Did Anyone Record my Debate with Austin Petersen?

I debated him at the Young Americans for Liberty national convention on anarchism vs minarchism. I unfortunately did not record the debate, and YAL didn't either. 

It occurred to me that, since nowadays practically everyone has a smartphone which doubles as, among many other things, a recorder, someone in the audience probably recorded the debate. If so, I would be interested in getting, and webbing, a copy.

A commenter has now pointed me at a recording of the debate that someone has webbed.

I live in a world where almost everyone in my audience has a video camera disguised as a phone in his pocket and where I can put a question to the world at large, as I did in this post, and get an answer in three days.

For those unhappy with how rarely I post here nowadays, the main reason is that I am active as a commenter on my favorite blog, Slate Star Codex, which I highly recommend. I will continue to post here from time to time when I have something I feel like writing about.

On another subject, Eric Raymond has an interesting post up today, arguing against the destruction of Confederate Statues on the grounds that they, the treatment of Lee in the North as well as the South as a hero rather than a traitor, and a bunch of other things were part of a successful attempt on both sides to heal the wounds of the Civil War.

Reading it, it occurred to me that it parallels what is happening at the end of my second novel, Salamander. There has been a rising attempting to reverse the result of an earlier succession struggle, it has failed, and the victorious incumbents are deliberately offering very generous terms to the losers for essentially the same reason Eric describes.

The issue comes up in the sequel, which I am currently working on. The following is the relevant passage, spoken several years later by a secondary character who was involved in the rising and is now arguing against another attempt:

“Don’t know if you remember, but a bit before the mountain blew up, all Earl Eirick’s food stores went up in flames. Figure the Prince and his mages did it somehow. With no food and no Forstish army, we were in pretty poor shape. Prince could have offered terms a fair bit worse than he did, asked for the Earls’ heads, maybe some others, maybe mine. Sent all of us he didn’t trust north, put his people in the holds. From where he sat, we were traitors tried to bring in a Forstish army, take his capital, mebbe kill him and his brother. Not a lot we could have done to stop him once the rest of the royal forces showed up–can’t keep an army in the field without food.

“I was the one brought the Prince’s terms back to the Earl, good terms considering. Duke Morgen gave ‘em to me–didn’t even know the Prince was in the keep till he stood up to guarantee ‘em.

“One part you don’t know, cause I never told anyone but the Earl. Morgen’s daughter that’s Princess Mariel now, Prince’s wife. Maybe widow. At the College with me. Knew her pretty well. After I got the terms from her father, Prince endorsed them, still wasn’t sure we could trust ‘em, considering what rode on it. Asked Mari. Prince had proposed to her during the siege. Figured she should know.

“She said they would keep the terms. And why. Prince and Duke wanted to tie the kingdom back together, had worried about it a long time. Reason to give us generous terms. Reason to keep them. Told Earl Eirick. He accepted the Prince’s terms. They kept them.

“Try to break up the kingdom, steal the throne from the Prince’s heir, I’ll do what I can to stop you. Asgeir too.”

Reviving the Living Paper Project

A very long time ago, I wrote some computer programs to go with my price theory textbook. The idea, in each case, was to do something on the computer that could not be done on paper. My favorite was a program I called curvedraw, which let you draw a total cost curve freehand on the computer. As you did so, the computer drew the corresponding marginal cost and/or average cost curves. At any point you could switch from drawing total cost to drawing one of the other two, at which point the computer would take over drawing the total cost curve. You could click on any part of the total cost curve and have the program draw a tangent with horizontal length one, hence vertical length equal to the slope, i.e. the marginal cost, thus seeing visually why the marginal cost curve was what it was. The idea was to teach the student to intuit the relation between total, marginal and average, between a function, its derivative, and its average.

My plan was to produce more programs and offer to customize them to other textbooks, and I sketched out ideas for some of them. I also had a design for a computer game in which the player was  building a trade league, an "empire" based not on conquest but on mutual advantage. An early version was written  by a programmer friend of mine but the living paper project eventually died, since neither I nor my friend was willing to put enough time and effort into it.

I put up a description of the project a few years ago, in the hope of bringing it back to life as open source. That may now be happening.  Ricardo Cruz has been looking at doing my programs in javascript so that anyone could try them using the browser. He has asked me to announce the mailing list [1] and the github page [2]:

[1] https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/price-theory

[2] https://github.com/rpmcruz/price-theory

 

Shanghai and Batumi

Two cities I have enjoyed visiting and hope to visit again. They are quite a long distance apart and in many ways very different, but they have one thing in common. In both cities, all the architects are crazy.

Not, however, in the same way. Shanghai architects are science fiction crazy:

 A spherical building of glass

A skyscraper with a stylized Saturn on top. 

Or a space station.

 

A very large transformer, about to transform.

Batumi architects are fantasy crazy. 

Build a tower. Take a bite out of one side. Insert a magic spinning array of capsules.

Each, presumably, containing someone. Or something.

A three pointed tower, complete with clock and gilded dome.

A steampunk palace.

The Poor Man's Air Conditioning

It has been very hot in San Jose the last few days. One solution is air conditioning, which we have and sometimes use. The other is to open the windows in the evening, when it cools off, close them in the morning. Sometimes–last night, for instance–that cools the house faster than air conditioning. And it doesn't show up on our electric bill.

I have long wondered why there isn't an automated version available, or if there is and I haven't come across it. It would be easy enough to have an insert for a window that was controlled by a simple thermostat. If the inside temperature is both above your optimal and higher than the outside temperature, open to let air in, if not close. A few such inserts should do, automatically and more reliably, what we do by hand. For an improved version, provide the insert with a fan--that uses some power, but much less than an air conditioner.

Does anyone know of a commercially available version of such a system for home use? Alternatively, am I missing some reason why it isn't as good an idea as I think?

Embedded Economics: v. 0.1

I have just webbed the first draft of the project I have been discussing here, a collection of short works of literature that contain economics with some brief comments by me. Most of the works are available online, so I could do it as a collection of links without first getting copyright permission for the pieces I included. There are, however, a few pieces missing as a result.

The draft is here. Comments and suggestions for additional things to include are welcome. For a more detailed description of what sort of things I want, see my recent posts.

Suggestions for a better title are also welcome.

Legal Systems Very Different From Ours

I have just webbed the latest draft of the book I have been writing. To give you a quick idea of what's there, here is the table of contents:

Introduction

1.      Imperial Chinese Law
2.      Romani Law
3.      The Amish
4.      Jewish Law
5.      Islamic Law
6.      When God is the Legislator.
7.      Pirate Law
8.      Prisoners’ Law
9.      Student Law [Not yet in]
10.    Embedded and Polylegal Systems
11.    Saga-Period Iceland
12.    Somali Law
13.    Early Irish Law
14.    Comanche, Kiowa and Cheyenne: The Plains Indians
15.    Feud Law
16.    England in the Eighteenth Century
17.    Athenian Law: The Work of a Mad Economist
18.    Enforcing Rules
19.    The Problem of Error
20.    Making Law
21.    Guarding the Guardians
22.    Ideas We Can Use

       Bibliography


Comments welcome.

My European Speaking Trip

For people interested in attending, here is the list of the open talks:

Gothenburg, Sweden, May 24, 18:00 CEST

"A World of Strong Privacy: Anarcho-Capitalism Online"

Allégården, Södra Allégatan 4, Gothenburg

Facebook link 

 

Stockholm, Sweden, May 25, 17:00

"The Confederation of Liberal and Conservative Students - Speakers evening with David Friedman"
"Market Failure: An Argument Both for and Against Government"

Blasieholmsgatan 4a

Batumi, Georgia, European Students for Liberty Batumi Conference, May 27

Shota Rustaveli University   11:30 – 12:30 "Market Failure, an Argument Both For and Against Government"

14:45 – 15:30 "Feud Law: The Logic of Private, Decentralized Law Enforcement" 

17:30 –18:00 – "Future Imperfect: Many Ways the World Might Change in Your Lifetime"

Moscow: May 29, 7:30 P.M.
"Zombie-Visionary: Can We Control the Future?"
Osobnyak na Volkhonke, Bolshoy Znamensky 2 Building 3, 2 floor
People need to apply at http://www.inliberty.ru/events/207-Zombiprovidec
A recording of the talk is now webbed. You have to figure out what to click on to turn on the sound, however. And what you will hear is in Russian--the simultaneous translation (I don't speak Russian), not the English.

May 30, 7:30
"Legal Systems Very Different From Ours"
Higher School of Economics, Staraya Basmannaya, 21/4 Building 1, 4 floor
People need to apply at https://www.facebook.com/events/294694010975746/ and have their ID with them, since it is on a university campus.  

Graz, Austria, June 6

University of Graz, Resowi Building, 2nd floor

"The Case for Anarchy," 11:30am, room SZ15.22

"Climate Change, Population, and the Problem with Externality Arguments, 6pm, room SZ15.21

Link to organizer with some additional information (partly in German): https://economics-club.uni-graz.at 

Budapest, Hungary, June 7, 6 P.M.

"The past and future of law without the state"

Kossuth Klub, Múzeum u. 7, Budapest 1088, Hungary

Facebook event
Facebook page for details and discussion

The Most Exciting Maybe of the Year

A  link in a recent post on my favorite blog took me to a piece on a recent article from the Netherlands Cancer Institute in Amsterdam. It describes a procedure which appears to reverse aging in mice. These are early results, they might be wrong, there might be currently unknown problems, and we are not mice. 

But it at least suggests the possibility of not merely slowing aging, which is what most anti-aging research is about, but reversing it.

Something Different. Or Maybe Not.

My younger son writes, among other things, fiction set in the world of super heroes and super villains. This morning he pointed me at someone else's work in that genre, a novella: Interviewing Leather. I read it.

The narrator is a reporter working for a Rolling Stone equivalent in a world with super heroes and super villains. His assignment is to interview a mid-level super villain, more precisely super villainess, who goes by the name of Leather.

It is an enjoyable story with interesting characters, plot, and moral issues. But what most impressed me was that the author took a pattern of behavior that came into existence for literary reasons, to make good stories, and constructed a persuasive explanation of why real people would act that way. Not easy to do when "act that way" involves a lot of dramatic posturing and dialog by both sides, most of it well suited for the dialog bubble of a comic book but entirely unnecessary for either committing crimes or stopping them.

To see how he managed to pull it off, read the story.

Discussing it after I finished, my wife raised the question of whether the story would work for the book I plan of stories that teach economics. It might. Part of the background is a description of the economics of the super villain business. Much of the point of it is people taking the actions that achieve their objectives, which is what economics is about, although neither the objectives nor the actions are exactly what we are used to.

If you read the story, or have read it, let me know if you think it belongs in my book.

Thoughts on Literature, Economics and Education

My recent posts here have dealt with my current project of putting together a book of short works of literature that have interesting economic ideas embedded in them. I've gotten suggestions both here and in response to emails that I sent to people who I thought might help. Some of the suggestions I expect to use. But my reaction to most of them was that they were not what I was looking for. The purpose of this post is to explain why. Part of doing so is looking at the difference between the project I am planning and the somewhat similar, but I think fundamentally different, project that Michael Watts produced in The Literary Book of Economics.

What is Economics?

Probably the most common definition is "the science of allocating scarce resources to diverse ends." Watts offers Marshall's definition: "The study of mankind in the ordinary business of life." Neither of those is what I think of as economics. Still less is it the study of the economy, which I suspect would come closest to what most people think the word means.

To me, economics is that approach to understanding behavior that starts from the assumption that individuals have objectives and tend to take the acts that best achieve them. That is what economists mean by "rationality," and it is the assumption of rationality that is, in my view, the distinguishing characteristic of economics. What I am looking for are works that tell us something interesting about the implications of that assumption.

Someone at some point suggested Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. It is an interesting book, although much too long for my purposes. But what makes it interesting, economically speaking, is not the vivid picture of poverty in the period between the wars but particular details relevant to implications of rational behavior.

I can give, by memory, an example. Orwell observed waiters in a fancy Paris restaurant, out of sight of the diners, spitting in the dishes they were going to serve. In an idealized market context, the waiter would never spit in the dish unless the value to him of doing so was more than the disvalue to the patron he was serving, which is unlikely. But throw in the inability of either the patrons or the waiter's employers to monitor the waiter's behavior and any benefit to the waiter of expressing his hostility is a sufficient incentive to make him do it. That suggests the further point that, when you cannot monitor someone's behavior, his preferences matter--you want the job he is doing for you to be done by someone whose preferences are close enough to yours so that he will want to do what you would want him to do–even if nobody is watching.

Economics is not the study of the economy. A picture of poverty, or unemployment, or wealth, or economic growth, however accurate and vivid, does not in itself teach you any economics. A story such as Poul Anderson's "Margin of Profit," which deals with a wholly fictional future, does, because it demonstrates in that world an important implication of rationality that holds in our world as well–that in order to prevent someone from doing something you do not want him to do it is not necessary to make it impossible, merely unprofitable.

How to Learn

One difference between my project and Watts' is that he includes things that are not, by my definition, part of economics, along with others that are. The other difference is that most of what he includes are not complete works but excerpts from much  longer pieces. 

I can imagine an economics professor reading through The Literary Book of Economics in search of things he can use in his teaching. But I find it hard to imagine anyone else doing so on his own initiative, merely because he enjoyed reading it. There is a reason why a book is the length it is; a novel is not, with rare exceptions, a series of short stories. I conclude that most of the people reading Watts' book, most of the people it was written for, will be students reading it because their professor told them to. And, judging by my experience of students over the years, many of the students told to read it won't. 

That fits the pattern of most modern schooling at all levels. Someone else decides what you should learn, tells you what you must do to learn it, and makes some attempt to make sure you follow his instructions. It is not a model I think highly of. A much superior model in my view, if you can pull it off, is to get someone to learn something primarily because he finds it interesting. The best way of doing that is to provide students with things to read that are  worth reading on their own, not things they read only because they are ordered to. Not even things they read only because they think the labor of reading them will pay off in future benefit. 

That view of education is why both children of my present marriage were unschooled. It is also why all of my nonfiction books, with the partial exception of Price Theory, were targeted at the proverbial intelligent layman. They can be, and sometimes are, used as textbooks, but they were written with the assumption that if the reader did not find a chapter worth finishing he was likely not to finish it.

It is also why I am not looking for literary excerpts that can be used to demonstrate economic points, unless the excerpt can stand on its own as a work of literature.

Ideas That Teach Economics: Who Should I Ask?

At least since I successfully used this blog to get a design for the cover of the third edition of my first book, I have been intrigued with the idea of using the internet as a way of collecting ideas and information. My current project, described in my previous post, is an obvious candidate. I have accordingly been using this blog, Facebook and G+ to ask for suggestions on what I ought to include in a book of short works of literature that contain economic ideas. I have also been emailing everyone I can think of who might contribute additional suggestions, ranging from my undergraduate debate partner, a fellow Kipling enthusiast and currently a federal judge, to two science fiction authors, also friends. Also lots of economists. It just occurred to me that I ought to try the second order approach--using the Internet to get suggestions about who I should use the Internet to get suggestions from. Hence this post.

Who should I contact by email who would be likely to know of short works of literature that included interesting economic ideas? What sites online might it be worth putting posts or comments on? 

So far the only one I have tried, aside from here, FB and G+, is Baen's Bar.

Ideas That Teach Economics: A Progress Report

In two previous posts I described my current project to put together a collection of works of literature that teach economics. Inspired in part by comments to those posts, I now have almost half a book's worth and am looking for more. Here is the current list, not necessarily in what will be the final order:

"Business as Usual DuringAlterations" by Ralph Williams

Horodotus on the marriage customs of the Babylonians

From Imitations of Horace by Alexander Pope

"Margin of Profit" by Poul Anderson

"The Peace of Dives" by Rudyard Kipling

"The Cambist and Lord Iron" by Daniel Abraham

"The Jigsaw Man" by Larry Niven

“The Verger” by Somerset Maugham

A Petition by Frédéric Bastiat

George Orwell, A Review of The Road to Serfdom and The Mirror of the Past

I am considering adding, at Peter Leeson's suggestion,  
"The Judgement of Solomon." 
It is a well known story but provides a simple illustration of a preference revealing mechanism, although arguably a flawed one.

With a little commentary by me, this would come to about 40,000 words. I am aiming at at least twice that, preferably a little more.

A few comments on what I want:

1. The idea is to teach economic ideas. Economics, to me, isn't the study of the economy, it is the approach to understanding behavior that starts from the assumption that individuals have objectives and tend to take the actions that best achieve them. So the fact that a story describes events in the economy, such as inflation or unemployment, is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition. 

2. I am looking for works that teach economics, not works that support my (libertarian, pro-free market) political views. 

3. I am looking for works that are good enough literature to be read as such. A story written by an economist to teach economics, such as Hazlitt's Time Will Run Backwards or Murder at the Margin by Marshall Jevons, does not qualify unless it is a good enough story to have survived on its literary merit alone. Ideally, this would be a collection that could be read for pleasure by someone uninterested in economics as well as being used as supplementary reading for discussion in an economics course.

4. I don't want excerpts that read as excerpts. The piece by Alexander Pope is part of a longer work but reads on its own as a complete poem.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, there is a somewhat similar project published in 2003, The Literary Book of Economics by Michael Watt. It is where I discovered the Pope poem, but so far that is the only thing I have found in it that I would want to use. It is not a book that I can easily imagine anyone reading all of for fun, although there are some interesting bits in it.

Suggestions can either be put as comments here or emailed to me.

Again Fictional Economics

A while back, I put up a post about an idea for a book, a collection of works of literature that taught economic ideas. Thanks to comments on that post, my list has expanded from two works to four, with a few other possibles. The purpose of this post is to make what I am looking for clearer and ask for more suggestions.

The plan is for a book consisting of works of literature, probably stories and poems, that are good enough to be worth reading for entertainment but that in addition embody interesting economic insights. Since it is to be a collection, the individual pieces have to be reasonably short—a novel would not fit. In my experience, good fiction writers usually write better fiction than even good economists, so I am not looking for something written by an economist to teach in fictional form, such as Looking Backwards by Hazlitt or Murder at the Margin and its sequels by Breit and Elzinga writing as Marshall Jevons–and in any case, all of those are too long for my purposes.

My present list:

"Margin of Profit" by Poul Anderson

A science fiction story whose point is that, in order to stop someone from doing something, you don't have to make it impossible, just unprofitable.

"The Peace of Dives" by Rudyard Kipling

An allegory in verse arguing that economic interdependence brings peace.

"So I make a jest of Wonder, and a mock of Time and Space,
"The roofless Seas an hostel, and the Earth a market-place,
  "Where the anxious traders know
  "Each is surety for his foe,
"And none may thrive without his fellows' grace."

--> "The Cambist and Lord Iron" by Daniel Abraham

A short story about prices--of an obscure currency, two men's lives, and a soul. 

--> "Business as Usual DuringAlterations" by Ralph Williams

A short story about why matter duplicators would not crash a market economy. 

Other suggestions? An excerpt from a longer work isn't impossible, but it has to stand on its own, be worth reading as a story. 

---
P.S. I think I have one more. "The Jigsaw Man" by Larry Niven. The central point is the same that I later and independently published in the  JPE as "Why Not Hang Them All: The Virtues of Inefficient Punishment."

A commenter pointed me at The Literary Book of Economics by Michael W Watts, which seems to be a project along the same lines as mine; I've ordered a copy. From descriptions I could find, it's a lot of relatively short excerpts from works of literature, each  making some economic point. I'm thinking in terms of many fewer pieces, probably each complete.