Doing Well by Doing Good: Motel Version

The motel room I'm staying in has a note explaining that, in order to serve the environment by reducing the waste of water for washing things, it only changes linens every other day. In many other motels that I have stayed in, the corresponding note tells you how to signal, by where you leave your towels, whether you want them washed or are willing to reuse them.

I have no objection to the policy—we don't, after all, change our sheets at home every day. But I find it amusing to see the motel using a "we are good people doing good things" justification for a policy that saves them time and money at a (usually very small) cost to their customers.

Which makes me wonder what other examples there are of people doing things in their own interest which others might object to, and justifying them as serving some greater good.

The First Experimental Science?

I have been reading through a large and interesting 10th century middles eastern cookbook. Unlike most medieval European cookbooks, it gives, for many recipes, precise quantities of ingredients. Reading it, it occurred to me that cooking may have been the first experimental science and perhaps a stepping stone towards other sciences.

The experiments get done daily, in the process of feeding people. It's natural enough for a cook to try different herbs, different spices, a hotter or cooler oven, a shorter or longer baking time, frying or boiling instead of baking, any of a wide range of variants, in the process of trying to produce something better.

In medieval Islam, and presumably other places, tasty food was a luxury valued by the rich—which meant that their cooks had both the resources and incentive to try to make it still tastier. And while some of what such experiments reveal consists of subtle differences, some is quite striking. Start with a basic  bread recipe—flour, water, and some source of yeast. Add a significant amount of fat—butter or oil—and instead of bread you have pastry crust. Brown flour in fat, stir in liquid, and you have just invented a new way of thickening your dish. Separate eggs, beat the whites thoroughly, and the result is almost magical. Experienced cooks can think of other examples.

Wanted: Motel Occupancy Data Online

Suppose you are driving across the country—as, at the moment, we are. At some point each day, you reserve a motel room for the night. The earlier you reserve it, the more likely it is that you can get the room you want. Also the more likely it is that something that happens during the day, slow traffic due to construction, a long stop at some interesting place you didn't know existed, will change your schedule, leaving you with a room reservation an hour or two too far down the road.

Most of the time, the first half of the problem is imaginary; most motels, most nights, have empty rooms, so if you put off your reservation until you arrive at the motel the odds are pretty good that you will still have a bed for the night. 

Most of the time, but not all the time—a fact of which we were rudely reminded this evening. We were leaving Laramie Wyoming, heading east, planning to spend the night in Cheyenne, when I checked online for rooms. And discovered that Frontier Days, a major Cheyenne event, had filled every motel room in town. 

Which is why I am writing this in a motel room in Laramie.

It would be nice to have an easy way of spotting problems like the one we just encountered in advance. It might take the form of an online web page, perhaps a map, showing where in the country today's motel occupancy rate was close to 100%. If such a map existed, Cheyenne this morning would have shown as a bright red dot, Laramie--where it took two tries to find a motel with space, Laramie being a mere fifty miles from Cheyenne and Frontier Days--a pink one. We would have called ahead this morning and either planned in advance to stay in Laramie or changed our plans to push on to the next town after Cheyenne, about two hours further east.

The funny thing about this post is that I composed it, in my head, a day or so ago—before my theoretical problem turned out to be real.

Mitt Romney, The Ideal Experiment

There are lots of things that can be said for or against Romney's candidacy, but it has at least one attractive feature—it provides a direct test of Obama's theory of how to win an election. A central feature of Obama's political strategy has been what his critics refer to as class warfare—attacks on the rich, with the implication that they are taxed at lower  rates than other people (pretty clearly not true) and ought to be taxed at higher.

It looks like a sensible strategy. It appeals to people's desire to think well of themselves, and so to believe that those who have been more successful got that way through, at best, luck and do not deserve their (possibly ill gotten) gains. It also appeals to the very natural desire to get something at someone else's expense—hence Obama's repeated claims that he will deal with budgetary problems entirely at the expense of very rich taxpayers. 

Most voters are not rich, so one might expect them to be persuaded. On the other hand, the midterm elections and current polling numbers suggest that a lot of them are not.

For an experiment on how well that particular strategy is likely to work in the U.S., Romney is the ideal test bed. He is very wealthy. He got his money not by writing best selling novels, being a sports or movie star, or inventing and marketing new and obviously useful high-tech gizmos, but by buying and selling companies, an activity that few voters are likely to identify with and one easy for the other side to present in an unflattering light—as the other side, of course, has been doing.

If, despite that, Romney wins, it will be good evidence that the strategy does not work very well in present day America. Which would, I think, be good news.

Quoting Adam Smith Out of Context

I just came across a blog which contained the following:

The rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than that proportion.

Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations

 The actual quote is:

It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.

Not only has the blogger removed without notice the first seven words of the sentence,  sharply changing its meaning, he has capitalized the word that starts his truncated sentence, thus pretending that what he is giving is the whole sentence.

Of course, the dishonesty is only in the blogger who first posted the supposed quote—various others seem to have copied it from him. I am not providing links to any of them, since I don't think they deserve the attention; readers who are curious should be able to find them easily enough.

I put a comment on one blog that had the quote, sourced to another. I'll see if the blogger is honest enough to let it show up. 

I've commented in the past on the practice of ascribing to Smith views he did not hold, such as support for public schooling and progressive taxation, supported by selective quotation. Most of those are probably honest errors by people who didn't actually read the text with any care, but this looks like deliberate dishonesty.

For those who are curious, what Smith is saying in the quote is that a particular tax, desirable on other grounds, should not be rejected just because it falls more heavily on the rich. His first maxim of taxation, however, at the beginning of the relevant section of the book, is that tax burden should be proportional to income.

Are Child Sex and Child Porn Substitutes?

I have seen several news stories of late quoting psychologists who argue that pedophilia, sexual attraction towards children, is an innate characteristic, probably with a biological base, probably unalterable. The obvious conclusion is that children are protected not by keeping people from having that characteristic but by keeping them from acting on it.

One way to do so is by punishing sex with children. Another way would be to make substitutes more readily available. There are, after all, a lot of adolescent and young adult males who, unable to get any desirable women to go to bed with them, have to do the best they can with masturbation and pornography instead. 

There is some empirical evidence that increased availability of pornography, via the Internet, results in reducing the amount of rape. The same argument suggests that child pornography might be a substitute for child sex—less desirable, from the standpoint of the pedophile, but also a lot less dangerous. If so, the current severe laws against child porn may actually increase, rather than decrease, the risk to children.

One argument for such laws is that the production of child porn itself involves child sex—but it does not have to. Child porn could be made using adult actors made to look very much younger than their actual age, possibly with the assistance of computer graphics. It could be made using images created entirely on computers. Arguably, legalizing such porn would provide many pedophiles—defined by preferences not practices—an adequate substitute for actual sex with actual children.

But I can't see any serious politician offering the proposal. Not, at least, if he plans to ever run for office again.

Back to Smart Phone Wish Lists

A recent news story suggesting that RIM should make Android phones with physical keyboards reminded me of one element of my smart phone wish list that has not yet been filled. I would like a phone with a list of desirable characteristics currently available—4g, big screen, Android—plus a physical keyboard.

And not just any physical keyboard. The old Psion PDA's had physical keyboards so good I could touch type on them, using thumb and three fingers of each hand. Comparing my Psion Revo to my current Samsung smart phone, the Revo is larger, but not much larger—still small enough to fit comfortably in a shirt pocket. Reducing width and length might squeeze the keyboard too much, but given the technological progress in making miniature computers over the past fifteen years I expect it could be made thinner, and the extra height and width would permit a screen bigger than my Samsung's 4.3", which would also be nice. 

And while I'm wishing ... . I'm a Verizon customer, which means that my current phone won't work in most foreign countries. That isn't a big problem—on a recent trip abroad I carried my old T-Mobile G1, the first Android phone, and bought a sim card for it in Prague for fifteen dollars or so that provided a 3g internet connection, which I mostly wanted so that I could use the gps. But still, it would be nice, when I got my ideal phone, if it was a world phone. 

And speaking of gps ... . Does anyone have software that would let me download the map for some area I planned to be in, say Prague, to memory—I have lots of free memory in my current phone—so that I could use the gps without requiring an internet connection?

The Rice Christian Cycle

Consider a political view that is out of fashion--conservatism or libertarianism c. 1960, say. Not many academics, not many authors, support it. But the ones who do are committed supporters because nobody else would pay the costs of being on the outside.  And, on average, they will be abler than the opposition, both because they have been exposed to both sides, the other being all around them, and because surviving intellectually when everyone thinks you are wrong is hard work.

Suppose some change, say the Reagan revolution, reverses the roles. One of the reasons for the change is that the outs, while less numerous than the ins, were of higher quality—more committed, with better arguments. It is hard, after all, to do a good job of rebutting views that you don't take seriously and, in any case, are rarely exposed to.

Now being a conservative is not only respectable, it is the route to a good job in Washington, perhaps a profitable and prominent career. The number who choose to support that position increases sharply but their quality decreases, both because it is much easier to maintain a position when it is in favor and because quite a lot of them are rice Christians--the equivalent, in the intellectual and political world, of Chinese who converted to Christianity because the missionaries had rice. 

On the other side, things are moving in  the opposite direction. Only those who really believe in liberalism (modern American sense) continue to support it, now that it looks more like the wave of the past than the wave of the future.

And since the new ins are getting flabby, and the new outs, if less numerous, are now of higher quality than they used to be, the wheel turns again.

Not, I am sure, a full explanation of political cycles, but perhaps at least a partial explanation.

Consequences of the Verdict

A number of commenters opposed to Obamacare have argued that the verdict, while an immediate loss for their side, might be a win in the longer run, either because keeping the unpopular program will hurt the Democrats in the election or because the legal principles on which the case was decided restrict government actions in important ways, even if not enough to render the mandate unconstitutional.

I do not know enough about either law or politics to have a confident opinion as to whether they are right, but I think there is an important consequence they are missing. 

First a digression ... 

One puzzle for public choice theory, the economics of politics, is why people vote even though they know that, in a large polity like the U.S., their vote has essentially no chance of affecting the outcome of the election. The answer I find most convincing is that most people vote for the same reason that many people cheer for their team in a football match. They enjoy being partisans, feeling "part of the team." That, in my view, is the reason why sports teams, unlike most other sorts of firms, are routinely connected to cities and universities. The connection brings with it a precommitted band of partisans and so increases the value of the entertainment being provided.

One round has just been completed in a giant game that is played out every four years with the future of the world at stake, a game that you can be a player in at the cost of a few minutes spent in the voting booth. However the other side may try to spin it, Obama won that round. Part of the fun of being a partisan is identifying with your side. It is, on the whole, more fun to identify with winners than with losers.Whatever other effects the outcome of the Obamacare case may have, that one will be a significant plus for Obama's team.

It Only Took Forty Years

One chapter in my Machinery of Freedom proposed what I described as "jitney transit," organized ride sharing for pay, as a low cost form of mass transit. The capital and operating costs are already covered, since lots of people are already driving from one place to another with empty seats in their cars. All that is needed is some way to connect riders with drivers. I did, however, note one problem:

The other difficulty is political. Many large cities have regulations of one sort or another to control cabs and cab drivers; these would almost certainly prohibit jitney transit. Changes in such regulations would be opposed by bus drivers, cab drivers, and cab companies. Local politicians might be skeptical of the value of a mass transit system whose construction failed to siphon billions of dollars through their hands.

I just got an email from a friend, pointing to an article on a modern version of the idea currently being implemented via a cell phone app. The entrepreneur responsible describes regulation as the key obstacle. Existing legal restrictions are avoided by making the payment nominally voluntary; the rider makes an offer of payment via the app, chooses how much to actually pay when he arrives. But there remains the risk of future regulation, pushed by incumbents to slow down innovation that competes with them.

Are There Sophisticated Fake Reviews and Reviewers?

Quite often, before choosing a restaurant, or buying somewthing, or hiring someone to work on my roof, I check the web for reviews. Occasionally I find a suspicious pattern—lots of very positive and rather generic reviews, along with a smaller number of very negative reviews that sound as though they were written by real people—which suggests that the positive reviews are fakes, written by someone working for their subject. On one notable occasion, that pattern warned me off of a roofing firm that, I concluded, was the third generation of a serial scam. There exists at least one online firm whose business is improving a firm's online reputation—I do not know enough about them to say whether they restrict themselves to honest ways of doing it.

Recently, looking for a furniture store, I came across what I thought might be a less clear version of the same pattern. The reviews were on Yelp, which lets you  click on the name of the reviewer and see the rest of his reviews. If all of one reviewer's reviews are in praise of a single firm, one might suspect that he works for them—and his job is writing favorable reviews. The reviewers I was looking at did not fit that pattern.

Which started me wondering  how sophisticated the people who sell the service of improving a firm's reputation might be by this time. Are there some who deliberately create believable reviewers, write real reviews of a number of products or businesses, and then sell the service of having the same reviewers write glowing reviews for anyone who will pay for them?

Anyone know?

Salt, Official Truth, and the New York Times

The New York Times recently published an interesting op-ed on the subject of salt. Its thesis is, first, that we have been and are being told by a variety of authoritative sources that we ought to consume less salt, second, that there is not and never has been adequate scientific support for that claim, and third that there is now evidence suggesting that the official advice is not merely mistaken but dangerous, that reducing salt consumption to the recommended level might well be bad for one's health.

What struck me about the piece was not mainly its contents—I had seen reports in the past on evidence that reducing salt consumption was bad for one's health—but its placement. I am not a regular reader of the Times, but my impression is that, in other contexts, it is sympathetic to arguments from official truth, arguments that start with some version of "all scientists agree that" and treat anyone who disagrees as either misinformed or in the pay of some interest group that wants the truth suppressed. Global warming is the obvious example, but I think there are others. So it was interesting to see them publish a piece debunking one version of that argument.

A close parallel to the case of salt is the case of saturated fat. A few decades back, the official wisdom, promoted by more or less the same sorts of authorities that now tell us to eat less salt, was that saturated fat was bad for the heart and one should therefor switch from butter to margarine. Further research eventually led to the conclusion that, while saturated fat was somewhat bad for the heart, trans-fats were much worse—and the margarine we were being told to switch to was made from hydrogenated vegetable oil, hence replaced saturated fats with trans-fats. In that case, as best I can tell, the official advice was not merely wrong but lethally wrong, a fact which led to less skepticism about official truth than it should have. Any readers better informed about the subject—nutrition is not an area where I can claim any expertise—are welcome to correct my account, but I think it is accurate.

I was, perhaps, less inclined than most to take official truth at face value due to early experiences in what was to become my field. As an undergraduate at Harvard in the early sixties, I had a conversation with a fellow undergraduate who informed me—he had no idea who I was—that he could not take an economics course at Chicago because he would burst out laughing. Even aside from what I knew about the controversy between the Chicago and Harvard schools, it seemed to me that the fact that a student who had probably taken one introductory course in the field thought himself competent to judge, with confidence, which school was correct, was a good reason to be skeptical of the claims of his teachers. And, within a decade or two, the Harvard school had largely conceded that, on at least some of the debated points, they had been wrong.

In the case of global warming, I am inclined to accept the official version of the climate science, since I don't know enough about the subject to be competent to question it. But the official version of the associated economics, the claim that the rate of warming implied by the climate science will have large negative effects, strikes me as unconvincing and probably wrong, for reasons I have discussed here in the past. 

(Many more of my posts on the subject.)

Is TSA Vandalism Deliberate Policy?

My previous post described a case of TSA vandalism that I recently encountered and raised the question of why the note informing me that my luggage had been searched did not identify the particular TSA employee who searched it—that being an obvious and inexpensive way of discouraging both pilfering and vandalism. One commenter on the post described his own repeated experience, along lines similar to mine, and offered an interesting explanation. 

The TSA agent is telling you not to bring stuff like that in your luggage anymore. Jars within jars containing some weird material need to be investigated by TSA agents. That means work and they don't like it. They are trying to teach you a lesson. The lesson is stop bringing that type of stuff on the plane with you.

Seen from this standpoint, the vandalism is not merely tolerated by TSA it is, at least tacitly, approved of. Which explains why TSA does not take obvious and inexpensive steps to prevent it.

It strikes me as a plausible conjecture but, short of getting a TSA inspector to confess, I cannot think of any easy way of testing it.