Ideas

Salamander: Magic and Physics

2012-02-01T13:27:00.000-08:00

I originally mentioned the economic element in Salamander, but one commenter asked about the relation of the magic to physics.

Part of what I was doing in the book was trying to sketch an original, interesting, and plausible version of magic. Since the story was largely set in a college training mages, I wanted something that sounded as though it had a deep enough theoretical background to be interesting.

What I came up with was modeled on the mathematics underlying quantum mechanics. As readers familiar with the subject will know, the same particle may be described by a superposition of states of exact momentum or a superposition of states of exact position. At the extremes, a particle with precisely known momentum can be represented either as a certainty of one eigenstate of momentum or as a superposition of eigenstates of position spread across the universe—hence, as per the uncertainty principle, if its momentum is known perfectly its position is entirely unknown—and similarly the other way around.

For an example of the same logic that does not depend on quantum mechanics, consider polarized light. The polarization of a beam of light can be described as a mix of vertically polarized and horizontally polarized. The same beam can be equally well described as a mix of left handed circularly polarized light and right handed circularly polarized light. In particular, vertically polarized light can be described as a mix of left and right handed with one phase relation, and horizontally as a similar mix with a different phase relation, and similarly the other way around.

That was the set of ideas on which my system of magic was based. In my back story, magic was originally thought of as based on the elements: earth, air, fire and water. What Olver, the Newton equivalent in my world who set off the shift of magic from a craft to a science, worked out, was that the elements were merely one basis star, a set of four things which could be combined in ways that describe all magic. But there are lots of other basis stars, each of which can also provide a complete description, and one point of any one star can be described as some mix of the points of any other star--just as a momentum eigenstate can be described as a mix of position eigenstates, or vertical polarization as a mix of circular polarizations. That gave me a structure sufficiently counterintuitive but coherent to work for my purposes.

I should confess that I did not work out the whole system. In particular, while there is one throwaway reference to "phase," I don't actually know how it fits in. My objective was only to get the description deep enough into the system to be convincing, to look as though there was a real theoretical science there.

One thing that came up in writing the book was the question of how the theoretical structure got figured out. The answer was that two mages, for their own purposes, had put together a very large collection of spells.

"Then Olver showed up, and what he had been looking for was sitting in the library waiting for him. Olver didn't need powerful spells. What he needed were multiple spells doing the same thing in different ways, using different talents. If you could banish horseflies with a spell of fire and air and get exactly the same result with a spell built only on heat, that meant that in some fashion heat was fire plus air. How the spell was constructed let you figure out just how the air and fire were put together. Olver started with more than forty multiples—two or more spells that did the same thing in different ways. When he was finished he had the science of magic as we now know it—the different basis stars, the central paradox that any one star spans all of magery, and the rest. That was the first big breakthrough in three hundred years, since the Dorayans worked out the basic principles by trial and error.

"If he had a spell that used warmth he could make one using air and fire, so mages were no longer limited to using only spells that fit their particular talents. Jon is right; the library came first. The theory of magic was built on the library; the College was built on the theory of magic. The talented came here because it was the only place in the world where they could learn not only what worked but why."

In my next post I plan to explain the link to economics—the Cascade as the magical equivalent of the central planning fallacy.

More on Harald

2012-02-01T10:41:00.000-08:00

Having received a gratifyingly positive response to my previous post, I thought I would say a little more about my first novel, then do another post on my second.

There are a couple of places in Harald where I mention tactics my protagonist is using to solve the problem of raising an army. One is a scene where he mentions having captured the Emperor's tent, presumably after defeating an Imperial army that the Emperor was accompanying. He talked some of his people into lugging the tent over the mountain pass that separates Kaerlia, where the battle was, from the Vales, and sets it up in his back pasture. One of the people he is telling the story to responds:

"Just what every meadow needs."

"Don't laugh. Silk hangings, tent poles banded with gold. By the time the story spread a bit, every highborn in the Imperial army had gold tent poles and chests full of silver and jewels. Made it easy to raise troops the next time."

The other is a bit more complicated. Harald forces a large body of cavalry loyal to Iskander, one of the two princes who are competing to be their father's heir, or possibly to replace him, to surrender, and auctions off their horses to the local plains nomads. In a later campaign, he defeats a different cavalry force, loyal to the Emperor. His nomad allies return home with the horses captured in that battle—and offer to sell them to Iskander. The bargaining is between one of Harald's sons and Iskander's son Kiron, who earlier spent some time as a guest/hostage at Haraldhold.

"Name Kiron. Speak for Commander, Governor. Know you Valestalk, Tengu?"

"Getting better, but I still speak your language better than you speak mine."

A long pause.

"Niall?"

"In the flesh. Got bored with rabbits."

"This is your army?"

Niall shook his head:

"My brother Donal is war leader for Fox Clan at the moment, four hundred clan brothers. Eagle, Bear, half this end of the plains sent someone along for the ride. Some day you try to get a couple thousand Westkin, fourteen clans, all moving in the same direction. Make running the Empire feel like a vacation."

"And you came along to … "

"Just now, to sell some horses. Thought your father might be interested; heard he was a few short. Cavalry mounts. Trained. Even have the right brand."

"How many horses--trained cavalry mounts with the Imperial brand--are you prepared to sell us? Assuming we can agree on a price."

Niall looked at him, considered.

"Sure you want to know?"

Kiron nodded.

"Four thousand. Don't expect you'll want all of them. Give you a good price, though. Market, this end of the plains, not what it used to be."
It occurred to Kiron that raising and supplying an army off the resources of a mountain farm presented difficulties to which Harald, being Harald, found his own unique answers. This one had a certain wild logic to it.

There is another feature central to the novel which is not exactly economics, although I think it is related both to my being an economist and to my being a libertarian. The central problem of the first half of the book is the attempt by a new and inexperienced king, badly advised, to convert his father's allies into subjects. Part of the reason is that he sees political structures in terms of a table of organization, a formal hierarchy, and is afraid that anyone not in allegiance to him cannot, in the long run, be relied on.

He is opposed by Harald, the leader of one of the allies, who sees political structures in terms of personal relationships. The alliance was put together by the previous king, who first dropped his father's unenforceable claim to rule the Vales then did everything he could to help the Vales when they were faced with a famine. In the wars with the Empire, he put Harald in charge of the allied army not because Harald had any particular rank but because he was the best commander available. And the alliance was held together in part by the close personal friendship between the king, Harald, and the Lady Commander of the Order.

During the conflict between Harald and the new king, it becomes clear that one of the most powerful of the provincial lords, the feudal level just below the king, is a de facto ally of Harald's even though nominally obedient to the king. And part of the point of the first half of the book is that Harald's real objective is not to defeat the king but to educate him, and so to recreate the old alliance.

Incidentally, for anyone interested, the book can be bought on Amazon, downloaded free from the Baen free library, or downloaded free as podcasts from the book web page.

Economics in my Fiction

2012-01-31T21:15:00.000-08:00

A correspondent points me at a blog post with the intriguing title "Sci-fi needs economists." Neither of my novels is science fiction, but both of them are speculative fiction—sf, of which sci-fi is a subset. And both of them reflect, in varying ways, the fact that they were written by an economist. It occurred to me that some readers of this blog might be interested in how.

The protagonist of Harald is a leading figure in the Vales, a semi-stateless society loosely based on saga period Iceland. The Vales are allied with the kingdom of Kaerlia, from which they were settled a few centuries back, and with a third, non-geographical polity, the Order, a female military order very loosely based on the Templars. I do not find an order of women warriors terribly plausible from a historical standpoint, but I like it as a plot device. The three are allied against the Empire, a larger, expansionist power loosely based on Roman, Byzantine, and Abbasid models.

One form in which economics appears is the central problem that Harald faces—how to raise and support an army without either taxation to hire troops or a feudal system with liegemen obliged to fight for him. Although his purpose is defensive warfare, the model I was thinking of was offensive—the Norse armies that ravaged Britain. As best I can tell they were, in large part, not national armies but entrepreneurial projects. Harald is not in a position to offer his people land, but he can offer them loot—loot captured from Imperial forces he defeats and, more important, ransom paid by the Empire to get back their captive soldiers. That, plus excitement, glory, the opportunity to train under the best general around, and a patriotic desire not to have their homeland conquered, have to suffice.

One implication is that Harald has to be very stingy with the lives of his men; if too many of them get killed or injured in this campaign, nobody may show up for the next one. Hence he specializes in what his daughter refers to as "Father's set piece battles—everything important settled five minutes before it starts." The objective, always, is to put the opposing force in a position where it will have to surrender; his favorite method is logistical, creating a situation where if the enemy do not surrender they will die of hunger or thirst.

The same issues arise on the other side, although not quite as obviously. The Emperor has legionaries who are professional soldiers paid by taxes, and auxilia, mercenary forces from inside or outside the empire to fill roles that the legionaries do not. From the standpoint of each individual commander, it is the legions, the elite heavy infantry, that really matter. While losing auxilia is a bad thing, you can always hire more; as long as the legions get safely home, the army has not been defeated.

The problem, as becomes clear in the final campaign, is that you cannot always hire more. Having gotten quite a lot of auxilia killed in earlier campaigns, the Empire finds mercenaries in short supply, not because most of them have been killed but because the ones who are alive would prefer to stay that way. The economic constraint.

My second novel, unlike the first, is an actual fantasy with magic. Its initial theme was the fantasy equivalent of the central planning fallacy. If readers are interested, let me know and I will be happy to expand on that. I am a little worried that, like many authors, I may be more interested in talking about my books than other people are in hearing about them.

Genetic Testing and Insurance: One Datum

2012-01-28T12:20:00.000-08:00

Reductions in the cost of genetic testing and improvements in what we know about what it tells us produce obvious benefits; if you know you are likely to have some particular medical problem, you may be able to take precautions against it. But they also have at least one potential downside. The more is known about the chance of bad things happening to us, the less able we will be to insure against them.

A solution to this problem that is sometimes proposed is to permit individuals to have their genes tested but forbid insurance companies to require testing as a condition of insurance or to use the information it produces. The problem with that is adverse selection. If the customer knows his risk and the insurance company doesn't, high risk and low risk customers are charged the same price, making insurance a good deal for the former and a bad deal for the latter. Insurance companies, realizing that most of those who choose to buy their insurance are bad risks, will charge accordingly, driving more of the low or average risk customers out of the market. In the limiting case, insurance is bought only by high risk customers, at a high risk price. A famous description of the problem is Akerlof's article "The Market for Lemons."

If we allow both insurance companies and their customers to make use of genetic information, then both high risk and low risk customers can buy insurance, but at different prices. The risk of having genetic variants that make you more likely to suffer some expensive medical problem is uninsurable, although you can still insure against the risk that, given those genes, the problem will actually appear.

The theoretical analysis of the problem is straightforward; interested readers can find one version in Chapter 6 of my Law's Order. But the theory does not tell us how large the problem is. That depends on empirical facts, in particular on how much the information provided by genetic testing affects the expected cost of insuring someone.

As it happens, I recently came across a datum relevant to that question, as a result of having my own genes tested by 23andMe, a company that does mail order genetic testing. It turned out that I had a genetic variant that implied a moderately increased risk of meningioma, the second most common type of brain tumor.

The information came a little late to be useful. Last summer, while I was part of a group on World of Warfare, one of the other players noticed that I had stopped responding. He called the house. My son took the call, came into my office, and found me half conscious on the floor. The diagnosis at the local hospital was meningioma, a benign (i.e. non-cancerous) tumor inside my skull but fortunately outside my brain. It was large enough to put pressure on my brain, so required surgery. I got surgery, all went well, and I am now fully recovered, aside from a visible scar and a tendency of my scalp to itch.

According to 23andMe, 35,000 Americans a year are diagnosed with meningioma, and in most cases the tumor is small enough not to require surgery. Assume that 10,000 of those, like my case, do, making the annual probability for a random American 1/30,000. Further assume that the average cost is $100,000. That's the right order of magnitude—I saw the figures for what it cost my insurance company, but don't have them ready to hand at the moment. The average cost to the insurance company of that particular risk is then about $3.

Finally, assume that my "moderately increased risk" means twice the average risk, which seems if anything a high guess. It follows that in a world where insurance companies had and used that data, my medical insurance would cost me, or my employer, three dollars a year more than in a world where the data was not available.

There are, of course, lots of other risks that my health insurance insures against. For some my genetics are presumably favorable, for some unfavorable. It would require much more information than I have to estimate how much the cost of insurance would vary from one person to another if all of that information was available and used. But at least the single datum I happen to have suggests that the effects might be small.

Is Newt Gingrich Living in Sin?

2012-01-22T16:44:00.000-08:00

He is currently divorced from his second wife, who is still alive, and married to his third. He also a Catholic convert. The Catholic church, as I understand its doctrine, does not accept divorce. Unless he somehow obtained an annulment, doesn't that make his current marriage adultery?

It's one thing to have committed a sin, repented, and reformed. But it looks as though he continues to commit mortal sin on a regular basis. Am I missing something?

---

The answer is that he is not living in sin. A commenter points me at an Esquire story on him which mentions that he got an annulment. The story is largely based on an interview with his second wife, who sounds like an interesting lady.

Who is the Least Bad Candidate?

2012-01-22T13:33:00.000-08:00

Last time around, when it was effectively down to three, I concluded somewhat tentatively that it was Obama. He seemed a little less bad than Hilary Clinton and had one big advantage over McCain—when Obama did bad things, we, people who supported free markets, wouldn't get blamed for them. And I thought there was at least a chance that he would do some good things.

Ex post, I was probably wrong, although it is hard to be sure; we will never know how bad the other two would have been. The one part where I was right was his advantage over McCain. If a Republican president had run an enormous deficit, insisted on his right to treat anyone he could label as a terrorist as outside the normal protections of the law, expanded the Afghan war, and ended up with the same economic results as Obama, it would have been harder to bring the Tea Party movement into existence and elect a considerable number of its candidates in the midterm elections.

We now have another presidential election coming up, and the same question. If we include Ron Paul in the candidate pool, the answer is pretty easy. While I have some reservations about his ability to function as President, given no experience as an executive, his policy positions are closer to mine than I have any reason to expect of a serious candidate. In particular, on two biggies, ending the War on Drugs and shifting to a non-interventionist foreign policy, he is on the right side. It's true that his monetary policy seems to assume that producing money will continue to be a government monopoly (those who know more about it are welcome to correct me if I am mistaken), although he wants to tweak the details a bit, so in that regard, if I correctly understand him, he shares the socialist views of the other candidates. But one can't have everything.

I suspect however that, as most commentators believe, Ron Paul has very little chance of getting nominated, let alone elected. His real function in this election is to force the Republican party—ideally both parties—to shift in a libertarian direction, by demonstrating that there are a lot of votes there, and at the same time to increase public support for policies currently supported by neither party.

Besides, including him makes the choice of least bad candidate an uninteresting one.

I am inclined to eliminate Santorum as well, since he also seems at this point very unlikely to get the nomination. That leaves us, yet again, with a pool of three, this time consisting of Gingrich, Romney, and Obama. Which is least bad?

It is a hard question. If we consider politics purely as a source of entertainment, Gingrich is an easy winner—he would be more fun to argue with than either of the others, and is likely to put on a better show. But the same things that make him interesting also make him frightening. I don't think a candidate who believes that the President and Congress ought to have the power to overrule the Supreme Court, as he apparently does, is exactly what the country needs. And I could imagine him coming up with a lot of other original—and dangerous—ideas. He is obviously smart and articulate, and it is possible that, once in power, his bite would be better than his bark, but I am not sure I want to risk it.

Romney is easier to evaluate. Pretty clearly, he is a liberal Republican currently pretending, for political reasons, to be a conservative Republican. In terms of the policies he would prefer, given the choice, I doubt he would be very different from the current incumbent—perhaps a little worse on military matters. Think of him as Obama light. Which leaves me wondering if perhaps I should again choose Obama as the least bad, at least if the Republicans succeed, as they well may, in taking both houses of Congress.

On the historical evidence, practically the only time the federal government runs a surplus is when one party holds Congress and the other the White House. While it is probably true that Obama is, as one commenter put it, not a Kenyan but a Swede, that his ideal is to make the U.S. into something more like a European welfare state, he is also a Chicago politician, unlikely to let his principles get in the way of his politics. Faced with a congress controlled by the other party, a substantial minority of it in favor of a sharp reduction in government expenditure and regulation, he might well decide that his best strategy is to outflank the Republicans on the right. He has already made a few gestures in that direction, in rhetoric if not yet in substance.

That could, of course, mean being even more willing than they are to reduce liberty in the name of fighting terrorism. But it could also mean trying to reduce government expenditure and regulation wherever doing so is not too politically expensive—most obviously the military, which Romney is quite unlikely to cut, but perhaps in other areas as well. And it is at least possible, although not likely, that if the Republicans do not learn from the lesson Ron Paul is teaching, Obama will, that he will conclude that a shift in a libertarian direction somewhere, perhaps drugs or foreign policy, is a sensible tactic to create a Democratic majority.

Gingrich: Open Marriage or Menage a Trois?

2012-01-22T11:51:00.000-08:00

Various news stories have reported that Newt Gingrich asked his second wife for an open marriage. So far as I can tell, it isn't quite true:

Marianne Gingrich, in her first television interview since the couple's 1999 divorce, told ABC News that when Gingrich admitted to a six-year affair with a congressional aide, he asked her if she would share him with the other woman, Callista, who is now married to Gingrich.

"And I just stared at him and he said, 'Callista doesn't care what I do,'" Marianne Gingrich told ABC News. "He was asking to have an open marriage and I refused...that is not a marriage."

...

Marianne Gingrich, in a separate interview with The Washington Post, said Newt Gingrich initially asked for a divorce.

(Fox News Story)

His original proposal was a divorce—the conventional resolution to such a situation. When his wife turned that down, he offered an alternative.

But that alternative does not seem to have been an open marriage—it is clear from other accounts that that was her term, not his. An open marriage would have meant not only that he was free to sleep with other people but that she was as well; so far as I can tell from the news stories, that was not what he proposed, although it is possible he would have been willing to. What he asked for was a different traditional solution, although the tradition is perhaps more French than American.

Kahneman and Caloric Leakage

2012-01-20T18:17:00.000-08:00

In a recent post, I discussed Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow, a very interesting book. Part of its point is that much, arguably most, of our thinking is done by a part of our mind that functions, invisibly and automatically, in the background, the part that recognizes faces and facial expressions, voices, and much else, a part that is very fast but not very smart. Many of the errors we make are due to the limitations of that part of our mind, limitations that are an almost inevitable accompaniment to its speed.

Thus, for example, the fast mind, faced with a problem it does not know how to solve, substitutes a similar problem that it does know how to solve and offers the solution to the second question in place of a solution to the first—without mentioning to the slow mind, the part that is responsible for rational thought, that it has made the substitution. Another limitation of the fast mind is that it is very bad at fine distinctions; thus, for example, it tends to deal with probabilities by classifying them into one of three categories—impossible, possible, certain. Attention, processing by the slow mind, is a scarce resource, so most of the time the slow mind simply accepts the information fed to it by the fast.

It occurs to me that the malfunctions of the fast mind may help explain why it is so hard to lose weight. Consider the well known principle of caloric leakage, the principle that holds that although a cookie has lots of calories, a piece of a broken cookie does not, the calories having leaked out—so you might as well eat it. Or consider my well established weakness for marginal cost zero food—another serving at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

The explanation for caloric leakage is the inability of my fast mind to deal with fine distinctions—a piece of a cookie is entirely different from a cookie, cannot be viewed as half a cookie, and so my knowledge that it has half the calories of the cookie never gets triggered. The explanation for the second problem is that, faced with zero marginal cost food, I have no need to pass the decision of whether to eat it on to my slow mind to decide whether it is worth the cost in money—and my fast mind doesn't worry about the cost in calories.

Also, as best I can tell, my fast mind has what an economist would describe as a high discount rate, and so is unwilling to give up benefits now for larger benefits in the future. And I like cookies.

The Courtesy of Princes

2012-01-20T17:57:00.000-08:00

Some years back, I came across the phrase "Punctuality is the courtesy of princes." I do not know where it originated—perhaps some reader can tell me—but it struck me as embodying an important truth.

Suppose you are the big cheese—king, CEO, guest of honor. If someone else comes late to dinner, his dinner is cold. But the dinner can't start without you, so if you come late to dinner, everyone else's dinner is cold too.

It struck me in part in the context of the SCA, a historical recreation group of which I am a long time member; it actually has kings and princes and feasts, and if the King is half an hour late to the feast everyone else is likely to get food that has been cooling for half an hour.

Part of the justification for the phrase is the observation that lack of punctuality by the prince imposes a cost on everyone else. The other part is the observation that doing things for people only really counts if it costs you something. If the King knights someone, that's great for the recipient, but it does not actually cost the King anything. But being careful always to show up on time when your presence is necessary for other people does cost something, since quite often you have other things you would like to be doing, so it is a way of showing that the welfare of other people, in particular the people you are in some sense in authority over, matters to you.

The point is not limited to feudal societies or historical recreation. In the real world, I make my living as a professor. If one of my students is five minutes late, he misses five minutes of the class. If I am five minutes late, everyone misses five minutes of the class. If one of my students persuades me to revise his grade upwards or exempt him from some requirement of the class that he finds particularly difficult, that's great for him but doesn't really cost me anything, so is weak evidence that I actually care about his welfare. Taking the trouble to never come late to class, on the other hand, does cost me something.

Punctuality is the courtesy of princes. And professors.

What if Arab Spring is followed by Arab Winter?

2012-01-16T16:44:00.000-08:00

The Arab Spring has gotten a generally favorable press in western countries—not surprising, since the governments attacked were undemocratic and, to varying degrees, oppressive, and democracy is very nearly the civic religion of modern developed states.

Like other religions, it relies as much on faith as on reason. African decolonization, carried out on a democratic model, repeatedly took the form of one man, one vote, once. Its results included some of the bloodiest conflicts of the postwar world. In several different countries, casualties were in at least the hundreds of thousands—worse, I think, than anything in colonial Africa since Leopold's Congo atrocities. That history should remind the supporters of democracy that it is a means, not an end, hence not always and everywhere an unambiguously good thing.

The recent success of Islamist parties, especially in Egypt, raises similar concerns. The final results might be governments worse than the ones that were overthrown—either democratic governments responding to majority opinion inconsistent with liberal values or a new and even worse generation of dictatorial rulers.

If that happens, it will be interesting to see the response in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Mormon Candidates, Gay Marriage, and Polygamy

2012-01-14T10:38:00.000-08:00

One argument frequently offered by opponents of gay marriage is that the logic that leads to the legalization of same-sex marriage also implies that polygamy should be legal. Supporters of same-sex marriage seem, in my experience, reluctant to make the obvious response—so what? Why shouldn't a man be permitted two wives or a woman two husbands, provided that all three parties are willing? Most seem to concede, at least by implication, that if same-sex marriage does lead to legalized polygamy, that is an argument against it.

It occurs to me that this raises a potential problem for two of the current crop of Republican candidates. Neither Huntsman nor Romney supports same-sex marriage. Both are Mormons. Surely at some point some curious voter will ask one or the other for his view of polygamy. Given that they are trying to get votes from people who regard polygamy as so obviously wicked that the mere possibility of legalizing it is a convincing argument against legalizing same-sex marriage, what are they to say?

It is true that the Church of Latter-Day Saints abandoned polygamy a century or so back. But it is also true that it was founded by polygamists, throughout its early history regarded polygamy as an important part of its religion, and abandoned it only under severe outside pressure, including military occupation by the U.S. army. Can a believing Mormon really hold that polygamy is not merely a bad idea at the moment but inherently evil? Can someone unwilling to say he believes that polygamy is evil win the Republican nomination?

Has the question come up yet? If so, how did the candidate evade it?

Politicians and Historical Ignorance

2012-01-10T15:38:00.000-08:00

Rick Santorum, in an interview some years back:

"Every society in the history of man has upheld the institution of marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. Why? Because society is based on one thing: that society is based on the future of the society. And that's what? Children. Monogamous relationships."

The comment has mostly been criticized in the context of the dispute over same-sex marriage. What struck me was the profound historical ignorance it implied, assuming Santorum actually believed what he said.

One can argue about whether or not any historical society had something equivalent to same-sex marriage—but Santorum included in his description of what every society was based on "monogamous relationships." Monogamy is, historically speaking, more common than polygamy, but polygamy was an accepted form of marriage not only in the Islamic world (where it still is) and in China through most of its history—two of the world's great civilizations. It was also an accepted practice in Old Testament judaism, the society on which all three of the major monotheist religions are based.

Santorum does not, however, have any monopoly on historical nonsense.

Gingrich: "I think Jefferson or George Washington would have strongly discouraged you from growing marijuana, and their techniques for dealing with it would have been rather more violent than the current government."

Most of the current crop of candidates could be excused for that one, but Gingrich, before he got into politics, was a professional historian and has written alternate history novels set in 19th century America. Yet he apparently does not realize that marijuana only became illegal in the U.S. in the 20th century. Or that, in the 18th century, hemp was an important commercial crop—and both Washington and Jefferson grew it.

Alternatively, and perhaps more plausibly, he doesn't actually connect what he says with what he knows.

To be fair, it is not only Republican candidates who appear to be strikingly ignorant of historical facts. It was, after all, our current Vice-President who, in a televised interview, claimed that:

“When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed.”

Thus demonstrating that:

1. He didn't know who was president in 1929.

2. He thought television was widely available in 1929—ten years before the first presidential speech to be given on television.

Readers are invited to provide additional examples.

Dear Apple—Getting the Interface Wrong

2012-01-06T16:25:00.000-08:00

I wish to find and open a file—say Switch, a useful program for doing things with sound files. My application folder contains about a hundred and fifty applications and folders, arranged in alphabetical order. To simplify the search for the one I want, I start by pressing S on my keyboard.

The window now shows, as its bottommost file, Safari, the first application that starts with S. Since the file listed at the bottom of the window is the first one starting with S, every other application whose name begins with that letter is now off screen. To get to the file I want, I will have to scroll further down.

Apple is famous for the elegance of its user interface, but in this case it got it wrong. Pressing S ought to either put Safari at the top of the window or System Preferences, the last S file, at the bottom. Either of those would put Switch where I want it—visible.

Until Apple makes that simple fix, I will simply have to remember, when I want to find Switch, to press T.

Shoes: A Modest Proposal

2011-12-21T10:03:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, while buying a new pair of shoes, I noticed something interesting. The wide size was comfortable on my left foot, tight on the right. The extra wide was comfortable on the right, loose on the left.

According to the seller, that is a common, perhaps even normal, pattern—the right foot tends to be just a tiny bit bigger than the left. My wife confirmed the pattern from her own experience.

My first thought was that perhaps a high end brand could take advantage of the pattern by selling shoes individually—one to fit the left foot, one to fit the right—instead of in pairs. It then occurred to me that the mass market approach would be to routinely make the right shoe of each pair a fraction of a size larger than the left. The first firm that did that ought to increase its sales, since lots of people would find its shoes a little more comfortable than the shoes of its competitors.

At which point it occurred to me that perhaps it was already happening. Does anyone know? Are right shoes and left shoes precise mirror images of each other, as I assumed, or do some firms routinely make one just a tiny bit bigger than the other?

It's All in How You Say It

2011-12-15T14:19:00.000-08:00

"Shamed former French leader Jacques Chirac has been found guilty of corruption and given a suspended jail sentence, becoming France's first ex-president to be convicted for his crimes." News story

George Orwell, Dishonest Rhetoric, and the Libertarian Movement

2011-12-15T10:18:00.000-08:00

The key-word here is ‘objectively’.
We are told that it is only people’s objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort, are ‘objectively’ aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true, the ‘objectively’ line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore ‘Trotskyism is Fascism’. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.

George Orwell, "As I please," 8 December 1944.

I was recently reminded of this passage in Orwell by posts on two different libertarian blogs. One, by Roderick Long, is a defense of left-libertarians who accuse right-libertarians of supporting government favoritism towards big business. He writes:

So when left-libertarians accuse (some) right-libertarians of supporting corporatism, this is to be understood in a de re sense, not in a de dicto sense. Thus the claim is that right-libertarians are supporting certain policies/institutions/phenomena that are in fact instances of corporatism; we are not claiming that right-libertarians are deliberately supporting them qua instances of corporatism – and so pointing out that they’re not is not relevant as a reply to the original point.

The language is different, employing the philosophical distinction between de re and de dicto instead of the political misuse of "objectively," but the logic is the same. Accuse someone of supporting something and then explain, when challenged, that you don't actually mean he supports it, you mean he supports things that you think support it.

The other post was by Walter Block, accusing Wendy McElroy of not being a libertarian. To Walter's credit, he goes into some detail in describing the immense evidence that Wendy is a libertarian, having been active in the movement for decades. But he concludes that nonetheless she is not, on the grounds that she opposes the Ron Paul campaign, which Walter believes libertarians ought to support. He writes:

I distinguish between being a libertarian, and agreeing with (virtually all) libertarian principles. The former implies that you act so as to promote liberty. The latter means that you agree with these principles, and, may, perhaps, as in her case at present, act against them. I have no doubt that Wendy is a libertarian in the second sense. Her whole adult life gives amply testimony to that fact. She believes in the libertarian message, fervently. She defends it, brilliantly. She extends it, creatively. But, as far as acting so as to promote liberty, her trashing of Dr. Ron Paul’s candidacy gives the lie to that. Belief is necessary, but not sufficient, for being a libertarian. Wendy passes the first test, but not the second.

Hence "not a libertarian" turns out to mean "disagreeing with Walter Block about what tactics libertarians should employ."

Thinking Fast and Slow

2011-12-13T13:53:00.000-08:00

by Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist who won (and probably deserved to win) a Nobel prize in economics, is a book well worth reading; I just finished it. Its subject is how the human mind works and, in particular, why we make the predictable mistakes that we do make.

The central insight is that we act as if we had two different mechanisms for making sense of the world around us and deciding what to do. System 1—intuition broadly defined—works automatically and very quickly to recognize a voice over the phone, tell whether a stranger's face is expressing anger, generate conclusions on a wide range of subjects. System 2—conscious thought—takes the conclusions generated by System 1 and either accepts them or rejects them in favor of its own conclusions, generated much more slowly and with greater effort. Attention is a limited resource, so using System 2 to do all the work is not a practical option.

System 1 achieves its speed by applying simple decision rules. Its view of probability, for instance, functions largely by classifying gambles into three categories—impossible, possible, or certain. One result is that an increase in probability within the middle category, say from 50% to 60%, appears less significant than an increase of the same size from 0% to 10% or from 90% to 100%.

That simple fact provides a solution to a very old problem in economics, the lottery-insurance puzzle. If someone is risk averse, he buys insurance, reducing, at some cost, the uncertainty of his future. If someone is risk preferring, he buys lottery tickets, increasing, at some cost, the uncertainty of his future. Why do some people do both?

Kahneman's answer is that insuring against your house burning down converts a very unattractive outcome (your house burns down and you are much worse off as a result) from probability 1% to probability 0%, a small gain in probability but a large gain in category (from possible to impossible). Buying a lottery ticket converts a very attractive outcome (you get a million dollars) from probability 0% to probability .001%, a small gain in probability but a large gain in category (from impossible to possible). Both changes are more attractive, as viewed by System 1, than they would be as viewed by a rational gambler.

If you have read Nudges, many of the errors Kahneman describes will be already familiar to you. The difference is that Thaler and Sunstein take those errors as observed facts; Kahneman explains, for the most part plausibly, why we make them, and supports his explanations with evidence. And while Kahneman has a few comments on political implications of his results, his main focus is on telling the reader what mistakes he is likely to make and why, in the hope of helping him to make fewer of them.

One of the attractions of Kahneman's book is that although some of his evidence consists of descriptions of the results of experiments, his own or others, quite a lot of it consists of putting a question to the reader and then pointing out that the answer the reader probably offered, the one most people offer, is not only wrong but provably, in some sense obviously, wrong.

Consider the following example:

Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.
Which is she more likely to be:

A bank teller
A bank teller and active in the feminist movement

Most of the people to whom the question was put judged the second alternative as more likely than the first—despite that being logically impossible. System 1 has a weak grasp of probability and so, in this case as in many others, substitutes for the question it cannot answer an easier question it can, in this case “which sounds more like a description of Linda.”

The book is more than four hundred pages long; if I tried to summarize all of it this would be a very long post. Read it.

Great Comment on Someone Else's Blog

2011-12-06T11:43:00.000-08:00

Will being a brilliant software engineer get you a smokin’-hot babe for a wife? No, it won’t. (There are exceptions to this.) But unless you’re a complete jerk, there’s probably an accountant with a cute smile who shares your love of HP Lovecraft, or a genetics lab tech with a great laugh who plays Dungeons and Dragons, or an IT consultant who loves to cuddle and is willing to put up with your cat’s YouTube fame.

It is less the case that shy, successful people are purchasing access to a mate and more the case that the shy, successful people have finally found a common breeding ground to spawn.

(comment by Anatid to a post on The Volokh Conspiracy)

Who Profits from the Recession?

2011-11-30T07:18:00.000-08:00

Reading Google News this morning, I noticed a headline:

Home Prices Continue to Fall:

D.C. Bucks Trend

I was particularly struck by it because yesterday, driving back to our temporary home in Fairfax from a visit to D.C., my wife commented on the amount of new construction we saw. The economy may not be doing so well, but the government industry is booming

Or, to quote my wife, "People talk about Main Street vs Wall Street. It should be Main Street vs the Beltway."

David Brin and Adam Smith

2011-11-28T15:34:00.000-08:00

I've run into yet another case of someone complaining about conservatives falsely claiming Adam Smith in support of their views while doing exactly that himself. The complainer this time is David Brin, who wrote an interesting book on surveillance some years back but has, in my experience, a tendency to pontificate well beyond the limits of his knowledge.

In the relevant passage, he wrote:

But anyone who actually reads Adam Smith also knows that he went on and on about that "fair and open" part! Especially how excessive disparities of wealth and income destroy competition. Unlike today's conservatives, who grew up in a post-WWII flattened social order without major wealth-castes, Smith lived immersed in class-rooted oligarchy, of the kind that ruined markets, freedom and science across nearly 99% of human history. He knew the real enemy, first hand and denounced it in terms that he never used for mere bureaucrats.

In a comment, I asked him to produce a quote from Smith saying that excessive disparities of wealth and income destroy competition. He responded with the following (from The Theory of Moral Sentiments).

"This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect, persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments."

Which, as I pointed out in my response, has nothing to do with disparities of wealth and income destroying competition. Apparently Brin couldn't find any examples of Smith saying what he claims Smith went on and on about, so quoted something else instead.

I could have gone on to point out that Smith's attacks are not, for the most part, against the "class-rooted oligarchy," which at his time consisted mostly of the landed gentry. On the contrary, he tried to persuade the landowners that the policies he thought were in the general interest were also in their interest—sometimes stretching his argument pretty far to do so. His attacks were mostly directed at the "merchants and manufacturers."

But it didn't seem worth the trouble.

Those interested in reading Brin's post and our exchange of comments will find them here.

My earlier post on people misrepresenting Smith while complaining about other people doing so is here.

P.S. Since I put this up, Brin posted another response and I answered it. As I suggest in my answer, my fundamental complaint about Brin is the same as my complaint elsewhere about Rothbard—that as long as he believes he is arguing for the right side, he doesn't really care whether what he says is true.

The Price of Money

2011-11-25T12:16:00.000-08:00

I have stayed out of macro-economics in my work as an economist for a number of reasons, but it is a hot political subject at the moment and several times of late I have gotten involved in online macro arguments, so I decided it would be worth learning a little more about it. Someone sent me a copy of a recent book of essays by Tim Congdon, who has the interesting distinction of being both a monetarist and a fan of Keynes, and I have started reading it.

The central claim of the first essay is that the views of the British Keynesians of the sixties and seventies were strikingly inconsistent with Keynes' own views. They saw inflation as a cost push phenomenon to which the proper solution was wage and price controls. Keynes, like later monetarists, saw it as a result of too much money and the solution as tight monetary policy. He was against wage and price controls, not for them.

One other thing struck me about the first essay: Congdon repeatedly refers to the interest rate as "the price of money." This is a very common error, and one that is not only wrong but dangerously wrong.

If the price of an apple is fifty cents, that means that if I give a seller fifty cents he will give me an apple in exchange. If the interest rate is five percent and that is the price of money, I ought to be able to buy money for five cents on the dollar. I doubt that Congdon, or anyone else, will be willing to sell it to me at that price.

The price of money is what you have to give up to get it—the inverse of the price level. If the price of an apple is fifty cents, the price of a dollar is two apples. The interest rate is the rent on money, measured in money. A change in the price of money affects both the money you are renting and the money you are paying as rent, leaving the ratio of the two unchanged.

Suppose that at midnight tonight every dollar bill in the world twins, along with a similar change in the accounting entries for bank deposits, other forms of money, and all obligations denominated in money. By morning, there is twice as much money as before—and nothing else has changed.

I would ask Congdon whether, under those circumstances, he would expect the interest rate to drop. If his answer is yes, my next question is whether he would expect a much more extreme drop if we relabeled pennies as dollars and dollars as hundred dollar bills, thus increasing the money supply, measured in "dollars," a hundredfold.

The reason the description of the interest rate as the price of money is not only wrong but dangerously wrong is that it implies a simple relation between money and the interest rate—in the extreme (but not uncommon) version, the belief that interest rates are set by central banks, with high interest rates the result of a tight monetary policy.

A central bank can create money and lend it out, increasing the supply of loans (which reduces the interest rate) and increasing the money supply. That is the one element of truth to the relationship. But what is affecting the interest rate is not the amount of money but the amount of loans; the government could get the same effect by collecting more in taxes than it spends and lending out the difference.

The interest rate is a market price—the price paid for the use of capital—and the central bank controls it only in the same sense in which the government can control the price of wheat by choosing to buy or sell some of it. The central bank does not have an unlimited amount of capital from money creation to lend and so has only a limited ability to shift interest rates from what they would otherwise be. Furthermore, a continued expansion of the money supply creates the expectation of future price rises, which pushes the nominal interest rate up, not down.

I have been unable to locate an email address for Tim Congdon, so am unable to point out his error to him directly. If any of my readers has one, I would be grateful if you would send it to me.

[Two people have now provided me with his email, I emailed him and received a friendly response.]

How to Destroy the Publishing Industry: Take Three

2011-11-23T11:30:00.000-08:00

It is now both easy and inexpensive for an author to self-publish his work, either as a print-on-demand paperback or an ebook; for the former I recommend CreateSpace, Amazon's POD subsidiary, which my wife and I used to self-publish a historical cookbook. Self-published books of either sort can be sold through Amazon, making them easily available to anyone who wants them. Thus two of the functions of a publisher, producing books and distributing them, are no longer necessary.

Publishers also help authors write their books by providing copy editors, locating cover artists, occasionally even providing useful feedback on the contents. But all of these functions can be provided almost equally well in other ways. Copy editors are for the most part self-employed free lancers rather than employees; there is nothing to stop the author from cutting out the middleman, or the author's agent from stepping in to fill that role. The best editorial help I ever got came not from a publisher but from my agent.

There remains one more function—filtering. The fact that a book has been published by a major publisher is no guarantee that it is worth reading but pretty good evidence that it is at least worth looking at. To finish the job of replacing the publishing industry, we need a substitute filter, a way in which readers can find, out of a million self-published books, the top ten thousand or so. My experience so far suggests that Amazon reviews are not adequate for the purpose; the novel that I self-published as a kindle has gotten reviews ranging from four to five stars, but sold few copies. We need something better.

My latest idea is to leverage the Kindle. Have Amazon get permission from Kindle owners to have their machines report, anonymously, on how long the owner spent reading each book on the machine. The longer the time spent, the better evidence that the book was, for that reader, worth reading. The rating algorithm should take account of differing book lengths and ignore books that were never looked at.

To make this work better, make downloading free for the first month, in order to increase the number of people who download each book and take at least a brief look at it. Once the month is up, the book price goes to whatever price the author chooses. A fancier version, probably not beyond the technology, is to make such a free book vanish from the Kindle a month after it is downloaded, leaving behind a link to where it can now be bought.

An even simpler approach would be to leverage the "sample the beginning of this book for free" option that Amazon already provides, implementing it in some form that lets Amazon find out how many of the readers who started the free sample finished it.

As its title suggests, this is not my first post on the subject. Readers interested in my previous suggestions for eliminating the publishing industry will find them here and here.

Fracking and Earthquakes: Bug or Feature?

2011-11-12T09:16:00.000-08:00

According to a recent news story, there is good evidence that forcing water into deep wells, done (among other reasons) in the process of fracturing rock to get at natural gas, causes earthquakes. The story takes it for granted that this is an argument against fracking, but while that might be true, it is by no means obvious.

The energy for an earthquake has to come from somewhere, and I don't think the amount of energy that goes into pumping water underground can be close to enough. What is presumably happening is that pumping in the water causes the release of energy that is already there. Dissipating that energy might mean lots of small earthquakes instead of a small number of big ones, which would probably be a net benefit.

If so, what has been identified is not a bug but a feature.

Do any of my readers have more information on the subject?

International Healthcare Comparisons

2011-11-10T12:22:00.000-08:00

Some years back, I had a post criticizing the widely cited (and often misrepresented) WHO study comparing medical care in a large number of countries. More recently, an online discussion resulted in someone pointing me at a book by Sheila Leatherman and Kim Sutherland, aimed mainly at evaluating the British National Health Service but with a number of international comparisons, in most cases among the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Parts of the book are available online at Google Books.

Judging by the information on the pages shown, the widely believed claim that the U.S. not only spends more per capita on health care than other developed countries but also gets worse results for its money is not supported by the evidence. The webbed parts of the book contain the following comparisons (pp. viii-xviii):

---

For “mortality from causes considered amenable to healthcare,” “in 1998 the UK had the highest mortality rates of the five countries compared.”

“England continued to have the highest breast cancer mortality rates among these comparator countries.”

“Of the five countries compared, the US had the highest survival rates from breast cancer, ...”

For colorectal cancer, “New Zealand had the highest mortality rate ... and the US had the lowest.”

“In 2001, England's mortality rate from stroke ... was lower than that in Australia ... but higher than that in the US ...”

“82% of UK respondents indicated that they were treated in [Accident and emergency] in less than four hours, a figure broadly in line with comparator countries (AUS 87%; CAN 74%; NZ 86%; US 87%).

“Patient reports of access to primary care within 48 hours saw the UK … outperform both the US and Canada” (Australia and New Zealand did still better).

“In response to a question regarding whether recent [Accident and emergency] visits would have been necessary if appropriate primary care had been available … the UK had the best result.”

“The UK had the lowest level of health consequences resulting from … errors and mistakes.”

---

I think these are all of the pieces of information shown that provide information on the relative performance of either the U.S., the U.K. (or in some cases England), or both, although I might have missed something. I am not including various input measures.

By my count, U.S. medical outcomes (including things such as speed of treatment) are superior to U.K. outcomes (in some case English outcomes) on five different measures, inferior on three. On two measures the U.K. (or England) is the worst of the five countries considered, on two the best; on three the U.S. is the best of the five (counting one tied for best), on none the worst.

There are four pure outcome measures, mortality and survival rates from various causes. The US was superior to the UK on all of them, best of the five countries on two. The UK was worst of the five countries on two.

The overall conclusion, based on this (very fragmentary) data, is that U.S. healthcare outcomes are on the whole better, not worse, than UK healthcare outcomes.

These results might change if I had a chance to look at the entire book. Unfortunately, neither the library at GMU, where I’m currently visiting, nor the library at SCU, where I teach, appears to have it. If by any chance someone reading this has access to the book, I would be interested in a more complete list of comparisons.

Two other points in the book struck me. Judged by per-capita spending on health the U.S. is the worst of the five, as I would expect, but North Ireland and Wales are close behind, which surprised me a little.

Also, the text has, under “Waiting for elective surgery,” the information that “The UK in 1998 and 2001 had high numbers of patients waiting: and in 2000 had long waits for elective surgery, relative to comparative countries.”

That’s a charge often made against the English system by its critics and routinely denied by its supporters. In this case it is coming from authors whose speciality seems to be the study of NHS performance.

Reason Magazine, Sarah Palin, and the Huffington Post

2011-11-08T16:03:00.000-08:00

In a webbed "candidate profile" of Sarah Palin, Reason.com writes:

Regarding the invasions of Iraq and Aghanistan, she said, "Our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God."

The actual quote is available in a variety of places. The following is from the Huffington Post; the accompanying video of the speech is no longer up:

"Pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God," she exhorted the congregants. "That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan."

What she is saying is not that the war is a task that is from God but that her listeners should pray that it is. She even says it twice over. Asking people to pray that something is true implies, not that you know it is true, but that you are afraid it might not be.

Reason converted "Pray that X is true" into "X is true." That is either incompetent journalism or a deliberate lie.

During the 2010 elections, I found I had a new hobby—defending Tea Party candidates from claims that they were nuttier than they actually were. One pleasant surprise was the discovery that the Huffington Post, at least in the cases I looked at (example), was a reliable source of information, even when reporting on people whose views they obviously disagreed with.

One unpleasant surprise was discovering, on Reason.com, words attributed to a candidate, given in quotation marks, which the candidate had not said. The author of the piece had altered both words and meaning. When I pointed that out to him by email he defended what he had written. The misquote was only corrected after I pointed it out to someone else at Reason.

I find it unfortunate that the leading libertarian magazine is a less reliable source of information than a leading publication on the other side.

The Evolution of the Camera

2011-10-29T08:51:00.000-07:00

Long ago when the world was young and cameras used film, there were two kinds. With a viewfinder camera, the human looked through the viewfinder, the camera looked through the lens, and the two views were different—significantly different for close-up shots. A single lens reflex camera (SLR), typically larger and more expensive, contained an elaborate internal mechanism to permit the human to view the scene through the same lens that the camera saw it through. To take a picture, the mirror that was directing the image up to the prism that bent it to reach the human's eye swung up and out of the way, in order that the light could get to the film instead. (There is also evidence in the fossil record of a still earlier design known as a twin lens reflex).

After digital cameras came along and I started using them, it occurred to me that the image I was seeing on the view screen was the same image that would be recorded on the camera's memory—one of the advantages of using electronics instead of optics for the purpose. I was already looking through the camera's lens, so no need for a mirror and prism. Oddly enough, however, SLR's (called dSLR's since they were now digital) were still being made, were still large and expensive, still had an elaborate apparatus of moving mirror and prism, and were still regarded as what serious photographers used.

They had two significant advantages over the less expensive sorts of digital cameras—interchangeable lenses and much larger imaging sensors, permitting them to take better pictures. They also had optical viewfinders that let you look through the camera's lens. The resolution perceivable by the human eye is higher than the resolution of a camera's viewscreen, so getting the image directly to the human was worth something—but, given the quality of the available screens, not very much. That, at least, was how I saw it—making the internal mirror and related apparatus the photographic equivalent of the human appendix.

It couldn't last—and, fortunately, didn't. It eventually occurred to someone in the industry that a camera with interchangeable lenses and a large sensor but without mirror, prism, and optical viewfinder could be very nearly as useful as a dSLR but considerably smaller and less expensive.

My Sony NEX-3 arrived yesterday. It cost about half as much as a comparable dSLR—and has the same sized sensor. With the smaller of its two lenses it is not very much larger than the pocket camera it replaces.

Celtic Wanderings?

2011-10-28T15:10:00.000-07:00

My current writing project is a book on legal systems very different from ours, based on a seminar I have taught for some years at SCU; my current chapter drafts are webbed for a workshop I am doing at George Mason this fall.

The legal systems I have done chapters on so far include ancient Irish law (c. 6th century) and traditional Somali law. Surprisingly enough, they have several features in common. In both, one consequence of injuring someone is the legal obligation to provide your victim with sick-maintainance—hospitality and medical services until he recovers.

In the Irish system the kin-group called the fine, consisting of all descendants in the paternal line of a common great-grandfather, is responsible for seeing that its members pay any fines or damage payments they owe or, if they don't, paying for them. In the Somali system the kin-group called the juffo, consisting of all descendants in the paternal line of a common great-grandfather, is responsible for some but not all fines owed by its members, the rest being the responsibility of the jilib, a group of several related juffos.

All very suspicious. The Celts wandered pretty far but, so far as I know, they never made it to the horn of Africa. Looking at it from the other side there are people referred to as "black Irish," but I don't believe ... .

Drones, Geneva Convention, and Other Ambiguous Goods

2011-10-20T16:53:00.000-07:00

"Any development that makes war appear to be easier or cheaper is dangerous and morally troubling. It lowers the political threshold of war. It threatens to weaken the moral presumption against the use of armed force." David Cortwright, writing at CNN.com on drones.

It is a legitimate argument, but its application is wider than may be obvious. The Geneva Conventions, for instance, are designed to make war cheaper—not in dollars but in human costs. The pre-Napoleonic rules of parole, under which a prisoner of war could give his word not to try to escape and then spend his imprisonment in the town inn instead of the much less comfortable prison, or even give his word not to fight until exchanged and then be sent home, were designed to make war less costly.

Any such change has two effects. One is to reduce the cost, the amount of damage to things that matter to human beings, including human beings themselves, of warfare, which is good. The other is to increase the amount of warfare, which is bad. There is no theoretical basis to say, in general, which effect is larger—it depends on the elasticity of supply of war.

In my Law's Order, I discuss [search for the word "duress" in the chapter] the same issue in a different context—whether contracts made under duress ought to be enforceable. When the mugger threatens to kill you if you don't pay him a hundred dollars and you pay with a check, should you be free to call up your bank and cancel payment once he is out of sight? Being able to pay him means that when mugged you don't get killed for failure to offer your mugger enough to let you go. But it also means that mugging is more profitable, so more of it happens.

In that particular case, I am pretty sure that making the contract enforceable has, on net, negative consequences. But there is no good reason to suppose that the same is true for innovations, technological or otherwise, that make war less costly.

How to Lie With Statistics: Tax Rates

2011-10-15T17:50:00.000-07:00

A good deal of the recent rhetoric in support of Democratic proposals for raising taxes is designed to make it sound as though rich people pay federal taxes at a lower rate than everyone else. That, as one can easily check by looking at the published figures from the Congressional Budget Office, is not only false but wildly false. Most people in the bottom half of the income distribution pay no federal income tax at all, although they do pay payroll taxes and, arguably, some of the cost of corporate income tax passed on in higher prices or lower wages. On the CBO calculations, the ratio of total federal tax paid to income rises pretty much monotonically with income.

The less extreme claim, which has been getting a good deal of press of late, is that a quarter of the households with an income of at least a million dollar a year pay taxes at a lower rate than the ten percent of those with incomes of under $100,000 who pay at the highest rate.

I have not seen any detailed explanation of how those numbers are calculated, but presumably they are based on income and tax for a single year. If so, although the claim may be literally true, it is also highly misleading—an elegant example of how to lie while telling the truth.

Income and tax liability vary for each individual from year to year. If you take a large capital loss one year, part of it carries over to reduce your taxes, but not your income, in the next year. If you have a large capital gain in one year, your taxes go up for that year but your average tax rate goes down, since capital gains are taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income.

Some of the 25% of high income taxpayers paying at the lowest rate are people who regularly pay less taxes than most, some are taxpayers who happen to be paying a lower rate than average this year. Some of the 10% of middle income taxpayers paying at the highest rate are people who regularly pay more taxes than most, some are people who happen to be paying a higher rate this year than most years. So the widely reported calculation overstates, by how much I have no way of knowing, the spread of both distributions, both the number of middle income taxpayers who on average, year after year, are taxed at a higher rate than the bottom 25% of high income taxpayers and the number of high income taxpayers who on average are taxed at a lower rate than the top 10% of middle income taxpayers.

If the logic is not clear, consider betting on the races. Each day, a significant fraction of the bettors—say a quarter—make money. A few of them make money because they really are much better than most at guessing which horse will win. Most of them make money because that was the day that they happened to be lucky. If you looked only at the day's results, you would conclude that the top quarter make money at the races. If you looked at the year's results, you would come up with a much smaller number.

Just as, if you looked at the tax rates paid by any group of taxpayers over a period of years, you would get fewer paying a rate that was unusually high or unusually low than if you look at them for a single year.

And for readers interested in a more general account of how to lie with statistics, I have a book to recommend.

----

P.S.

Here are two summaries of federal tax incidence, one from the Tax Policy Center of Brookings and the Urban Institute, one showing the figures from the Congressional Research Service. The former shows figures for the top one percent and top tenth of a percent. At least by its calculation, the effective rate rises monatonically with income.

P.P.S.

I linked to the figure showing the Congressional Research Service numbers, which I found on Google+. That apparently didn't, or at least doesn't, work. Here is the figure:

Are the Amish Anarchists?

2011-10-15T09:49:00.000-07:00

I have been reading up on the Amish for one chapter of the book on legal systems very different from ours that I'm currently working on. They provide an example of what I think of as an embedded legal system—a group that is under the authority of an external legal system, but also has its own legal system which it succeeds in enforcing on its members. Other examples are modern gypsies and Jewish communities during the diaspora, which were often given the right to impose Jewish law on their members by their gentile rulers.

It occurred to me that one could view the Amish as a working example of a form of anarchy. It is a very strange form, since the rules that the Amish are under are considerably more constraining—including rules on what styles of clothing they can wear, rules against owning automobiles or flying on airplanes, and much else—than the rules the rest of us are under. But those rules are all voluntarily accepted, and the system that generates them may reasonably be viewed as a competitive system of private law.

To expand on that, for readers not familiar with the Amish... . The only level of Amish "government" with any authority is the congregation, typically made up of about thirty to forty households. Its authority is over individuals who, as adults, have chosen to swear to accept its rules. The only punishment it can impose is shunning—the refusal of members of the congregation to associate in various ways with a member who has been excommunicated. Members, including excommunicated members, are free to resign from their congregation and join any other congregation that will accept them, or drop out of the Amish sect entirely.

The rules—the ordnung—vary from one congregation to another and change over time. In some settlements the congregations are, in effect, miniature territorial sovereigns, so if a member of one congregation wants to shift to another, perhaps because its rules are less (or more) strict than the rules of his current congregation, he has to physically move, although often not very far. In other settlements, especially ones where there are congregations with a considerable range of different versions of the Ordnung, congregations overlap, so you can switch congregations while remaining in the same location.

It's true, of course, that the Amish are under the rule of the U.S. (or, for a smaller number, Canadian) government. But they receive very few services from government, since they are unwilling to accept most of the conventional forms of government aid and, as pacifists, are unwilling to report crimes against themselves to the police or sue in the government courts to collect debts. Off hand, the only significant benefit I can think of that they get is protection against foreign invasion. And, on the other hand, governments at various levels imposes sizable costs on them, in the form of taxes that (with the exception of Social Security) they have to pay and regulations.

So I think they provide pretty good evidence of at least one form of (very structured) anarchy that works.

Mormons, Fundamentalists, and Critics

2011-10-10T14:23:00.000-07:00

Various people of late have been going back and forth over claims that Mormons are a cult and are not Christians. What strikes me is how much better press Mormons get, in the political context, than evangelical fundamentalists. If you look at the actual beliefs of the two groups, the official doctrines of the Church of Latter Day Saints are at least as nutty as those of fundamentalist groups that deny evolution, believe humans and dinosaurs coexisted ten thousand years or so back, and get routinely mocked for those beliefs.

The LDS claims that if you live a good life you will eventually become a god with a universe of your own to run, or that your ancestors can be converted post-mortem and so saved, are a bit odd, but there is no way of proving they are false, any more than one can prove false the beliefs of those who expect the second coming of Christ real soon now. But the belief that there was a lively civilization in the New World long before Columbus, and one that fits the description in LDS scripture, is inconsistent with what archaeology tells us about the relevant history. That surely ranks with the more direct versions of creationism as a denial of accepted scientific views.

The odd beliefs of fundamentalist Christians are an issue at the moment for Republican political candidates, many of whom sound as though they agree with them, raising the question of whether they actually believe or only pretend to. But I have not noticed any of the people who pick on candidates such as Palin or Bachmann for their religious views asking whether Romney and Huntsman really believe in the pre-Columbian "history" that their church proclaims or are being prudently silent on the subject.

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P.S. some days later. A British newspaper asks the same question.

Random Thoughts on Education

2011-10-09T12:26:00.000-07:00

Part I: Marshall as Textbook

In a recent book review in The New Republic, Robert Solow writes:

"When I first studied economics in 1940, we were not given Marshall to read as a textbook; it would probably have been an improvement if we had."

Although I was not literally given Marshall to read as a textbook, I came pretty close. My first position as an economics professor was at VPI, and while there I ended up, over a period of years, teaching a wide range of courses. It occurred to me later that my doing so might have been, not an accident, but a deliberate policy by James Buchanan, who was the dominant figure in the department. I had never taken an economics course for credit, and teaching things is a good way of learning them.

One of the courses I taught was the history of economic thought, which I taught as economic thought not as history. As I put it later when teaching the same course at UCLA, I wanted the students to imagine that they were graduate students in economics getting ready for their prelim exams, the year was 1776, and The Wealth of Nations was the latest thing in the field.

I did not learn all that much economics from Smith, a brilliant writer and thinker but a somewhat muddled economic theorist. But the other two figures I focused on were David Ricardo and Alfred Marshall, and I learned quite a lot of economics from them. One result is that, to this day, I teach the concept of economic efficiency in terms of Marshall's version rather than the later, more fashionable, and (in my view) inferior approaches associated with Pareto, Hicks and Kaldor.

Part II: How Kids Learn to Write Nowadays

Talking with my younger son on the phone, he mentioned that he was planning to write and web an account of his recent playing of Rome: Total War, a computer game he is fond of—and do it as the work of a later historian describing the rise of whatever empire established itself as victor in the course of the game. His sister, as of a few years ago, spent a good deal of time writing up and webbing battle reports describing events in World of Warcraft. I don't think either of them has gotten into fanfic, the practice of writing stories set in the world of Star Trek, or Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings, but a lot of other young people have. And quite a lot of the people I know online who write novels, including some who get them published, started out running role playing games.

All of which suggests to me that English classes, in high school and college, play a much smaller role in teaching this generation how to write than their teachers might suppose.

Donating to Both Sides: A Research Proposal

2011-10-04T08:52:00.000-07:00

It is, I gather, fairly common for corporate donors to give money to both candidates in some two candidate races. Assuming that is correct, the question is why.

Both donations can't be intended to influence the outcome of the election, since they push it in opposite directions, so presumably the purpose is to buy influence with the winner. But doesn't the donation to the loser reduce the donor's influence with the winner, just balancing an equal donation to the winner?

I can see two possible answers. One is that the information is not always public, so the winner may not know about the donation to the loser. I don't think that's been possible in recent elections, but I'm far from expert on the subject.

The other possibility is that the money isn't intended to be spent on the election. It's my understanding (those who know more are welcome to correct me) that, under some circumstances, a candidate who retires is allowed to keep the balance of past campaign donations. If so, one would expect the pattern of donating to both candidates to be most common when at least one of them is near the end of his career.

Which suggests some interesting possibilities for research.

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P.S. A commenter informs me that my fact is not a fact, that what is actually happening is that donations by employees of a firm, some of whom support one candidate and some another, are being misinterpreted as donations by the firm.

Should We Hope for a Republican Sweep?

2011-10-01T19:41:00.000-07:00

Like many other people unhappy with the administration, I have been worried by the apparent inability of the Republicans to find a candidate who is both electable and likely to make a significant improvement, and worried that they may end up losing an election that they ought to win. Thinking about it this evening, it occurred to me that perhaps that isn't such a bad outcome.

Suppose the Republicans convert Obama's current unpopularity into majorities in both House and Senate, but manage to lose the presidential election. Would that outcome be obviously worse than one in which they won everything?

There is much to be said for divided government. Consider what happened the last time the Republicans had both Congress and the White House.

Or, for that matter, the last time the Democrats did.

Could There Be a European War?

2011-09-30T11:03:00.000-07:00

There are lots of things that the supporters of the Euro, and the Common Market, and the broader project of which both are a part, hope to get from increased European unification. But the one big thing is future peace. The first half of the 20th century featured two horrific wars, originating in and largely fought in Europe, largely between European states. Behind all the talk about the convenience of a common currency or the advantages of free trade within the EU is that memory, and a burning desire that it not happen again.

Which raises two interesting questions, to neither of which I can offer a confident answer:

1. If the EU dissolves, with countries going back to separate currencies and separate trade policies, is there any significant risk of a third major European war within, say, the next fifty years? My gut reaction is that there is not, but I do not have any real support for it.

2. If the EU is maintained and European integration increased, perhaps along the lines that the supporters of the Euro have been urging as necessary to save Greece, Italy, Ireland, and Spain, is there any significant risk of a third major European war within, say, the next fifty years?

Before dismissing the possibility out of hand, it is worth considering what came out of the "integration" of the American states. I am not sure how much of a stretch it is to imagine a future where some of the countries, such as Germany, feel that they are being outvoted and exploited by others, such as Greece and Italy, through the institutions of a United States of Europe, with the tension eventually exploding into civil war. Each side would, of course, start out confident that once it was clear they were willing to fight the other would back down.

(Might make an interesting sf plot.)

Which suggests a third question: Does European integration make a major European war less likely, or more?

Comments welcome.

3D printing of clothing

2011-09-29T17:28:00.000-07:00

At least, sort of 3D.

My wife, as usual, has been complaining about the difficulty of finding dresses that meet her requirements, which include fitting her, looking reasonably attractive, being washable, and pockets. Having read a number of things recently about 3D printing, it occurred to me to wonder if something along similar lines would, or soon will be, practical for clothing.

It requires an accurate model of the customer's body, which I'm not sure you could get from photos, although it's possible that smart software could manage it. But for a less demanding version, imagine something like a phone booth in a shopping mall. You go in, shut the door, take off your clothes—if Clark Kent could do it, so can you. The sensors in the booth take a 3 dimensional picture of you. Perhaps you move around a little and they take more pictures, since how your shape changes as you move is relevant to getting clothing that will be comfortable. The description of your body shape is uploaded to the firm that put the booth there.

You go to the firm's web site, select fabric, color, style. The web page displays what the resulting dress will look like. If you like it, automatic machinery produces the dress for you.

Custom tailoring for the masses.

If customers are worried that their naked pictures will get ogled by someone in the cloud, the booth delivers its data directly to the customer, perhaps on a flash disk. The customer downloads the relevant software, plugs in the flash disk, connects to the web site for availability of fabrics, colors, and styles.

Is it doable? Is it being done? It seems like an easier problem than full scale 3D printing, since clothing is made from 2D shapes joined together. The quality of the material should be at least as good as with conventional clothing, since it's the same cloth. And the fit a good deal better.

Anything I'm missing? Any ambitious entrepreneurs out there?

D. Friedman vs D. Brin

2011-09-26T07:48:00.000-07:00

[Here's a link to Brin's post and the comments, including mine, courtesy of Chris Hibbert]

I've been having an exchange on Google+ with David Brin, started by a post of his that began:

Is it "class war" to reset tax levels to the levels of the prosperous 1990s?

I pointed out that, according to the CBO figures, the top quintile of the income distribution was paying a slightly higher average federal tax rate in 2007, the last year for which I could find CBO data, than in 1990, while the bottom quintile was paying about half the rate in 2007 it was paying in 1990, and asked him if what he was proposing was doubling the taxes on low income taxpayers.

My point, of course, was that although there is lots of rhetoric about the rich paying low taxes, what actually happened over the past twenty years was a sharp cut in federal taxes for the lower half of the income distribution.

Brin responded with:

Quintiles are utterly utterly misleading. 90% of the people in the topmost quintile still earn most of their income from wages, not dividends or capital gains. Try the top 5% and 1% and 0.1% and include shelters overseas (estimated.) This is exactly the kind of razzle dazzle switcheroo you should be wary of and have spotted for yourself.

To which I replied by quoting his post, followed by:

I don't think I'm the one offering razzle-dazzle--and I note that while you ask me to look up data, you don't actually offer any.

As you could easily have discovered if you looked up the numbers yourself, the CBO figures for 2007 show the top 1% paying an effective federal tax rate of 29.5%. The figure for 1990 is 28.8%.

The bottom quintile, on the other hand, paid an effective rate of 8.9% in 1990. In 2007, it was 4.0%.

So you have your facts backwards, at least so far as I can tell from the CBO figures--if you have something better, feel free to offer it. The effective rate on the bottom quintile has been cut in half since 1990, on the top 1% it has increased a little. I have no idea, and you don't say, what your source is for "shelters overseas (estimated)," but I suspect it's bluff--do you have figures showing that the top 1% is sheltering much more of its income now than in the 1990's? That's what your argument requires.

Let me repeat my question, since you didn't answer it the first time. You suggest rolling back tax levels to what they were in the 1990's. Does that mean that you want to double taxes on low income taxpayers, to get them back to where they were then? That's the big change, after all.

My figures are only up to 2007, since that's all I could readily find from the CBO; my guess is that the 2010 figures, if I could find them, would show a lower tax rate than in 2007 for all groups, since the current Administration has financed its budget largely with borrowing. But the big change from 1990 would still be the sharp drop in the effective tax rates paid by the lower part of the income distribution. For some reason neither you nor Obama seems to have noticed that--or at least let it interfere with your rhetoric.

Brin has so far not responded. I'm waiting to see if he will support his claims, concede error, or simply leave the argument unanswered. The fact that his response to my first post was, so far as I can tell, pure bluff--no data, just the implication that if one looked at the data it would support his beliefs--is disturbing.

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David Henderson has a link to a piece that goes into much more detail than I have and finds that the tax system has been becoming pretty steadily more progressive over the past fifteen years, under both Democrats and Republicans.

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The argument continues. For those who don't want to follow the link at the top of this and then search through the comments, here is my most recent response (to two of his):

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David B. writes:

“In fact I agree that taxes for everybody are lower now than they were in the 1990s.”

Because current spending is financed by borrowing. Which, absent a default, will eventually have to be paid for by higher taxes.

That was not however the point of my comments. My point was that taxation has become more progressive since the 1990’s, when you and lots of other people, including Obama, want to claim it has become less. Do you agree with that? If so, why have you gone to so much trouble, with your handwaving about the top 1% and tax shelters, to deny it?

“Put this in the context of 6000 years of history …”

More evasion. If I can’t get you to face demonstrable facts about taxation in the U.S. over the past few decades, I doubt that arguing with you about the past 6000 years of history would be very useful.

You keep trying to make this an argument about whether one supports or opposes the policies of the Bush administration. I didn’t vote for Bush, didn’t approve of his policies at the time, and don’t approve of their continuation by Obama, so you can have that argument with someone else. I’m simply trying to get you to face the fact that the federal tax system has gotten more progressive over time, not less.

And when I point you at evidence that that’s true, your response isn’t to try to rebut it, or even to understand it, but to talk about “you guys” and try to change the subject to your grand theories about America. If I’m going to argue about grand theories, I would prefer to do it with people who care whether the facts they use in their arguments are true or not.

“You even seem to implicitly say that tax rates SHOULD be progressive. Of course they aren't. Look closely.”

I have said nothing at all about whether tax rates should or shouldn’t be progressive. I’ve merely been trying to establish what they are, and how they have changed over time.

“Most of these right wing "studies" incorporate corporate taxes INTO the recipient's claim of taxes paid, under the bizarre incantation that this envelopes what the call "double taxation."”

Does that include the “right wing studies” by the Congressional Budget Office? Have you looked at their figures on the federal income tax alone? That by itself is highly progressive. That plus payroll taxes—which they treat as entirely a tax on the employee—is still progressive, although not as progressive.

How progressivity has changed over time requires a little effort to determine, and you would rather demagogue than make that effort. To see that the federal tax system is progressive, under any plausible assumption about incidence, requires only the ability to read and do arithmetic. But it apparently doesn’t fit your current ideology, whatever that may be.

I am curious, however, as to who you believe pays corporate income tax, since you think the notion that it comes out of money that would otherwise go to dividends and capital gains is bizarre. Is it just manna from heaven?

What's Wrong With Gestational Surrogacy?

2011-09-17T20:49:00.000-07:00

Gestational surrogacy is the arrangement by which a couple arrange to fertilize the woman's egg with the man's sperm, then have the fertilized ovum implanted and gestated in another woman's womb. In the U.S. the practice is regulated by state law, illegal in some states, legal in others, which means that in practice it is legal, since the couple can arrange to do it in a state where it is legal.

I gather, however, from a conversation with someone who has been researching the subject, that in most of western Europe it is illegal, and that while it is legal de jure to arrange to have it done abroad—India and the Ukraine are apparently the favored destinations—it is made difficult de facto by administrative obstacles put in the way of bringing the resulting infant back to its parents' home country. The U.K. is a partial exception; gestational surrogacy is legal, but only if it is altruistic, which is to say, only if the host mother is not paid for undergoing the inconvenience and risk of bearing another woman's child.

Which raises an obvious question: Why would anyone be against the arrangement? In many cases, it makes it possible for a couple to have a child—their own child—when they otherwise could not. Even in those cases where the biological mother could bear her own child, why should anyone else object if she can find another woman willing to do it for her on mutually acceptable terms?

There are, I think, a number of possible answers, although none that in my view justify the restrictions. One is that the decision to be a host mother is not freely made since it is "compelled" by poverty. This sort of argument is common in a variety of contexts, but I find it hard to make any sense of it. Put in its simplest terms, the claim is that if the potential host mother does not accept the offer she will starve to death, hence accepting the offer is not really a free choice, hence she should not be permitted to make it. Which, if the starting point is correct, means that out of our generous concern for a poor woman we will compel her to starve to death.

A second possibility, following a line of argument originated (I think) in the context of prostitution by professor Margaret Radin of Stanford Law School, is that by permitting a woman to rent out the use of her womb (body) we "commodify" motherhood (sex), cause people to think of it as something to be bought and sold, and so cheapen the human experience. Restated, the claim is that the transaction of buying sex or renting a womb is both an exchange and a statement. The exchange is one that, in Radin's view, should be permitted, since the woman owns her own body and so is entitled to decide how it is employed. But the statement, because of its effect on other people's view of their lives, is one that ought not to be made, hence the transaction may, arguably should, be prohibited.

What is bizarre about this argument is that it was made by an American law professor. The American constitution, as routinely interpreted by judges and law professors, contains a very strong protection for freedom of speech, making it a violation of the constitution to prohibit an act, such as flag burning, which is also speech. Following out that principle, Radin's argument ought to imply that even if there were good reasons to prohibit surrogacy or prostitution, the fact that both are speech as well as acts ought to protect them. She, along with those who accept her argument, reaches precisely the opposite conclusion.

A somewhat better argument that might be made against surrogacy is that permitting a couple to produce a child when they otherwise could not means that they will have no need to adopt, hence prohibiting surrogacy benefits children in need of parents. There is some logic to the argument, but its morality is questionable. Surely a legislator willing to forbid a couple from producing their own child in the only way they can in order that they will have to adopt someone else's ought at least to feel obligated to refrain from producing any children of his own until he has adopted at least one.

Finally there comes what I suspect is the real reason. Natural is good, and surrogacy (like IVF before it, and many other things as well) is unnatural. Our grandparents didn't do it, our pre-human ancestors didn't do it, so there must be something wrong with it, something wicked, sinful. Icky.

And worse still if done for money.

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On the principle of full disclosure, I should mention that my granddaughter Iselle might not have come into existence were it not for surrogacy. A hard argument to rebut (see below).

Have I Been Tuckerized?

2011-09-10T10:56:00.000-07:00

Someone yesterday told me that I had been Tuckerized by Jerry Pournelle in Prince of Mercenaries. A little quick research found that that book has been included in a larger volume called The Prince. Both books are out of print, I don't think I own either, and in any case am currently something over two thousand miles from my library.

Is there anyone reading this blog who has one of the versions of the book and can check to see if my name appears, linked to one of the characters? I don't think the novel I'm currently working on has a space for a character named J. Pournelle, Destitute Nelly, or anything close, but perhaps one of the scenarios in my current nonfiction project ... .

Religion, Law, and Sex

2011-09-10T09:18:00.000-07:00

"We certainly respect First Amendment rights. However, religious freedom does not allow for criminal acts," Phoenix police spokesman Steve Martos told CNN.

From a news story describing the arrest of 20 people at Arizona's "Goddess Temple," on charges that the temple was a actually a brothel.

"In addition to sex-ed and sex toy classes, the church offered "sessions" to heal sexual blockages for up to $650 a pop, ABC News reported. And that, cops say, has nothing to do with praising Jesus, or any other higher power."

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"For these patients, some sex therapists turn to surrogate partners — people who help patients with intimacy issues using a hands-on approach. This can include having sex with the patient."

From a news story on the use of surrogate partners to solve sexual problems.

"The practice is controversial, and most sex therapists don’t work with surrogate partners. Some question its legality, although no laws specifically prohibit surrogate partners, according to the International Professional Surrogates Association (IPSA)."

Or in other words, selling sexual services is clearly illegal if done under the pretense of religion—despite the fact that religious prostitution is a well established historical practice, even if one not associated with Jesus. But it is presumptively legal if "exotic religion" is replaced by "sex therapy."

Which suggests that the law may not be as nearly neutral among religions as it claims. You just have to take care to pick a religion that judges respect.

A Puzzle, a Solution, and Why It Cannot be Right. Maybe.

2011-09-05T14:27:00.000-07:00

In the U.S. in the 20th century, stocks have consistently outperformed bonds. For an economist, this is puzzling. If you consistently get a better return buying stocks than buying bonds, why does anyone buy bonds? One would expect investment to shift out of bonds and into stocks until the return on both investments was equal.

There are several solutions that other people have offered to this puzzle. One is to argue that investors are risk averse and bonds have a more predictable yield; the rebuttal has been that, except over very short time periods, stocks almost always outperform bonds, so nobody investing for more than a few years can reduce his risk by buying bonds. Another is to claim that the U.S. market in the 20th century is a special case; investors in stocks just happened to be lucky, many times over.

I have a different solution, one that is elegant, coherent, and arguably cannot be right. More interesting still, the argument that shows it cannot be right also shows that there is no such thing as insider trading.

I start with a bit of real world history:

When the Macintosh first came out, I was already familiar with the idea of a graphic interface and convinced that it was a better way of interacting with computers, having seen a video some years earlier on work at Xerox PARC. I observed that the rest of the world, or at least the people I could directly observe, had no idea what was going on; one colleague, told that I was buying a Mac, asked why I wasn't getting a PC Jr. instead, apparently in the belief that they were roughly comparable because of similar size. I concluded that if his response was typical, Apple stock was underpriced, so I bought some. It turned out to be a correct decision.

I was an insider for that transaction, not in the legal sense but in the economic sense; I knew relevant things that most of the market did not know. Imagine a stock market in which every investor is in that sense an insider, each for a different tiny niche, a particular subset of investments with regard to which he has information that other investors do not have and cannot readily obtain. Like any inside trader, the investor can expect a better than market return when he invests on the basis of his inside information.

If expected return was all that mattered, each individual would invest only in the niche where he had specialized information. But individual investors are risk averse, so wish to diversify their investments. Having bought or sold stock in my niche to the point where any further bets would lose me as much in increased risk as they make me in expected return, additional investments will be outside of my niche. My investment income consists in part of a (say) 2% return on my capital, in part of an additional stream of income representing the rent on my specialized knowledge and obtained via a more than 2% return on capital invested in my niche.

It follows that the average return on investment, mine and everyone else's, is higher than the marginal return. My average return, pooling niche and non-niche investment, is something more than two percent. But my marginal return, what I would get if I invested another dollar, is only 2%, since I am already invested in my niche up to the limit imposed by risk aversion. The argument for equalizing returns on stocks and bonds is put in terms of average return—that, after all, is what we can observe. But the logic implies that what is equalized is marginal return. If bonds yield the same 2% return as stocks bought by an outsider—which, outside of my niche, I am—a 2% return on bonds is a sufficient reason not to shift capital out of them.

We now have an explanation of how, in equilibrium, the average return on stocks can be consistently higher than the average return on bonds.

Unfortunately, the explanation cannot be right. The problem is that the outsider could choose some variant of the strategy sometimes described as throwing darts at the Wall Street Journal, buying stocks at random and so getting the market's average return. If he wishes to eliminate any random element, he could make his investment outside his niche by buying 1/100,000,000 of the stock of every firm on the exchange, guaranteeing himself the market's average return. He is getting the average market return on his outside investments, more than the average market return on his inside investments. So is everyone else.

Call the average market return R. I have just demonstrated that R equals a weighted average of Rout=R, the return on outside investments, and Rin>R, the turn on inside investments. Hence I have demonstrated that R>R, which is mathematically impossible.

I reached this point in the argument some years ago and eventually gave up, on the assumption that I must be making a mistake. A day or two ago, it occurred to me that I had not only proved that my explanation of the stock/bond puzzle was wrong, I had also proved that insider trading, as normally imagined, does not exist.

To see why, apply the same argument to a market where only some investors are insiders. Anyone who wants can get the market return by investing in a random collection of stocks—or, to avoid any randomness, an equal fraction of every stock out there. Assuming, as economists routinely do, that investors are rational, all outsiders follow that strategy. Insiders get a return greater than the market return, outsiders get the market return. The market return is a weighted average of the return to insiders and outsiders. Hence R>R.

The only way out of this puzzle that I can see, whether for the general case of insider trading or my explanation of the stock/bond puzzle, is to assume that investors who are not insiders consistently follow a strategy that produces a lower return than another strategy readily available to them. When the insider buys or sells on the basis of his specialized knowledge there is some outsider willing to sell or buy, providing the other side of the transaction—despite knowing that doing so, in a market containing some insiders, is on average a losing game. That appears to contradict the assumption of rational actors, hence to be heretical from the standpoint of conventional economics.

Readers to whom all of this seems like confusing mumbo-jumbo are free to skip over it and wait for my next post, which will be on a different subject. Economist readers are invited to offer some solution to the puzzle that does not depend on investor irrationality.

What is Wrong with Global Warming Anyway?

2011-09-05T12:39:00.000-07:00

The argument for large and expensive efforts to prevent or reduce global warming has three parts, in principle separable: Global temperature is trending up, the reason is human activity, and the consequences of the trend continuing are very bad. Almost all arguments, pro and con, focus on the first two. The third, although necessary to support the conclusion, is for the most part ignored by both sides.

The usual argument to show that an increase in global temperatures by a few degrees centigrade over the next century would be a catastrophe, or at least a very bad thing, consists of pointing out specific bad effects: rising sea level increasing the risk of flooding in very low lying areas, rising temperature making particular areas less suited to growing the crops they now grow. But an increase in global temperature would also have good effects, as should be obvious to anyone who has ever spent a winter in Chicago, not to mention Alaska or Siberia. The question is not whether there are any bad effects but whether there are net bad effects, whether the increased risk of flooding in Bangladesh does or does not outweigh the opening of a sea route north of Asia and the increase in the habitable area of Canada and Siberia.

The answer, I think, is that nobody knows if the net effects would be good or bad, and probably nobody can know. We are talking, after all, about effects across the world over a century. How accurately could somebody in 1900 have predicted what would matter to human life in 2000? What reason do we have to think we can do better?

Should we, for instance, assume that Bangladesh will still be a poor country a century hence, or that it will by then have followed the path blazed by South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong—and so be in a position to dike its coast, as Holland did several centuries ago, or move housing some miles further inland, at a cost that can be paid out of petty change? Should we assume that population increase makes agricultural land more valuable and the expansion of the area over which crops can be grown more important, or that improvements in crop yield make it less? While there may be people who believe that they know the answer to such questions, the numbers required to justify such belief are at best educated guesses, in most cases closer to pure invention. Someone who wants to prove that global warming is bad can make high estimates for the costs, low estimates for the benefits, and so prove his case to his own satisfaction. Someone with the opposite agenda can reverse the process and prove his case equally well.

If we cannot calculate in any detail what the actual consequences of global warming and associated costs and benefits will be, an alternative is to ask whether we have any reason to expect, a priori, that costs will be larger than benefits. There are, I think, two answers.

The first is that any change, whether warming or cooling, is presumptively bad, because current human activity is optimized against current conditions. Farmers grow crops suited to the climate where they are growing them; a change in climate will require a costly change in what they grow and how they grow it. Houses are designed for the climate they are built in and located in places not expected, under current circumstances, to flood. Putting it in economic terms, we have born sunk costs based on the current environment, and a change in that environment will eliminate some of the quasi-rents that we expected as the return for those costs.

This is a real argument against rapid change. But the global warming controversy involves changes over not a year or a decade but a century. Over a century, most farmers will change the crop they find it most profitable to grow multiple times; if average temperatures are trending up, those changes will include a shift towards crops better suited to slightly warmer weather. Over a century, most houses will be torn down and replaced; if sea level is rising, houses currently built on low lying coastal ground will be rebuilt a little farther inland—not much farther if we are talking, as the IPCC estimates suggest we should be, about a rise of a foot or two. Hence the presumption that change is bad is a very weak one for changes as slow as those we have good reason to expect from global warming.

It is hard to see any other reason to expect gobal warming to make us, on net, worse off. The earth and its climate were not, after all, designed for our convenience, so there is no good reason to believe that their current state is optimal for us. It is true that our species evolved to survive under then existing climatic conditions but, over the period for which humans have existed, climate has varied by considerably more than the changes being predicted for global warming. And, for the past many thousands of years, humans have lived and prospered over a range of climates much larger than the range that we expect the climate at any particular location to change by.

If we have no good reason to believe that humans will be substantially worse off after global warming than before, we have no good reason to believe that it is worth bearing sizable costs to prevent global warming.

Readers who reject this conclusion are invited to offer reasons why we should expect the negative effects of global warming to outweigh the positive. Readers on the other side, inclined to post comments attacking me for being so credulous as to accept the reality of anthropogenic global warming, are free to do so but should not expect any response from me, since that is not the argument I am at the moment interested in having.

Arctic Ice: Prediction That Isn't

2011-08-13T08:28:00.000-07:00

A recent story suggests, based on computer modeling, that the decline of arctic sea ice may be a good deal further in the future than various people predicted, fifty or sixty years instead of five or ten. It struck me because I had some posts a while back pointing out that a NASA/JPL web page was misrepresenting the facts on the subject, claiming a continued decline in the face of a (perhaps temporary) reversal.

The other thing that struck me about the post was that the author did not understand the nature of computer modeling and how you test it:

Accuracy of future predictions was checked by running simulations of the late 20^th century. The Model replicated the events of the past well enough to suggest that its forecasts of possible futures are realistic.

How are such models created? By fitting to past data. Having used that data in constructing the model, it is no longer available to test it. Someone is said to have claimed that with ten parameters he could fit the skyline of New York. Assuming he did it, it does not follow that by keeping the same regression coefficients while increasing the range of the parameters he could predict the skyline of the rest of the country.

In order to test the predictions of a model you need to do it against actual predictions—information that didn't go into building the model.

What the Tea Party Gets Wrong

2011-08-10T15:37:00.000-07:00

Suppose the government wants, for some reason, to subsidize biofuels. There are at least three different ways to do it:

1. For every gallon of biofuel produced, the government will pay the producer a one dollar subsidy.

2. For every gallon of biofuel produced, the government gives the producer a one dollar tax credit.

3. Make a regulatory rule that forces people to use more biofuels, such as a requirement that gasoline can only be sold if combined with at least ten percent biofuel.

The first two differ only in labeling. They have the same effect on the federal budget. They provide the same amount of subsidy. They are both, in fact if not in form, federal expenditures. The only difference is that the second is an expenditure masquerading as a tax cut.

A lot of expenditures pretend to be tax cuts. If you look at the CBO figures for federal income tax in 2007, you discover that, on average, the bottom 40% of the income distribution not only does not pay federal income tax, it is paid federal income tax—a federal welfare program in the form of tax credits. And since these are 2007 figures, it is Bush's federal welfare program, not Obama's.

As best I can tell by news stories dealing with recent budget controversies, this simple point has somehow been missed by the Tea Party Republicans. They insist on taking such expenditures at face value, as tax cuts rather than expenditures, hence oppose their elimination. They have thus fallen for the very simplest scam operated by their opponents in both parties, and by doing so come out against instead of for cutting federal expenditures.

The third alternative is also an expenditure, also a subsidy, should also be opposed by those who wish to reduce the role of government in the economy. But at least it uses a less obvious device, goes to more trouble to hide what it is, than number 2.

Capital Gains Taxation: Contra Landsburg

2011-08-10T00:20:00.000-07:00

Steve Landsburg has a recent post on capital gains taxation in which he makes one odd but arguably legitimate point while missing two other and, I think, more important ones. The result is that he gets the wrong answer to the question of how capital gains ought to be taxed.

His central claim is that the tax rate on capital gains ought to be zero—more precisely, that if it is zero, taxpayers with capital gains will end up paying as taxes the same proportion of their income as those with other forms of income. It's not as screwy a claim as it seems at first; here is the argument, in my words not his. It assumes a 50% income tax, no capital gains tax.

Taxpayer A earns $1000, pays $500 in taxes, has $500 left to spend on her own consumption—half as much as she would have in a world without taxes.

Taxpayer B earns $1000, pays $500 in taxes, uses the remaining $500 to buy an asset which then appreciates at 5%/year for the next twenty years; for simplicity we ignore compounding. B then sells the asset for $1000, which he can spend on himself.

In a world without taxes, B would have had $1000 to invest and so would have ended up with $2000. Hence A and B have both paid the same tax rate—50%. The only difference is that A chose to take her (taxed) income in the form of $500 of consumption in (say) 1990, B his (taxed) income in the form of $1000 of consumption in 2010. Each ended up with half the consumption he would have had in a world without taxes, so is really being taxed at 50% on all income. Hence, Steve argues, the fair capital gains tax rate, the rate that treats capital gains like other income, is zero.

What is being described here as capital gains looks an awful lot like interest. B could, after all, have deposited his $500 in a bank at 5% instead of buying an asset that appreciated at 5%. From an economic point of view, interest is what people are paid to postpone their consumption, making resources available for other people to use productively. It's not obvious why interest should not count as income and be taxable as such.

No doubt some of what shows up as capital gains is in fact implicit interest, but I don't think that is the natural way of looking at most of it. I think it is more accurately viewed as the return from a particular form of skilled labor. A speculator/investor spends time and effort figuring out what firms and what assets are going to increase in value and investing in them, improving the allocation of capital, nudging markets a little closer to efficiency, and being rewarded, assuming he does a good job, with income above and beyond the normal return on capital. I do not see why the income from that form of labor is a less suitable subject for taxation than income from digging ditches. And since the return is not a fixed proportion of the amount invested, as in Steve's case, but a function of the time and effort spent investing it, Steve's argument for implicit taxation does not apply.

There is, however, a serious problem with treating capital gains as ordinary income—much of it, perhaps most of it, is not income at all.

To see why, imagine that you buy a house for $100,000 and sell it, twenty years later, for $200,000. Over those twenty years, not only has the price of housing gone up, the price of practically everything has gone up, with the result that two dollars at the end of the period will buy about what one dollar bought at the beginning. Measured in nominal terms, by counting dollar bills, you have made a capital gain of $100,000 and will be taxed on it. Measured in real terms, by what those dollar bills will buy, you have made a capital gain of zero. Prices in our society trend up over time, so measured capital gains overstate—for long periods greatly overstate—actual capital gains.

Combine these two arguments and you have a simple conclusion. Capital gains ought to be indexed—measured in real rather than nominal terms, purchasing power not number of dollars. That done, they ought to be taxed as ordinary income.

The Syrian Bodycount Puzzle

2011-08-08T09:22:00.000-07:00

"a crackdown that, by the count of some human rights groups, has killed more than 2,000 people. Hama, the victim of one of the bloodiest moments in modern Middle East history, is a national symbol of violent repression. The military crushed an Islamist revolt there in 1982, killing at least 10,000 people. The assault in Hama last week, in which more than 200 people were killed, inflamed sentiments across the country"

(recent news story)

Syria has been in revolt for months. News stories describe attacks by tanks and troops on nonviolent protesters. At least one story on the recent attack on Hama made it sound as though the city had been bombed out and destroyed.

Checking Wikipedia, the population of Hama is 696,863. 200 people killed comes to fewer than one in 3000.

Which raises an obvious puzzle. The figures on bodycounts are coming from the opposition, which one would not expect to minimize them. Yet they seem surprisingly small, given the scale of the violence.

Which makes me wonder if, at this stage of things, a lot of what is happening is bluff—security forces killing a handful of demonstrators in order to shut down demonstrations, while refraining from the sort of large scale violence of which they are surely capable for fear of setting off a level of conflict with which they cannot adequately deal.

---

"Syrian troops stormed the port city of Latakia and sprayed it with gunfire on Saturday, killing at least two people" (Aug 13 news story)

Probability of U.S. Default

2011-08-07T13:22:00.000-07:00

"The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default" said Greenspan on NBC's Meet the Press.

The first sentence is true. The second is not.

Suppose that avoiding default requires money creation on a scale that would set off an inflation rate of fifty or a hundred percent a year. The U.S. could--but would it? That would be a de facto default although not a de jure one, since creditors would be being paid back in inflated dollars. And it would have all the added costs of inflation.

Would Greenspan advise doing it? Unlikely.

Reality Based Community?

2011-08-07T11:50:00.000-07:00

I was struck by a recent post to a NYT blog on the subject of "What Happened to Obama." The author is identified as a psychology professor. His thesis is that Obama should have told a story to the American people that made sense of what happened. The story he should have told is the standard left of center view of who did what and was at fault. No mention of the fact that the collapse started in an industry dominated by two giant firms, both created by the federal government, both (along with private firm) long pressured by politicians of both parties to make it easier for people to buy houses with borrowed money.

Three things struck me about the piece. The first was that depended on the author's opinions about subjects in which he had no expertise—in at least one case, in which his factual belief was strikingly false ("a deficit that didn’t exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars." I suppose he could mean that there was at least one post-war year in which the budget was in surplus—but that would require him to care about facts, not stories.) He simply took for granted, as almost everyone on his side does, the 1960's Keynesian story that deficits reduce enemployment—despite the fact that the predictions the administration made based on that theory have not turned out to be true.

The second thing was the confidence with which he wrote. He has no doubt that his opinions on subjects in which he has no professional expertise are correct—presumably because they fit his political views and those of the people he knows. He probably does not even know that there are professionals in the field, including ones with Nobel prizes, who are skeptical of the economic theories he takes for granted.

The third and most interesting was the focus on "story." As he put it, "in similar circumstances, Franklin D. Roosevelt offered Americans a promise to use the power of his office to make their lives better and to keep trying until he got it right."

It apparently did not occur to him that reality matters—that if you give the patient the wrong medicine he may die, even if you have a good story about why it is the right medicine. It apparently did not occur to him that the outcome of the policies FDR followed was the longest and worst depression in U.S. history. Which might have had something to do with the relation between FDR's story and the reality it claimed to describe.

Hence the title of this post. The blogger in question apparently does believe what some unnamed Bush official is asserted to have claimed—that one makes one's own reality. If you only have a good enough story ... .

The Cost of Healthy Eating: Incompetence or Fraud

2011-08-05T08:47:00.000-07:00

According to a recent article, "A new analysis shows healthy eating can really run up a grocery bill, making it tough for Americans on tight budgets to meet nutritional guidelines. The study estimates that getting the average American to the recommended target of just one nutrient, potassium, would cost an additional $380 each year."

Anyone who believes that should Google for "potassium supplement"—priced at $9 for a 120 potassium iodide tabs of 32.5 mg each from one source for $9, 100 caplets of 99 mg of potassium gluconate for $6.87 from another, and about ten cents a pill—with calcium and magnesium thrown in for free—from a third.

The trick is quite simple. The article pretends to be about what healthy eating costs. It is actually about what people who eat healthily spend. Higher income correlates with better education, so people who spend more also, on average, spend better, nutritionally speaking. That is no evidence that good nutrition costs more—and, as a comparison between the price of spareribs and the price of pork and beans or fruit salad would demonstrate, it often does not. Precisely the same analysis could be used to show that people who spend more on rent eat better too.

It is possible, although not likely, that an author could be sufficiently clueless to make the argument and believe it. But not this author. Reading the article it is pretty obvious what axe is being ground.

And I have difficulty believing in an author who thinks that if only the prices of apricots and raisins were sufficiently subsidized, people who currently prefer Happy Meals would switch to fruit salads instead.

Obama and Taxes: If the Truth is Too Complicated ...

2011-08-02T19:09:00.000-07:00

President Obama's rhetoric in favor of tax increases is heavy on claims that the rich fail to pay their share, light on facts. Most of it is put in terms of claims about the federal income tax. Which is strange, since the federal income tax is paid almost entirely by high income taxpayers.

For details, see the figures provided by the Congressional Budget Office. For 2007, the latest year they cover, the bottom 60% of the income distribution paid about 1% of federal individual income taxes, the top 20% paid about 86% of the total and the top 1% almost 40%—the opposite of what Obama's rhetoric implies.

These figures are, however, misleading in two different ways. The federal individual tax is heavily weighted towards high income taxpayers, but it only produces about 40% of federal tax revenue. Payroll taxes produce about the same amount and, because they are paid only up to a maximum, the top 20% of the income distribution pays a lower share of its income in that form than the quintile below it, making the combined effect considerably less graduated than the figures on the income tax alone suggest.

The second problem should be obvious to an economist but seems to be invisible to almost everyone else. It's natural to think of the size of the check I write to the IRS on April 15th as the measure of the cost to me of the income tax—natural but wrong.

To see why, suppose that the demand for high wage workers—top surgeons, lawyers, executives—is very inelastic. High taxes on such workers reduce the number of suitably talented people willing to enter the field, with the result that customers in need of their services bid up their wages. In the limiting case of perfectly inelastic demand, the result is to transfer all of the cost of taxation from those who hand over the money to the consumers of their services.

The same issue arises for other taxpayers as well. Payroll taxes take the form of a tax "paid by" the employee and another tax "paid by" the employer, but both are actually a tax on the same transaction—hiring labor. If an employer owes a thousand dollars in wages to an employee, it is of no economic significance whether the fraction that goes to payroll taxes is taken out by the employer before he hands over the money or by the employee after.

Who bears the actual burden of taxes depends on elasticity of supply and demand. If the labor supply is elastic, if the number of people willing to work is not very sensitive to wages, the burden ends up on the employees. If the only way of getting more workers is to pay them more and employers are willing to pay whatever it takes, on the other hand, wages rise by about the amount of the tax and the burden is born by the consumers of what the workers produce.

Similar problems arise if one tries to estimate the real effect of other sources of revenue, such as the corporate income tax. Corporations are legal people but not actual people, so taxes they "pay" end up reducing the consumption of customers, employees, or stockholders. Who bears how much is again a hard question.

The CBO attempts to take account of such issues in its calculations; its conclusion, again for 2007, is that the bottom 40% of the income distribution bears about 5% of the burden of federal taxes, the top 20% almost 70%. It finds the lowest quintile bearing a tax burden of about 4% of its income, with the rate rising quintile to quintile to about 25% for the highest and almost 30% for the top 1%.

Whether the CBO estimates are correct, I do not know, and I doubt they do. Whether they imply that high income tax payers bear more or less of the burden than they should depends on how you believe the burden should be distributed. But the CBO estimates, at least, do not support rhetoric implying that executives pay taxes at a lower rate than their secretaries.

And I haven't even mentioned state and local taxes... .

Obama presumably understands all of this; if not, he surely has people working for him who can explain it to him. Explaining it to the public in the form of sound bites designed to support the policies he favors is a harder problem, but not an insoluble one.

If the truth is too complicated ...

Schooling Compulsion, Incentives, and Literacy

2011-08-01T10:24:00.000-07:00

There are at least two different ways of getting someone to learn something. You can offer to teach him something he wants to know, or you can compel him to learn something you want him to know. Unschooling uses the first approach, conventional schooling the second. One difference between the two is their effect on the incentives of teachers.

Consider the case of literacy. The ability to read is useful to almost everyone in a modern society, so one would like an educational system that does a good job of teaching it. It is widely believed that the current American system does not.

If the objective is to teach people to read, the obvious starting point is to ask what sorts of things those people would enjoy reading, since it is easier to get someone to do something he likes doing. The answer might be comic books, car magazines, science fiction, fantasy, soap opera summaries, or any of a wide variety of other sorts of written material, depending on the particular people being taught.

As best I can tell, that is not the approach taken by conventional K-12 schooling. Instead, students are assigned to read books chosen on one of two criteria. Either they are books regarded as good literature—famous books from the past or current books that English professors approve of—or books believed to teach lessons that the people selecting the books want taught. That would include biblical literature in the past, patriotism—or acceptance of homosexuality, depending on the state—at present, and a wide range of other lessons, depending on current and local political fashion. While it is always possible that the books chosen would also be ones students enjoyed—I'm very fond of Kipling, some of whose stories might be assigned reading in English class—that is not what they would be chosen for, so the odds are not very good.

The ability to read is useful to almost everyone. Knowledge of and appreciation for great literature, even if we accept the educational establishment's definition of what qualifies, no doubt can enrich one's life, but on the evidence of what books people actually read it does not enrich the lives of a very large fraction of the population. That suggests that learning the former should probably have considerably higher priority than learning the latter.

In an educational environment where teachers can advise and persuade pupils but not compel them, it will, because the teachers who insist on telling their pupils to read books that the teacher likes and the pupil does not will shortly find their advice ignored. In an environment where teachers can tell students what books to read and, to at least some degree, punish those who fail to obey, on the other hand, there will be a strong temptation to assign the books that the teacher thinks the student ought to read, sacrificing the higher priority of literacy for the lower priority of literature—or, sometimes, propaganda.

Which may explain why Johnny can't read.

I encountered a different version of the same logic a good many years ago in my own work. My Price Theory textbook was out of print. I decided to rewrite it into a book targeted at the proverbial intelligent layman, the sort of book that gets read for the fun of it while teaching the reader the basics of an academic subject, in my case economics. My model, insofar as I had one, was The Selfish Gene, a book from which I learned quite a lot about evolutionary biology.

In the course of the project, it occurred to me that there was an important difference between the book I was starting with and the book I intended to end with; nobody would be forced to read the latter. It followed that if at any point the reader decided that it was not worth continuing, I would lose him. To deal with that problem I followed a deliberate policy of starting each chapter with a hook, a puzzle that would sufficiently engage the reader to persuade him to finish the chapter to find the solution. Economics is full of such puzzles; I don't know how hard it would be to do the same thing in another field.

The result, Hidden Order: The Economics of Everyday Life, has been by a sizable margin my most successful book.

Incentives matter—including mine.

———

In the interest of honesty, I should add that some people are forced to read Hidden Order, because it is occasionally used as a textbook, even though that was not the purpose it was written for. But not, I think, very many people.

What Would Modern Polygamy Be Like?

2011-07-31T04:47:00.000-07:00

Responses on G+ to some of what I posted on polygamy raise an interesting consequentialist argument against it—that wealthy men would "buy up" too many wives, leaving a surplus of unmarried single men likely to cause social problems such as increased levels of crime.

The argument takes it for granted that polygamy mostly means polygyny, multiple wives rather than multiple husbands. Historically that has been the pattern. Monogamy is the most common marital arrangement, polygyny next, polyandry rare. But it raises the question of why that pattern existed and whether it would persist in a modern society where polygamy was legal and common enough to have a significant effect on the marriage market.

One answer is that men, for reasons probably hardwired by evolution, want to know which children are theirs in order that they can avoid spending their scarce resources on other men's children. Prior to modern times, maternity was an observed fact, paternity a conjecture. The obvious way of strengthening the conjecture was to arrange matters so that a woman had sex with only one man, a condition satisfied by monogamy and polygyny but not by polyandry. Modern paternity testing, which I like to refer to as the stealth reproductive technology, changed that. It no longer requires a wise child to know his father, merely a properly equipped lab.

A second possible answer is that under pre-modern conditions, with high rates of both infant mortality and death in childbirth, one woman could not be counted on to produce as many children as several husbands would want. That again has changed. In a world where infant mortality is close to zero, a fertile woman who enjoys producing and rearing children, supported by the income of multiple husbands, should be able to produce enough offspring for all of them. And it is worth noting that a second function of marriage is sex, and women are less limited in that regard than men.

All of which suggests that, in a modern context, polyandry might turn out to be as common as, or more common than, polygyny, in which case the objection vanishes or even reverses, becomes an argument in favor of polygamy rather than an argument against it.

How could one find data to test the theory? One possibility would be to study modern polygamy not in contexts such as the FLDS, where it represents the survival of old marital patterns, but in the context of polyamory, where it appears as the growth of new ones. I do not know if anyone has attempted a census of polyamorous households—there are obvious difficulties, since many have reasons to keep a low profile—but the results would be interesting.

The Real News

2011-07-30T21:58:00.000-07:00

Reading Google News, I am struck by the degree to which dramatic stories crowd out arguably more important material. The top of the page is dominated by the current U.S. debt limit crisis. It is an entertaining example of the game of Chicken as played by politicians but of limited importance otherwise, since both sides are focused not on how to deal with the long term debt problem but on the terms on which they will agree to postpone dealing with it.

Meanwhile there are at least two other stories getting considerably less play but arguably of more real importance.

Modern Turkey is the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, one of the more successful polities of the past thousand years or so. It was also, arguably, the first Muslim state to succeed in fitting itself into the modern world, thanks to the system established by Kemal Ataturk after World War I. The central feature of that system was secular democracy guaranteed by the threat of a military coup against any attempt to transform Turkey back into some version of a religious state, a guarantee that has been gradually eroded by the increasing political strength of Islamicist parties.

Recent charges by the government that a considerable number of officers are involved in a conspiracy can be interpreted either as a defense against a real threat or as a preemptive counter coup by the government against its own military. They have now led to the resignation of the four top officers of the Turkish military.

That could mean that Turkey has become a real democracy with no need for a synthetic military backbone. It could mean that Ataturk's experiment is finally collapsing, that in not very long the count of successful Islamic secular states will drop from one to zero. Either way, the outcome is likely to be more important for the rest of the world than whether the U.S. government does or does not find it necessary to pay its employees with IOU's for a week or two, or auction some spectrum, or sell some land, or play short term accounting games, or in any of a variety of other ways buy time while politicians haggle.

On the other side of the world, something else is happening that could be even more important. The collapse of the Soviet Union left the world with two polities still committed, at least in theory, to communism, while Hugo Chavez' rise to power looked very much like the gradual creation of a third.

That experiment may now have been recognized as a failure by its chief supporters. The latest news from Venezuela shows Chavez backing off from socialist rhetoric, saying good things about small business and the middle class, claiming to have an improved vision for his country—possibly inspired by conversations with one or both of the Castros during his cancer treatment in Cuba. It is possible—not perhaps likely, but possible—that the news of how to make a country richer has finally gotten through to the last holdouts.

Or at least, the last but one.

GKC, Liberal Toleration, and the FLDS

2011-07-30T11:12:00.000-07:00

A serious political ideology, at least as held by sophisticated supporters, is a complicated set of ideas. But an ideology also has a sort of sketch version seen by both supporters and critics as outlining, in simplified form, its essential nature. One part of the sketch version of modern liberalism is tolerance of cultural diversity, sometimes put as moral relativism. We would not want to put our grandparents on an ice floe and shove them out to sea, but if that is how Inuit deal with the problems of their society, who are we to object? It is not as if we have some proof that our values are right and theirs are wrong.

The best critique of this position I have come across, from a psychological more than a philosophical point of view, is one of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown stories, "The Chief Mourner of Marne." Readers who would prefer to read it themselves without spoilers from me should do so now.

Spoiler space

The story centers on James and Maurice, cousins, close friends, almost brothers. Maurice dies, supposedly of a chill caught at the seaside, and James is so afflicted by his death that he becomes a sort of hermit, unwilling to meet even with past friends, encouraged by "the priests" in a sort of religious melancholia.

As the story continues, Father Brown succeeds in getting from an eye witness a more plausible version of the story. Maurice did not die of a chill. The two men became rivals in love, fought a duel, and James killed his best friend and has mourned him ever since.

The response of a friend of the woman both men were in love with:

"You mean to leave him to this living death of moping and going mad in a ruin!" cried Lady Outram, in a voice that shook a little. "And all because he had the bad luck to shoot a man in a duel more than a quarter of a century ago. Is that what you call Christian charity."

"Yes," answered the priest stolidly, "that is what I call Christian charity."

"It's about all the Christian charity you'll ever get out of these priests," cried Cockspur bitterly. "That's their only idea of pardoning a poor fellow for a piece of folly; to wall him up alive and starve him to death with fasts and penances and pictures of hell-fire. And all because a bullet went wrong."

"Really, Father brown," said General Outram, "do you honestly think he deserves this? Is that your Christianity?"

"Surely the true Christianity," pleaded his wife more gently, is that which knows all and pardons all; the love that can remember—and forget."

And then we discover what really happened—and why the winner of the duel fled the country for years and then went into seclusion.

----------

The surviving cousin is not James but Maurice. Knowing his friend was the better shot, he dropped to the ground just before James fired. James, struck with remorse, ran over to his fallen cousin, who shot him dead. Not a duel but cold blooded murder.

"Are you sure of this?" asked Sir John at last, in a thick voice.

"I am sure of it," said Father Brown, "and now I leave Maurice Mair, the present Marquis of Marne, to your Christian charity. You have told me something today about Christian charity. You seemed to me to give it almost too large a place; but how fortunate it is for poor sinners like this man that you err so much on the side of mercy, and are ready to be reconciled to all mankind."

"Hang it all," exploded the general; "if you think I’m going to be reconciled to a filthy viper like that, I tell you I wouldn’t say a word to save him from hell. I said I could pardon a regular decent duel, but of all the treacherous assassins——"

"He ought to be lynched," cried Cockspur excitedly. "He ought to burn alive like a nigger in the States. And if there is such a thing as burning for ever, he jolly well——"

"I wouldn’t touch him with a barge - pole myself," said Mallow.

"There is a limit to human charity," said Lady Outram, trembling all over.

"There is," said Father Brown dryly; "and that is the real difference between human charity and Christian charity. You must forgive me if I was not altogether crushed by your contempt for my uncharitableness today; or by the lectures you read me about pardon for every sinner. For it seems to me that you only pardon the sins that you don’t really think sinful. You only forgive criminals when they commit what you don’t regard as crimes, but rather as conventions. So you tolerate a conventional duel, just as you tolerate a conventional divorce. You forgive because there isn’t anything to be forgiven."

"But, hang it all," cried Mallow, "you don’t expect us to be able to pardon a vile thing like this?"

"No," said the priest; "but we have to be able to pardon it."

Which brings us back to moral relativism and the FLDS. What Warren Jeffs is charged with was normal and acceptable behavior in a society, Old Testament Judaism, a great deal closer to ours than the Inuit. It remained accepted throughout the diaspora until, if I remember correctly, about a thousand years ago. It remained accepted in parts of the diaspora, North African and Arabic Jewish communities, up until modern times.

When the Israeli rabbis decided to raise the age of consent from twelve and a half to something more in tune with modern views, their justification was the claim that early pregnancy was more dangerous in the 20th century than it had been two thousand years earlier, a factual claim it is difficult to imagine anyone taking seriously, given the medical progress over the intervening interval.

I have yet to see commentary by anyone identifying himself as a liberal defending Jeffs, or the FLDS more generally, on grounds of moral relativism. As Chesterton points out, it is easy to forgive people for doing things you don't really disapprove of.

Harder when you do.

To be fair, what I am criticizing is the sketch version of liberalism. No doubt someone holding a more detailed and sophisticated version could come up with a justification for making and enforcing the laws that the FLDS is accused of breaking. Making such as a justification consistent with the rhetoric of moral relativism might be a more difficult project.

[I should probably add, to avoid any possible confusion, that I am an atheist not a Catholic. That does not prevent me from admiring Chesterton's writing, including his sometimes brilliant defenses of his religious views.]

Should King David and Solomon be in Jail?

2011-07-30T05:06:00.000-07:00

The polygamist FLDS is again in the news, although the current assault is a good deal less outrageous than the activities of the Texas child protective authorities a few years back, which I covered extensively here.

But it does occur to me that it raises a serious issue for both American Christians and Jews, at least ones who take their religion fairly literally. It is clear from the Old Testament that God's chosen people practiced extensive polygamy. It is clear from what we know of Jewish law that marriage and sex were legal at ages well below those at which they are currently illegal in most of the U.S.; a woman was a legal adult at twelve and a half, provided she had shown some sign of menarch. By those standards, nothing that Warren Jeffs is charged with, at least so far as I know—I haven't actually followed the case—should be illegal.

Yet I would be surprised if any large fraction of modern American Christians and Jews actually defended Jeffs. What is their basis for not doing so? Should King David and Solomon be in jail?

Thoughts on the Debt Limit Controversy

2011-07-29T17:42:00.000-07:00

As best I can tell, there are two different games being played. One is the attempt by each side to make sure that either it gets the credit for solving the problem or the other side gets blamed for not solving it. That game is basically about rhetoric and PR.

The other and more interesting game, now that the administration has dropped its demand for tax increases, is about whether or not to raise the limit by enough to get past the next election. From Obama's standpoint, the answer is, I think, obvious. Having the option of deficit spending is almost always a benefit for those currently in power, since it lets them buy votes without obvious cost. Concern with the size of the national debt may have changed that, at least for a while, but I think more likely not. Hence Obama would like to be able to spend as much money as he wants through the election while satisfying demands for fiscal responsibility via cuts, possibly imaginary, in future expenditures.

The Republicans, on the other hand, would like to be in a position to force real reductions in spending, both because many of them think reductions are a good thing and, I suspect, because many of them think that reductions in spending by Obama will cost him the votes that the spending would have bought him. One way of doing so is to arrange things so that a second increase in the debt limit will be needed before the election, and make their support for such an increase conditional on serious reductions in expenditure—which are not, so far as I can tell, happening on either of the current plans.

There is one other feature of the situation, one which may explain Obama's failure to hold out for tax increases even while orating in favor of them. An election is coming up, and Democrats to Obama's left have no realistic alternative.

Debt Limit as Incentive: A Modest Proposal

2011-07-28T00:29:00.000-07:00

News stories on the debt limit controversy agree that Boehner's plan, which increases the limit by $900 billion, will require further action before the 2012 election, but that Reid's plan, which increases the limit by $2.4 trillion, will not. Obama would obviously like to push the debt limit issue to some date, any date, after the election. To an economist, that suggests a simple tactic to reduce government expenditure.

Raise the limit by an amount that will require further action before the election unless Obama manages to substantially reduce federal expenditure, but which can be pushed past the election if he does. It will then be in Obama's self-interest to find ways of cutting federal spending, which is a better guarantee than any legislative promises that Congress can pass today and break tomorrow.

Of course, it is also an incentive to find ways of increasing tax revenue—but until the election, the Republican House is in a position to deal with that problem.

P.S. I note that Reid has gotten at least one thing right. I've been arguing for some time that one way of reducing the debt problem is by selling off government assets, the policy that Greece has been urged to follow. Reid apparently agrees, although his specific proposal is on too small a scale to help much with the current situation.

(Almost) Free Medical Advice

2011-07-27T21:15:00.000-07:00

A recent news story about the use of smart phones as heart monitors reminds me of an idea along similar lines that I recently had.

There are a variety of medical conditions, such as Alzheimers or a brain tumor, that cause a gradual decrease in mental performance, gradual enough so that the victim may not notice it. Early warning of such a condition could be very valuable.

Many people, faced with a few minutes of boredom, pull out a cell phone and play a game. It should be straightforward to add to such a game the ability to monitor some simple measure of player performance such as reaction speed that, under most circumstances, is reasonably stable over time. If the measure trends down for longer than, say, a month, a message goes to the phone's owner, suggesting that he see a doctor. Just in case.

It doesn't work for everyone. It doesn't watch for everything that might go wrong. But the cost is negligible and the potential payoff from detecting a tumor or early stage Parkinson's tomorrow instead of next year could be large.

Austrian Fantasy

2011-07-26T06:25:00.000-07:00

Browsing the web, I came across the following claim by Lew Rockwell:

" Need I note, as this article indirectly indicates, that the whole world is reading Rothbard, but that Friedman is almost a nobody outside of mainstream academic economics?"

He provides no support for the claim—the link is to a collection of links on Rockwell's site to works by Rothbard—so I thought I would look for some data. I do not know where one would find figures on what books people read, but the most readily available source for books they buy is Amazon, which ranks books according to sales; rank 1 would be the best selling book on Amazon, rank 100,000 would be the hundred thousandth best book. So I searched Amazon.com for books authored by Murray Rothbard and books authored by Milton Friedman, in each case sorting by sales to find the ones that sold best.

Friedman, Money Mischief: Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,132 in Books

Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom: 40th Anniversary edition: Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,120 in Books

Friedman, Free to Choose: Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #3,719

Rothbard, A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II: Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #34,118 in Books

Rothbard, The Case Against the Fed: Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #22,316 in Books

Rothbard, The Mystery of Banking: Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #49,523

Rothbard, America's Great Depression: Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #63,960

Readers are welcome to check the numbers themselves—they will, of course, be a little different each time you check them, since Amazon updates rankings on the basis of current sales—or search for a Rothbard book with sales anywhere close to the top three I found for Friedman.

I do not usually waste my time defending my father, a job he did more than adequately for himself, but this seemed like a striking example of one prominent Austrian—Lew Rockwell founded the Mises Institute, which publishes several of the Rothbard books I listed—who appears to be living in a fantasy of his own invention.

He is, of course, more than welcome to post a comment here providing the data to support his claim.

[New Information]

A correspondent points me at data on relative online interest in Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard.

In fact, according to Google AdWords, there are approximately 135,000 searches a month for your dad's name globally. That's in comparison to 8,100 for "murray rothbard" and 22,200 for just "rothbard". This is based on a 12-month average. Google Keywords
available at: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Another metric to look at is Google Trends which puts this information into a graph over time, and allows keyword comparison. Take a look at:http://www.google.com/trends?q=milton+friedman%2C+Murray+Rothbard

For Mac Fans in a Hurry: An Idea

2011-07-25T08:14:00.000-07:00

The MacBook Air uses an SSD, a solid state disk, available in 128 GB and 256 GB sizes. The current iMac has space for two drives, one of which can be an SSD, letting you put software you want to run fast, such as the OS, on the SSD, while using the physical hard drive for bulk storage. Other World Computing offers a range of replacement SSD's for the Air which, at least according to them, are considerably faster than Apple's. For someone who has an iMac, would like to add an SSD to it, and is thinking of getting an Air, this raises an interesting possibility.

Get an air with a 128 GB SSD. Get the 240GB SSD from OWC, or an even bigger one if you are feeling extravagant. Replace the Air's SSD with the upgrade. Put the drive you took out of the Air into your iMac.

Cost (assuming you get the 240) is $479. That's $179 more than if you bought your Air from Apple with the larger hard drive—but you end up with not only a faster Air but a faster iMac. Buying your iMac with an SSD and a standard drive—admittedly, that would be a 256 GB rather than 128, but I'm not sure how important the difference is— costs $600.

I can only see one problem with this approach, assuming you are willing to pay the price to speed up both machines. Apple does not support third party installation of an SSD into an iMac. A little casual browsing suggests that it is possible but not easy, and I am not sure if at this point there are places that will do it for you, and if so what price.

But it is a tempting thought, for anyone who really likes fast machines.

Norway and 9/11: Fighting the Last War

2011-07-24T00:02:00.000-07:00

A common criticism of militaries is that they are always preparing to fight the last war instead of the next. The recent attack in Norway suggests that the same problem exists for the "war" on terrorism. The point is made clearer if we compare that attack to its closest equivalent: 9/11.

The attacks have two critical characteristics in common. The first is that the form of the attack was original. The second is that it was strikingly successful, from the standpoint of its objectives—did a lot of damage at a relatively small cost to the attackers. That is not terribly surprising, since an original attack is one that potential defenders do not expect and so fail to take precautions to prevent.

With the benefit of hindsight, it was obviously imprudent, arguably suicidal, for a political party to put a large number of its younger supporters, its future elite, on a not very large island with no guards. That created a situation where a single gunman could murder about eighty victims and badly handicap the future of a major political party.

If the final point is not obvious, consider the equivalent U.S. case, scaled. The U.S. has more than sixty times the population of Norway. What would be the effect on the future of the Republican or Democratic party if more than 4000 of the most active members of the Young Republicans or Young Democrats were killed?

What was the cost of accomplishing that to the perpetrator? As far as we know, he did it all himself. The shooting spree required one rifle, one pistol, and a lot of ammunition—total cost probably under a thousand dollars. The previous explosion, part of whose purpose was presumably to set up the opportunity for the subsequent shooting, cost one car, very likely rented, a lot of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, and some sort of detonator and timer. For a wild guess, total cost of the whole project between one and ten thousand dollars.

Plus, presumably, life imprisonment, a cost balanced by the opportunity to get wide publicity for his political views.

Which gets us back to where I started. Most of what one can see being done to prevent terrorism, most obviously the exertions of the TSA, is aimed at preventing a repeat of 9/11. It ought to be aimed at the next, and entirely different, 9/11.

Which is a much harder thing to do, since we do not know what it will be.

Playing with Kids: Asymmetrical Games?

2011-07-23T21:33:00.000-07:00

In my experience, there are at least two different approaches to parents playing games with kids, related to two different views of what children are: Pets who can talk or small human beings who don't yet know much. The former provides a justification for the adult cheating against himself, deliberately playing badly in order to give the child a chance. The latter implies that children, like other people, are entitled to honest treatment, and pretending to try to win when you are actually trying to lose does not qualify.

The simplest version of the second approach, and the one I am familiar with from my own experience, is the sliding handicap. Our house had a basement with a ping-pong table, and I spent a good deal of time playing ping-pong with my father. The rules were very simple. I started with some number of points, and whichever of us got to 21 points first won. Every time I won, my starting number went down by one, making the next win harder. Every time I lost, my starting number went up by one, making the next win easier. The result was that the typical game was close, decided by how well each of us played—a more interesting interaction than if we had played without a handicap and my father, who for most of the relevant period was a better player than I was, had deliberately thrown some of the games in order to "make it fun" for me. And the sliding handicap provided a longer run metagame as well, in which my objective was to push the handicap down as far as possible—ideally, in the sufficiently long run, to zero and below.

The approach can be applied, and no doubt is, to a wide variety of other games, as when the better chess player spots his opponent a piece by removing it at the beginning of the game.

What about a game that, unlike ping-pong, is asymmetric, and as a result easier for one side than the other to win? Consider, for example, a board game based on the battle of Gettysburg. The two armies in that battle were quite different, as were their objectives. Unless the designer of the game makes a point of tuning the rules to make victory equally easy for either side—which, of course, he might do—one would expect one side to start with an advantage. The same could be the case for a more abstract game, such as one of the variants of Tafl, a family of early European games of which the best recorded example is Tablut, discovered and recorded by Linnaeus during his travels in 18th century Finland.

In the Tafl games, one side represents a king and his defenders, starting in the central portion of the board. The other represents the attackers, starting around the periphery. The objective of the attackers is to kill the king, the objective of the king is to escape the board. Not surprisingly, in most of the variants, which differ mainly in the size of the board and the number of pieces, one objective is easier to accomplish than the other.

The problem with an asymmetric game is that the handicap doesn't slide. It works fine for two unequal players who are going to stay about equally unequal, but not for the parent/child situation where the child will, with luck, be gradually catching up to the parent. Are there examples of asymmetric games that solve that problem, perhaps by a range of starting scenarios of increasing difficulty for one side, decreasing for the other? The obvious ones are computer games where the player can set the difficulty level against the computer—are there good two player games that work that way?

I cannot resist the temptation to end this post, more random in its subject matter than most of mine, with a quote from the page on Tafl that I earlier linked to:

"Evidence shows that the game of Tablut, described by a traveller called Linnaeus during his trip to Finland in 1732 ..."

Presumably the author of that comment knows more about the history of games than the history of biology.

Does Obama Have a $2.7 Trillion Get Out Of Jail Free Card?

2011-07-23T13:20:00.000-07:00

In a recent post, based on a WSJ piece by Thomas Saving, I pointed out some implications of the status of the Social Security Trust Fund. My point in that post was that Obama appeared to be either deliberately lying about the implications of the debt limit for Social Security or strikingly ignorant of them.

It now occurs to me that, if one accepts the interpretation Saving offers of the Supreme Court decision in Helvering v. Davis (1937), there is another implication: Obama may have a $2.7 trillion dollar get out of jail free card, a way of spending that much additional money without exceeding the debt limit.

When Social Security revenue is more than expenditure, the excess is loaned to the federal government and used to help pay for its expenditures. The result is a debt of the federal government to the Social Security system, a debt that is included in the total of the national debt. If Social Security revenues fall below expenditure, the treasury is required to pay back the difference, thus redeeming some of the bonds that make up the trust fund. Doing so lowers the national debt, since it includes intergovernmental obligations, so the treasury could borrow the amount it has just paid without exceeding the debt limit.

Under Helvering, at least as Saving interprets it, the receipts from the Social Security tax are not earmarked; they are income of the federal government that can be spent on anything the federal government wants to spend them on.

Revenue from Social Security is about $800 billion/year. Suppose no agreement is reached on raising the debt limit. Obama instructs the relevant people to spend the income from Social Security on the war in Afghanistan, bailouts, whatever he thinks needs money. He then instructs the Social Security system to cash in as many bonds as are required to meet its obligations to Social Security recipients, say $700 billion. He then instructs the treasury, since the national debt is now $700 billion below the debt limit, to borrow $700 billion. The net effect is that he has increased total expenditure, Social Security included, by $700 billion without exceeding the debt limit. The trust fund is currently at about $2.7 trillion, so he can do it for four more years.

And if an extra $700 billion isn't sufficient for his purposes, it isn't clear to me that he couldn't simply instruct the Social Security administration to ask to cash in some more of the trust fund, instruct the Treasury to agree to do so, and then instruct Social Security to hand over the money to whatever part of the federal government requires it.

There are obvious PR problems with this sort of solution to the present problems, both because it is so obviously gaming the system and because the part of the system it games is Social Security, which is a politically highly visible target. But are there any legal problems?

[Later note]

Some readers seem puzzled as to where the Treasury, in my story, is to find the $700 billion that it is to pay to the Social Security Administration, once the debt limit is reached. The answer is straightforward. With or without a debt limit, the federal government is continually collecting money and spending it. In my scenario, the government takes (say) $50 billion that it was supposed to pay as salary to federal employees, pays it to SSA instead. SSA cancels $50 billion in trust fund bonds. The national debt, which includes the debt owed by the federal government to the SSA, is now $50 billion below the limit, so the Treasury borrows $50 billion and pays out salaries to federal employees. Rinse and repeat as many times as necessary.

[Still later note]

A friend who knows much more law than I do writes:

It turns on, on further research, that Congress anticipated and prevented the very trick you have devised. Public Law 104-121, section 107(a), prohibits redemption of Social Security trust fund securities prior to maturity for any purpose other than the payment of benefits or administrative expenses.

So it's still true that the debt limit cannot block social security payments, at least until the trust fund runs out. But my multi-trillion dollar get out of jail free card has been cancelled.

Curses, foiled again.

Two cheers for the Huffington Post

2011-07-23T04:48:00.000-07:00

My previous post came very close to accusing President Obama, when he warned of the possibility that the debt limit would prevent the payment of social security checks, of either deliberately lying or being culpably ignorant of the relevant facts—my only hedge being that it was possible I had myself been misinformed. One of the commenters on the post pointed out an article in the Huffington Post making essentially the same point. That such an article would appear there is worth noting, since the Post is an explicitly left wing site that one would expect to support Obama in the current controversy, where he is arguing for raising taxes in order to continue, at least to some degree, the current unusually high level of government expenditure. It's to their credit that, at least in this case, they are willing to publish the truth even when it goes against their political interest.

This reminded me of a less striking example a few years ago, when I discovered that I had a new hobby—defending Tea Party Republican candidates against stories that exaggerated how nutty they were. One of the cases involved references to "Colorado’s Ken Buck, who says he opposes the principle of separation of church and state."

Following that up, I found a video of the speech by Buck that was pretty clearly the source for the claim. The video was on the Huffington Post, and their story, unlike the one I just quoted, gave a reasonably accurate account of what he said—not that he opposed the principle but that he thought it had been applied more broadly than it ought to have been.

I don't read the Huffington Post regularly enough to offer any more detailed opinion, but on the basis of these two cases it looks as though it may be a more honest source of news than one usually expects of an ideologically oriented publication. Which would be a good thing—it makes it at least a little easier to resolve political disagreements if the various sides are all arguing from about the same facts.

WoW in Realspace, a Software Suggestion

2011-07-22T21:23:00.000-07:00

If I am in a group in World of Warcraft, I can view a map that shows where all members of the group are. It occurs to me that the same ability would be useful outside the game—and that implementing it would be straightforward. Simply have two (or more) smartphones with gps talking to each other. Your phone tells mine where you are, mine shows me where both of us are, while mine tells yours which shows you. Useful for finding your spouse in a crowded art and wine fair, shopping mall, or equivalent.

Does it already exist?

Social Security, the Debt Ceiling, and Obama

2011-07-22T07:58:00.000-07:00

I recently came across an interesting piece, going into some detail on the accounting status of the Social Security Trust fund and its relation to the debt ceiling. If it is correct, Obama's claim that running into the debt ceiling could prevent the payment of Social Security checks is either a deliberate falsehood or evidence of striking ignorance. It is not a subject on which I have any expertise, however, and I would be interested in comments from any reader who knows more about it than I do.

The argument is quite simple. Social Security's past surpluses were borrowed and spent by the federal government, creating a federal debt to the Social Security administration in the form of Social Security Trust Fund special bonds, a liability that counts as part of the national debt.

Suppose that next month's Social Security revenue is less than Social Security obligations by, say, $20 billion, the number Obama used to CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley. The SSA cashes in $20 billion of special bonds, which under current law the treasury is required to redeem, and uses the money to send out social security checks. Cashing in those checks lowers the national debt by $20 billion, so the treasury is now free to borrow $20 billion without exceeding the debt limit, leaving it with the same amount of money to pay other obligations that it would have if the SSA had not needed the money.

If that account is correct, it looks very much as though the President was deliberately misrepresenting the situation, taking advantage of the ignorance of his audience to frighten seniors into supporting whatever policies he proposes to solve the current debt limit problem.

Gang of Six Plan: Right Answer or Smoke and Mirrors?

2011-07-20T11:57:00.000-07:00

It's a real question; I haven't looked into the details of the plan and any serious effort to do so would probably take a good deal of work. The plan as described seems to me a sensible compromise along the lines I suggested in an earlier post: "Raise" taxes only by eliminating tax expenditures, features of the tax code designed to subsidize particular taxpayers and activities. And the gang of six proposal claims to do it by broadening the base enough to lower marginal rates, thus reducing the inefficient incentives due to the tax system.

What I don't know is how much substance there is to the proposal, in particular to the expenditure cuts. Does it go beyond "spend $X less on program Y," which is likely to get changed at the point when it is supposed to be implemented and supporters of program Y point out all the terrible consequences—as has happened repeatedly with bogus medicare cuts? Or is more of it along the lines of "raise the age of eligibility for Social Security by a month a year for the next twenty-four years," which one can imagine actually happening and which would have a significant effect?

Any readers who have looked more carefully at the proposals than I have and would like to comment?

Murdoch Musings

2011-07-20T11:00:00.000-07:00

I continue to be intrigued by the ongoing flap over Rupert Murdoch's media empire. A few more or less random thoughts:

1. Murdoch claims that, prior to the recent explosion, he was unaware of the hacking at News of the World—despite the fact that two people had been arrested and, I gather, convicted in the case. How believable is the claim?

I don't know the answer, in part because I don't have much feel for how an organization that big is run, how much information makes it to the very top level, how much is handled further down. According to Murdoch, the paper represented only about 1% of his media holdings, I think measured by income, which makes the claim at least somewhat plausible.

2. How likely is it that the facts of what News of the World reporters had been doing, in particular facts that had become public prior to the recent flap, would have surprised Murdoch?

My suspicion is that he would take it for granted (as I do) that reporters routinely skirt the edge of the law and not uncommonly break it in the course of doing the job they are hired to do. It would be surprising if they didn't bribe police officers, sometimes with cash, to tip them off on potential news stories. The police have the information, it is valuable to reporters, markets tend to move resources to those who most value them. It would be surprising if they didn't often take advantage of illegal but easy opportunities to obtain information—for instance by getting at poorly protected voice mail messages. Nobody in the U.S. seems to be very surprised to discover that police officers spend a good deal of time in donut shops eating free donuts—and providing the shops with free crime prevention.

Obviously this question is related to the previous one. The less surprising what was going on was, the less the reason to report it up the corporate hierarchy to the top. Especially if the people at the top were unlikely to try to stop it and had good reasons to maintain deniability with regard to knowing about it.

And it isn't hard to believe that a cover-up by someone a couple of levels below Murdoch, in a position to get the police to fail to investigate the case more thoroughly, would have included an internal as well as external cover-up. "Police say nothing that serious happened, a couple of our people pushed too far over the line, being taken care of."

3. How much of what was being done at the News of the World was being done at non-Murdoch papers? Presumably the Murdoch people have been looking for evidence, and if they found any we would have heard about it, or soon will.

4. Perhaps the hardest things for Murdoch to have been ignorant of were the payouts to victims of hacking to settle their claims, some of which were quite substantial. But out of court settlements, including ones where the payer/potential defendant does not admit guilt and the details of the controversy are kept private, are legal and not that uncommon in civil cases. In criminal cases they are illegal, but hard to prevent if a case raises both civil and criminal issues. For an earlier and pretty high-profile example, consider the Michael Jackson abuse controversy, where, as best I recall, criminal charges got dropped after a civil settlement, presumably because the witnesses were no longer willing to testify.

5. Finally, the paranoid thought—was the pie in the face incident a set-up? It clearly benefited Murdoch, both because it made him the victim and because of his wife's dramatic response. Setting it up would be very risky, since discovery would be a catastrophe. But if the wife just happened to know someone she was sure she could trust to do it and keep his mouth shut ... .

6. Other thoughts from readers?

Mailforge v Eudora

2011-07-20T07:56:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned in an earlier post (for details read the comment thread), I recently switched my email program from Eudora, which I had used for many years but which is not supported by Lion, the newest version of OSX, to MailForge, a Mozilla email program designed to feel like Eudora. Lion is being released today, so it seems an appropriate time to record the result of the experiment.

When MailForge works it works better than Eudora did, but there are a variety of minor ways in which it doesn't work, although none so far that is a real killer. Having downloaded mail once, it refuses to do it again until I quit and reload the program, at which point it turns out that there is additional mail to be downloaded. I have it set to automatically open a mailbox with new mail in it, but it doesn't. It has an address book to which I can add a group of email addresses with a nickname but as far as I can tell doing so has no effect; the new group does not appear in the address book thereafter.

To be fair, some of these problems might be due to Eudora files that I imported into MailForge; after most of twenty years of copying files from one machine to another, some—I am thinking in particular of some of the filters I looked at—pretty clearly had been corrupted in one way or another. Initially filtering didn't work; after I went through the filters removing the corrupt ones it did. I should do something similar with my address book and see if it fixes that problem.

And, to be fair, when MailForge works it is faster and smoother than Eudora was. With my old Eudora, if I selected a group of emails and hit delete, sometimes they vanished, sometimes I got an error message. With MailForge they vanish. And I am pretty sure that the actual download of the email is faster.

But I expect that there are more glitches waiting to bite me, that the reports which made me initially unsure whether MailForge was the right solution—roughly speaking that it wasn't yet quite ready for prime time—were correct. Whether I would have been better off with my alternate plan of converting to Thunderbird, a better developed fork off the same open source project but one not designed specifically for Eudora users, I don't know.

Next project: Take a look at Lion and see whether I want the upgrade. If I do, wait a few weeks on general principles and get it. While resisting all temptation to replace my perfectly good, indeed beautiful, elegant, amazingly tiny, MacBook Air, with the faster model Apple has just released—this time with a lighted keyboard.

I don't suppose my son needs a slightly used ultralight to take off to college ... .

Murdoch, Media, Cops and Politics

2011-07-18T21:06:00.000-07:00

In an earlier post, I proposed the current Murdoch flap as a potential miniseries with an ending out of modern fantasy fiction. This time I want to look at it from a more serious point of view, to try to figure out why it happened and what the longer run implications are.

The simple answer is that it happened because Murdoch got unlucky—a number of stories broke involving illegal activities by people in his employ, some of which involved not only lawbreaking but lawbreaking of a particularly offensive sort. Once it was clear he was in trouble, the pressure on people inside and outside his organization to continue covering up other past offenses became less, leading to a potential cascade.

All of that may explain the timing, why it happened when it did. But I suspect there was a deeper cause, one that will be relevant to future political press magnates as well, may even imply that there will be no future press magnates on the scale of Rupert Murdoch. We may be watching the extinction of the last dinosaur.

I start with the question of why Murdoch had as much power as he did, power not only over political actors but, as the evidence strongly suggests, over law enforcement as well.

I do not think the answer is money, although of course he had a lot of money and used it. I am not sure exactly where Murdoch ranked in the list of "X richest men," but he was not in the latest Forbes top twenty. He had more influence than people who were considerably richer than he was. Why?

In the case of influence over politicians, the answer is obvious. Electoral support from a popular newspaper or TV station is worth votes. So is the willingness of major media to slant stories in your favor, to deflect attention from your errors and misdeeds and focus it on your successes while applying the opposite policy to your opponents. Murdoch had something valuable to offer politicians; it is hardly surprising if they were willing to do him favors in exchange.

The same applies to his relations with the police. There is evidence that journalists paid police for information. But even without such payments, media coverage of police actions matters, can matter a lot, to the police. How and whether their actions are covered by the media may determine whether a particular police official looks like Sherlock Holmes or Inspector Clouseau, competent professional or bumbling amateur. If the police end up killing innocent people, as happens all too often, or failing to catch guilty people or prevent their crimes, how and whether the story gets covered matters.

From the standpoint of economics, all of this is a consequence of rational ignorance. If believing the truth about politicians and police was a matter of great importance to every voter, the voters could presumably find reliable sources of information with which to do it, as they often do find such information with regard to matters controlled by private choice, such as what car to buy or what grocery store has the best prices today.

But for purposes of public choices, news is mostly entertainment not information—for the good reason that, considered as information, it is not very valuable. Each voter knows that his vote has a trivial effect on electoral outcomes, hence making sure he casts it for the right, or at least less bad, candidate is not worth much. Getting a good story is, often if not always, more important than getting a true story, and under those circumstances the authors of news stories have considerable ability to influence what their readers believe is true.

Which implies that someone with control of a lot of the media can be expected to have quite a lot influence over politicians and law enforcement. Rupert Murdoch did. What changed?

What changed, not in the short run but the long, was the technology of spreading information, specifically the growth of the Internet. I take the role of the Drudge Report in breaking the Monica Lewinsky story as a useful marker. In the old days, judging by what we now know about the sex lives of various past politicians, the major media would have discretely chosen not to cover the case, there woul have been rumors in minor media, and the scandal would never have gotten as far as it did. But as news is increasingly spread through decentralized mechanisms hard for any single actor or organization to control, the power of media organization declines. Even if they still have as many readers as before, there are now other places to read things, making it increasingly difficult for them to control the flow of information.

If I am correct in this analysis—I am not sure I am, but it seems plausible—the timing of the Rupert Murdoch flap was an accident. That it happened was not. The development of alternate sources of public information was gradually weakening Rupert Murdoch's ability to get politicians and law enforcement people to do favors for him in exchange for his doing favors for them, reducing both his political power and his ability to have his people get away with doing illegal and potentially unpopular things in the course of gathering the news. Eventually his power dipped below the level necessary to sustain his policies, and everything blew up.

That, at least, is my current theory.

Witch or Saint: A Story Seed

2011-07-16T08:30:00.000-07:00

This morning, for no good reason, I have been thinking of an idea for a story which I am very unlikely to ever write, and it occurred to me that someone else might.

The setting is the trial of Joan of Arc. The protagonist is one of the English prosecutors, an intelligent, deeply believing catholic clergyman who has the job of proving that Joan is a witch in order that she can be burned at the stake. The problem is that he has concluded that not only is she not a witch, she is a saint, whom God, for his own mysterious reasons, has provided to the wrong side. It follows that if he goes on to carry out his assignment he will be committing a sin for which he will deserve, and get, an eternity in hell. He is a loyal Englishman but the price of loyalty is in this case rather high.

I do not know where the story goes from there. Suicide is a mortal sin, so not a very attractive solution to his problem. The best solution I have thought of so far is for him to report the problem to a superior who takes his secular obligations more seriously and his religious obligations less, make it plain that he intends to go public with his conclusions, go from there to a priest to whom he can make confession, then go home and wait for the assassin to show up.

But there are surely other, and possibly better, ways the plot could go.

In Search of Bogus History

2011-07-15T05:40:00.000-07:00

For no particular reason, I was recently thinking about the subject of bogus history—historical "facts" that are very widely believed and flatly false. The example I started with is one of some current political interest, the belief that Herbert Hoover responded to the beginning of the Great Depression by cutting government expenditure. As I pointed out some time back in response to such a claim, it's the precise opposite of what really happened. By the end of his term, Hoover had increased federal expenditure by about 50% in nominal terms, 100% in real terms (i.e. allowing for the fall in prices), 200% measured as a share of national income (which, of course, had fallen). By that standard, he makes Obama and Bush look like skinflints.

For a second and unrelated example, consider the standard story of Columbus—that he heroically stood up for the scientific truth of a spherical earth against a flat earth orthodoxy, sailing west in defiance of warnings that he would fall off the edge.

That again is almost precisely backwards, since in that controversy Columbus was the one holding out against the (accurate) scientific knowledge of the day. A spherical earth had been the accepted scientific doctrine for well over a thousand years and the Greeks had produced a reasonably accurate estimate of its size. Combine that with what was known about the width of Asia—by the end of the 15th c. quite a lot of people had gotten to China and back—and it was possible to calculate about how far Columbus had to travel to reach "the indies" by sailing west. In fact, he barely made it to the Americas, the width of a continent and the Pacific ocean short of where he claimed to be going. His justification consisted of fudging both numbers—claiming the earth to be much smaller than it was, the width of Asia much longer. Details available from Admiral of the Ocean Sea by Samuel Eliot Morrison. I'm going by memory, but reasonably sure of my facts.

What are other such examples—historical beliefs widely held and demonstrably false? Medieval witch hunts might be a candidate, large scale persecution of witches having started long after the end of the Middle Ages and being based, I think, on beliefs that the medieval church considered heretical. And I gather that the Spanish Inquisition has an undeserved reputation in that context, that being concerned with the serious issue of secret Muslims and Jews it regarded witchcraft accusations as a distraction to be dealt with by applying serious standards of evidence. And, from one of my areas of interest, there is the myth that medieval food was overspiced to hide the taste of spoiled meat.

But can anyone here offer examples as clear cut as my first two?

The Fall of the House of Murdoch

2011-07-14T19:39:00.000-07:00

As anyone who reads UK news and many who do not by now know, there has been an enormous flap over media mogul Rupert Murdoch, set off by revelations that people working for one of his newspapers had been acquiring information in ways that were not only illegal but arguably very reprehensible—in one case apparently destroying evidence relevant to a murder investigation in the process of accessing the voicemail of the victim. Results at this point include his shutting down the newspaper in question, cancelling, at least for the moment, his attempt to expand his ownership of an important satellite TV firm, and much else.

And as anyone who interacts much with people from the U.K. probably also knows, Murdoch is not merely a random media mogul. He is viewed by everyone in Britain left of center, and probably some who are not, as the diabolical ally of Margaret Thatcher and several of her successors in their project to destroy Britain. Hence quite a lot public gloating at his difficulties.

Which started me thinking about the miniseries.

The puzzle is why all of this happened when it did. The various misdeeds occurred years ago, and although not all were revealed publicly, enough were to send two of the people responsible to jail. The most offensive—the hacking into a child murder victim's voice mail—only became generally known recently, and seems to have been the spark that set off the current conflagration. But if I read the accounts correctly, pretty much everything important was known to at least some people other than Murdoch's, and in most cases to some law enforcement people—one part of the scandal is the strong suggestion of corruption or incompetence by Scotland Yard. So why now?

The obvious explanation is that it is not an accident. Someone has been plotting against Murdoch, accumulating scraps of evidence, lining up allies, getting everything prepared—and the trap has now been sprung. But who?

There is a simple and obvious answer, although for some reason it does not appear to have occurred to anyone else. Early in Murdoch's rise to power he clashed with, and I gather ultimately defeated, his predecessor, media mogul Robert Maxwell. Men like that hold grudges.

Maxwell was born in 1923, so is not yet ninety, so not too old for political and financial intrigue. It is true that he is reported to have died about twenty years ago. But it was a very convenient time for him to die, since his empire was collapsing around him, so perhaps one ought not to rely too confidently on his being actually dead.

The plot outline for the miniseries is now clear. Robert Maxwell, having faked his own death, has been patiently intriguing for twenty years from the shadow of the grave to get his revenge on the man who supplanted him. The plot has finally reached its culmination, leaving Murdoch struggling for financial and political survival.

Only in the final episode do we discover the real truth about Maxwell. Considered as a plot device, faking your own death is so Twentieth Century. Nowadays we have ... other alternatives.

———

(The assistance of research by posters in the newsgroup alt.fan.cecil-adams, none of whom have any responsibility for my conclusions, gratefully acknowledged.)

Bogus Links

2011-07-14T05:32:00.000-07:00

If you click on "links to this post" at the bottom of my previous post, you get a long list of purported links. So far as I can tell, almost all of them are bogus—they don't actually have anything to do with the post. I don't know if they are due to some sort of glitch in the software that produces the link or if they are an attempt to get traffic to their blog by pretending to connect to mine.

Does anyone here know what is going on? Is there something I can do about it easier than going through the whole list trashing all the bogus ones, which could take quite a while?

For what it is worth, the chief offenders appear to be:

Anti-Dismal

Truth to Power

MTEF is the Bayesian Heresy

OS Time Machine: A Modest Proposal

2011-07-09T07:18:00.000-07:00

The latest version of OSX, due out shortly, does not include Rosetta, software included in past versions to make it possible to run programs written for older versions of the hardware. One result is that Eudora, the Email program which I have been using for almost twenty years and on which I have an enormous collection of past correspondence, will stop working when and if I update the operating system. The obvious solution is to move all of my accumulated email to a more up to date email program, probably Thunderbird. So far my attempts to do so have been unsuccessful—mailboxes copy over, but their content does not. Until I can solve that problem, I do not plan to update to Lion.

There is, however, another and more elegant way in which the problem could be solved. While I cannot run a program that worked under OSX10.2 but broke under 10.3, I can and occasionally do run programs under OS9, using a free third party emulator and Apple system software to which I have a license based on my ownership of the long obsolete machine it originally ran on.

What open source volunteers did for SheepShaver, Apple programmers, with vastly greater resources and unlimited access to Apple's own past software, could surely do better. Emulation is a well developed technology; I can switch among the current version of OSX, either of two versions of Windows (in Parallels), or OS9 in Sheepshaver, without ever having to reboot my machine. It is true that emulation carries some penalty in speed—but I would expect that to be more than outweighed by running software designed for machines of five or ten years ago on current hardware. Maintaining, in effect, multiple copies of Apple's system software on one machine would tie up a certain amount of hard drive storage—but modern machines have very large hard drives.

Apple's current approach to backup is an elegant program named Time Machine. Instead of giving you a backup of your hard drive as it was at some point in the past, it gives what its name implies, access to the state of your drive as it existed a day ago, a week ago, a month ago. That could be very convenient when you discover that it was last month that you accidentally deleted a document you now need or made changes you would now like to undo.

What I am proposing is the OS equivalent. Most users most of the time would be running the latest version of the operating system. If I want to run Eudora, I enter OS Time Machine, scroll back to OSX 10.6, and am good to go. If I want to entertain myself with Warlords II, a game that I and other members of my family spent quite a lot of time playing a very long time ago, I scroll back to OS9, perhaps even OS8, and play it. If I want to access documents written with WriteNow, my and family's favorite word processor for many years but now many years unsupported, or on AppleWorks, which at the moment still runs on current software but not very well, those too would be easy options. Emulation is not, of course, perfect; their might be occasional glitches. But it ought to be adequate for most purposes.

And very cool.

When I mentioned the idea to my wife, she pointed out a further advantage. Home computers such as the TRS80 and the Apple II first became widely available more than thirty years ago. That means that at this point, there are quite a lot of people in their fifties, some in their sixties or older, who have been routinely using computers for most of their adult life, not even including those who started out earlier on mainframes.

As people get older, they tend to become more conservative. At twenty, learning a new program to do something your old program already does, perhaps do it a little better or with a few more bells and whistles, feels like an adventure, a challenge. At sixty it may feel more like a chore. Once OS Time Machine is incorporated in the Macintosh system software, you never have to do it again. If the new program has new features you want, you buy it and learn it. If the advantages of the new are outweighed by the very large advantage of software you have been using for years and are intimately familiar with, or if the changes actually make the new software less suitable for your purposes than the old, you don't. I expect there are already enough cybergeezers to make up a significant market niche, and the number can only increase.

Over time, OS Time Machine could introduce additional features. Double click on a program that no longer runs on the latest version of the OS, and it automatically shifts you back to the most recent version under which it did run before loading the program.

So far as I can see, the proposal is technically doable, although it would of course cost Apple something in programmer time and other expenses. The strongest argument I can see against it is that it would increase the complexity of the Macintosh software universe by keeping more old programs in use, programs that users might, perhaps unreasonably, expect Apple itself to support, a cost that might more than outweigh the benefits.

But I hope not.

Chinese Sulfur and Global Warming

2011-07-08T05:57:00.000-07:00

There have been a number of recent news stories reporting that global warming pretty much stopped for the past decade, due to the cooling effect of increased sulfur output in China roughly cancelling, at least in the short term, the warming effect due to CO2. Assuming that the account is correct, I think it has an interesting implication, not for climate science but for the controversy around it.

I don't watch that controversy very carefully, but one part of it is the question of what is actually happening to global temperature, with some skeptics arguing that the upward trend is for one reason or another either fictional or exaggerated. My question is whether, prior to this particular explanation surfacing, the other side had conceded that for some unknown reason temperatures were not rising as predicted, or whether they waited to admit that until they had an explanation. If the latter, then perhaps the wrong side is getting labeled "denialist."

Can readers who are involved with the controversy, on one side or the other, point to evidence, claims and counterclaims about what was actually happening to global temperatures over the past decade?

———

A commenter provides a link that leads to a BBC interview with Phil Jones, who was a central figure in some of the recent climate controversy. He makes it reasonably clear that the recent data, while not inconsistent with the long-run warming trend, did not actually support it, which is evidence of the honesty of his side of the argument. The interview was, on internal evidence, between January 29 and February 13 of 2010, which I believe puts it well before the sulfur explanation had come out.

The Death of Copyright: One Observed Solution

2011-07-06T13:03:00.000-07:00

Intellectual property in digital form is easy to copy, easy to transmit, making the enforcement of copyright law more difficult. As an increasing fraction of I.P. takes that form, we face the problem I like to describe as the death of copyright. If creators cannot control the use of what they create, how are they to get a sufficient reward to make it worth creating? It's an issue I have discussed here in the past, and also discuss at some length in the relevant chapter of Future Imperfect—available for purchase, but also webbed for free.

I recently came across one interesting example of a solution to that problem, hence this post. As I've mentioned, I spent last weekend at Westercon, a local sf convention. Like most cons, it had an art show. Being a relatively small con, most of the art was of a not very pretentious sort—I did not, for instance, notice the originals of the cover art for published books. The price range for most of it was between about $20, mostly prints and very small pieces, and $100.

The guests of honor at the con included the Foglios, the couple who produce Girl Genius, a very popular steampunk webcomic, and there was at least a moderate steampunk (alternate history, Victorian high tech) theme to the convention. The art show included the uncolored drawings for a number of frames of the webcomic, as well as at least one piece of unrelated art by Phil Foglio.

They were priced between a thousand and two thousand dollars each.

Phil Foglio is obviously a skilled artist, and one would expect his work to sell for substantially more than the work of the average sf semi-pro. But I suspect that the size of the gap reflects less that difference than the desire of the fans of the webcomic to possess a genuine piece of art associated with it. Which means that the creators of that particular piece of intellectual property can give away their digital creation online while making a significant amount of money selling associated non-digital creations in realspace. And they can do it at essentially no cost to themselves, since the drawing has already been created in the process of producing the webcomic. That is one example of what I think of as the tie-in approach to dealing with the death of copyright—the same principle that lets me put books up on the web for free and make a significant amount from being paid to give public talks, an opportunity in part created by people reading my books.

How much of an income can the Foglios expect from that particular source? My younger son, a fan of Girl Genius, tells me that it updates three times a week. Suppose the Foglios sell two-thirds of the uncolored drawings—why uncolored I don't know, perhaps because the coloring is done in a later digital step, and once the drawing is being printed from a computer it loses its rarity value. Further suppose that after paying a commission to the con or other intermediary, they end up with a thousand dollars per drawing. That's an income of a hundred thousand dollars a year—not enough to make them rich, but enough to pay for a fair fraction of groceries, rent, and the like. And they have a variety of other tie-ins, including physical books based on the comic, to supplement that.

It's an interesting world.

Stranger in a Strange Land: Fifty Years After

2011-07-05T14:03:00.000-07:00

An earlier post discussed the topic of one of the panels that I participated in at Westercon this weekend. Another was on the subject of the Heinlein best seller, in particular its effect on the present day world. It occurred to me that some readers of my blog might be interested in my view of the subject.

Stranger had a significant short term effect on the culture when it came out, but a negligible long term effect judged by the present. Its most radical message was the idea of group marriage, group marriage of a particular sort. The nests it described were high trust families formed with minimal search and courtship, yet stable. You looked in someone's eyes, recognized him or her as a water brother, and knew you could trust each other forever after. It was a naively romantic picture, possibly workable with the assistance of the protagonist's super powers, but distinctly risky in the real world. The picture fit well into the naively romantic hippy culture of the time, quite a lot of people seem to have tried to implement it, and no doubt for at least a few it worked. One member of the panel audience made it reasonably clear that she had joined a nest, was still in it, and was happy with the result.

Sexual mores did indeed change, but not in that direction. Living in southern California in the eighties, the view that seemed most common among young adults—many of those I associated with would have been met within the SCA, a subculture that had noticeable overlap with hippiedom—was very different. The ideal pattern was stable monogamy—but who could be so lucky. Insofar as it had been replaced, it was mostly by the increasing acceptability and practice of casual sex.

There has been some development since Stranger was published, in practice and theory, along the lines of group marriage, but of a very different sort. Polyamory is much more self-conscious and structured than what we see in Stranger—partners are classified as primary or secondary and a good deal of attention paid to just what those terms mean and what behavior they imply. The result is rather closer to the Oneida Commune of the 19th century—on a much smaller scale—than to the nest. Another and less visible development has been the gradual increase in acceptability of the BDSM subculture, although most of that, at least in realspace, is still pretty low profile.

I think this description fits not only what happened in the real world but what happened in Heinlein's fictional worlds. Consider another and much more sophisticated version of a group marriage, the line marriage in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It is highly organized, new members are brought in at the low age end on a regular pattern of alternating gender, there is extensive search/courtship. And the protagonist offers a plausible explanation of its social role, why these particular institutions developed as they did and what purpose they serve.

Finally, consider Friday. The protagonist, surprisingly naive given her profession, joins a group marriage, makes a substantial commitment to it, and is booted out, her share of the assets stolen, when it is discovered that she is an artificial person, the superior product of genetic engineering. Her much later commitment to a second group marriage is the result of somewhat more careful research.

———

And, for a tangent back to self-publishing, one of my reasons to attend sf cons and participate in panels is as an opportunity to get some publicity for my work. Being, like (I suspect) many authors, addicted to the frequent checking of Amazon ratings, I took the opportunity to monitor the effect on the rating of Salamander of my con participation last weekend. As best I can tell it drove the rating, which had been drifting up above (I think) 100,000, back down to something in the 20-30,000 range, which is about the best it has yet managed.

Of course, it's now drifting back up. But if I mention it often enough here ... . And we do seem to have sold a few more cookbooks.

Asset Sales: A Third Option

2011-07-05T13:40:00.000-07:00

Discussions of the current debt limit controversy mostly take it for granted that, if the limit is not raised, the federal government will either have to cut spending—often, it is implied, by defaulting on the interest obligations on the present debt—or raise taxes.

There is, however, a third option, one that has gotten quite a lot of attention in the Greek case: Asset sales. The U.S. government, like the Greek government, owns a lot of valuable stuff, most obviously land and buildings. I don't know what the total value is, but it is hard to believe that it isn't substantial. In the Greek case, I have seen it claimed that selling all such assets would come close to liquidating the national debt.

Of course, there might be technical problems to doing it quickly, if only because of legal restrictions on how such can be sold.

———

Robert Murphy has a fairly detailed discussion of assets that could be sold, concluding that the total of reasonably liquid ones is about $1.6 trillion. That doesn't include buildings that are currently unused or underutilized, and other more difficult to estimate (and perhaps to sell) assets.

SF and Alternative Economies

2011-06-29T10:50:00.000-07:00

This Sunday, I'm scheduled to be on a panel at Westercon, a local SF convention, with the title:

" Economics, SF's Weak Spot
So many SF worlds, only two main economic systems. What else might we come up with as theories of value and exchange?"

Presumably the two systems referred to are market exchange and centrally planned socialism. Even within those classifications there is quite a wide range of possibilities. The Yugoslav system, for example, was nominally socialist but looked rather more like a market economy in which the firms, instead of being sole proprietorships, partnerships, or joint stock companies, were worker co-ops. The market socialism proposed by Abba Lerner and Oskar Lange in the course of the calculation controversy of the early 20th century was a system in which the means of production belonged to the state, but the state instructed the managers to play the game of pretending to be profit maximizing capitalists in order to take advantage of the decentralized control mechanism of the market. And the system of institutions I sketched in my first book was not what most supporters of the market imagine such to be, since even what are traditionally seen as government functions, such as defining and enforcing law, were entirely private. And that one has showed up, occasionally, in other people's speculative fiction.

Suppose, however, we are willing to lump all of those into two piles. Are there other interesting alternatives, real or fictional, worth including in speculative fiction? What are they?

One that occurred to me is not only a real historical institution and one that appears in fiction, it is also one that plays a central role in science fiction fandom itself, as well as elsewhere in the modern world. I will be participating in three panels at Westercon, as well as giving a demonstration on how to make cuirboulli, hardened leather armor, an interesting period technology. My efforts will not be entirely unrewarded. I will probably get a free convention registration for myself, I may get one for my wife, I will almost certainly get access to the green room, the lounge that SF conventions traditionally provide for their panelists and speakers, which includes not only a certain amount of free food, something there is usually quite a lot of at cons, but also a chance to interact with some of the more interesting people present.

But none of that is really a market exchange, a payment for service in the ordinary sense of the terms. I get the same reward whether I am on one panel or six, whether I am the organizers' favorite panelist or deemed barely worth inviting. And, as suggested by the way I just described the rewards, I don't actually know what I'm getting, since the terms are determined by custom not contract. What I am participating in is not a system of explicit exchange but a gift economy.

Most summers, although not, as it happens, this summer, my family spends about a week at the Pennsic War, the largest event put on by the Society for Creative Anachronism, a historical recreation organization in which we are long term participants. Over the course of that week I teach eight or ten classes on topics relevant to the hobby. Teaching classes is one of the ways I make my living, but it would never occur to me to charge for these ones, or to the people running the Pennsic University to offer to pay me for them. I don't even charge for handouts, which under the rules I am entitled to do. Their cost isn't very large, and it simply feels more appropriate to give them away, to include them within the (medieval) virtue of generosity.

During the same period of time I will spend about six nights, from dark to midnight or so, running a bardic circle, designed to create the illusion of a group of medieval people sitting around a campfire entertaining each other. Hosting it involves being prepared to present period, or at least period feeling, poems and stories to fill in as much of the three hours or so of the circle as is not filled by pieces presented by other people present, as well as maintaining a conversation that supports the illusion, offering around period nibbles, being a host.

And one other element. If you present a piece that really impresses me, both as a good and entertaining story and as a good job of maintaining the illusion, you will leave with a silver arm ring of my construction. The silver is real and the rings reasonably heavy; the construction of new rings to replace the ones I have given away the previous years is one of the projects I engage in earlier in the summer. The pieces are modeled on the arm rings given away by Norse rulers to reward entertainers. Ideally I would like to average one a night, but I don't think I have ever been that lucky.

This again is a gift economy and was recognized as such, in that context and others, by its medieval participants. It is a pattern that has been observed in many other societies. The basic rule is that, instead of exchanging value for value on pre-agreed terms, you give something to someone in the expectation that, although he has no legal obligation to reciprocate, he has a social obligation to. If he doesn't, he will lose status, be seen as a skinflint, almost a cheat. The Elder Edda, a collection of Norse poetry probably dating from the 9th century, contains one poem, Havamal, that is a collection of verses of advice attributed to the god Odin. One of my favorite lines is:

"No man is so wealthy that he objects to receiving a gift in exchange for his gift."

They knew what they were doing.

They did. I'm not sure I do. Looking at the institution as an economist, it feels like a much clumsier way of coordinating human activity than an explicit market. Looking at it as a participant, on the other hand, it makes sense, feels right. A few days ago, wandering the web, I came across a comment by someone who at some point had received one of my arm rings. She referred to it as "one of my most treasured possessions."

She wouldn't have if she had bought it.

So that is one example of an economic system, a way of coordinating human activity, that doesn't fit neatly into either the socialist or market category, even though the transactions are entirely volunary. Other examples?

What is FaceBook Good For?: Part II

2011-06-29T07:49:00.000-07:00

After a little more experience, it looks to me as though the main function of Facebook is to keep me updated on what various people are doing—roughly speaking what I currently do by following other people's blogs—and to keep them updated on what I am doing. While that is worth something to me, it isn't worth very much. I'm not really interested in what most people I know casually are doing, and I'm not even interested in most of what actual friends are doing. When I get a message that actual friend X has just friended stranger Y, my immediate reaction is complete disinterest.

From which my conclusion is that it probably makes sense to keep my total number of Facebook friends small. Hopefully those whose invitations get ignored will not interpret that negatively—one reason for this post.

What I have not figured out how to do is to use Facebook as a way of getting people to either read my webbed work, of which there is a lot up, including the full text of multiple books available for free, or buy my recent self-publishing projects. My guess is that the solution is a fan page for myself, which would feed information out to interested people without absorbing much of time with the reverse stream, but so far I haven't figured out quite how to set up and control such a thing. The closest I've come is to put up some material on the "wall" of my personal page pointing at the things I think people might want to look at, and I have no idea to what extent it is actually being read.

Blog to Book, an Open Source Project

2011-06-28T06:19:00.000-07:00

In a recent post I raised the possibility of producing a book based on the contents of a blog such as this. My initial feeling was that the project wasn't worth doing, since the material was already available to be searched and read in its present form. A number of comments offered persuasive arguments on the other side, suggesting that, for at least some blogs, the material could be made considerably more useful and accessible by the sort of selection and organization that would accompany the conversion into a book.

At which point it occurred to me that, while the project might indeed be useful, there was no particular reason why I—more generally, the blog author—had to be the one who did it, or even had to give permission for someone else to do it.

Initially I was imagining that what was being produced would be a physical book, a hardcopy, but that is arguably an obsolescent technology anyway. Suppose instead what is produced is a web page, a hyptertext table of contents to a blog, whose purpose is to select out and organize those parts of the blog of interest to the author of the page. Each entry links to the corresponding blog post; notes clarify what is where. It is not a full substitute for the original proposal, since the author of the web page, unlike the author of the blog, is not in a position to combine three posts into two, eliminating duplication, or revise the post that started a discussion to take account of what came later. But it could provide quite a lot of the additional value that would be provided by the earlier version. In particular, it could let someone interested in my political ideas follow that subset of the blog without being distracted by my search for the perfect pocket computer/internet device, and it would make it easier to see the connections between my views of how to organize the world and my views of how to bring up children.

At which point it also occurred to me that the project itself need not have a single author. It could be in the form of a Wiki targeted at the blog. There could be multiple such web pages, written by authors interested in different subsets of the blog content. There could be dueling versions, one by a fan of my political philosophy, one by a critic, each using his organization of and comments on my posts to support his view.

In at least one important way, this would be an easier project than my original version. A significant amount of the material on my blog was written by other people. That's obviously true of the comments. But I also had extended exchanges with two other professors, Robert Frank (who I managed to confuse with Robert Ellickson in my original post on this subject), and Robert Altemeyer, who came on the blog to defend his work against my criticism. Their contributions are, morally and I suspect legally, their intellectual property, not mine, so I could not legitimately include them in a book I authored without their permission. Very possibly they would give it, possibly not—and if we imagine stretching such a project far enough into the future, some of the people whose permission was required might no longer be around to give it. I could, of course, give my summary of their arguments, but that would be less informative and, I think, less convincing, than their version. But given that their contributions are already available online, no permission is required to link to them.

At which point this is becoming not so much an idea for my blog as a speculation about the ways in which exchanges of ideas and arguments might evolve over the next few decades, given the technologies now available.

A Possible Budget Compromise

2011-06-27T12:51:00.000-07:00

My first preference, of course, would be to balance the budget entirely by cutting expenditures; Reason has had past discussions on how that could be done. The basic problem, in my view, is not the deficit, troubling although it might be, but the amount of resources consumed and misallocated by government.

But if there is going to be a compromise involving increasing taxes and decreasing expenditure, I think the right way to do it would be to make the "tax increases" take the form of reductions in tax expenditures, the elimination of features of the tax code whose only purpose is to subsidize one or another activity, and which distort economic decision making in the same way as other subsidies do. The obvious big one is the deduction for home mortgage interest, which subsidize home ownership relative to renting and thus played some role in creating the recent financial crisis—although I suspect that is politically untouchable.

The Obama administration, in theory, seems to agree with that approach; a recent news story claimed they were proposing to eliminate a large tax expenditure associated with an accounting rule. Unfortunately, the news story I saw on the proposal got the substance of the rule (permitting a choice between LIFO and FIFO accounting) completely wrong, making the difference look both larger and less justified than it is. As I explained in my comment to the story.

"He used the example of an oil company that bought oil when prices lower and sells it when the price is higher, declaring its profit based on the higher price. "We just don't think that's right," he said."

It isn't right--and it has nothing to do with the LIFO/FIFO issue. Either the spokesman is lying, he is incompetent, or your reporter got confused.

The difference has to do not with the price when sold but the prices at which two different batches of the same product, such as oil, are bought. A firm buys a thousand gallons of oil at $2/gallon, puts it in a tank. Six months later it buys another thousand at $3/gallon, adds it to the same tank. Six months after that it sells a thousand gallons out of the tank for $4/gallon.

Under LIFO ("Last In First Out") the oil sold is considered to be from the second batch bought, so cost is $3/gallon, revenue $4/gallon, profit $1/gallon. Under FIFO ("First In First Out") it is considered to be from the first batch, profit $4-$2=$2 gallon. Note that the ultimate effect is on the timing of the profit, not the amount, since the second thousand gallons will eventually get sold too, and the total expense for the whole two thousand is the same either way.

Under neither rule is the cost set to the sale price, which would make profit zero and is what your story seems to be claiming.

For what it's worth, I teach this as one bit of a course at the law school of Santa Clara University.

The Blog, Considered as Book

2011-06-27T04:48:00.000-07:00

I don't have any accurate estimate of the total number of words I have posted to this blog over the years, and am not sure how I would get one, short of copying the whole thing to a word processor and having it count them. But my guess is that it would come to substantially more than the word count of one of my books.

Which suggests an interesting possibility. Select out a suitable subset of posts, polish them a little, organize them a little, and publish them as a book. Think of it as a low work way of producing my equivalent of the four volume Orwell collection that I have commented on here from time to time.

At which point the next question is, "why bother?" The blog is, after all, already here. Anyone curious as to my extended exchange with Robert Ellickson, or my coverage of the Texas FLDS mess, or my recent views on self-publishing, can use the blog's search engine to find them and read them. Failing that, with sufficient patience, he can page through past posts; they are all there.

Which suggests that perhaps this will become the new substitute for a book, at least for the sort of book that consists of an extended collection of essays.

"The Sorcerer" Considered as a Political Statement

2011-06-26T17:14:00.000-07:00

I spent a good deal of this afternoon attending a performance (the last, so you don't get to go) of Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Sorcerer," a work I had never seen before. It was not entirely Gilbert and Sullivan's; the setting had been transferred to 1890's India, with a few minor changes in names and words to make it fit, and I gather that the costuming, setting and dance routines had been deliberately provided with a substantial dose of Bollywood aesthetics. I have some reservations about the general project of modifying classics; there is a reason why William Shakespeare or Gilbert and Sullivan are as famous as they are, so editing by a less distinguished artist may not be, on the odds, a good gamble. But this time it worked.

I had not realized the degree to which "The Sorcerer" could be seen as a political statement, an attack on paternalism. The central figure, for those unfamiliar with the plot (and willing to hear about it), is an irresponsible young idiot named Alexis with an ideological commitment to the principle that love solves all problems and is its own justification—it doesn't really matter who loves whom or why. Acting on that principle, he spikes the party teapot with a love potion provided by a professional sorcerer ("My name is John Wellington Wells/A Dealer in magic and spells/..." the only part of the play I had heard before), everyone in the village falls asleep, and when they wake up each falls in love with the first person of suitable gender he or she sees, not counting married people or those who have already seen and fallen in love with someone else.

Almost everyone ends up paired off, most of them unsuitably, although the plot does manage to free them at the end. It is clear from Alexis' conversation with the young woman he is in love with that he has devoted no serious thought either to the truth of the belief whose implications he is imposing on a large number of other people without their consent or to the likely consequences; indeed, it is not entirely clear that he is capable of thought at all. When a minor miscarriage of the plan on which he insisted results in his chosen maiden falling in love with someone else, he blames her.

It was a very entertaining performance, and my only complaint is that Gilbert got the ending wrong. Having Alexis carried off to Hell might have been a mildly excessive punishment, but he shouldn't have gotten the girl.

Now for dinner at our favorite Indian restaurant.

Textbooks that are Fun to Read

2011-06-26T08:56:00.000-07:00

Wandering around the web yesterday, I came across a forum, I think for law students, on which someone mentioned my Law's Order and commented on how much he had liked it—the sort of thing an author likes to see. Like my earlier Hidden Order, the book is intended to fill two different roles, to be usable as a textbook but also to appeal to the proverbial intelligent layman who would like to learn a subject by reading an entertaining and educational book about it.

Which got me thinking about what books succeed in that dual role. Textbooks are notoriously boring, in part perhaps because they are selected by the professor who assigns them not the students who read them, and some have the reputation of being seriously dumbed down in intellectual level while unusably broad in coverage. What books are there that are used as textbooks but also bought and read in significant numbers by people who are reading them because they want to?

One of my models was The Selfish Gene; I don't know if it gets used as a text, but it is certainly a readable and informative book. A famous example would be the Feynman lectures. Other suggestions?

I was thinking about the question in part for two reasons. One is that it ought to be important to a professor adopting a book. When I rewrote my Price Theory, a textbook, into Hidden Order, I was very conscious of the fact that if at any point the (non-student) reader lost interest in what he was reading he would stop. I tried to design the book to keep that from happening, by starting each chapter with a hook that would hold the reader's interest to the end. I think the result was a considerably better textbook as well as a book that sold many more copies outside the textbook market.

But the other reason links to my recent discussion of ways in which self-publishing, both online POD and eBooks, may be radically changing the mechanisms by which books get produced and distributed, in the process largely cutting the conventional publishers out of the loop. I have hopes that something similar may be happening, somewhat more slowly, to the higher-ed industry.

I think there is an increasingly widespread perception that the current model works badly. In large part, it consists of young adults spending four years partying and socializing while pretending to acquire the sort of education that was a social or professional requirement for a small part of the population a century or so ago. There is evidence that a large fraction of those who go to college for four years learn almost nothing of what they are in theory being taught—a result unlikely to surprise any professor who has taught a large required course in his field and observed how many of those taking it are simply trying to memorize enough to pass the exams before going back to doing something they actually want to do. And it is very expensive, especially at the high end, where "high" is more a description of the status of the school and the ability of the students than of the fraction of them who are there mainly to learn what is being taught.

Which suggests the possibility of a more attractive model, in which young adults get on with their lives while educating themselves, in whatever subjects are of interest to them, in a less formal framework. That could mean working, it could mean getting married and rearing children, for those with a little inherited money and simple tastes it could mean trying to write novels, or do volunteer work, or engage in some other activity that they find a satisfactory way of spending their time. It could even mean a life centered on parties and socializing, supported by parents or whatever minimal investment of paid labor it requires, just done outside of the expensive framework of college or university.

And meanwhile getting eduction by reading books, perhaps using educational software, interacting with people online. A sort of higher-ed version of the unschooling I have discussed here in the past in the K-12 context. It is how I got quite a lot of my education; I like to describe myself as having taught at the graduate level at respectable schools in two different fields (law and economics) in neither of which I have ever taken a course for credit.

One Cheer for Islam

2011-06-25T09:24:00.000-07:00

A detail I have noticed in news stories about the current Syrian unrest is that demonstrations tend to happen on Fridays—because that is when people are already assembled in their mosques. I think that illustrates one desirable effect of religions, including Islam, even from the standpoint of someone like me who doesn't agree with any of them.

A religion is an ideology, and as such is a competitor with other ideologies such as nationalism. The Syrian government feels free to do a lot of things. But it isn't free to simply tear down all the mosques and announce that assemblies on Friday are illegal and will be punished.

In the Syrian case the situation is complicated by the fact that the government is dominated by an arguably heretical Muslim sect, which limits its ability to co-opt the major Islamic groups within the country—contrast that to the situation in Iran, where the government is controlled by the majority Twelver Shia sect. During the Nazi period, the Christian churches did not, so far as I can judge, do an awful lot to constrain what the governments were doing, although of course some individual Christians did. But still competition, even limited competition, is valuable. Even in Iran, I suspect the government is to some degree constrained by the fact that prominent Shia scholars have reputations and from them authority that doesn't derive directly from any official position.

What is FaceBook Good For?

2011-06-25T09:05:00.000-07:00

I recently gave in and set up a FaceBook page, mostly in the hope of getting more visibility for both my recent self-publishing projects and the considerable amount of my stuff that's freely available to be downloaded or read online—more or less a web page equivalent, but more visible. I'm coming to suspect that it's a tool poorly adapted to that purpose, but I haven't really figured out how it works well enough to be sure.

The first shock was when I "friended" my son Patri and suddenly my page was flooded with his conversations. Some of them are of mild interest to me, but I see no reason to expect other people to want to read them on my page instead of on his and I haven't figured out how to keep them from appearing, or if I can, or even if I can limit the volume of other people's stuff that automatically shows up on my page. I'm pretty much not accepting friend requests until I have a clearer idea how the system works, so don't be offended if I ignore yours. As I commented to someone elsewhere online, I may have to unfriend my firstborn.

I did manage to find a couple of people I haven't seen for decades—the two UCLA students to whom my Price Theory was dedicated—and send them "hullo, long time, how are you doing" style notes. And I put up a notice that I plan to be on panels at Westercon next week. Which I am guessing is more the sort of thing FaceBook is intended for.

I also set up a page on my own web site consisting of links to my work, both self-published for sale and free online, which should make finding stuff a little easier than by wandering my fairly substantial site; that page is now linked to my FaceBook page.

Advice from those more familiar with the system welcome.

Forced Speech

2011-06-24T10:16:00.000-07:00

From a recent article on Conrad Black, about whose case I know very little:

Despite the nullified counts, prosecutors are asking St. Eve to hand the burly, silvery-haired Black the same 6 1/2 -year sentence she originally meted out in 2007, meaning he would have to spend about 4 1/2 more years in prison.

“He fails to acknowledge his central role in destroying Hollinger International through greed and lies, instead blaming the government and others for what he describes as an unjust persecution,” prosecutors said in a recent filing.

Am I the only one who finds outrageous the idea of punishing someone for insisting that he is innocent after a court has concluded that he is guilty?

"Ve Haf ways of making you confess."

If I were a conservative congressman ...

2011-06-24T09:40:00.000-07:00

faced with the Barney Frank/Ron Paul bill repealing the federal ban on marijuana, how would I respond?

On the one hand, it's hard to deny that the war on drugs has been a massive failure. And part of my political base would be sympathetic to repeal; I might remember that in 2004 the state of Montana voted for George Bush 59/39 and for medical marijuana 62/38. But another part of my base would regard the proposal as anathema. How to straddle that divide?

For the benefit of any politician in that situation, here is a rough draft of a speech or press release:

I have been asked for my view on the bill representatives Frank and Paul have introduced to repeal the federal ban on marijuana. I think the first thing one must concede is that the War on Drugs, as it has actually been fought, has been a failure. For forty years it has spent large amounts of money, imprisoned large numbers of people, helped turn our inner cities into free fire zones, and imposed on the police enforcement obligations difficult or impossible to fulfill. The one thing we have not done, despite repeated promises and predictions, is to succeed in preventing Americans from using illegal drugs.

By that measure, surely the essential one, the project has been a failure. Part of being an adult is being willing to recognize one's mistakes. What is not clear is whether the mistake is the war itself or how it has been conducted. I would like to hope that we can come up with some approach to the problem that will achieve the objective and will not do enormous damage in the process. But I think we must be open to the possibility that, given our circumstances and our society, no such solution is possible, that the overuse of recreational drugs is simply one of those evils that must be endured because there is no practical way of curing it.

I therefor intend to vote to bring the Frank/Paul bill to the floor, to encourage an active and extended discussion, and either to vote for it or to propose some alternative to the failed approach of the past forty years. And I would like to thank representatives Frank and Paul for taking the first step in that process.

I'm curious as to what my readers think of this effort in rhetorical role playing. Would it work—appeal sufficiently to both sides? Should I look into a future career in speech writing?

I think I'll probably keep my day job.

Concerning Michelle Bachmann

2011-06-24T00:53:00.000-07:00

I just came across a pretty good piece on her by Meghan Daum, which I think fits my impressions despite being written by someone with very different political views from mine. It is in large part about the difference between Bachmann and Palin.

Daum's point, although she doesn't put it that way, is that Palin is a flake and Bachmann isn't. Bachmann's beliefs may be mistaken—obviously Daum thinks they are. But she really holds them, really lives up to them, really has put a lot of thought and effort into living the life she believes she ought to live. Which makes her a more formidable candidate, a better qualified one, and, probably, a more interesting person. For details, see the piece.

I should probably add that inasmuch as I had a candidate, it was Mitch Daniels. I agree with Ron Paul and Gary Johnson more than with any other equally serious contender and even know both slightly, to the extent of having spoken at the same event with Johnson a while ago and having met Paul in libertarian circles in the past. But I find it hard to imagine either of them actually getting elected—which is, after all, the usual requirement for the job. I expect that Bachmann's views are similar to mine in some areas, very different in others—and that the same will be true of any serious contenders for the Republican nomination.

I expect that in the next election, as in the last, I either won't vote at all or will vote for the LP candidate as a purely symbolic gesture, assuming that this time they decide to nominate a libertarian.

Turkey and the Arab Spring

2011-06-23T13:15:00.000-07:00

On an entirely different topic ...

Reading a recent story on Turkish objections to Syrian repression, it occurs to me that Turkey is in an interesting position with regard to recent events in the Muslim world.

In a very real sense, it did it first. The reforms of Ataturk did not establish a full-blown western European democracy, since they left the military with the undemocratic job of preventing the recreation of a religious state. But they did create something closer to a stable, modern, democratic state than any then contemporary Muslim society that I know of. And the project, although fraying a bit at the edges of late, has been remarkably stable over time.

Measured by population, Turkey is only about the fifth largest Muslim country (sixth if you count Nigeria), a little smaller than Egypt, a little larger than Iran. But its per capita income figure is higher than any of the other Muslim countries of comparable size, the only serious competitor being Iran; by that measure at least it is a success.

Which raises the possibility that Turkey, which has for quite a while been trying to fit itself into the western European community with some difficulty, may, if all goes well, find itself the central figure in a new community of at least moderately free and democratic Muslim countries.

Sovereign Default and Future Borrowing: A Query

2011-06-22T23:53:00.000-07:00

Suppose Greece defaults on its foreign debts, as seems not unlikely. What would the effect be on its ability to borrow?

The obvious answer is that, having stiffed its creditors once, it will be unable to find new ones. But it is not obvious that it is true. The more the country owes, the greater the incentive to default. At present, from what I can judge of Greek politics at long range, it is not entirely clear that there is any other alternative; there may be no politically viable path to paying off the current indebtedness. Greece after default, like a company coming out of bankruptcy, may actually be in a better position to borrow than before.

There must surely be historical data on this question; Greece is not, after all, the first country to face the possibility of sovereign default. I, however, am lazy. So instead of doing research, I am putting the question to my readers.

In the past, when countries defaulted on their debts, did the interest rate they had to pay for future loans go up, or down?

Readers with long memories will realize that this is not the first time I have raised the general question.

Pot Puffing Politicians: A Moral Issue

2011-06-22T20:22:00.000-07:00

I recently came across a report of an exchange with a prominent politician, I think governor Cuomo, who had admitted to past marijuana use but was not a supporter of legalization; I have now lost track of the piece. It occurs to me that it raises an interesting issue in both morality and rhetoric.

Imagine that, like Cuomo and Obama, you have admitted to past pot use. You now have a problem. Politicians like to at least pretend that their policies are based on morality and justice, not merely political prudence. So you appear to face two alternatives:

1. The use of marijuana is not the sort of thing that people deserve to be punished for. Hence by supporting existing law you are in part responsible for unjustly imprisoning thousands of people, something of which you ought to be bitterly ashamed. Also something you should stop doing—immediately if not sooner.

2. The use of marijuana is the sort of thing people deserve to be punished for. You used it, hence you deserve to be punished. Turning yourself in to the local jail immediately might be considered irresponsible, given other and even more binding obligations you face. But once your term is up, it is obviously your obligation, as a morally responsible individual, to do so. No doubt you can afford a lawyer to work out the details.

Have any politicians actually faced up to this problem and explained why they are unwilling to accept either of the two alternative conclusions?

Thoughts on Huntsman

2011-06-21T15:28:00.000-07:00

Jon Huntsman's announcement that he is running for the Republican nomination strikes me as raising a couple of interesting issues, quite aside from what sort of job he would do as President. One source describes him as the anti-Trump, on the grounds that he is serious and Trump was not.

He strikes me as more nearly the anti-Romney. His most obvious attraction is to conservative Republicans who believe they need a centrist candidate in order to win the election. Like Romney he has a centrist image, but he does not have the same history of appearing to want to be all things to all people and he did not create the first draft of Obamacare. Not knowing a whole lot about either of them and being a libertarian rather than a conservative, I still feel more comfortable with the idea of Huntsman as President than of Romney.

One somewhat ambiguous element, however, is the verbal support that Huntsman is getting from not only the political center but the Democratic establishment. It could be that they have only the welfare of the country at heart—but the obvious suspicion is that they think he would be easier to beat than, say, the current governor of Texas, who seems at the moment to be the most likely conservative nominee.

I was amused by Harry Reid's comment that Romney has flip-flopped on so many policy issues that he “doesn’t know who he is.” Not that I don't agree—but isn't that also true of the candidate that Reid's party plans to nominate?

Caplan Contra Krugman: A Very Clever Post

2011-06-21T00:40:00.000-07:00

Paul Krugman has recently been claiming that people on the left understand the views of those on the right much better than people on the right understand the views of those on the left. As Bryan Caplan argues in his response, this partly hinges on the fact that Krugman is comparing left wing academics to right wing polemicists. If instead you compare how well libertarian economists can reproduce Keynesian arguments with how well Keynesian economists can reproduce libertarian arguments, the conclusion might well reverse.

The clever thing about Bryan's response is that he proposes an objective test of the question, a sort of ideological Turing test.

Put me and five random liberal social science Ph.D.s in a chat room. Let liberal readers ask questions for an hour, then vote on who isn't really a liberal. Then put Krugman and five random libertarian social science Ph.D.s in a chat room. Let libertarian readers ask questions for an hour, then vote on who isn't really a libertarian. Simple as that.

If provided with sufficient funding, redo the experiment using economists, using political philosophers, replacing libertarians (or liberals) with conservatives. Generate some actual empirical evidence of who understands whose arguments well enough to defend them, which is arguably important, even essential, evidence of understanding them well enough to be justified in rejecting them.

Puzzles of the Linked Web

2011-06-21T00:02:00.000-07:00

In the course of poking around to see who is referring to my blog posts, downloading stuff from my web page, and the like, I've encountered a couple of puzzles, and it occurred to me that some of my readers may know much more about the subject than I do.

The first came when I followed the link at the bottom of my web page to usage statistics provided by my ISP. One of them is "Top 100 of 4635 Total Referrers." Reading down them, I noticed a lot of what looked like pornographic URL's, mixed in with less exotic and more obviously relevant ones:


			http://hot-asses.brunettes4u.com/
			http://daviddfriedman.blogspot.com/2011/06/murray-rothbard-on-me-and-vice-versa.html
			http://www.google.co.in/url
			http://www.youngblackpussy.info/black-booty/
			http://my-naked-ex-girlfriend.hotnakedgirlfriends.com/
			http://www.google.com/m/search
			http://nudecelebsfree.info/

Naturally, I clicked on some of them. And ended up looking not at pictures of hot naked girlfriends but at a respectable, innocuous, indeed dull page offering information on online education. I tried clicking on some more and ended up, each time, in the same place. It doesn't work if I click on a URL that looks as though it might actually belong there—only the pornographic ones.

My only guess so far at what is going on is that traffic is being steered to the respectable page by the use of what look like unrespectable URL's, somehow forwarded to the respectable URL when you click on them. But surely there must be a more plausible explanation.

My second puzzle is less exotic. I did a Google search for the title of our POD cookbook and got a surprisingly large number of hits. But when I clicked on one and searched the page for a word from the title, it was not there—there was no reference at all to the book. That was not the case for all of the hits, but it was for a surprisingly large number.

The pattern was not random. The pages I was finding were not pages likely to talk about a medieval & renaissance cookbook. But they were pages likely to link to my blog—largely libertarian or libertarian related pages. In some cases, the date of the page predated the cookbook by several years.

My current guess is that those pages had links to something that had once appeared on my blog. Somehow, when I started posting to the blog about the cookbook, something changed, sending Google a (mistaken) signal that the links were going to those posts.

Can anyone offer a clearer or more plausible explanation of what I'm seeing? Is there a good webbed discussion of this stuff somewhere?