Our recommended strategy involves actions that individuals can take that can save lives, even in catastrophic terrorist attacks. This can be demonstrated by tracing the recommended actions back to the terrorist attack scenarios and seeing how they respond effectively to an individual’s needs for safety and health. Protection can be achieved against chemical agents, dirty bombs, and nuclear fallout. Once a biological attack has been identified, medical treatment can help prevent smallpox and anthrax infections. Even in the most challenging situations of nuclear and indoor chemical attacks, individuals can avoid the dangers, if they act quickly....
By exhaustively analyzing the effects of various terrorist scenarios, we discovered that individuals would have only a few primary needs rather than the multiplicity that might be expected in such catastrophic situations. These primary needs are captured in the individual’s strategy in terms of the overarching goals that an individual would seek in each type of attack.
Radiological Attack: Avoid inhaling dust that could be radioactive.
Nuclear Attack: Avoid radioactive fallout, evacuate the fallout zone quickly or, if not possible, seek
best available shelter.
Biological Attack: Get medical aid and minimize further exposure to agents.
These might seem obvious to you, but consider this:
One problem, however, is that the recommended response actions may not be the ones that individuals would intuitively undertake. Indeed, an individual’s first instincts may often be to care for others or find one’s family or friends. This is why our individual’s strategy includes the priorities that should guide an individual’s actions, the first being to act to ensure one’s own survival.
U.S. Population with Health Insurance: Number up, Percentage Down
The NY Times sums up nicely the new data from Census regarding the number and type of people in the U.S. who do not have health insurance coverage. Extensive data quotes follow:
The number of people without health insurance shot up last year by 2.4 million, the largest increase in a decade, raising the total to 43.6 million, as health costs soared...
The proportion of Americans with insurance from employers declined to 61.3 percent, from 62.6 percent in 2001 and 63.6 percent in 2000. The number of people with employer-sponsored coverage fell last year by 1.3 million, to 175.3 million, even as the total population grew by 3.9 million....
The number of full-time workers without health insurance rose by 897,000 last year, to 19.9 million....
[and much further down]
The drop in coverage came even though the number of people with health insurance increased, by 1.5 million last year, to 242.4 million. But the increase was more than offset by the combined effects of population growth and the decline in workplace coverage....
Fully one-third of the foreign-born population was uninsured. About 43 percent of noncitizens -- 8.9 million of the 20.6 million noncitizens -- and 17.5 percent of naturalized citizens lacked coverage.
Among people living in poverty, 49 percent of those who worked full-time were uninsured.
But middle-income households accounted for most of the increase in the number of uninsured. In households with annual incomes of $25,000 to $74,999, the number of uninsured people rose last year by 1.4 million, to 21.5 million, and the increase was most noticeable among households with incomes of $25,000 to $49,999.
I don't know if you want to read the rest yourself. It assumes that people without health insurance are in trouble, or will be in trouble. It seems that more employers do not include contributing to health insurance premia in their compensation packages. Of those employees who were no longer offered health insurance on the job, many decided to purchase health insurance on their own. But many didn't.
I have only one question--one that Census doesn't ask of employees without insurance. What goods and services are they purchasing instead of the health insurance? How many employed and uninsured are saving to pay for the health costs they must pay out of pocket?
I think it is time for health insurers to highly advertise their "critical care" insurance packages (that cover serious illnesses and injuries but leave day-to-day healthcare to out of pocket expenses). If these affordable alternatives were picked up, the policy debate would change from having "health insurance" to making sure that everyday care were truly "accessible."
I'm was having some fun in the comments section of Nathan Newman's fine progressive blog. Some of us were debating whether the wealthy of 1900 are worse off than the poor of today. I don't mean to start trouble with progressives. I find their concern for the poor admirable, but they must also recognize that the "poor" in the U.S. today are some of the most well-off human beings in history.
This afternoon, I have to travel to Pax River Naval Air Station to brief a client. This will take about 2 hours of travel each way. I know we could have this meeting by video teleconference (VTC), or even through old-fashioned teleconference, but we won't.
To many people, the perceived benefits of face-to-face meetings cannot be garnered through any other means of business contact. Sometimes human judgement requires a firm handshake or a clear, resonant and intelligent voice across the table....
New Census Department figures on American mobility, released Monday, showed that 46 percent of Americans lived in a different home in 1995 than they did in 2000.
Americans move around quite a bit--from one house to another, and one income bracket to another.
It's easy to think of The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas as the "free-market Fed." Bank President Bill McTeer and Chief Economist Mike Cox set the institutional tone by publishing documents such as the Dallas Fed Annual Reports. In addition, the Bank has some lighter fare. Economic Insights, usually written by Robert Formaini, are four-page essays that highlight the key contributions of first-rate free-market economists (who appear to be all long dead or very senior).
The current issue examines the work of Ronald Coase. It's a very quick read with extensive quotations from his work.
However, it bears repeating that Coase himself thought it unfortunate that scholars focused primarily on the zero-transactions cost "Coase Theorem", which is not applicable to the real world, instead of his work assuming positive-transactions costs, without which organizations are pointless.
From Coase's Nobel Prize lecture:
Pigou's conclusion and that of most economists using standard economic theory was, and perhaps still is, that some kind of government action (usually the imposition of taxes) was required to restrain those whose actions had harmful effects on others, often termed negative externalities. What I showed in that article, as I thought, was that in a regime of zero transaction costs, an assumption of standard economic theory, negotiations between the parties would lead to those arrangements being made which would maximise wealth and this irrespective of the initial assignment of rights. This is the infamous Coase Theorem, named and formulated by Stigler, although it is based on work of mine. Stigler argues that the Coase Theorem follows from the standard assumptions of economic theory. Its logic cannot be questioned, only its domain. I do not disagree with Stigler. However, I tend to regard the Coase Theorem as a stepping stone on the way to an analysis of an economy with positive transaction costs. The significance to me of the Coase Theorem is that it undermines the Pigovian system. Since standard economic theory assumes transaction costs to be zero, the Coase Theorem demonstrates that the Pigovian solutions are unnecessary in these circumstances. Of course, it does not imply, when transaction costs are positive, that government actions (such as government operation, regulation or taxation, including subsidies) could not produce a better result than relying on negotiations between individuals in the market. Whether this would be so could be discovered not by studying imaginary governments but what real governments actually do. My conclusion; let us study the world of positive transaction costs.
I'm not yet 30 years old, yet I find that I do lose track of some things--like time, my watch, a cup of coffee, etc. However, there are some things that I really don't think I need to keep a detailed inventory of--like my dress shoes. Yet Johnston & Murphy is convinced that this is something I really want. From an email corporate just sent me:
Johnston & Murphy takes pride in sharing our ongoing commitment to quality, craftsmanship, and style with our loyal customers. We would like to continue to keep you up to date on our latest products, promotions, and store events via e-mail.
Each month, you will receive advance notice of product announcements, specials, and in-store events. You can also use our Preferred Customer Program to track past online purchases so you can keep an inventory of your shoe wardrobe.
We hope you find this information helpful....
[Emphasis added]
I think the quality of J&M shoes is excellent; my feet firmly believe that they're worth their high prices.
And perhaps there is a huge demand for personal shoe inventory systems among their clients. I applaud their entrepreneurial insight, and wish them the best of luck, even though it sounds to me a rather boring and unprofitable venture.
Bernard Manischewitz, the last member of his family to preside over the worldwide kosher food empire that began when his grandfather opened a small matzo bakery in Cincinnati, died on Saturday at his home in Verona, N.J. He was 89....
Mr. Manischewitz was an intensely private man who avoided using his own name to register in hotels and make restaurant reservations, Dr. Hoffman said. He also believed that not dropping his name made good business sense. When he was in Alaska bargaining over the price of whitefish for making gefilte fish, Dr. Hoffman said, he feared that if people knew he was Mr. Manischewitz, they might expect a higher price.
Smart man.
See also this financial innovator:
Henry Harfield, a lawyer specializing in banking who also participated in the release of prisoners taken at the Bay of Pigs, died on Sept. 13 in Manhattan. He was 89....
Many of the issues he worked on were esoteric, but important. He developed the legal basis for negotiable certificates of deposits, creating a legal way for commercial banks to pay interest on deposits. Citibank introduced certificates of deposit as a product in 1961.
In another obituary Mr. Harfield is revealed to have a far greater skill--humor:
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, on October 17, 1913, (he often joked that he was the same age as the Federal Reserve System but in better shape), he graduated from Yale College in 1934 and received his law degree from Columbia in 1937....
Mr. Harfield was a known wit and a much sought-after speaker. A prolific author, even his learned articles were laced with humor. His irrepressible wit sometimes got him in trouble. Martin Mayer, writing in the New York Times Book Review in 1986, recalled: "The epigraph of the first chapter of my book ‘The Bankers’ in 1975 was a quotation from Henry Harfield, a senior partner in the law firm of Shearman & Sterling, addressing a lawyer’s group: ‘Just remember this: If bankers were as smart as you are, you would starve to death.'..."
Tyler Cowen (at Marginal Revolution) recognizes that free floating prices cannot part the Red Sea. The economic libertarian will argue that in times of disaster, having higher market prices for emergency goods will permit an influx of inventory that otherwise would quickly sell out. But Tyler notes that because of law and custom, prices didn't increase, meaning he "couldn't buy a flashlight or the right size batteries, the night before the storm was to come." Tyler notes that we should think about balancing our infrequent emergency needs (by increasing prices) with our daily need of trust in sellers (where price stability is valued):
Kraemer suggests that we should allow price gouging in times of emergencies. This policy conclusion need not follow. Since supply is constant in the short-run, higher prices won't give more flashlights to more people, although in the long run the economy will stand readier with emergency flashlights. Higher prices will allocate flashlights to those people most willing to bid for them, but at the cost of all buyers feeling gouged. After all, not wanting to be gouged is a preference too. And the subsequent decline in trust will eliminate other potential gains from trade.
I do not think this adequately reflects current business inventory systems. Right now large multi-region and national chain stores possess much larger inventory of emergency supplies in all their stores than they carry individually. They have computer systems that tell them how much of which products are on each store's shelves and storerooms. Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Lowe's, CVS, Rite Aid, Walgreens, Eckerd, and others do not have unlimited supplies, but counting all their stores within 1 or 2 night shipping distance, they might very well carry sufficient inventory to meet a regional emergency.
But these stores demand profits, and are not usually geared for inter-store shipments of inventory, meaning there will be significant marginal costs of labor and shipping to disaster areas. There must be a set of financial incentives that would make it worth their while to pack up their inventory in stores outside of (potential or actual) emergency areas and send them into such areas.
To my knowledge, no major chain has proactive targeted inter-store shipments. People in Texas and Oregon did not face battery and plywood shortages because inventory was sent to the hurricane coast. Please tell me if I'm dead wrong here.
But Tyler might be right that "merchants fear that customers will resent price increases during times of trouble." But would he resent merchants more for having a good at a higher price good or not having it at all?
Granted, inter-store transfer is far more likely to occur the easier it is to predict disaster. Isabel was on the radar days before she hit, but we couldn't we certain she would. Still, stores sold out of emergency supplies... It seems a profit opportunity was not met...
T&B will have updates soon. Hurricane Isabel caused an extended power outage in my area, which though now resolved, has put me a few days behind schedule.
Note in the meantime that I have not fallen into the broken window fallacy--which claims that destruction of wealth can be, on net, a positive economic shock. Most of the time the fallacy is refuted by showing the alternative goods or services a person will have to forgo to replace the broken window. I call this the weak refutation.
A stronger refutation comes with the recognition that not only has a window been broken, but so have personal plans--economic and otherwise. Simply put, I've lost days of work time which I will never recover. I now have to work when I wanted to spend time with my seven-week old son. This unexpected change in plans will divert a massive amount of time and energy from my preferred path onto one I judged inferior. Even if Isabel causes a net "positive economic shock" by getting me to work harder, I will have suffered, on net, a "negative personal shock."
UPDATE: For less terse and more compelling examples of how individual planning shapes economic activity, and how disruption of these plans can lower productivity, I recommend reading "Outages cause unexpected 'take your kid to work day' for parents" by Kimball Payne, Peter Dujardin and Audra Barlow of Daily Press. It also reminds us that dedication to the job and employer is not dead:
At Northrop Grumman Newport News, the region's largest employer with more than 18,000 workers, those who were called in Monday were setting up such things as gas and welding equipment and getting cranes and rigging equipment unbattened and ready for use. Several members of the computer department's staff slept overnight at the yard in recent days.
"They did a great job of getting a very advanced and intricate system ready," said shipyard spokeswoman Jerri Fuller Dickseski of the computer technicians. "It's been an incredible team effort on their part."
The business articles in the more "serious" newspapers are nowhere near as grounded in the dirty details of everyday work activity:
But for all the trouble in getting to work, employees said they were happy to be there.
Bernard Banks, 40, acknowledged that things were a little slow at Siemens VDO Automotive, one of the largest companies in Hampton Roads to start up production Monday. Much of the day was spent re-tooling machinery.
"But it's good to get back to the routine instead of sitting at home waiting for the power to come back," Banks said
Isabel disrupted the routines of the population of several states, and destroyed the lives of many. If anybody tells you about the economic benefits of disaster, just send them this link, and ask if the benefits could possibly be worth the costs.
Brad DeLong has an excellent take on a NY Times story, and continues thus:
What, after all, does a good society do when the roulette wheel of the market spins and the little ball lands on a number and lots of people--through no fault of their own--lose all their chips? The Republican answer is that you do what George W. Bush did: you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, call a few of your father's friends to get yourself appointed to various boards of directors, grab for opportunity and become the local political fixer for the Texas Rangers's money men--and that if you can't pull yourself back up via your own unaided grit, there's something wrong with you. The social-democratic answer is something called "social insurance": unemployment insurance to cushion your standard of living while you look for another job, low-cost public education so that you can gain new sets of skills, public-sector support for research and development, a steeply-progressive income tax so that public goods are paid for out of the roulette-wheel winnings of those lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time in the market economy rather than by those hard-working families without much luck.
I was taught that in this world one couldn't count on the good fortune of entrepreneurial insight, or on beating the odds, or being well connected. One mustn't count on miracles, on good men doing good deeds, or on charity. One should help others (family, friends, neighbors) in need, but shouldn't count on the Good of Everyone Else when in need oneself. A free man doesn't count on the Good of Society to make up for his own misery, even if it wasn't his fault or mistake.
Prof. DeLong, there is a third way: one should not bet on red or black, but on oneself. This is a heterogeneous solution. Either individuals and nuclear families spread risk over time, or they join together to create extended families and bail each other out in times of need. Others have called this "saving for a rainy day," and it's the responsibility of everyone in a Free Society to make his own arrangements. Self-reliance is not just a theory; yet it is treated like a third rail guaranteed to kill on contact.
Most of us do not live in a dream world of having super-rich and highly-educated parents set us up for life. But just because utopia is no place, doesn't mean we must succumb to the fallacy that our only two options of social organization are Social-Democratic compulsory "insurance" or the catastrophic loss of our wealth, families, and homes during the every downturn of the business cycle. People are NOT too stupid to tie their own safety nets.
The choice we face every day is how much to save for the seasons of bad harvest, or when government taxing and spending runs amok, or when our jobs are picked up by the churning market tornado, and thrown into Mexico, China, India, and Bulgaria. Instead of helping us make scarcity-influenced & market-based choices, governments, aided by economists-like-us and social theorists of all stripes, have required that citizens should never face the consequences of misfortune.
Prof. Delong and I are very lucky bastards. While the DeLong nuclear family pays more in taxes annually than the Brancato nuclear family earns, we're both in the top 25% of income earners in this country. In his language, the little ball landed on our numbers. We don't have to worry much about the business cycle--Prof. DeLong has tenure at Berkeley, and I work in national defense at a think-tank.
But the ball did not land on the number of my brother, who works a full-time retail job to pay the mortgage and utilities and a part-time shipping job to help cover the rest. DeLong's solution to the woes of the business cycle is to mandate that workers pay my brother (and everybody else in his situation) when he gets thrown out of work, so we can set him back on his feet. Being in the bottom 50% of income earners, my brother may never be able to call himself rich by American standards, and he may not have graduated from 16th grade, but he knows damn well how to spend less now and save for difficult times ahead. For both my brother and me, the Social Insurance scheme Mr. DeLong hails makes it harder for us to control our own standards of living. Prof. DeLong insists that social insurance is good for families, but it isn't for ours. Perhaps we expect too much freedom from our federal government.
Note: I agree that almost-pure public goods should be financed by the most well off; but some public goods are considered "public" mostly because of our ideological requirement that everyone consume them, not because the real-world production and supply of such goods has revealed anything remotely like a theoretical market-failure.
For every regulation there is a cost, and sometimes that cost is not where we expect it. In Matthew Yglesias' assessment of Portland's suburban sprawl restrictions, he notes that the costs of zoning are not revealed in housing prices:
Eliminating barriers to new housing construction need not imply giving in to forces of suburban sprawl. Indeed, the Portland, Ore., metropolitan area, which features America's oldest and toughest major sprawl restrictions, has found ways to increase housing supply that, according to a recent Fannie Mae Foundation study, have allowed the area to limit growth without experiencing higher housing prices than the rest of the nation during much of the period studied.
Basically, Matthew is saying that the zoning (combined with other government initiatives) had the amazing effect of relocating and reconfiguring the building of housing units without causing any undue increase in the price of such units, as happened everywhere else. This might be true, but my economic intuition tells me there's more to the matter.
It is true, as Mr. Yglesias asserts. that the Fannie Mae study (actually written by Anthony Downs at the Brookings Institution) states that Portland's approach has "allowed the area to limit growth without experiencing higher housing prices than the rest of the nation during much of the period studied." But in fact, one commentator (William A. Fischel of Dartmouth) noted that Downs' major conclusions do not utilize comparisons of Portland to the rest of the nation. Fischel states:
The upshot is that Downs' finding of a seemingly modest increase in housing prices between 1975 and 2000 needs to be reconsidered. Portland's housing price inflation looks modest only in relation to the rest of the West. Compared with the rest of the country outside of the West (including the rapidly growing South), Portland's housing prices, like those of other Far West metropolitan areas, look quite a bit out of line.
Even Fannie Mae's "Bottom Line" assessment disagrees with Yglesias:
This study provides initial evidence that an urban growth boundary or other stringent land-use controls can, at least for a short period, exert upward pressure on the rate of increase of housing prices, if it is combined with other factors strongly stimulating the demand for housing in the region, such as employment growth. However, it does not find evidence that urban growth boundaries necessarily exert this upward pressure.
There may be a "smart" (low cost) way to limit growth, but Portland's is not it.
Note 2: I think we should be concerned with anti-sprawl zoning's effect on the total cost of home rental or home ownership. This total cost includes the increased cost in time and money of longer commuting times, and being further away from cultural centers. It should also include losses to restricted property owners, and payments made by taxpayers to subsidize the cost of building residential units.
Employees Pay Same or Lower Share of Health Insurance Premia
Milt Freudenheim complains in the New York Times that people are paying more out-of-pocket for health insurance premia:
People in employer-sponsored health plans are paying 48 percent more out of their own pockets for care than they did three years ago, according to an authoritative new study, and the cost will be even higher next year.
This is both absolutely true and completely misleading. I think we should also take a look at the share of total expenditure on health insurance that is paid directly by employees. After all, healthcare coverage is just one component of total compensation, along with wages, unemployment insurance, and the like. From an employee standpoint, we should look through the lens of the total compensation package, not the average size of a single component. Still...
Out-of-pocket spending for insurance premiums, deductibles and drug co-payments rose to $2,790 this year for a typical employee with family coverage, from $1,890 in 2000, Mr. Altman said.
Would Mr. Freudenheim prefer that there be no premium increase, and have average wages lowered by $900 ($2,790-$1,890)? From the perspective of individual choice, isn't it better to give employees more money and less "company scrip" that can only be turned in for healthcare? The argument could be made that employees will always pay 100% of all health insurance premia in out-of-pocket expenses and in lower wages. There's more:
Over all, according to the Kaiser study, health care premiums rose 13.9 percent this year, the biggest increase since 1990, outpacing the 11 percent rise in spending for hospitals and doctors, and far ahead of the 2.4 percent increase in manufacturers' prices.
All this carefully selected data is taken from the Kaiser Family Foundation's 2003 Employer Health Benefits Survey. The full report, which contains a mountain of well-presented and clearly summarized data, is here.
One neat thing about the KFF survey is that a variant of it has been conducted since 1987--so, for some variables, we have a 15-year time series. Let's look at the share of healthcare premiums directly paid by employees. Chapter 6 says:
The average percentage of total premiums that workers pay remains virtually unchanged in 2003: 16% across plan types for single coverage and 27% for family coverage (Exhibit 6.2). Percentage contributions for family coverage have remained fairly stable for a number of years, while those for single coverage declined from 1996 to 2000 (from 21% to 14%) and have been stable since that time.
So for employees with families there's been almost no change in the percent of premiums paid, but single employees have seen their share of premiums drop!
In all honesty, I should note that there have been steadily increasing deductibles and co-pays. However, KFF provides no data regarding how much money is actually spent by employees on either co-payments or paying-up their deductibles, so I can't give the percentage of "total cost" paid by employees.
Also, we are told that, "Most workers experienced no change in benefits in 2003." This means that nearly all employers have not switched to plans that cover less. But this "no change" does not address 1) what plans themselves have done to increase of decrease benefits (like cover more drugs), and 2) quality improvements in treatment. Plans have generally increased coverage, in some areas dramatically:
All types of plans are less likely to cover oral contraceptives than other types of prescription drugs (99%) although the percent of covered workers with coverage for oral contraceptives has grown substantially, at 88% this year, up from 71% in 2000. The number of covered workers with the option of sterilization and reversible contraceptives has also grown dramatically over the past few years. In 2001, 67% of covered workers had coverage for sterilization, compared to 87% this year. Reversible contraceptives were available to 41% of covered workers in 2001 and 72% of covered workers in 2003.
The first thing that should be said about bankruptcy is that it can operate to help promote and maintain a vigorously competitive economy. Perhaps the most important characteristic of vigorous competition is the particularly strong stimulus it gives to invention and innovation, and to the continual search for new and improved products and services. While numerous commentators have noted the progressive character of a market economy, they have paid less attention to the place of bankruptcy within a competitive market economy....
The central nature of the economic process requires businesses to make their investments in new products and services well in advance of whatever will subsequently be generated as income. There are no crystal balls that firms can consult to assure the accuracy of their commercial projections. Commercial ventures are unavoidably risky and uncertain. While there are various measures and instruments available to manage that risk and uncertainty, it is impossible to abolish risk and uncertainty....
Bankruptcy can be a productive facet of a market economy, and some procedures for the orderly dissolution of the losses that bankruptcy represents are important for releasing commercial energy into potentially more productive directions.
Free and open competition is highly progressive, but that progress comes at a price, one aspect of which is bankruptcy.
Bankruptcy allows businesses to bury their dead or severely decayed commercial plans and projects, and to move forward
once again. Orderly bankruptcy proceedings promote overall commercial and competitive vigor. Without bankruptcy, the dead hand of the past would lay more heavily upon commercial conduct, retarding its progressive character in the process.
I want to point you to Glenn Sacks' fantastic article on the cost of being a working father (in case you missed Instapundit's pointer).
My fatherhood was the hollow, joyless fatherhood many men endure--all the burdens of supporting children drained of the pleasure of actually being with them. At times it seemed the only interaction I had with my son was disciplining him, the one parenting job which has not so generously always been reserved for fathers.
My father, a small business owner who worked 70 hour weeks, had a similar fatherhood. One day, when I was 9 or 10 years old, I overheard my father tell a close friend that his one regret in life was that he didn't spend more time with his children. That shocked me then, and from then on we both made efforts to spend time together.
Sacks compares the Mommy and Daddy taxes:
Crittenden has several worthwhile suggestions on how to reduce the mommy tax, including universal preschool, a year's paid leave after the birth of each child, and full benefits for part-time work. I'm not sure how practical these ideas are, but I'm certainly interested, since they could help mothers as well as fathers and children. But how dare she, and other feminists, claim that the burden of children falls only on mothers? Yes, Ms. Crittenden, there is a mommy tax, but the daddy tax is just as large.
Dad died while I was in high school--from a heart condition related to his working hours. From my personal experience, the daddy tax would replace inflation as the cruelest tax. That's why I'm a determined daddy-tax avoider.
Barter is the exchange of goods (or services) without the use of money.
Barter can occur between two or more parties. With two parties, one or more goods are swapped among the parties. The same is true with three participants, but in that case A supplies something to B, B supplies something to C, and C supplies something to A.
The process of barter can quickly get complicated. With two-person barter, the first task is to find someone who has what you want, and wants what you have. Then you have to haggle to set final terms of exchange. With more than two traders, linking all participants and sealing the deal can become very difficult. Because of these complications, means have developed to ease the process of exchange.
The first facilitator of exchange is the market--a congregation of people who intend to exchange. Both real-life spaces like a town square on a certain day and virtual places like half.com and TradeAway are considered markets. Markets make it easier to find someone to trade with, expand access to goods, and increase competition among traders--making a better deal more likely.
In barter exchanges, there is no such thing as a "buyer" or "seller"--since all traders exchange good for good. In our day, a buyer is someone willing to pay money to acquire a good, and a seller will take only money in exchange for a good.
Money is the second facilitator of exchange. Money is a particular good almost universally accepted in exchange. It makes exchange easier--in two ways: First, money makes it possible for some market participants to concentrate on selling, and others on buying, but everybody on producing something in particular. Second, complicated barter exchanges--with 3 or more traders--can be broken down into a sequence of simple two-trader exchanges. With money, when A sells a good to B, B sells a good to C, and C sells a good to A, the trades can occur at different times in different markets.
This process is made more robust when another person, middleman M, enters this sequence. A middleman will connect A, B, and C more cheaply than they could do so if they were to try to do so themselves.
NOTE: "Barter" is the #1 search of T&B; I'd like to provide searchers with useful and concise information. Hence, I'm open to critics and would like links to better expositions than mine.
According to the survey, the foreign-born population grew to more than 33 million in 2002, slightly larger than the entire population of Canada. Of the total U.S. population, 11.8 percent were foreign-born and accounted for 44 percent of the nation's population growth last year.....
About 52 percent of the nation's foreign-born population is from Latin America, 27 percent from Asia and 15 percent from Europe.
Check out the rest of the survey for interesting data. If you do, you'll find out that there was a statistically significant decrease in the percentage of foreign-born coming from Europe (15.4% in 2001 to 14.7% in 2002), and a statistically significant increase in the percent of foreign-born from Latin America (51.3% to 52.3%). As always, beware that this is survey data, which means that some "changes" may not be statistically significant:
The 2002 [American Community Survey] data were based on responses from a sample of the U.S. population. As with all surveys, the estimates and rankings may vary from the actual values because of sampling or nonsampling variations.
So is the increase in foreign-born a real trend?
I'd say yes, but we should not be fixated on 33 million as the "correct" number.
Table 2 of the American Community Survey states that the 2001 foreign born population was 31,482,280 (11.4% of the total) and the 2002 foreign born population was 33,048,849 (11.8% of the total). However, this 0.4% increase must be understood within the +/- 0.2% margin of error for differences. (This is based on a 90% confidence interval).
In other words, there is a 90% chance that the interval from 11.6% to 12.0% (32,488,700 to 33,609,000) includes the "real" percent (population) of foreign born.
Opium production and export have resumed in Afghanistan despite central government attempts to prohibit such activity. Drug smuggling is thus responsible, in some measure, for such economic growth as has occurred in a number of regions....
Although there have been numerous achievements during the past year, aid for Afghan reconstruction has not been nearly as generous as for other recent operations. For example, per capita external assistance
for the first two years of conflict was $1,390 in Bosnia and $814 in Kosovo but is only $52 in Afghanistan....
International assistance has spurred some growth, particularly in more-secure urban areas, such as Kabul. However, until entrepreneurs can travel freely and transport goods across the country without intimidation or theft, the economic growth of Kabul and other urban centers is unlikely to spread.
