A Report from Cairo
I am not with King Tut but I have sent two of my top reporters to Cairo to observe the urban growth in the developing world. Their presence in Cairo is a field experiment and I'm eager to see their "treatment effect" on all 8 million people they meet. I will write up the results and send the paper to a top journal. Here is their first report. I hope they used the crisp one dollar bills that I gave them as their per-diem.
"We visited the Pyramids in Giza, rode a camel on a camel badly built for two, and are amazed at all the modern and ancient things jumbled together in Cairo: like a lady carrying five tires on her head. We had a good flight.
Cairo is bustling. The road from the airport was characteristically beautiful. lined with palaces King Farouk etc. and Saldins citadel. The hotel is on the Nile and has beautiful views and internal design. A huge amount of traffic functions completely without traffic lights. if an economist had the pedestrian death rate from traffic accidents and the cost saving of not having lights corrected by the gain or loss of commuting time with no lights, an Egyptian calculation of the monetary worth of a life would emerge and be interesting. Tonight the Cairo museum."
Dear Reader, note that without any formal training in economics that they have noted
a key theme in the Presidential Address by Dixit last year.
To Quote from Dixit's 2009 AEA Big Presidential Speech on Order without law.
http://www.princeton.edu/~dixitak/home/PresAd_F1.pdf
"It is important to maintain a distinction between the state’s laws and actual order
that must support economic activity, and between the laws that are on the books and how they actually function (or fail) in reality. The state’s role seems simplest in situations that require pure coordination to achieve the better of two equilibria in an assurance game: daylight saving time and traffic lights are commonly cited as examples. However, notoriously dangerous intersections persist despite traffic lights, and well-understood social norms of behavior can allow smooth flows of heavy traffic despite the absence of traffic lights. Tom Vanderbilt (2008, 186-204) argues that norms can work better than traffic lights. At a more entertaining level, YouTube videos illustrate traffic “law without order” in St. Petersburg:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2JFL1Sk21Y and conversely, “order without law” in India:
click here for the India Video
click here for the Vietnam video
"We visited the Pyramids in Giza, rode a camel on a camel badly built for two, and are amazed at all the modern and ancient things jumbled together in Cairo: like a lady carrying five tires on her head. We had a good flight.
Cairo is bustling. The road from the airport was characteristically beautiful. lined with palaces King Farouk etc. and Saldins citadel. The hotel is on the Nile and has beautiful views and internal design. A huge amount of traffic functions completely without traffic lights. if an economist had the pedestrian death rate from traffic accidents and the cost saving of not having lights corrected by the gain or loss of commuting time with no lights, an Egyptian calculation of the monetary worth of a life would emerge and be interesting. Tonight the Cairo museum."
Dear Reader, note that without any formal training in economics that they have noted
a key theme in the Presidential Address by Dixit last year.
To Quote from Dixit's 2009 AEA Big Presidential Speech on Order without law.
http://www.princeton.edu/~dixitak/home/PresAd_F1.pdf
"It is important to maintain a distinction between the state’s laws and actual order
that must support economic activity, and between the laws that are on the books and how they actually function (or fail) in reality. The state’s role seems simplest in situations that require pure coordination to achieve the better of two equilibria in an assurance game: daylight saving time and traffic lights are commonly cited as examples. However, notoriously dangerous intersections persist despite traffic lights, and well-understood social norms of behavior can allow smooth flows of heavy traffic despite the absence of traffic lights. Tom Vanderbilt (2008, 186-204) argues that norms can work better than traffic lights. At a more entertaining level, YouTube videos illustrate traffic “law without order” in St. Petersburg:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2JFL1Sk21Y and conversely, “order without law” in India:
click here for the India Video
click here for the Vietnam video
posted by Matthew Kahn at 7:38 AM
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