World Cup Country Rankings and Betting Odds

The ranking information:

1. FIFA ranking
2. ELO ranking
3. UBS predictions, model based on past cup performances, home advantage, and the ELO rating (which is based on recent game outcomes taking into account strength of the opposition)

The betting odds:

1. World Cup Betting Directory
2. William Hill
3. Sportsbook

Sign of the Times

According to a study done for the British Beer and Pub Association, 39 pubs close each week in the UK. More specifically, there were 1566 closures between June and December 2009. The good news is there are 52,000 total pubs and there were 553 pubs that opened. I personally suffered from the phenomena of pub closures on the third and fifth days of my walk along the Cotswold Way. On Day 3 (Painswick to Dursley) we arrived in Ryeford, expecting refreshment at a pub indicated on our map. As you can see in the picture on the left we arrived too late. The Ryeford Arms was boarded up. We asked a man walking through the parking lot where we could find a pub nearby. We suggested King's Stanley (which was on the way, more or less) but he said their pub had closed too. Responding to our disappointment, he put it simply as, "Sign of the times." Fortunately he told us about a pub at 3/4 miles in the wrong direction (The Woolpack in Stonehouse) that was indeed open and making good lunches. Two days later we came up the pub shown in the picture on the right just north of the town of Cold Ashton. This pub may not close I suppose if a new publican is found but I think the To-Let sign is indeed an accurate reflection of the difficult economics of pubs in England today.

So what is the problem? I suppose one simple thing is that drinking is down. Since more people have cars, they are less obliged to frequent the local pub. Land values are up, making the opportunity costs of pubs rise. One thing that would seem to go against the land story is the highest rates of pub closure (-3% per week according to the study!) are in the regions called Tyne Tees and Granada (northern England) which are probably not the areas of high housing price increases. In Central and Southern England entry is higher relative to exit (but still net exit).

Secret of Human Success? Trade

At some point after millions of years of indulging in reciprocal back-scratching of gradually increasing intensity, one species, and one alone, stumbled upon an entirely different trick. Adam gave Oz an object in exchange for a different object...The extraordinary promise of this event was that Adam potentially now had access to objects he did not know how to make or find; and so did Oz.

The claim that Ridley makes in a new book reviewed here, is that Neanderthals had comparable brains to Homo Sapiens but evidence suggests they relied on local resources whereas some 80,000 year old seashells have been found far from the nearest coast, which anthropologists infer to have been used in barter.

I like this because it shines the spotlight on my academic specialty: international trade. But now that I think on it, I'm no longer sure humans were the first species to trade one item for another. There was a BBC article a year ago about male chimps trading meat for sex!

Parasitism of the -isms

Empires bought stability at the price of creating a parasitic court; monotheistic religions bought social cohesion at the expense of a parasitic priestly class; nationalism bought power at the expense of a parasitic military; socialism bought equality at the price of a parasitic bureaucracy; capitalism bought efficiency at the price of parasitic financiers.

quoted in John Tierney's NYT review of Matt Ridley's new book, the Rational Optimist. I like this way of thinking. It helps to explain why society has not ever discovered a perfect social organization. Inherent in each approach is a tendency that undermines its performance in the long run. I would add that pro-labour policies also run the risk of parasitism by militant or obstructionist unions.