE

It has been 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell. But deep in the forest here, a red deer called Ahornia still refuses to cross the old Iron Curtain.

Ahornia inhabits the thickly wooded mountains along what once was the fortified border between West Germany and Czechoslovakia. At the height of the Cold War, a high electric fence, barbed wire and machine-gun-carrying guards cut off Eastern Europe from the Western world. The barriers severed the herds of deer on the two sides as well.

…Herds of them roam both sides of the old NATO-Warsaw Pact border here but mysteriously turn around when they approach it. This although the deer alive today have no memory of the ominous fence.

The full story in the WSJ.

Erik Meyersson looks at post-election education and employment trends for women, comparing municipalities where an Islamic party barely won the mayor’s seat to those where an Islamic party barely lost–a regression discontinuity:

Islamic rule has had a large positive effect on education, especially for women. This impact is not only larger when the opposing candidate is from a secular left-wing, instead of a right-wing party; but also in poorer and more pious areas.

This participation result also extends to the labor market, with fewer women classifi…ed as housewives, a larger share of employed women receiving wages, and a shift in female employment towards higher-paying sectors.

Meyersson hails from IISS in Stockholm, and this is his job market paper.

If this ever struck you as backbreaking labor:

Then this invention will make you wonder why the rectangular water jug still exists:

It is the Q Drum.

We need to stop thinking about human rights as trumps and begin thinking of them as a language that creates the basis for deliberation.

I’ve been reading Michael Ignatieff’s 2001 lectures, Human Rights As Politics and Idolatry. Ignatieff is a true human rights pragmatist. To him, rights are neither inviolable nor intrinsic. Inviolability is impossible, since rights so often contradict even themselves. Intrinsic? This requires us to root rights in religious faith (which is exclusionary or imperial). Among humanists, it is simple idolatry.

This seems like an odd thing for a captain of human rights to argue. But Ignatieff argues that rights need not be inviolable or intrinsic to be universal. Rights exist to protect individuals from tyranny. They are universal because they are useful to all.

This brings him to my favorite argument:

In order to reconcile democracy and human rights, Western policy will have to put more emphasis not on democracy alone but on constitutionalism, the entrenchment of a balance of powers, judicial review of executive decisions, and enforceable minority rights guarantees. Democracy without constitutionalism is simply ethnic majority tyranny.

I’m sympathetic to Ignatieff. Certainly I think human rights serve an instrumental and universal purpose, and that purpose is sufficient to enact and protect them. But is there no deeper basis for human rights than simple pragmatism?

The critics, who write responses at the end of the book, are not so critical. Where are the philosophers who argue the intrinsic basis for rights? Reader suggestions welcome.

Monday is a public lecture, Child Soldiers: How Our Hype Can Harm.  Tuesday is a more academic paper, The Industrial Organization of Rebellion: The Logic of Forced Recruitment and Child Soldiering.

When I gave the public lecture at SFU, some people asked if there was a paper. Not really–it’s a synthesis of a body of work–though this and this paper are close.

The academic paper should be posted in a couple of weeks.

Thomas Cromwell is now a little over forty years old. He is a man of strong build, not tall. Various expressions are available to his face, and one is readable: an expression of stifled amusement…

It is said he knows by heart the entire New Testament in Latin, and so as a servant if the cardinal is apt–ready with a text if abbots flounder. His speech is low and rapid, his manner assured; he is at home in a courtroom or waterfront, bishop’s palace or inn yard…

He works all hours, first up and last to bed. He makes money and he spends it. He will take a bet on anything.

That is Thomas Cromwell, onetime Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII, reconsidered by novelist Hilary Mantel.

Most of us know Cromwell as the great villain to the great saint Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons. Mantel gives us a different picture: Cromwell as the moderate man of reason, with More playing the sanctimonious and selfish ideologue.

I bought the novel, Wolf Hall, after reading this glowing review in the New Yorker. It’s marvelous. If you’re the sort who thinks historical fiction is mostly tripe, you’ll be mostly right in general, but mostly surprised with this book. It won the Man Booker prize this year.

If you’re the sort who loved Pillars of the Earth, it’s much like that, but less hackneyed and just as enjoyable.

I look at the MIT faculty. It is a highly international group and they are certainly churning out great research except when the World Cup is played and then the place turns into the United Nations.

That is Matthew Kahn, UCLA economics professor, in a post on the future of research economics. It is a follow up to Tyler Cowen’s thought-provoking economics research trends.

The Most Wanted paintings, as well as the Least Wanted paintings, reflect the artists’ interpretation of a professional market research survey about aesthetic preferences and taste in painting.

Intending to discover what a true “people’s art” would look like, the artists, with the support of the Nation Institute, hired Marttila & Kiley, Inc. to conduct the first poll…

Digitized versions of the paintings and the survey statistics which inform them are made available to the public through Dia’s web site.

Pure genius. Here, according to the statistics, is the painting America wants most of all:

Why yes, that is George Washington.

Here is America’s least wanted painting:

And here, in increasing order of bizarre, are the highest common denominators in Kenya, Holland, and Italy:

One of the artists, Russian Alex Melamid, described their concept for the project as follows (ironically):

In a way it was a traditional idea, because a faith in numbers is fundamental to people, starting with Plato’s idea of a world which is based on numbers. In ancient Greece, when sculptors wanted to create an ideal human body they measured the most beautiful men and women and then made an average measurement, and that’s how they described the ideal of beauty and how the most beautiful sculpture was created.

In a way, this is the same thing; in principle, it’s nothing new. It’s interesting: we believe in numbers, and numbers never lie. Numbers are innocent. It’s absolutely true data. It doesn’t say anything about personalities, but it says something more about ideals, and about how this world functions. That’s really the truth, as much as we can get to the truth. Truth is a number.

simple correlations between restaurant visits and overeating may conflate the impact of changes in supply and demand. People choose where and how much to eat, leaving restaurant consumption correlated with other dietary practices associated with weight gain…

A key question is whether the growth in eating out is contributing to the obesity epidemic, or whether these changes merely reflect consumer preferences.

Although eating McDonald’s food three times a day for 30 days caused Morgan Spurlock to gain 24.5 pounds in the documentary film Super Size Me, this “experiment” is unsuited for measuring the causal effect of restaurant consumption on body weight because Mr. Spurlock intentionally overate and would have experienced similar weight gain following a comparable diet at home.

The interesting causal parameter is how much more an obese person consumes in total because he or she ate at a restaurant.

That is Michael Anderson and David Matsa casting doubt on St. Spurlock. They are applied economists, and so enter the natural experiment:

In rural areas, Interstate Highways provide a shock to the supply of restaurants that is uncorrelated with consumer demand. To serve the large market of highway travelers passing through, a disproportionate number of restaurants locate immediately adjacent to these highways.

For residents of these communities, we find that the highway boosts the supply of restaurants (and reduces the travel cost associated with visiting a restaurant) in a manner that is plausibly uncorrelated with demand or general health practices.

Their result: restaurants – both fast food and full service – show little effect on obesity. Paper is here. Sorry I don’t have an ungated link.