Andrew Chamberlain debunks the idea that we ought to credit NASA with the invention of Velcro, Teflon, Tang, Dust Busters, calculators, ad infinitum (thanks to Radley for the pointer). Andrew makes a number of excellent points (with great links, too), but I have to mention explicitly the one Andrew only hinted at: counting these ancillary and sometimes accidental inventions among NASA’s benefits is another variant of the old broken-window fallacy.
If Congress had not allocated all that money to NASA, then either (a) Congress would have allocated it in other ways, or (b) it would have been left in the private sector, where it would have been spent or invested. Either way, it would have stimulated other sectors of the economy. The activity that would have resulted in those other sectors is “what is not seen,” as Fredric Bastiat would have said: it is the invisible cost of the NASA budget. Those other sectors might also have produced a variety of both intentional and accidental inventions. We will never know what advances might have been made in other realms of human endeavor.
Inasmuch as NASA does pioneering research, one could argue that NASA is more likely than other programs to produce spillover benefits. But, as Andrew astutely points out, spillover benefits can result from all kinds of research, not just space exploration, so the claim of spillover benefits is hardly unique to NASA. And accidental discoveries can be made just about anywhere. In any case, the existence of spillover benefits doesn’t erase the costs. To get all those benefits, we had to sacrifice potential gains, of both the novel and mundane variety, elsewhere in the economy. It’s conceivable that NASA produced value on net, but we have to consider the hidden costs to make that calculation; and because those costs are in terms of things that never happened, we can’t ever know for sure. The next time you hear a laundry list of inventions that “would never have happened” if not for NASA, at least give a thought to all the other potential inventions that might have happened if not for NASA.
Friday, January 23, 2004
Broken Windows on the Moon
Thursday, January 22, 2004
My Miss-understanding
A Jan. 21 posting by Chris Potts on LanguageLog discusses negated sentences that mean the same thing as their non-negated counterparts, the most well-known probably being this pair:
(1) (a) I couldn’t care less. / (b) I could care less.
This reminds me of another not-to-be-taken-literally negation that I first heard from my wife. She said:
(2) I miss not seeing her.
I had to take a few seconds to figure out what she meant. “So… you used to not see her … but now you do see her … and you wish you didn’t have to?” I asked. No, it turns out I could have saved the mental energy of figuring out the compositional semantics and just jumped straight to the pragmatically sensible meaning. She meant what I would have said like this:
(3) I miss seeing her.
I did a search for miss not on the Internet and found too many examples to include here, as well as a discussion of this idiom here.
Now Chris says cases like these challenge the theory of natural-language negation, since a negated sentence really ought to mean the opposite of an un-negated one. But I wonder. Looking at the couldn’t care less example, it may just be that speakers who use (1b) have a single definition for the whole phrase could care less—in other words, could_care_less = don’t care. And they could even still have the ordinary, compositional meaning for could care less, and would just have to use it with the appropriate intonation to distinguish it from the idiomatic could_care_less. As in, "I COULD care less about your well-being, like so many other parents seem to do with their kids -- but I DON'T care less!"
Coming back to the miss not seeing cases, we could just say that for people who use this construction, miss simply means “regret” (an idea mentioned in the above website). And what if there are speakers who can say either (2) or (3) equally well? OK, so for them, there are two homonyms, each pronounced as “miss,” one taking a gerund phrase and meaning “dislike not being able to do something that one previously could do,” and the other taking a negated gerund phrase and meaning “regret.”
The real test of this hypothesis would be finding out if there are speakers who can do something like this:
(4) I miss seeing you and not doing all the things we used to do.
Can this mean “I miss seeing you and I regret that we don't do all the things we used to do”? If you could say this or hear it with the above meaning, I’d like to hear from you!
Meatbull!
When my son got interested in dinosaurs, I began to learn about all the dinosaurs that had been discovered since I read about them as a kid. One of them is a meat-eater from South America, with a snub-nosed face and two short horns above its eyes. These features reminded the dinosaur’s discoverer of a bull, so he named it Carnotaurus (yes, that’s –taurus, not –saurus), which most of the dinosaur books I’ve seen translate as “meat-eating bull.” Now that’s just not right. The Carno- part means “meat,” and the taurus part means “bull,” but where’s the “eat” part? Carnotaurus doesn’t mean “meat-eating bull”; it means “meatbull”!
But wait, you say. “Meatbull” doesn’t make any sense. That’s right. “Meat-EATING bull” makes much more sense, but dammit, just because “meatbull” doesn’t make any sense doesn’t mean you can just go adding whatever meaning you think should go in there! For example, think about the Jurassic plant-eater Brachiosaurus, whose name means “arm-lizard.” Arm-lizard? What’s an arm-lizard? Well, if Carnotaurus means “meat-EATING bull,” then maybe Brachiosaurus means “arm-BREAKING lizard.” After all, “arm-BREAKING lizard” makes a lot of sense if you imagine a big old Brachiosaurus stomping down on an unfortunate allosaur. For that matter, who says we have to insert a meaning that makes sense? Brachiosaurus could just as easily mean “arm-EATING lizard,” or “arm-DRINKING lizard,” or “arm-PAINTING lizard.” Actually, “arm-lizard” does make sense once you find out that the people who named it were referring to the fact that its front legs (i.e. arms) were longer than its rear legs, which is unusual for a dinosaur. But in that case, why hasn’t Brachiosaurus been translated as “arms-LONGER-THAN-LEGS lizard” for all these years?
So paleontologists have a couple of options. They can say that Carnotaurus means “meat-bull,” and that a meatbull is a bull that eats meat. Or they can name the dinosaur something like Carnivorotaurus, and say that that means “meat-eating bull.” But they can’t name it Carnotaurus and say that its name means “meat-eating bull.” Alas, as R. Crumb, might put it, Meatbull doesn’t work that way!
Sex Selection
This article by Kathleen Parker, in which she argues against the use of genetic sex selection, is a miracle of poor reasoning. It’s the kind of article that’s almost anti-persuasive: if these are the best arguments they can muster against sex selection, then it must be okay. I can’t resist giving it a brisk fisking.
Just because we can, should we? And who should decide? Is this yet another place government doesn't belong? If not a matter for government oversight, then who should decide what we do with human life in all its permutations - pre-born, test-tubed, sperm-selected and ova-donated.Ooh, um, I don’t know… parents, maybe? Odd how that option didn’t even make the list.
Priests, rabbis and imams? A jury of one's peers? Bioethicists?
Family planning no longer means counting moon phases.This is news? Family planning hasn’t meant counting moon phases since the invention of the pill.
Increasingly, it's a matter of mapping gender and genes. Already some specialty sperm and egg banks offer "Ivy League" donors; hundreds of couples have signed up for sex-selection trials.In this context, “already” means “for over 30 years, since sperm banks first appeared.” Sperm banks have always kept track of the characteristics of their donors, so that sperm shoppers could choose the sort of father they wanted. So far, it hasn’t been a problem.
What's the big deal about identifying sex, proponents ask? If a family has three boys and wants a girl, why shouldn't they have the option to choose? Questions far outnumber answers thus far, which may be an answer in itself.That’s right, more questions constitutes an answer. From now on, if you want to ban something, you don’t actually have to demonstrate a harm – you just have to ask a bunch of questions.
Some pragmatists worry that sex selection could become a new form of sex discrimination. Or that we might upset the balance of nature by fooling with the ratio of boys to girls, as occurred in China when families limited to one child aborted females.This is, in my mind, the only serious objection to sex selection. But the fact that it happened in China – which (a) has a long cultural history of strongly preferring boys to girls, (b) still has many regions dominated by agriculture, which favors having children who can work the fields, and (c) has a state policy limiting parents to a single child each – doesn’t mean that it will happen here. And even if it does, the problem might be self-correcting; see my previous post on this subject.
Sex selection also adds a prickly new dimension to the abortion issue. If you order a girl and mistakenly get a boy, do you abort the "wrong sex"? Of course, you certainly may, and some have. Wrong sex, wrong time, wrong mood. Getting born these days is a tricky proposition.The reasoning here is exactly backward. People who care that much about getting a baby of the right sex can abort wrong-sexed fetuses under the status quo, with no help from sex selection technology. I doubt such abortions are common, but more importantly, the availability of sex selection will reduce their frequency, not increase it. Parents who really, really want a boy can make 99.99% sure they get one in the first place, rather than aborting two or three girls first.
Here's at least one question I haven't heard asked: When did it become accepted wisdom that people should always get exactly what they want? Since when are perfect outcomes the standard by which we measure quality of life?Strange that she hasn’t heard anyone ask that question, since statists ask it on a regular basis, as though it were actually an argument or something. It’s not. We all know it’s impossible for everyone to get exactly what they want. But when we can improve some people’s happiness without substantially burdening others’, only pointless self-denial would prevent us from doing so. If improving people’s ability to come closer to getting what they want is a bad thing, then we need to rethink a lot of other technological advances – like condoms, for instance, which have been around at least since the time of Caesar.
In every case, I suspect, a degree of narcissism creeps into the romantic equation that results in our little darlings. Father wants a son just like Dad; Mother wants a daughter just like Mom.If true, this claim mitigates the alleged sex-ratio problem. At least in cases where both Mom and Dad are involved in the decision, the two sources of narcissism cancel each other out (to some degree, at least).
Besides which, life without surprises – and the kind of spontaneity that sometimes results in an unplanned pregnancy – would be intolerably boring.So should we ban birth control to encourage more of those fun “surprise” pregnancies? Look, if you want a surprise, you can still have one – it’s not like trying to tickle yourself! If you want your child’s sex to be a surprise, don’t use sex selection! For decades now, parents have had the ability to find out their child’s sex before birth; many have chosen to do so, but others have not. (Neal and his wife chose a clever halfway house, because he wanted to know but she didn’t. Neal found out the baby’s sex and then agreed to switch pronouns from week to week – “he” this week, “she” next week – so his wife wouldn’t be tipped off. If he ever slipped, the error could be written off to forgetting what week it was.)
Perhaps there are some risks to sex selection, but I haven’t heard a truly persuasive one yet. Articles like this one just reinforce my suspicion that opposition to sex selection stems from squeamishness and little else.
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
Schadenfreude
That’s the feeling this article inspires in me. An Ohio woman just won $162 million (well, $67 million actually, because she took the lump-sum payment) in the lottery. The local government officials were almost as excited as she was – after all, they figured they had just gotten a windfall of unexpected tax revenues! But it was not to be, because the city had neglected to include lottery winnings in the definition of income.
"It's not a good day for the city," Mayor Georgine Welo said Monday. "We were all excited until we went to go for the money and learned that we are not entitled to it. We are very saddened by the news."Yeah, I’ll bet. It’s enough to make you weep – from laughing so hard. Hey, how about this: the city should take $2 of tax revenue and buy a lottery ticket for itself next week.
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
Alternative Programming
As Julian notes, the State of the Union Address is like the Super Bowl for political geeks. But as a political geek myself, I still don’t get it. The SotU is invariably a lethal mix of boring, stupid, mawkish, and frustrating. The endless ovations only add to the torture. And if you really feel like you’re missing something, you can skim the full transcript (minus ovations) in the morning paper. Here’s a hint: if the only good reason to watch something is the drinking game, then find something else to watch. There are plenty of better options, and they, too, often have drinking games. Hey, I’m not saying MTV’s Taildaters/Punk’d line-up is sophisticated television, but consider the alternative. As for me, I think I’ll be watching Firefly on DVD.
Braves versus Thinskins
Christopher Potz’s recent post on offensive team names reminds of something I’ve been meaning to say on the subject. Activist groups pushing for the elimination of team names like Redskins, Indians, and Braves have made a strategic error that likely damages their case in the eyes of the public: they refuse to distinguish between derogatory and non-derogatory references to American Indians. “Redskins” is clearly offensive to anyone who gives it much thought; but “Indians” is pretty neutral, and “Braves” is arguably complimentary. As long as activist groups insist on the elimination of all these names, the public is likely to ignore them. Given an all-or-nothing choice, they prefer all to nothing. The mere fact that a team name makes reference to an ethnic group, or to that group’s warrior class, does not indicate racism; if it did, then activists would be equally upset over the Patriots, Minutemen, and Vikings. If the activists hope to make a difference, they need to adopt a more moderate stance favoring the elimination of only the truly offensive names.
(PETA has made a similar error in its advocacy of animal rights. Many Americans might favor marginal changes that improve the condition of food animals on factory farms and research animals in labs. But they are not willing to go vegetarian, forgo the health and safety gains from research, and rename the Green Bay Packers because its name is a reference to the meat-packing industry.)
Monday, January 19, 2004
The Nature Con...servancy
These two articles spell bad news for free-market environmentalists. For many years, I had considered the Nature Conservancy a fine example of how environmental goals could be sought by private means rather than government coercion. Unfortunately, it turns out the Conservancy is most likely guilty of various forms of malfeasance and unethical behavior. It also turns out, according to this report, that the Conservancy wasn’t that market-friendly, either: it received much government funding, and it frequently sold properties to the government despite the express wishes of those who sold or donated them to the Conservancy in the first place.
Of course, it’s good news that a seemingly corrupt and (as it turns out) anti-market organization will likely be brought to justice. But it’s bad news that what appeared to be a noble organization is not so noble after all.
Moreover, some of the organization’s laudable practices may be tarred with the same brush as its unsavory ones. For instance, both articles imply that it’s somehow unethical for the Conservancy to have engaged in “conservation buyer” sales and to have allowed for some development and resource extraction on its preserves.
[Earlier Washington Post] stories also reported that the Conservancy had repeatedly bought land, added some development restrictions, then resold the properties at reduced prices to its trustees and other supporters. The buyers made cash gifts to the Conservancy roughly equal to the difference in price, thereby qualifying for substantial tax deductions. [excerpt from first linked article above]Although the sale of properties to the organization’s own trustees undoubtedly smells corrupt, there is nothing inherently wrong with the general approach described here The notion that land must remain pristine in order to achieve environmental goals is a myth perpetuated by other environmental groups. In reality, it’s possible to use land for various purposes with only negligible harm to the environment, as long as suitable development restrictions are in place. Even better, the proceeds from resource extractions can generate funds which can be used to preserve yet more sensitive properties from development. This strategy, which is both economically sensible and environmentally sound, may suffer unjustly as a result of the Nature Conservancy’s unethical actions. (Thanks to Tyler Cowen for the pointer.)
[The Nature Conservancy has now] [s]uspended all new logging and other "resource extraction activities" on its nature preserves. The Post articles detailed how in Texas City, Tex., the organization had drilled for oil and natural gas under the last native breeding ground of a highly endangered species of grouse known as the Attwater's prairie chicken. The suspension will not stop natural gas production on the Texas preserve, a spokesman said. [excerpt from second linked article above]
Stuck in a Syntactic Puzzle You Can't Get Out Of
That's the clever post title I thought Neal should've used for his post below, and now I have a chance to use it, because Dad emailed me the following message that he was unable to post in the comments box:
Neal calls this kind of situation an "attachment ambiguity." No doubt that is the correct linguistics term, but I call it bad diction, good diction being defined as a skillful choice of words accurately used to express clearly the speaker's ideas.Here are my answers, even though the questions were for Neal. With regard to the intentional misdirection ("I want to kiss her, but..."), I think the technical linguistic term is "pun." "BTW" is Internet shorthand for "by the way." And Sting was the lead singer of the Police, so I think Neal deliberately used both names.
Our society generally forgives a modicum of bad diction or bad grammar on the part of singers and songwriters, because it is often necessary to make the timing and tempo (or the rhyming) of the lyrics fit with the melody ("poetic license"). This is not surprising, since frequently (if not the majority of the time) the music is written before the lyrics are. In fact, it is not uncommon that different people write the music and the lyrics. My impression is that this is especially true with musicals.
Were it not for the absurdity of the "call her up a thousand times" scenario, that would be exactly what I would think was meant, just as Ellen did, because of the sentence structure. Consider the following:
"I resolve to call her up a thousand times a day" has the same structure as, "I resolve to call her every week." Now, having removed the outlandish aspect (a thousand calls per day) from the problem, it is clear that what the speaker means to say is that he intends to call her every week (whether he actually gets around to it is another matter).
If, instead, the speaker said, "Every week I resolve to call her," it is equally clear that every week he resolves all over again to call her (but apparently he can't ever work up the nerve to actually do so).
While on the subject of misleading song lyrics, Neal, what is the proper linguistics term for the kind of intentional misdirection embodied in the song line that goes, "I want to kiss her, but .... pause .... she won't let me," meaning that he wants to kiss her (except she won't let him), although what the singer wants the listener to hear is that he (the singer) wants to kiss her butt.
Also, what does BTW mean? And did you mean to say Police both times or Sting both times?
Sunday, January 18, 2004
Foundering on a syntactic puzzle
Thanks, Glen, for the introduction. And now, I'll get right to some linguistic stuff.
In a recent post on LanguageLog, Geoff Pullum spoke of “founder[ing] on [a] semantic puzzle”. I’ve known this feeling when it comes to syntax, and particularly in song lyrics. I’ve always had a tendency (which I’ve gradually learned is not a normal one) to take things literally, and end up chuckling over lines like this one:
(1) Your prison is walking through this world all alone. (“Desperado,” by the Eagles)
But one song lyric in particular had me foundering on a syntactic puzzle. Back in high school, I’d hear this line from the Police on the radio:
(2) I resolve to call her up a thousand times a day… (“Every Little Thing She Does is Magic”)
And I’d wonder: Which is it? Does he make a resolution a thousand times a day? Or does he make one resolution, namely, that he will call her up a thousand times a day? Well, gosh, she’d get pretty annoyed if he called a thousand times a day, so it’s probably the resolving that he does a thousand times a day. Yeah, that’s probably it. But even after making my determination, the next time I’d hear the song, I’d go through the train of thought all over again. It was weeks before I was able to hear how the rest of the verse went, because about 5 seconds would always have elapsed before I turned my attention back to the song. (It goes, “ask her if she’ll marry me,” something something something). Much later I learned that there was a name for this kind of situation: an attachment ambiguity. Does “a thousand times a day” attach to the lower verb phrase “call her up”, or to the larger verb phrase “resolve to call her up”?
BTW, for those who think the “call her up a thousand times” scenario is so outlandish that no one could possibly think that was what Sting meant, that was exactly what my sister thought he meant until I opened her eyes to the more likely meaning!
Changing of the Guard
I have two announcements. First, I am pleased to announce that my brother Neal Whitman will be guest-blogging on Agoraphilia for the next couple of weeks. Neal earned his doctorate in linguistics from Ohio State University in 2002, and he has articles published or forthcoming in The Journal of Linguistics and Language. Rather than offering a description of his political ideology, as seems traditional on mostly political blogs like this one, I will instead state his linguistic ideology: he is a semanticist with syntactic leanings. (That's supposed to be a little joke. If it's not funny, blame me, not Neal.) I look forward to his posts on language and whatever else he feels like venting about.
Second, Agoraphilia bids fond farewell to gadfly Jim Dow. He's not dead or anything; he's just decided blogging's not really his bag. He'll no longer be a regular co-blogger, but hopefully he will guest blog at some point in the future.
Friday, January 16, 2004
The Three-Way Terrorism Trade-Off
This pre-9/11 article from the Journal of Law & Economics has disturbing implications for the fight against terrorism. The article demonstrates an unavoidable trade-off among three different goals of the justice system: lowering the crime rate, minimizing the number of innocents convicted, and treating individuals equally before the law (e.g., using the same rules of evidence for all people). The trade-off between the first two goals is probably obvious. But this article takes the argument a step further, by pointing out that our attachment to procedural equality could entail punishing more innocent people.
To put it another way, suppose we hold the crime rate constant. Then applying the same procedural rules to all groups implies jailing more innocent people than if we treated groups differently. The only way to avoid that trade-off is to accept an increase in the crime rate. Here’s how the abstract puts it: “Specifically, we estimate that innocent black Americans would be roughly eight times more likely to be wrongly convicted of murder than innocent white Americans if society placed no value on equality when it comes to convictions. However, we estimate that eliminating inequality entirely could cost up to 1,900 lives annually because of a rise in the murder rate.” (Note that the form of equality referred to here is procedural equality, not equality of conviction rates across groups.)
What’s the logic? Say you’re playing blackjack, and you’re a good card counter. You’re halfway through the shoe, and you know that a disproportionate number of 10-valued cards remain to be dealt. Then it makes sense for you to increase your bet. You would be foolish to make the same bet on every hand, ignoring the information garnered by card-counting (unless, of course, you’re worried about getting kicked out of the casino). Changing your bet based on the count won’t guarantee you better results on every shoe, but you will do better in expected value and over the long haul.
The article’s argument, in a nutshell, relies on the same point. If you know that members of different groups have different probabilities of having committed the crimes they’re accused of, then insisting on the same standards of evidence or burden of proof across groups is equivalent to betting the same amount on every hand, regardless of the card count. You’re throwing away valuable information. Now, there might be very good reasons for doing so – equality before the law is nothing to sneeze at – but there’s no avoiding the trade-off. Ignoring that information means either (a) accepting a higher crime rate (which means innocents getting hurt), (b) punishing more innocent people (again, innocents getting hurt), or (c) both.
Now apply this lesson to the war on terror. Instead of talking about conviction of crimes, we can talk about apprehension of potential terrorists by means of airport searches, detainment, and so on. If we insist on treating everyone equally regardless of ethnic background (i.e., no ethnic profiling), we either (a) accept a greater likelihood of successful terrorist acts, or (b) harass a larger number of people, or (c) both. If it’s indeed the case that Arabs are more likely than non-Arabs to be terrorists (as a proportion of their group’s population, not as a fraction of all terrorists), then the trade-off here is quite real. I’m not actually advocating that we abandon procedural equality and embrace ethnic profiling, but I think we should at least recognize the sacrifice.
Thursday, January 15, 2004
Oh, This Can't Be Good
According to MSN Entertainment News, Michael Jackson has moved out of Neverland and into a rented Beverly Hills mansion. Here’s the best part (emphasis mine):
The hillside property, which also includes indoor and outdoor swimming pools, a huge tennis court, home theater, and ballroom, overlooks a kiddie park in Coldwater Canyon (d'oh!) and is located just a few minutes from Jackson's parents, reports People.You know what they say: location, location, location.
Wednesday, January 14, 2004
Phrases for Lazy Writers in Kit Form Are the New Clichés
Geoff Pullum of Language Log says we need a word to denote “phrases for lazy writers in kit form.” To be more specific, “the thing we need a name for is a multi-use, customizable, instantly recognizable, time-worn, quoted or misquoted phrase or sentence that can be used in an entirely open array of different jokey variants by lazy journalists and writers.” As the paradigmatic example, Pullum offers the frequent use of the old saw about Eskimos having some really large number of words for snow (which turns out to be false) in sentences like, “If Eskimos have N words for snow, then Santa Cruzans must have even more for surf.”
I haven’t come up with a name yet, but I do have another example: “X is the new Y.” I suspect this turn of phrase first appeared in the fashion world, in statements like “Grey is the new black.” Now it’s being used for just about anything, fashion-oriented or not. I have to admit getting a chuckle when I heard that butt crack is the new cleavage. But a quick Google search for “is the new” reveals a writing formula out of control. Among other things, I learned that:
Slick is the new scruffy. (style)Someone’s gotta make it stop!
Scar tissue is the new black. (style)
Old is the new young. (style)
Glam is the new metal. (music)
Rock’n’roll is the new hip hop. (music, duh)
Knitting is the new rock’n’roll. (pastimes)
Gambling is the new rock’n’roll. (pastimes)
Blood is the new black. (horror movies)
To text is the new sex. (um, sex)
Open is the new closed. (software source code)
Small is the new big. (companies as investment opportunities)
Hate is the new love. (literature, I think)
Dean is the new McCain… and the new Carter, and Goldwater, and McGovern, and Reagan… (public nuisances)
Orange is the new black. (terror alert system)
Black is the new pink. (astronomy, color of black holes)
Blacker is the new black. (non-reflective surfaces for telescopes)
UPDATE: Mark Liberman, also at Language Log, comments. After some further Googling, Liberman discovered that many others have also observed (and been annoyed by) the "X is the new Y" trend.
UPDATE (added 12/6/2005): Shortly after composing this post, I proposed a word for these formulaic clichés: "snowclones." With Pullum's blessing, my coinage has become the term of art. Check out the Wikipedia entry. Given the number of people who find this page while following snowclone links, I thought it wise to add an update that actually includes the word. If I can claim no other accomplishment when I die, at least I'll have one neologism to my name!
Tuesday, January 13, 2004
Libertarian Space-Hounds
Mark Kleiman writes:
Some time I'd like to hear one of the libertarian space-hounds explain to me slowly why space exploration should be funded by coercive taxation rather than private enterprise plus voluntary contributions. It's not that I don't know the answer to that question, but I don't see how that answer is consistent with hostility to government in general.Until I read Mark’s post, I was unaware of any “libertarian space-hounds” who supported government involvement in space exploration. Every libertarian I've heard or read on the subject has advocated the defunding of NASA and privatization. See, for instance, this whole page o’ links from Cato. After a bit of Googling, I discovered that Glenn Reynolds apparently supports government subsidization of space (by means of tax credits unavailable to other enterprises, among other things). But as famous as Reynolds has become, he’s certainly not the designated source for all libertarian opinion.
I suspect a survey of libertarians would reveal them to be almost uniformly opposed to government-funded space programs. Yet one libertarian’s advocacy of government involvement is enough to generate talk of “libertarian space-hounds.” Calling libertarians down for hypocrisy is all good fun, but let’s be serious: libertarians exhibit greater consistency than virtually any other political group. Indeed, I would argue that’s exactly why critics love to dig up examples of libertarian hypocrisy -- because libertarians actually state broad principles that could be contradicted by positions on specific policy issues. Other groups immunize themselves from charges of hypocrisy by refusing to adopt any overarching principles in the first place, except for vague generalities.
UPDATE: Mark has posted an update to his original post responding to my point. He is probably correct that the overlap between sci-fi fans and Ayn Rand fans is pretty large. For that matter, I’m a sci-fi fan myself (though my passion for Rand faded many years ago). The question, of course, is whether they let their fascination with space cloud their political judgment. On that question, I can only surmise, since I don’t have access to a survey.
I’m a bit confused by Mark’s comment, “All I want to know is how the libertarians are going to vote this year. If it's for Bush, then I will doubt Glen's assertion about ideological consistency.” There is certainly a boatload of good reasons for libertarians not to vote for Bush, and I certainly don’t plan to. But looking at whom one votes for in political elections, wherein every viable candidate will assuredly hold a variety of non-libertarian positions, seems an odd way to judge ideological consistency. At best, it tells you something about the relative weight the voter attaches to different libertarian positions when he is forced by circumstance to choose among them.
Better Ways to Bust the Budget
In response the president’s plan to build a moon base (a boondoggle if I ever heard one), Alex Tabarrok chides the president for his lack of originality and poses the following challenge to his readers:
What's your big-think idea to unify, motivate and inspire the nation? A moon-base will cost on the order of 200 billion so let's economize and say that the idea should cost 100 billion or less - a better idea and 100 billion to spare! Ideally, the idea should be mostly free of politics and have a strong possibility of success given that the money is spent. Email me and I will post the best ideas with full credit.Of course, I'm not at all excited about the government spending $100 billion on something to unify and inspire us. But if the borrowed money's just burning a hole in the Treasury's hole-ridden and mostly empty pockets, I would suggest the following: Clone a human being, without serious physiological defects, by the year 2015. I suspect this research program would generate substantial positive spillover effects, mostly in the fields of medical technology and life extension. We might, for instance, learn how to grow organs that are already genetic matches for the recipients.
Of course, this will never happen, because our government is currently more interested in throwing hurdles in the way of medical science (by means of moratoriums, regulations, and outright bans on cloning and stem-cell research) than helping to advance it. My proposal assuredly fails Alex’s “mostly free of politics” requirement.
Monday, January 12, 2004
The Anal Movie Critic, Guest Edition
I’ve often used this space to critique films from a politico-economic perspective. But here’s my brother Neal’s take on “The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” from a linguistic perspective [note 1: the adolescent-girl speech pattern is deliberate] [note 2: warning, spoiler alert]:
Like, you know what would've been cool? When Eowyn is trying to get a can of whup-ass open on the master Ringwraith? And he says, "You fool! No man can kill me!", and then Merry sticks him in the calf with his sword? And he drops Eowyn, and she pulls off her helmet and her long golden tresses fall down upon her shoulders? And she says, "I'm no man!" and shoves her sword right into his helmet?Of course, word games have a long pedigree in literature, as my cousin Todd recognizes in his reply to Neal:
Like, he should have said, "Foolish girl, to think you can overcome me with your silly word games! Don't you know that when I said 'man' I didn't mean 'male'; I meant 'human'! Now you die!"
Yep. If they'd been speaking a language like Latin (with 'vir' vs. 'homo') or ancient Greek (with 'aner' vs. 'anthropos'), they wouldn't have had this confusion.
Yeah, and if Macbeth had said, "Macduff, you dumbshit, Caesarians don't count!"(Actually, I think he means Caesarians do count [as “of woman born”], but you get the idea.)
Another, more recent example comes from the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. A prophecy says that Slayer will face the Master (a very powerful vampire) and die at his hands. Well, it turns out the writers of these prophecies had a different definition of death -- one that doesn’t account for modern resuscitation techniques. Buffy faces the Master, and he chokes her to death. Minutes later, a friend revives her with CPR, and she comes back to kick the Master’s ass. I like this story better than the others (“no man” and “of woman born”) because the linguistic ambiguity results from a historical change in what it actually means to be dead (at one time, what happened to Buffy would indeed have been considered death), as opposed to a linguistic ambiguity that would have been apparent even at the time the prophecy was made.
Saturday, January 10, 2004
Free Markets, Damned If They Do...
Further thoughts on my post below about the proliferation of choice. To be fair to the article’s author, he did not actually advocate public policies designed to reign in choice (though I suppose he might in his book). But I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that others have advocated such policies or will in the future. If so, then we have a nice example of the “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” trap that statists set for free markets. If markets don’t produce a wide array of choices, they are condemned for imposing the values of some consumers (those with the greatest influence on producers’ choices about product characteristics) on the population at large. We hear this kind of argument from the high-brow critics of pop culture (“Britney’s driving out Mozart!”), despite the wide variety of non-pop cultural products also available. On the other hand, if markets do produce a wide array of choices (as is, in general, the case), then we get the criticisms discussed in the previous post: that people are paralyzed by choice, that they spend too much time making decisions, that they are less content, etc. One way or another, the market takes the blame.
Similarly, no matter what happens to food prices, markets come under attack. If the price of food is high, markets get blamed for starvation and hunger. If the price is low, markets get blamed for making people fat.
As I discuss elsewhere, alcohol regulations are justified via a similar Catch-22. Franchise termination laws (which restrict the ability of alcohol suppliers to find new distributors) are sometimes justified by the alleged need to restrain the monopolistic power of large suppliers. The claim is that termination laws are required to protect competition, thereby (presumably) holding down prices. But if turns out that the laws actually drive prices up by shielding the large distributors from new entrants and the encroachment of small distributors, as I think is more likely the case, then the regulators fall back on a different argument: that higher prices are good because they cause people to consume less of the devil drink – like a back-door sin tax. Either way, regulations are justified.
Readers are invited to email me more examples (or put them in the comments box).
Thursday, January 08, 2004
Bet You Won't Hear This in the State of the Union Address
Remember the weapons inspectors who were looking for evidence of weapons of mass destruction after the war in Iraq? The Bush administration is withdrawing them from the country. A different team whose job is to dispose of biological and chemical weapons will remain in Iraq, but it is "still waiting for something to dispose of."
Delegating Authority, Dodging Responsibility
Amy, who writes one of the most prolific one-person blogs I know, calls down the Washington Post for inconsistency. The Post is concerned that the Patriot Act was written in vague language that allowed its actual content to be filled in primarily by the executive branch – which sounds an awful lot like a violation of the constitutional division of powers. But, Amy notes, the Patriot Act hardly breaks new ground in this respect, as virtually every federal regulatory agency works on the same template. To be consistent, the Post should also take issue with the enabling statutes that created the EPA, OSHA, FDA, etc.
One reason that Congress delegates legislative authority to the executive is, as Amy suggests, to allow for a greater expansion of state power. If Congress actually had to specify all the content of regulations, they just wouldn’t have the time to do as much regulating as they’d like. But I would argue that a more explanation of why Congress delegates its power is to finesse disagreements among its own members. Making trade-offs among disparate policy goals is hard work. Members of Congress would rather not make the trade-offs, especially since they will get blamed for any actual decisions they make – possibly losing votes and campaign money. So instead, they pass vague laws that claim to make satisfy everyone. Take, for example, the mandate created under the Emergency Petroleum Allocation Act (which I’ve taken from Gary C. Bryner’s book Bureaucratic Discretion):
[Issue regulations that] protected the public health, maintained public services and agricultural operations, preserved a sound and competitive petroleum industry, allocated crude oil to refiners to permit them to operate at full capacity, resulted in an equitable distribution of supplies to all parts of the country, promoted economic efficiency, and minimized economic distortion.In short, deftly palm the coin. Why should Congress make any hard decisions, when they can tell someone else to do it for them? And then, if anyone complains, just blame the administrative agency in charge.
Wednesday, January 07, 2004
Inefficiency Across the Curriculum
I’ve observed a disturbing trend (it’s gone on far too long for a fad) in education toward “across-the-board” curriculum elements. The most recent example, which affects me rather directly, is the requirement that group-work be included in every MBA class here at CSUN. (Actually, it may not be a requirement, but one of the items on every MBA class evaluation form is “Did this class help you to develop your teamwork skills?” or something to that effect.) The idea, of course, is that teamwork is so important that students should practice their teamwork in every class. Similarly, many high schools and colleges have implemented “writing across the curriculum” requirements, under which every class of every subject -- including math classes -- should have the students do a substantial writing assignment of some kind.
Two things irk me about “across-the-board” requirements. The first is their apparent lack of regard for the value of specialization. I was trained in economics, and that’s where my comparative advantage lies. Fortunately, I have reasonably good writing and editing skills, so I’m not worthless to my students in those areas. But the same cannot be said for all economists, or mathematicians or physicists. Moreover, I don’t have time in an economics class to spend on grammar and writing lessons, because I barely have enough time to cover all the economics material I want to cover. As a result, the writing assignments in my classes probably don’t actually improve anyone’s writing skills. The good writers get good grades, the bad writers get bad grades, and that’s all there is to it. To make people better writers, you have to assign them multiple papers and provide extensive feedback on each one, and you need to make them revise each paper to correct the problems. But doing all of that would seriously detract from my ability to teach my students economics.
My second problem with “across-the-board” requirements is their susceptibility to political bias (for lack of a better term). Why are writing and teamwork skills required across the board, while quantitative skills are not? In my experience, I’ve found students’ quantitative skills to be just as bad as, probably worse than, their writing and teamwork skills. A writing-across-the-curriculum requirement imposes no additional burden on an English teacher, because writing is already the crux of the course, but it imposes a substantial burden on me. Why isn’t the English teacher required to test his students’ quantitative skills, just as I’m expected to test my students’ writing skills? My best guess (readers are invited to suggest others) is that the people who impose such requirements don’t emphasize math because they, too, are deficient in their quantitative skills, and they feel awkward about requiring of students what they lack themselves. But if this hypothesis is true, it’s evidence of a greater need for quantitative skills.
Not that I would advocate a “math across the curriculum” rule, because I wouldn’t trust most teachers in other subjects to do it correctly. I would settle instead for the weakening of the current across-the-board requirements that place a disproportionate burden on one subset of the faculty.
Monday, January 05, 2004
Chained by Choice
An article by Barry Schwartz in yesterday’s Parade magazine says that people can actually be made worse off by having more options (the full text is apparently not available online). According to the conventional wisdom of economics, Schwartz’s claim verges on nonsense: In most microeconomic models of choice, it’s logically impossible to decrease a person’s well-being by increasing the size of his choice set. But the article argues otherwise. Here’s a sampler of the article’s claims:
• “But if the number of choices keeps growing, negative effects start to appear. As choices grow further, the negatives can escalate until we become overloaded. At this point, choice no longer paralyzes us; it might even be said to tyrannize.”
• “At any large drugstore, you’ll find 80 types of painkillers, 40 kinds of toothpaste. … A choice that once took only 5 minutes now could take most of the day.”
• “The American ‘happiness quotient’ has been going gently but consistently downhill for more than a generation. In the last 30 years – a time of great prosperity – the proportion of the population describing itself as ‘very happy’ has declined. The decline was about 5%. This might not seem like much, but 5% translates into about 14 million Americans.”
• “Here we are, living at the pinnacle of human possibility, awash in material abundance. We get what we say we want, only to discover that it doesn’t satisfy us. The success of 21st-century life turns out to be bittersweet. And I believe that a significant contributing factor is the overabundance of choice.”
The notion that more options can make us worse off is not a logical impossibility, but I’m highly skeptical of its importance. In defense of the standard economic view, consider the following:
• If the burden of choice is too great, you can nearly always discard some portion of the choice set. Pick the first outfit you pull out of the closet. Buy the first can of coffee you see on the shelf. Go with the waiter’s recommendation at the restaurant.
• The process of searching for something – the best pair of jeans, a better job – often generates net benefits, at least in expected value. Otherwise, we could just terminate the search earlier. The fact that a choice that would have taken you 5 minutes now takes longer does not, in itself, indicate that you’re worse off, because you will only incur the added search time if the increase in value you expect to get exceeds the cost of search.
• Sometimes the search itself is enjoyable. If someone spends a whole day looking for a pair of jeans, I’m betting that person actually enjoys shopping.
The most plausible argument in support of Schwartz’s position is not that your own larger choice set makes you worse off, but that others’ larger choice sets do. The reason is that you might measure your happiness in relative terms, so that if everyone gets better off (say, wealthier) by an equal amount in absolute terms, nobody’s actually any happier. This approach transforms a positive-sum game (everyone can improve their condition) to a zero-sum game (one person’s gain is another person’s loss). But even if that’s part of the story, it’s nowhere near the whole story. I enjoy my DVD player immensely, not because I have one and others don’t (almost everyone I know has one now), but because I enjoy the superior picture and sound quality, the ability to turn captions on and off, etc.
Surveys like the one mentioned above, showing that fewer people are “very happy” than 30 years ago, don’t really show that people are worse off or that people only measure happiness in relative terms. On the contrary, it might be that people engage in benchmarking: they look toward the success of others to gauge how well they are doing relative to their potential. If lots of other people around me are managing to achieve more with similar initial resources, that’s a valuable signal that I could possibly be happier than I am. Knowing this, I might be reluctant to classify myself as “very happy” when I know I have the potential to be happier. Thus, we may rely on a relative definition of happiness to answer survey questions, but declining scores might merely indicate that people now have more unexploited opportunities to improve their absolute happiness than they did before. It does not follow that their absolute happiness level has fallen.
Saturday, January 03, 2004
Legislative AIDS, part 2
(For context, see part 1 below.) I’m skeptical of government funding of any medical research, but I can think of at least two reasons (besides Eugene’s) why it makes sense to give greater funding to HIV/AIDS than breast cancer or heart disease, if funding is measured on a per-victim basis.
First, HIV/AIDS tends to strike people down in the prime of life, whereas breast cancer and heart disease strike down older people. That means that lives saved by means of HIV/AIDS correspond to a greater number of life-years saved. If the government were interested in saving the most number of life-years instead of the most number of lives, it would be justified in spending a greater amount per HIV/AIDS-victim than per victim of diseases that strike later in life. (I don’t have specific figures, so I can’t say whether the difference in average age at death is large enough to justify the actual disparity in funding. If anyone can find specific figures, please email them to me.)
Second, any treatment that prevents, cures, or inhibits the transmission of HIV/AIDS create positive externalities; this is a result of the communicable nature of HIV/AIDS. For example, if someone is vaccinated against a disease, other people who have not been vaccinated also benefit, because their chance of being exposed to the disease is lower when fewer members of the population have it. The same cannot be said of non-communicable conditions like heart disease or cancer; the fact that you’ve been treated for cancer doesn’t make me any less likely to get cancer. Since there is a stronger case for subsidizing activities with positive externalities, it makes sense that HIV/AIDS would get greater funding than non-communicable conditions. (The fact that a conscientious person can generally avoid exposure to HIV/AIDS, by practicing abstinence or monogamy, using condoms, etc., weakens but doesn’t eliminate the argument. First, even for those who practice safe sex, some residual chance of exposure still remains, especially in the case of healthcare workers. Second, all these practices are burdens for at least some members of the population, and lower likelihood of exposure would reduce the need to use them.)
I don’t mean to imply that either of these arguments is a definitive argument in favor of funding research on HIV/AIDS or any other form of medical research. There are good public choice reasons to resist any involvement of government in setting scientific priorities. But for the time being, government funding isn’t going anywhere, so we might as well ask whether the priorities chosen are justified. With regard to the seemingly disproportionate funding of HIV/AIDS over other illnesses, prima facie considerations indicate the answer may well be yes.
Friday, January 02, 2004
Legislative AIDS
Eugene Volokh and Clayton Cramer are having a set-to on the subject of NIH funding for HIV/AIDS. Cramer observes that the federal government spends 10 times as much money on HIV/AIDS than it does on heart disease and cancer, when measured on a per-victim basis. Cramer takes this as evidence that the government “cares more about homosexuals and IV drug users than it does about everyone else.”
Eugene defends disproportionate funding for HIV/AIDS because it’s a communicable disease with the potential to spread and affect much larger numbers of people in the future. (I think an even stronger defense can be made on different grounds – but I’ll save that for a separate post.) Eugene also takes on Cramer’s claim that the government “cares more about” homosexuals and IV drug users, noting that those two groups “are only a tiny share of all voters … lots of voters dislike IV drug addicts, and quite a few still dislike homosexuals.” Cramer responds by arguing that small, well-organized groups – also known as special interests – regularly get greater government assistance than larger, less well-organized groups.
Cramer is presumably correct that the level of HIV/AIDS funding is attributable to the logic of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs that rules our political system. Yet Eugene wins the overall debate, for two reasons. First, as Eugene notes in an update to his original post, the power of a special interest to get legislative favors hardly shows that the government “cares more” about that interest. I would add that the phrase “cares more” shouldn’t even be applied to a collective entity like Congress, because groups don’t have preferences as individuals do. Institutional incentives, such as the need to win elections and collect campaign funds, drive the body’s choices in directions that may have little to do with personal preferences. It may well be true that each member of Congress cares less about homosexuals and drug users than other people, yet legislators are led to favor these groups through legislation because of their strength in the lobbying process.
Second, while legislative choices do reflect the power of special interests, that’s just as true of funding for heart disease and breast cancer as it is of funding for HIV/AIDS (and steel tariffs, and agricultural subsidies, ad infinitum). The more interesting question is whether the results, whose seedy origins are no surprise, can be rationalized. And that’s where Eugene’s argument about the communicability of HIV/AIDS, which Cramer never refutes, enters the picture. Even if it’s true that HIV/AIDS gets disproportionate funding because of the lobbying power of homosexuals, it might still make sense to fund it more.
Similarly, we all know that national defense spending is driven, at least in part, by the lobbying efforts of defense contractors. Nonetheless, national defense is a public good, and therefore federal funding for national defense is more justifiable than funding for most other things (which can be provided more easily by the private market). In other words, it’s reasonable to enquire into the justifiability of the results, even while recognizing their origin in a flawed legislative process.
Saturday, December 27, 2003
Optimal Crime and Punishment
Chris Bertram discusses the extent to which human beings raised under different circumstances can or should be assumed to have the same rational and moral faculties. In the comments box, one commenter argues:
That some people grow up under averse conditions, that incline them to act in violent ways, does not necessarily mean that they should be held less accountable for their actions.I haven’t read the Blank Slate, so I can’t say whether this accurately reflects Pinker’s position. But I can say that the argument is flawed, despite being highly intuitive. To see why, imagine we’re not talking about different classes of potential criminal, but different ways in which to invest your money. If two lines of investment were equally risky, but profits were particularly hard to make in one of them – that is, if the return per dollar invested were low – you would not want to throw more money at that line of investment in order to get a high enough gross return. On the contrary, you’d shift your funds from the lower return investment to the higher return investment. (You might still keep a mix of the two investments because you wished to diversify your portfolio, or because there were diminishing returns in each investment; but the lower return per dollar would bias the mix away from the lower return investment.)
Steven Pinker gave this example, in the Blank Slate. We are all agreed that rape is evil and completely wrong. Say it is proved that 1% of the population is more inclined to rape for genetic reasons. That does not mean that they should not be punished for rape. Instead it means that the punishment for rape for them should be much more severe, in the hope of providing a stronger offsetting force to deter them from raping (this of course ignores a lot of argument about what can deter crime in fact).
Similarly, you wouldn’t want to throw away crime-enforcement dollars (and resources) on criminals who are resistant to deterrence, when the same dollars could deter a larger number of more responsive criminals. If you want to maximize your net gains from law enforcement, it actually makes sense to spend less on catching and punishing the most resistant, and more on catching and punishing the least resistant, criminals. That’s why, for instance, it makes sense to have lower punishments for children and the mentally insane: they are likely to commit their crimes regardless of our deterrence efforts (unless we spend prohibitively large sums on preemptive efforts), and therefore our efforts are better spent elsewhere.
It’s true, of course, that worse crimes should be punished more harshly, but that’s not the same issue. Bertram’s commenter indicates that we’re talking about different criminals committing pretty much the same crime, rape in her example. If we consider all rapes equally bad, then we should spend our rape-prevention resources on those potential rapists most likely to be deterred. (Even if rapes are not all equally bad, to justify different punishments for different rapists we would have to believe that the least deterrable rapists systematically tend to commit the most heinous rapes.)
If you want an argument for why it makes sense to hold everyone responsible for their actions regardless of their resistance level, here’s one: that we cannot easily distinguish between those people who are more and less deterrable. Children and the mentally insane provide nice categories that we can separate from the general pool, but even these categories do not have well-defined borders. Some legal minors are as rationally capable as adults. Some most-likely-sane criminals attempt to slide through the insanity loophole. Thus, even these seemingly obvious exceptions create some poor incentives for those who shouldn’t, but might, be able to take advantage of them. Other categories, such as poverty, are related to the possession of rational and moral faculties tangentially at best. (The rejoinder that the poor empirically commit more crimes proves nothing, because that is perfectly consistent with rational choice: criminal opportunities are naturally more attractive to people with fewer legal opportunities.) Given the fuzzy boundaries between different classes of criminal, we have little choice but to treat them for the most part as a single class.
Wednesday, December 24, 2003
Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas to all! I have nothing new to say about this holiday, but here's something old (from this blog a year ago).
How to Get Lucky
This fascinating article, with the studies supporting it, confirms what I’ve long thought to be true about luck: that it’s not really luck at all. Lucky people display specific behaviors and attitudes that make them more likely to spot opportunities and find ways to turn bad outcomes into good ones. Unlucky people’s greater anxiety causes them to miss such opportunities, and their low expectations become self-fulfilling prophecies. Moreover, as one of the author’s experiments shows, there are things that unlucky people can do to make themselves lucky. (Thanks to Tyler for the pointer.)
Tuesday, December 23, 2003
And the Creep Goes On
Kelly Jane Torrance got booted from a meeting of the American Public Health Association, for having the temerity to record what the public health professionals were saying. Read the whole scary thing; here’s a taster:
Speaker after speaker scorned the notion that individual Americans are responsible for their own choices. Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI—the Ralph Nader spinoff that has already ruined movie popcorn for millions of us), made no effort to hide her agenda. "We have got to move beyond personal responsibility," she pleaded with her audience. In a session titled "The Politics of Food," Skip Spitzer of the radical Pesticide Action Network added that "the idea of 'personal responsibility'" is merely "a cultural construct," ready to be superseded for our own good.Thanks to Will (guest-blogging at the Agitator) for the pointer, and for reminding me of a warning I’ve been meaning to give my readers. The strategy of suing Big Food for the eating choices of individuals is, as Radley and Julian have noted, the leading example of reductio creep: the transformation of a seemingly absurd extension of an opponent’s argument into a serious policy proposal. So what is the next step in the creep? What will be the target of the anti-responsibility lobby’s next campaign?
Amy has the answer. Obesity is caused by two things: consuming too many calories and burning too few. It makes as much sense to attack the latter as the former. So how long will it be before General Electric and other manufacturers of labor-saving appliances (such as washing machines, dishwashers, and escalators) get sued for making people fat? Amy’s faux proposal (warning labels on appliances) could be only the beginning. Amy might have been joking, but I’m dead serious. In principle, you cannot distinguish the case against Big Food from the the case against Big Appliances. If the legal and political systems abandon personal responsibility in the former case, why should they uphold it in the latter? Worse, the argument can be extended to any product or activity that tends to reduce calorie usage, such as movies, television programs, even white-collar jobs (how long before someone sues for workers’ comp because they got fat from sitting at a desk?).
The creep is like undertoe: before you know it, you’re a mile down the beach, scratching your head and wondering where you left your towel and cooler.
Monday, December 22, 2003
The Least Samurai versus Return of the Rings
I’ve seen two movies in the theater recently – “The Last Samurai” and “The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.” Both kept me entertained while in the auditorium, but only the latter would I actually recommend to others. “Samurai” had some exciting fight scenes but was otherwise forgettable. Worse, like many movies of the “Western man goes to live in another culture” genre, its socioeconomic message is atavistic and misleading. The message of such films is nearly always something like, “The old traditional culture was more honorable than modern Western culture, and we should lament its passing.”
What’s wrong with that message? The fact that old traditional cultures were often politically brutal and economically backward. The samurai culture was no exception. The samurai were the warrior class of feudal Japan, a system that, like feudal systems elsewhere (notably Western Europe in prior centuries), privileged the nobility, tied the common people to their land, restricted trade, stunted economic growth, and forcibly kept the mass of people in poverty. “The Last Samurai” focuses almost exclusively on the seemingly honorable traits of the samurai themselves – loyalty, discipline, respect, etc. – while downplaying (if not outright ignoring) the cause those characteristics served, a cause utterly without merit: preservation of the god-monarch status of the Japanese Emperor and the feudal system over which he reigned. (To be fair, I’m eliding some distinctions here myself. At the time the movie was set, the 1870s, the Japanese Emperor’s power was weak, the monarch being little more than a figurehead. But the system he symbolized was still feudal, with all that implies.)
At times, the film’s conflict appears to be between traditional Japanese culture and the militaristic greed of the West. Undoubtedly, the Western powers often acted less than admirably during the historical period in question. The U.S. government terrorized the American Indians at home, while attempting to extend its military power abroad (though not nearly to the extent it did in the next century). The European powers were even worse, governing and exploiting vast colonial empires. Japan was justified in wishing to resist Western control.
But in no way does the West’s poor behavior legitimize the samurai culture. What made the Western nations’ foreign policies undesirable was their deviation from the Western liberal principles of freedom, democracy, property, and contract – principles that were the source of the West’s astounding prosperity and the dramatic improvement in their quality of life over the preceding four centuries. By rejecting those principles, Japan’s feudal political-economic system guaranteed its continued stagnation relative to the West. (Eventually, Japan was able to achieve independence from the West by adopting a quasi-capitalist system. Unfortunately, that system melded with the worst aspects of the militaristic samurai mindset, leading to the Japanese imperialism that culminated in World War II.)
I feel somewhat silly spending time criticizing “The Last Samurai,” because in truth, the film is a thematic lightweight. “Return of the King” is a much better film, far more worthy of discussion. Yet interestingly, the LOTR trilogy draws on some of the same primitive impulses: glorification of military prowess, disdain for technological progress, approval of traditional undemocratic forms of government. Why does LOTR deserve a pass on these matters while “Samurai” does not? The simplest is answer is that the LOTR films are immeasurably better in pretty much every other respect, from the writing to the acting to the cinematography. But more importantly, LOTR is obviously a fantasy, whereas “Samurai” claims the mantle of history. The samurai were real; the Rohirrim were not. We know little of the economic system of Gondor and Rohan, so we can imagine that their rulers are benevolent dictators who protected the economic and personal freedoms of their people. In Middle Earth, good and evil are tangible things that result from your species and your soul (human vs. troll, elf vs. orc); in the real world, good and evil are behaviors whose incidence is mostly a function of institutional incentives.
One completely unrelated comment on “Return of the King.” From those I’ve talked to about it, the most common criticism is that the ending was far too long. And it’s true that the movie includes a half hour or more of denouement, which is really too much for one movie. But in Peter Jackson’s defense, neither of the previous installments in the trilogy had any denouement at all. ROTK’s ending could charitably be considered three denouements in one. Is one half hour of ending really too much for nine hours of movie?
Friday, December 19, 2003
Beware of Bipartisanship
The campaign finance law that the Supreme Court just (mostly) upheld is a disaster, but at least give it credit for truth in labeling. Its official name is the “Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act” (BCRA). The term “bipartisan” betrays what is probably the worst aspect of that law: that it further entrenches the Democrat-Republican duopoly that dominates our political system.
Democrats and Republicans have no trouble reaching the public and getting their message out. Everyone knows the two major parties. Most everyone knows who their candidates are in any major election. The viewpoints of the major party candidates will be broadcast to the public even if they barely spend a dime, because they will benefit from scads of free media. All the news networks and papers report the campaign activities, press releases, and public appearances of the Democrats and Republicans. And the candidates can parlay their free media into paid media, because more exposure means more potential supporters becoming aware of their candidacy and subsequently contributing funds.
Pity the little-known independent and third-party candidates. Rarely do they get free media, and as a result, they typically remain unknown. And being unknown, they find it difficult to grab the kind of initial attention that generates large numbers of individual donations. For little-known candidates, the best option may be to rely on one or a few “sugar daddies” who are willing to make large initial donations for the sake of publicity. Ross Perot was able to do it with his own money – but he couldn’t have used his money to fund a candidate other than himself without running afoul of the campaign finance laws. The BCRA aggravates the problem by further limiting donations and “issue ads” that could draw attention to lesser known candidates and their causes.
Let us not forget that campaign funding, like most forms of investment, eventually falls victim to diminishing returns. The initial infusions of money have a much higher return than the later ones. The new campaign finance law might succeed in reducing the total amount of money received by the major parties, but it will also reduce the money received by their smaller competitors, and the marginal impact of the reduction will be much larger for them because they are still fighting to get start-up funds. The reduction in funding to both major parties will not change their positions relative to each other, but it will improve both their positions relative to independents and other outsiders.
The two major political parties got together and agreed to place limits on political activity. And then they sold the agreement as being in the public interest. Now, if the two dominant producers of a single product got together and agreed to limit their sales, or if they successfully lobbied to place regulations on their own industry, would anyone with a brain believe for more than half a minute that their actions were motivated by a desire to serve the public interest? I think not. So why should we give the D’s and R’s any more credit? Bipartisanship is not something we should applaud; it is something we should fear.
Thursday, December 11, 2003
Money Can't Buy Me Speech
Suppose that I think George W. Bush’s presidency has been a miserable failure. Actually, you don’t have to suppose, because I actually think that. And suppose I find a couple of dozen other people who agree with me. All of us want to convince other people of the same thing (that George W. Bush’s presidency has been a miserable failure), but none of us alone has enough money to buy a radio or TV ad. So we pool our funds and come up with enough money to buy an ad blasting the current administration for the miserable failure that it is, in the hope that other citizens will come to support our position.
The activity I’ve just described would seem to be the essence of free speech, no? And yet the Supreme Court has just upheld a ban on precisely that kind of activity.
Yesterday’s Supreme Court decision upheld campaign finance regulations of two distinct varieties. First, it upheld restrictions on donation of “soft money” to political parties. While I think such restrictions are terribly unwise, one can make at least a plausible argument for their constitutionality. A donation directly to a candidate or his party is not exactly the same as an independent expenditure, as Eugene Volokh argues persuasively here. (His argument, in short and probably inadequate form, is that a restriction on campaign contributions is effectively content-neutral and doesn’t even specifically target speech, since campaign funds can be used for a variety of non-speech activities.) But second, the Court also upheld a ban on “issue ads” run by interest groups, whether or not those interest groups have any direct connection with the candidate or his party. Inasmuch as an “interest group” could be any group of people associated by a common interest (such as, for instance, our interest in not having a miserable failure for a president, or not having a campaign finance law that prevents our saying so), the prohibition is not evenly targeted at the real special interests that were the alleged impetus for the law’s passage. The problem, of course, is that one person’s “special interest” is another person’s “good cause,” and the law cannot easily distinguish between them in any principled way. Nor should it try, because even true special interests have a constitutional right to speak their minds. Or did until yesterday.
Tuesday, December 09, 2003
Whiny Poets
I saw the same Marilyn vos Savant column that Alex did, and I was planning on posting a riposte myself, but Alex Tabarrok beat me to the punch. (My only complaint with Alex's reply is that he uses "advise" as a noun.)
Monday, December 08, 2003
Meta-Spam and Spam Evolution
The fastest emerging category of spam in my email inbox is now meta-spam -- that is, spam advertising devices for screening out spam. Some of them even say, “Want to stop getting annoying messages like this one?”
Also on the topic of spam, has anyone else noticed how fast the “Paris Hilton” spamming strategy has evolved? The original messages all spelled her name correctly. But now, presumably to reach people who have created email filters to keep out any subject line with “Paris” or “Hilton” in it, the latest messages all refer to “Par1s Hiltun,” “Parris Hi1t0n,” and so on. I have to wonder what fraction of the people who actually took the time to create an anti-PH spam filter will nonetheless eventually succumb to the temptation and click a link to see “Par1s Hiltun” doing amateur porn. The spammers must think the fraction is non-zero, or else they presumably wouldn’t bother with the modifications. Incidentally, I have not created any such filter yet, and yet it seems that all the messages have the young lady’s name misspelled now. There must be a selection mechanism at work here, such as the spammers noticing higher response rates on the messages with misspellings.
Friday, December 05, 2003
What We Really Need Now Is Another Pointless Waste of Money
Bush thinks we need to have another mission to the moon. Because our government has, you know, lots of cash on hand and nothing else to do with it.
Of Purses and Sows' Ears
Here’s an editorial about the massive pork content in the current appropriations bill. Pork projects account for almost $23 billion – appalling in the best of times, unconscionable given the projected budget deficit (in the hundreds of billions). However, when the author impugns the character of our elected leaders (“it's a reflection of the weak character of the individuals who occupy the country's highest offices”), I think he’s rather missing the point. I hate politicians as much as the next guy. But pork-barrel politics is a predictable and inevitable result of our democratic political system, and character has little to do with it. Even a politician with the best of intentions faces the inexorable logic of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs. You either bow down to it, or you eventually lose office.
It’s true, I suppose, that impugning the character of the politicians who take part in the pork-barrel process is one way of drawing attention to the problem and, possibly, limiting it. But we shouldn’t be misled into thinking that special-interest legislation results from bad character. Politicians are just responding rationally to incentives, and those who don’t respond to the incentives don’t stay politicians for long. Call it a character issue if you like, but the fact is that our system systematically selects for this form of bad character.
Wednesday, December 03, 2003
It’s My Baby and I’ll Sell If I Want To
I’ve been a long-time proponent of allowing a market in baby-selling -- or more accurately, the sale of parental rights -- as an alternative to the current adoption system. Under the current system, mothers are allowed to give their parental rights away for free, but they are not allowed to sell them for any price above zero. Like any price ceiling, this prohibition creates a shortage: too many willing adoptive parents and too few available babies. Letting the price rise to a market-clearing level would increase the number of babies available, by inducing more women to carry babies to term instead of aborting them, and also by inducing some “marginal” parents (i.e., parents who are just barely willing to keep a baby instead of giving it up for adoption) to opt for paid adoption instead. The result would be more satisfied adoptive parents, better cared for children, and wealthier birth mothers. For the complete case in favor of baby-selling, read this excellent article by Don Boudreaux.
However, a potential problem with the free market in adoptions recently occurred to me. It’s not a bad enough problem to overcome the arguments in favor (for reasons I’ll explain below), but it does present an interesting question about the power of markets to overcome bargaining problems. The problem arises from the fact that both birth mothers and birth fathers have a legal right to prevent an adoption. That means any potential buyer would need to buy off both parents before the sale could be complete. This situation creates a potential hold-out problem, since each of them would like as large a share of the gains from trade as possible. Fathers who under the current system have no interest in their offspring might, in a market system, suddenly take an interest for the sake of getting a share of the proceeds.
If both parents bargained hard enough, we could easily imagine some potential sales getting thwarted by the excessive demands of the mother and father. But set that difficulty aside, and assume there is some automatic division of the proceeds (arrived at through private negotiations or perhaps by fiat). Say the father automatically gets X% of the baby’s price. The problem is that the pregnant mother choosing between an abortion and carrying the baby to term would face a positive externality: she would bear the full cost of carrying the baby to term, but would only get (1-X)% of the benefits. At the margin, this would deter some pregnant women from having the baby at all, even if doing so would be efficient. If the full benefit is B, and the cost is C, this occurs whenever B > C > (1-X)B. As a result, an inefficiently small number of babies would be born and brought to market.
Now, presumably there’s a Coasean solution to this problem, as with any externality problem. When the mother chooses not to carry the baby to term, the father also loses whatever share of the payment he might have received. Realizing this, the father could offer the mother some inducement, presumably a larger share of the baby’s price, to induce her to give birth after all. The size of the inducement would be a function of the difference between the costs (C) and the benefits (B); the larger the difference, the greater would be the necessary inducement. In the marginal case, when B is just barely larger than C, the father would have to offer the mother almost the entire price and accept a negligible payment for himself. The problem here, as with any Coasean solution, is that transaction costs may be too high. Reaching an agreement over the size of the necessary inducement could be a costly process, in some cases costly enough to overcome the net gains from the agreement itself. Thus, while bargaining between the mother and father could reduce the size of the problem, it could not eliminate it: the number of babies born and brought to market would still be inefficiently low.
I’m still cogitating about this issue, so there may be some market solution that I haven’t considered. In any case, even if this potential problem is real, it’s hard to imagine that the result would be worse than the status quo, where the price that a mother legally can be paid is held down to zero (or actually, to the amount needed to pay for medical expenses and the like). Even if the price paid to the mother on the free market were not as high as it would need to be to induce all desirable births, it would still be higher than the price in the current system.
Friday, November 28, 2003
Cloning versus Adoption?
Brian Weatherson of Crooked Timber links to a paper by Stephen Coleman defending reproductive cloning against its critics. One such critic, David James, argues that adoption provides a viable alternative to all reproductive technologies (including cloning, fertility drugs, and in vitro fertilization). Coleman offers the following rebuttal:
The problem unique to adoption is that these cases involve an existing child, and in most cases, existing parents. In the words of Barbara Katz Rothman “For every pair of welcoming arms, there is a pair of empty arms. For every baby taken in, there is a baby given up”. The vast majority of mothers do not relinquish children for adoption because they want to, but rather because they are forced to through poverty. They are not unwilling to care for the child, they are simply unable. This is especially the case with international adoption. Virtually all the children adopted internationally come from economically or politically oppressed areas. Probably only the orphans from these areas can really be classed as “unwanted”. Even within the USA, one study found that 69% of parents giving children up for adoption cited external pressures, including financial constraints, as the primary reason for surrender. Given these problems, adoption hardly looks the glowing alternative to reproductive technology that James suggests.Much as I’m in favor of cloning, I fail to see how the above even begins to constitute an argument against adoption. In fact, I think it strengthens James’s case. While the decision to give up a child for adoption is undoubtedly a wrenching one for biological parents, the existence of willing adoptive parents does not make the biological parents worse off in any way. It merely provides them with one more option. Suppose there’s a poor woman who has just given birth to a baby, and someone with better finances offers to adopt it. Does that offer somehow make her poorer? Of course not. She can still choose to keep the baby, with all the hardship that would entail; the potential adopter has merely provided her with another route, which she is free to accept or reject. Her position is still unenviable (who wants to be poor?), but no worse – and arguably better – than it would be if adoption were ruled out.
And the same goes for anything that increases the size or quality of the pool of potential adoptive parents, and contrariwise for anything that diminishes the pool. So despite my support for cloning, I have to admit there’s something to the adoption argument. If the possibility of cloning substantially reduces the number of willing adoptive parents, both the children who could have been adopted and their biological parents may end up worse off.
It is true that the choice between keeping a baby and giving it up for adoption can cause a great deal of anxiety for the biological mother. Foreclosing the adoption route would eliminate any anxiety associated with making the choice. Instead of facing this agonizing decision, the mother would have no option but to keep the baby. But adoption will always be an option, whether or not reproductive technologies are available, so there’s no avoiding either the choice or the anxiety. And besides, I think it’s a good thing for a biological mother to ask herself, in all seriousness, whether she is ready to raise a child. Raising a child takes time, effort, and (yes) money; if biological parents don’t have all of these things to offer, then for the sake of the children they should at least consider adoption.
However, as James and Coleman both recognize, the adoption argument is hardly unique to cloning; it applies to any other technology that improves the ability of potential parents to have non-adoptive children. I’d be curious to know whether the advent of fertility drugs and in vitro fertilization substantially reduced the number of people seeking to adopt children. I strongly suspect that the effect of cloning would be smaller, given most people’s likely preference to have children genetically similar but not identical to themselves. (I personally would prefer a genetically related child to an adopted child, but I’d prefer an adopted child to a genetically identical child.) In any case, we would have to weigh the cost of fewer adoptions against the gain from better satisfying the preferences of parents who would prefer genetically identical to adopted children. If some people are so focused on genetics that they’d prefer clones of themselves to adopted children, they are hardly the ideal adoptive parents.
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Dating for Game Theorists
This is the funniest damn thing I’ve seen in a long time. That guy in the cartoon could be me, if I didn’t shave and dressed like a slob. Link courtesy of Language Log (hey Neal, how come you didn’t tell me linguists used game theory, too?). For more on rational-choice mating-and-dating, see here and here and here.
Monday, November 24, 2003
The Anal Film Critic: Legally Blonde, Deaf, and Dumb
And as long as I’m giving belated film reviews, I might as well grouse about “Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and Blonde,” which I saw on the airplane while returning from a conference. I had been avoiding this movie because I figured I would certainly be irritated by its politics. (I don’t generally dodge viewpoints I disagree with, but rarely do I seek them out as entertainment, unless I will get my own turn to speak.) Presented with the chance to see it for free, I figured I’d give it a chance.
The premise of the film is that Elle Woods, airhead and Harvard Law graduate, goes to Washington and tries to pass a law banning the testing of cosmetics on animals. She begins this quest after discovering that her pet Chihuahua’s mother is a test animal. (Question: Are dogs really used as test animals with any frequency? I thought they used rabbits, mice, rats, and chimps most often.) Now, what I expected to see in the movie was a strongly biased case against animal testing: lots of arguments about the alleged inefficacy of such testing, with virtually no representation of the other side. But what I saw was arguably worse. While the movie presents very little resembling an “argument” at all for either side, the handful of quasi-arguments presented are all on the pro-testing side. Several representatives and scientists make at least superficially persuasive statements in defense of testing, all of them left unaddressed by the test-banners. So what carried the day for the anti-testing side? Pure emotional appeal, based on the cute furriness of the subjects. Elle’s cute wittle doggie sticks its head out of a bag and barks, and all the congresscritters melt. (That’s the short version. If you’re a glutton for punishment, watch the whole thing for all the schmaltzy details.)
In short, we are not to judge the wisdom of an animal-testing ban on the basis of clearheaded discussion and scientific facts. Rational argument be damned -- it’s all about the warm fuzzies.
Saturday, November 22, 2003
Anarchy, State, and The Matrix
I saw the third installment of the Matrix during its opening weekend, and I’m going to depart from the conventional wisdom by recommending it. Before watching it, I rented and re-watched the second installment (“Matrix Reloaded”), rewinding as necessary to make sure I understood the confusing bits. Then I viewed “Matrix Revolutions” in the theater and thoroughly enjoyed it. The key is to regard the two movies as one continuous story. WARNING: There are spoilers in the remainder of this post, so don’t continue reading if you haven’t seen the movie yet (and intend to see it).
The original “Matrix” raised a number of interesting philosophical questions, most of which “Reloaded” seemed either to ignore or to confuse. But “Revolutions” brings the philosophical questions back to the fore. The most intriguing question, to me at least, is whether deliberately living in the Matrix can be a valid lifestyle choice. In the original movie, Cipher (Joe Pantoliano) decides that he actually prefers the Matrix to the ugly real world, and he makes a deal with the machines to let him re-enter the Matrix (with his memory suitably wiped, so he won’t realize his reality is only virtual). Readers of Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” will recognize this as a variant of Nozick’s experience-machine thought experiment: would you choose to allow yourself to be hooked up to a machine that would create the mental experience of a blissfully fulfilling life? If your answer is “no” because you’d want to believe that your life and accomplishments were real, or some similar objection, then suitably modify the thought experiment to make that the case (“your memory of having made this choice will be wiped, and the machine will create the belief that you’re living in a real world and your accomplishments are your own”).
The purpose of the thought experiment is to demonstrate an alleged flaw in utilitarianism. If, as utilitarianism posits, happiness is the sole criterion for goodness, then you would indeed choose to get hooked to the experience machine. The fact that most people have an instinctive aversion to the idea of being on an experience machine (or living in the Matrix) is, supposedly, evidence of something wrong with utilitarianism. Any person who would choose to live in the Matrix, like Cipher, must have something wrong with him. Cipher’s deficient character is further evidenced by his willingness to sacrifice Morpheus, Neo, and the other members of the Nebuchadnezzar crew.
And that’s where the philosophy rests – until “Matrix Revolutions.” Between “Reloaded” and “Revolutions,” we discover that the Oracle (previously an unalloyed friend of the free humans) is in quasi-cahoots with the Architect who designed the Matrix. When the Architect discovered that he could not design a Matrix that 100% of all human beings would accept, the Oracle provided him with a means of dealing with the problem. In each generation, a fraction of humans who reject the reality of the Matrix are allowed to escape into the real world, where they join the other free humans in the city of Zion. At some point in the movie, either the Oracle or the Architect (can’t recall which) indicates that every human in the Matrix has, either consciously or subconsciously, chosen to accept the Matrix’s programming. Most people – upwards of 99% – are sheep who willingly accept the virtual reality. Those who reject it are allowed to leave, in the manner of Neo and Trinity. (Periodically, the free human population gets too large, and the machines come to destroy Zion. Carnage ensues, and only ends when the Messiah-like Neo arranges a truce, and the cycle begins once more. But that’s not crucial for the question I’m addressing here.) At the end of “Revolutions,” the Oracle makes sure that the Architect will continue to allow the program-rejecting humans to escape the Matrix.
In contrast to the narrow conception of free will in “The Matrix,” whereby people are only truly free if they live in the real world, we have a broader conception: everyone has the freedom to live in the real world or to stay in the Matrix. True, for the people inside the Matrix, it is a subconscious kind of free will – but they choose nonetheless. Indeed, the presence of choice is the Achilles’ heel of the Matrix, which the Oracle solves by instituting a right of exit.
And in this choosing between different ideas of the good life, we find another connection to the philosophy of Nozick, born of another of his thought experiments: the concept of “little utopias.” Nozick’s idea of the good society is a system in which people can choose what kind of communities they wish to live in, subject to no overarching rule but a right to vote with your feet. The “little utopias” vision finesses the seeming conflict between freedom and the desire of (at least many) people to submit to the controls of religions, creeds, cultures, and governments. In the Nozickian vision, you have the right and the freedom to choose which controls to subject yourself to. And that is, in key respects, the same vision presented at the end of the Matrix saga: you can choose which world to live in, the real world or the virtual. But the latter of those two worlds is one that Nozick himself surmised that most people would intuitively reject: living in the experience machine. And is that so wrong?