Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?

The gap in economic views between economists and the public is well documented.

Average folks are either more skeptical or less knowledgeable about market mechanisms. One result is that they are far more pessimistic about the impact of free trade than economic theory and practice show they should be.

A new paper by George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan looks deeper and finds that within the public, gender is strongly linked to economic opinion. Men and women who haven’t attended college end up with similar views—dubious of market economics on matters like trade. That’s probably not surprising. But Caplan also found that college-educated men are much more likely to agree with economists than college-educated women are. Being male, Caplan writes, “has 15.7% of the effect of a Ph.D. in economics” on a non-economist’s views. Caplan’s theory is that men are more interested in economics than women. Men who don’t end up becoming economists are still likely to take a course or two out of curiosity, and that can have a lasting effect on their opinions. His paper, “The Gender Gap of Economics: Why Do Men Think More Like Economists?” is available from http://econlog.econlib.org.

WAL-MART as Jolly Green Giant

New research finds that large importers like Wal-Mart can help the global environment more than government regulators:

“Networks of private contracts...fill the regulatory gaps created when global trade increases the exploitation of global common resources and shifts production to exporting countries with lax environmental standards. As critics of trade liberalization have noted, public responses often are inadequate to address the attendant environmental harms….

“Environmental groups may need to shift focus in ways that cut across the cultural grain: They may do more for the environment by inducing importing firms to impose standards on exporting firms than by focusing on national and international governments.”

— Michael Vandenbergh, “The New Wal-Mart Effect: The Role of Private Contracting in Global Governance,” UCLA Law Review.

Faster than a Speeding Student

There’s ample concern about the quality of Wikipedia, the Web-based encyclopedia which any reader can edit and whose entries top practically any Google search you do. But there’s no question about the quantity. The total database grows by tens of millions of words each month. A fast reader who never needs to sleep, charging ahead at 400 words per minute, would still be unable to read as fast as new content is being created, let alone catch up with the vast amount of text already published. The English-language version alone, at last count, had over 609 million words—more than 15 Encyclopedia Britannicas put together.

Take a look at the graph on this page. While still rising quickly, the English version of Wikipedia now comprises only about one-fourth of the total words in all editions, which include more than 200 languages. Among them: Basque, Arabic, Esperanto, Latvian, Inuktitut (Eskimo), and Cherokee. There’s even a Latin version, with a suitably collaborative motto: Vicipaedia cooperandi opus est.

Dial 'M' for Macy's

On June 1, Macy’s (the company formerly known as Federated Department Stores, with a stock ticker symbol of FD) began trading under the ticker symbol M. The move put Macy’s in elite company. There are nearly 500,000 possible stock symbols of two, three, or four letters. The 26 single-letter symbols are, by comparison, scarce and prestigious. They are all assigned by the New York Stock Exchange in an opaque process that leaves plenty of room for rumors and favoritism. Forty-three firms have had to relinquish such symbols at one time or another, reports David Michayluk of the University of Technology, Sydney, in his SSRN working paper, “The Rise and Fall of Single-Letter Ticker Symbols.” One of these, Helm Resources, held H for just one year. By contrast, United States Steel has kept the mysterious symbol X since 1901.

Today, only 16 stocks trade with single-letter symbols. Market caps vary widely, from $1.7 billion for Barnes Group (B) to $255 billion for Citigroup (C). Richard Grasso, while he led the NYSE, often said he was holding I and M in an effort to lure Intel (INTC) and Microsoft (MSFT) from the NASDAQ. The Macy’s move suggests the NYSE acknowledges that Mister Softee is staying put.