Extract, from when Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom watches the yuppies in the town centre.

The women of this race especially fascinate Harry; they wear running shoes instead of high heels but their legs are encased in sheer pantyhose and their faces adorned by big round glasses that give them a comical sexy look, as if their boobs are being echoed above in hard hornrims and coated plastic. They look like Goldie Hawn conditioned by Jane Fonda. The style these days gives them all wide mannish shoulders, and their hips have been pared and hardened by exercise bicycles and those ass-hugging pants that mold around every muscle like electric-colored paint. These women seem visitors from a slimmed-down future where sex is just another exercise and we all live in sealed cubicles and communicate through computers.

Listening
Started the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Rise of Nations lecture series. Content's interesting but the lecturer has the most boring voice ever. Oh well, 7 lectures down, only 41 to go...

What I'm Not Watching
Yes, I suck. I abandoned The Last Picture Show on DVD after only half an hour. I think one problem is that I've been spoiled by going to the cinema more lately, so it's harder to watch films on a small screen in a distractible environment. But also, the film did seem grindingly dull, with a bunch of barely distinguishable who-gives-a-shit characters meandering aimlessly about exchanging witlessly arch dialogue while nothing happens. I suspect without its pioneering boobies that movie would have been nowhere.

What I'm Watching
Did see "Ghost Rider" a while back but never wrote about it. Middling superhero action movie, elevated by a nicely deadpan performance by a slightly-too-old Nicholas Cage, hampered by a very leisurely start. OK to watch.

Museums
Went to see the A New World: England’s first view of America exhibition at the British Museum. Not bad, not very crowded, though not sure it would justify even the modest £7 admission fee. My membership expires 31st March and tempted to just leave it. You get in to exhibitions free, but the BM still makes you fart around booking tickets ("to count heads", the lady said), so it's just as much of a nuisance.

Exhibition is mostly watercolours of the flora, fauna and people of the New World, with a few artifacts, maps and European pictures mixed in. Fairly interesting.

Museums 2
Also popped into the Cartoon Museum nearby. £3 to get in but worth it: some interesting originals of political cartoons; and kids and grownups comics. Fascinating to see the works in progress, with neat corrections and dialogue pasted over the top. Has originals of some famous cartoons, including the legendary 1945 Zec cartoon the Mirror used at the end of World War Two.

Web
Saw another couple of interesting economics articles lately.

This Euro economics book review (extract) has an interesting analysis of why European social market economics worked well from 1945 to 1973, but not so well afterwards.

This development economics has a lot of empirical stuff to it, which is refreshing. Cites some evidence that compulsory education is valuable, which suggests that the market alone is not sufficient to educate people.

The most compelling study on this subject of which I am aware is by Josh Angrist, of mit, and Alan Krueger, of Princeton, published in 1991. They looked at what happened to people in the United States who dropped out of school at age 16, which is when it ceases to be mandatory. Among the study’s subjects, there were some who ten years before had been just old enough to make it into first grade, and some who missed the cutoff age by a few days. Therefore, looking carefully at the group, you would find some who ended up with almost one whole year more of schooling, just because of the accident of having been born a few days earlier. The result was much like what would have happened if a lottery had determined whether each child would be put into school for nine or ten years--which is why economists call it a natural experiment. The differences in what eventually happened to them could be confidently ascribed to the fact that some got more education than others.

Angrist and Krueger found that being forced to stay longer in school does in fact pay off. Those who had stayed in school longer were paid more--the market rewarded investment in education, even by these young people who were dying to get out of school, and who would drop out as soon as they were given the chance. In other words, the incentives were there, but that was not enough for these children. And when they were forced to get educated, it made them more productive--and happier as well, according to a more recent study by Phil Oreopoulos of the University of Toronto.