File-Swappers Give Thanks for a Turkey of a Law

On Sept. 21, 2004, California's Governor Schwarzenegger signed Cal. Penal Code § 653aa [PDF format]. That new law criminalizes the unauthorized electronic distribution of a sound recording or audiovisual work by a sender who fails to disclose his or her valid email address and the title of the work. If laws were meals, this one would rank with Thanksgiving Dinner at the Salvation Army: A largely symbolic gesture, well-intended but poorly executed, to temporarily satiate the beggars at the door. In other words, California lawmakers have given a big fat turkey to the Hollywood lobby.

Section 653aa(a) says:

Any person, except a minor, who is located in California, who, knowing that a particular recording or audiovisual work is commercial, knowingly electronically disseminates all or substantially all of that commercial recording or audiovisual work to more than 10 other people without disclosing his or her e-mail address, and the title of the recording or audiovisual work is punishable by a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), imprisonment in a county jail for a period not exceeding one year, or by both that find and imprisonment.

Minors get separate and more lenient treatment in § (b) of the statute. Some exceptions and definitions follow thereafter.

What exactly does this law achieve? It certainly allows lawmakers to tell the Hollywood lobby that they have done something to combat peer-to-peer file swapping. Prosecutors may even catch a few defendants under § 653aa. They will not a lot, however, and they will probably never catch any half-way clever ones.

Two problems limit the utility of § 653aa. First, although § (a) requires that a would-be violator fail to disclose the "title" of the work, the act does not define that term. The goal, presumably, is to encourage the use of works' titles so as to make it easier to police peer-to-peer networks. But as the problems of policing the Napster network demonstrated, most works can be and are described by many different titles. An MP3 of Mark Knofler's, "Sailing to Philadelphia," might thus be swapped under the title, "MK's Sailing," "Sailing to Philly," "Saling to Philadelphia," or so forth. Any of those many permutations would arguably satisfy the title requirement of § 653aa, yet their multiplicity would hardly make it easy to automatically screen a network for the unauthorized dissemination of files.

Second, the act's definition of "e-mail address," in § (g)(5), permits the unauthorized dissemination of files from effectively untraceable accounts. Even an address like "1fi7s8@anon.ru" could qualify as "a valid e-mail address, or the valid e-mail address of the holder of the account from which the dissemination took place." If you used that sort of account to disseminate files, you attach some sort of "title" and escape the reach of § 653aa.

File swapping may or may not pose a dire threat to Hollywood. Section 653aa looks very unlikely to change that. The act does have one saving grace, however. Section (i) stipulates that it "shall become inoperative on January 1, 2010, unless a later enacted statute deletes or extends that date."

[Cross-posted to The Technology Liberation Front.]

[NB: I substantively edited this post in response to Michael Yuri's correction, which he offered in his comments to the duplicate post at Technology Liberation Front. I'll update that post, too.]

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Marriage Options for Unbelievers

When it comes to marriage, what’s an atheist libertarian to do? What kind of ceremony is appropriate, and who ought to officiate? For an atheist, the obvious choice might appear to be a judge or justice-of-the-peace. But for a libertarian atheist, state idolatry is as objectionable as spiritual idolatry. Sure, libertarians recognize the existence of the state (while atheists do not recognize the existence of a god), but why go inviting the state into what is ultimately a personal commitment? And while many people, including libertarians, might choose to invoke the state’s contract-enforcement apparatus, that act is conceptually distinct from the act of wedding another person (as I argued here).

I was once briefly married. Since my wife-to-be was also an atheist (or agnostic), we opted for the justice-of-the-peace default. But I doubt I’d do that again. As we discovered during our first and only year of joint tax-filing, there are few if any benefits of legal marriage for couples without children. Indeed, we ended up paying a marriage penalty amounting to about $300 of our paltry incomes (yes, I filled out the “dummy” tax forms to find out what we would have paid if we’d been single). If I ever went down that path again, I’d be inclined to postpone the legal marriage unless and until children made it worthwhile. But without ministers or judges, what’s left? Ship captains?

Fortunately, help is on the way. This Slate article discusses the growth of “secular life ceremonies.” Most of the rituals described definitely fall on the faux-mystical side of the ledger – e.g., Celtic handfasting and summoning the spirits of North, South, East, and West to bless your union. Since when do paganism and animism count as “secular”? But at least the alternatives are growing, and that’s a good thing.

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The Affirmative-Action Coin

In responding to my three-sided coin challenge, Patri Friedman offered another nice puzzle:

Given an unknown unfair coin, with probability p of coming up heads, where 0 < p < 1, simulate a fair coin toss. You do not know what p is, only that it is fixed.

No contest or emails this time – I’ll just post the (or an) answer in the comments section.

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Nada to ADA on ‘Net?

Need something to celebrate? The web just fended off another attempt at regulatory choking, this time by activists trying to impose on websites the "reasonable accommodation" requirements of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). You can thank Access Now v. Southwest Airlines, 2004 U.S. App. LEXIS 20060 (11th Cir., Sept. 24, 2004) [PDF format], for that win. Take it easy on the champagne, though; another assault looms.

The case arose when Access Now, Inc., an advocacy organization for the disabled, and Robert Gumson, a blind individual, sued Southwest Airlines for failing to make the "vitual ticket counter" on its website accessible to blind persons. Southwest moved to dismiss on grounds that its website is not a "place of public accommodation" within the scope of the ADA. The trial court ruled against the plaintiffs’ claim, reasoning that "To expand the ADA to cover 'virtual' spaces would be to create new rights without well-defined standards."

Fortunately for our freedoms of speech and commerce, the court of appeals affirmed. While expanding the ADA to cover the web might give us warm and fuzzy feelings, a cold and hard assessment can hardly fail to find that the regulatory burden's marginal costs far outweigh its benefits. Moreover, whatever the merits of applying the ADA to real space venues, applying it to the web would necessarily impinge on freedom of speech. A website, after all, constitutes nothing more than someone's writing.

Notably, however, the Eleventh Circuit did not rule against the plaintiffs on those grounds. Rather, the court essentially ruled against them because they had abandoned their original theory of the case and come up with a new one on appeal. Because evaluating that new theory would have required a factual record that the trial court had never had occasion to develop, the court of appeals declined to consider the plaintiffs’ claims. They lost, in other words, on a technicality.

As the Eleventh Circuit noted, whether the ADA applies to the web remains an unresolved and hotly contested legal issue. The First and Seventh Circuits lean towards expanding the ADA’s scope, while the Third, Sixth, and Ninth Circuits have held to the contrary. The Access Now case, far from resolving the issue, has taught ADA activists how to plead their next case.

[Cross-posted to The Technology Liberation Front.]

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No Poll-Box Paradox

Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber raises an objection to the notion of rational non-voting (the idea that people don’t vote because the miniscule expected benefits are swamped by the costs):

What’s wrong with this argument? Well, one thought, which I remember hearing first from my friend Alan Carling, is this: the argument involves inconsistent assumptions about rationality. The assignment of a low probability to my vote making a difference assumes what the conclusion of the argument denies, namely, that rational persons would vote. But the argument says they wouldn’t. Well if they wouldn’t then I would be the only voter (a dictator, in effect). In which case I would certainly be rational to vote since I can count the full expected benefit of $1000 in favour of doing so. But if that’s the case, and I should vote, then so should everyone else … in which case I shouldn’t … in which case nor should they … in which case I should ….

It sounds like a paradox, but really it’s not. I play on the seeming paradox when I say to my students, “For economists, the question is not why people don’t vote; it’s why they ever do!” But even that question is not terribly difficult to answer.

First, “rational” is not synonymous with “self-interested” or “materialistic” or “concerned only with outcomes.” It simply means acting consistently with one’s own preferences, whatever they might be. There is nothing irrational about voting because (a) one feels a civic or moral obligation to do so, or (b) one derives some kind of direct pleasure from the expressive act. And indeed, that is probably a sizable chunk of why most people vote. Some people entertain the myth that “every vote makes a difference,” but most will admit – at least upon prodding – that their one vote will almost certainly not alter the outcome of the election. They continue to vote because they derive some kind of direct psychic benefit from voting (or perhaps a psychic cost from shirking).

But second, even if we assume people are solely concerned with their votes’ effects on electoral outcomes, no paradox arises. The reason is that the expected benefits of voting decrease as the number of voters rises. If no one else were going to vote, your vote would be decisive. If ten other people planned to vote, it would still make sense to cast a ballot. Even if a hundred or a thousand other people intended to vote, it would not be outrageous to think your vote could stand a chance of making a difference. When the number of other voters numbers in the millions, of course, the expected benefit is vanishingly small. The rational non-voting argument, like most economic arguments, is a claim about the marginal chooser – in this case, the voter right on the cusp between voting and non-voting. Since the marginal benefit of voting declines with the number of voters, there is a turning point at which the marginal benefit sinks below the cost. For the marginal voter, the expected benefit should be approximately equal to the marginal cost.

The two arguments work best in concert. The rationality of voting when few others will vote assures that at least a certain number will vote. Feelings of civic duty and self-expression pump up the marginal benefits further. Together, these factors assure a large enough voting public to make the probability of your vote affecting the outcome tiny relative to the material costs. Only if your psychic benefit of voting is large enough to cover this rather sizable gap will you choose to vote.

Chris’s objection can be rejuvenated by observing that while it’s rational for some people to vote, the model does not determine which people will vote. Suppose, for instance, that the marginal voter’s expected benefit of voting – including all psychic benefits – dips below the cost when the number of other voters reaches (say) 10,000, in an overall population of 100,000. There is still a question of which 10,000 voters will vote. Why these 10,000 people instead of those 10,000 people? The problem has multiple equilibria, and there’s no obvious means of determining which equilibrium will in fact occur (a common feature of economic models that produce multiple equilibria). But the most plausible argument (to me, at least) is that the voting contingent will consist of those voters with the highest psychic benefits, which are independent of the number other voters.

To recapitulate: The rational non-voting theory is a theory of the marginal voter. It is fully consistent with the existence of a situation in which some people vote and others don’t, even if people assess the benefits of voting purely based on its electoral effects. However, recognizing the existence of benefits derived from the act of voting itself allows for a more complete explanation of (a) why as many people vote as do and (b) which people do in fact vote.

UPDATE: I originally attributed the CT post to Henry Farrell, an error I've now corrected.

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Non-Minority Males Run the AALS Gantlet

In a post yesterday I began to offer some data indicating that non-minority male candidates for law teaching jobs suffer discriminatory treatment. I’ll offer some more and better data here. As before, all the data comes from the American Association of Law Schools’ Statistical Report on Law School Faculty And Candidates for Law Faculty Positions (2002-03), which compares how candidates listed in its Faculty Appointments Register did in landing law school teaching jobs from the 1990-91 hiring season to the 2001-02 one.

The most on-point data comes from Table 7E of that document (go here and scroll down to Table 7E). In brief, that data shows that in all but two (1995-96 and 1997-98) of those twelve hiring seasons, men non-minority candidates fared worse than all other categories of candidates. In the first of those two exceptional years, 1995-96, non-minority women did worse than non-minority men. In the second, 1997-98, a very small group of minority women candidates (only 67) did worse than a typically large group of non-minority men (382). In another hiring season, 1999-2000, non-minority women candidates did just as badly as non-minority men candidates.

For the usual good reasons, averages prove most probative. Averaging over the twelve hiring seasons, non-minority men plainly did much worse than any other category of candidate reported in Table 7E. Here’s the data in tabular form:

      Composition and Success Rates of FAR Candidates,

                   1990-91 to 2001-02



                   All Candidates     Successful Candidates



Category              #  Cat. %       #  Cat. %  Success %



Minority Women       772   7.6       135  10.3    17.5

Minority Men        1072  10.5       185  14.1    17.3

Non-Minority Women  2687  26.3       373  28.4    13.9

Non-Minority Men    5694  55.7       620  47.2    10.9

Standing alone, that data, however facially damning, would not prove that non-minority men candidates for law teaching jobs suffered racial or sexual discrimination. From a statistical point of view, we would in addition need to run a regression analysis to show that those candidates were at least as well qualified as their counterparts. The AALS study offers no data on that front, though I am willing to bet that it could prepare a report if asked. Such a report could base candidate credentials on class ranking or law review participation, both of which offer fairly objective measures of academic success. It might also use somewhat less objective measures such as rank of degree-granting school, advanced degrees, and clerkships. The FAR forms contain all that data in searchable fields, so I assume the AALS could pull up the data. For present, all I can say is that I strongly doubt that non-minority male candidates for law teaching jobs tout significantly worse credentials than any other class of candidates.

From a legal and ethical point of view, the case that non-minority males suffered racial or sexual discrimination in seeking law teaching jobs would prove much stronger if backed with evidence that someone intended to disfavor them. I’ve already pointed out that the AALS search engine facilitates such discrimination, though it would remain to prove that someone actually used that search engine so as to deliberately ignore non-minority male candidates.

Other evidence of intentional discrimination might exist too, such as the rejection letter I once got, when I was interviewing for law teaching jobs, frankly admitting that, while I was in all other respects a desirable candidate, my would-be employer felt compelled to add racial diversity to its faculty. I think that the letter’s writer meant to make me feel good. I ended up feeling good and mad. In retrospect, however, I appreciate the all-too-rare admission that I had been denied an equal opportunity to win employment.

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The Three-Sided Coin: Answers

The three-sided coin problem generated numerous responses. Virtually all the proposed solutions were correct, with most reporting “thinking time” of under 10 minutes. Some said it took them less than a minute, while others admitted longer times, but 5 minutes was about in the center. A couple of respondents thought the problem was so easy that maybe it was a joke, but most seemed to think it was a nice challenge. Of course, I have a biased sample here, since I don’t know how many people read the problem but couldn’t figure out the answer, or figured it out but didn’t email me.

The most common wrong answer was this:

Flip the coin twice. If you get two heads, go to the beach. If you get two tails, go to the mountains. If you get one heads and one tails, in whatever order, go to the desert.

This approach doesn’t work, because you can get one heads and one tails in two different ways (HT and TH), each one having 1/4 probability. So with this approach, you’d go to the desert 1/2 the time.

As I indicated in the first post, there are many acceptable answers. Here’s the simplest solution, first submitted by Mike Glover. This was also the most common solution, with about 15 people suggesting it (or something very similar):

Label the options A, B, and C. Flip two coins. If you get HH, choose option A. If you get HT, choose option B. If you get TH, choose option C. If you get TT, start over.

Here’s the answer I had in mind, some variant of which was submitted by 7 respondents:

Flip a coin for each pair (A vs. B., B vs. C, and A vs. C). If any option wins both of its head-to-head matches, choose that option. If no option wins both its matches, then start over.

The principle behind these two solutions is the same: attach A, B, and C to equally probable outcomes, and repeat the procedure if any other outcome comes up. Mike’s solution uses two coin flips to generate four outcomes, and then repeats on one of those outcomes. My solution uses three coin flips to produce eight outcomes, and then repeats on two of them.

But I was mistaken to think every solution would have to rely on this principle. Lauren Fisher submitted a very clever solution:

Flip a coin until heads comes up. There is a one-third chance that the first head will come up on an even-numbered flip.

Doubt it? The math works. The probability of the first head occurring on an even-numbered flip is:

(1/2)^2 + (1/2)^4 + (1/2)^6 + (1/2)^8 + …
= (1/4) + (1/4)^2 + (1/4)^3 + (1/4)^4 + …
= (1/4)/(1 - 1/4) = 1/3

This solution does not, like the prior solutions, rely on repeating the procedure for certain outcomes. If you’re concerned that this procedure only generates the 1/3 probability, without choosing among the three options, that’s easily remedied: if the first heads comes up on an even-numbered flip, choose A; if the first heads comes up on an odd-numbered flip, then flip the coin one more time to decide between B and C.

Lauren’s answer does share one thing with Mike’s and my answers: it could in principle require you to flip the coin an infinite number of times. Some respondents suggested procedures that would avoid that problem. For instance, two respondents suggested using the positioning of the coin when it falls – e.g., treating the word “LIBERTY” as one-third of the quarter’s circumference, and choosing option A when LIBERTY is closest to your body. Another couple of respondents suggested something like dividing a piece of paper into three sections, then setting it on the floor and flipping the coin onto it. Although these approaches could work as a practical matter, I think they run counter to the spirit of the puzzle. Glen Raphael defends these approaches, saying:

You might criticize my proposals to make use of rotational or positional info on the grounds that they don't produce exactly a 1/3rd probability. However, any proposal involving merely flipping the coin fails the same test - coins aren't perfect. Flip a quarter and you don't get an exactly 50% chance of heads; it'll be off by a few hundredths of a percent.

Agreed. But in keeping with the conventions of puzzles like these, I wish to assume that we have a “perfect” quarter. Given a perfect quarter, the algorithms discussed earlier will generate a probability of exactly 1/3. (BTW, Glen R. came up with Mike’s algorithm in addition to his position/rotational proposals.)

So, of the three mathematical solutions – mine, Mike’s, and Lauren’s – which is best? All three produce the correct outcome, so the question is which one will get you to a decision fastest. Mike’s clearly dominates mine, because the probability of getting a decision on any given round is 3/4 for both, but his involves only two flips per round while mine requires three. So it’s down to Mike’s and Lauren’s solutions. For Mike’s solution, the average number of rounds it takes to reach a decision is 4/3 (which results from a guaranteed first round, a 1/4 chance of a second round, a 1/16 chance of a third round, etc.). Since each round requires two coin flips, the average number of coin flips is 8/3. For Lauren’s solution, the average number of rounds it takes to for the first head to come up is 2 (which results from a guaranteed first flip, a 1/2 chance of a second flip, a 1/4 chance of a third flip, etc.). But 2/3 of the time, it will be necessary to flip one more coin to decide between options B and C. This adds another 2/3 of a round to her average, for a total of 8/3, which exactly ties Mike’s algorithm. I’m sure this is no coincidence, but I’m not going to try explaining why.

Thank you all for playing!

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My Bias; My Slur; My Bad

Please allow me to apologize for my use, in a recent post, of a slur that I’m afraid reveals an unfair bias. The phrase results from my over-generalization of a few unfortunate personal experiences, and risks offending millions of my fellow Americans. I’ve caught myself saying it in the past and resolved to stop. Nonetheless, once again, I unfortunately called part of the U.S. the “Boring Coast.”

I initially coined that term, together with “the Fun Coast,” in an attempt to come up with a pairing more evocative than “East Coast/West Coast” or “Right Coast/Left Coast.” I’m sticking with “the Fun Coast,” which I think fairly captures much of what I love about my adopted home. But I pretty quickly realized that, even if I often find some aspects of the other side of the U.S. less interesting than this side, I can not fairly call it “boring.” I’ve thus since opted for “the Respectable Coast,” a usage that I think captures something of the essence of the East, that usefully contrasts it with the West, and that casts no unfair cloud on the glory of the former Colonies.

Again, I apologize to everyone from those Respectable parts. Please understand that I was just having some Fun.

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Some AALS Data Documenting Preferential Treatment

In earlier posts I’ve described how the American Association of Law Schools facilitates sexual and racial discrimination against candidates for law school teaching, suggested that in so doing it disadvantages law schools that have mostly minority faculty, also argued against affording preferential treatment on the basis of mere genes, and offered outreach and education reform as an alternative policy. But I’m not done! I still plan to write about whom properly bears the most blame for discriminating against pale-skinned males who want to become law professors (hint: neither women nor minorities) and who such discrimination hurts the most (hint: not those self-same males). Here, though, I’d like to follow up on my earlier claim to have detailed data indicating, contrary to what some people believe, that law schools in fact do tend to disfavor pale-skinned males in hiring.

The AALS itself very helpfully provides that data. It has for many years tracked how often the various sorts of candidates listed in its Faculty Appointments Register actually land law school teaching jobs. Its Statistical Report on Law School Faculty And Candidates for Law Faculty Positions (2002-03), compares the success rates of men and women from the 1990-91 hiring season to the 2001-02 one (go here and scroll down to Table 7B). In brief, that data shows that in all but one (1995-96) of those twelve hiring seasons, women candidates fared better than men ones did. Averaging over the twelve years, women candidates got hired 13.9 % of the time, whereas men candidates got hired only 11.3 % of the time.

The effect of preferential treatment really jumps out in the data comparing the relative success of minority and non-minority candidates from 1990-91 to 2001-02 (go here and scroll down to Table 7C). In all but one (1997-98) of those twelve hiring seasons, minority candidates fared better than non-minority ones. Averaging over the twelve years, minority candidates got hired 17.2 % of the time, whereas men candidates got hired only 11.8 % of the time.

Uh, oh. The kids need breakfast! I’ll try to follow up later with more data and analysis. There’s interesting data specifically about the success (or, more properly, failure) of non-minority males candidates, and I really need to talk about the prospects of a regression analysis. That ought to be enough to get your started on your own number-crunching, and consequent ruminations, however.

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The Brighter Side of Hurricanes

The hurricanes afflicting the Boring Coast have recently attracted a great deal of attention, and for good reason. Those hurricanes threaten terrible losses to lives and property. Without discounting their salient costs, however, I’d like to point out that we on the Fun Coast feel the effects of hurricanes, too—and that we often love it.

As explained here, the eighteen or so hurricanes to hit the Eastern Pacific each year seldom do much damage. They usually drift to the west, out to sea, where they harmlessly dissipate. We have no record of any of them coming ashore in California, though they sometimes do strike Mexico’s comparatively lightly populated western shore.

So what’s the upside of a hurricane hereabouts? Surf. Great surf. Great long swells of head-high and better surf.

But wait, it gets better! Hurricane season falls during the best time of year to surf in SoCal. The June Gloom has long disappeared, the water has finally warmed up, the summer tourists have left, and the kids have gone back to school. Thanks to a hurricane, a very fortunate surfer (see, e.g., me) might thus find himself standing on a warm, sunny, Orange County beach staring agog as macking sets pump through a nearly empty line-up. Rest assured, though, that he won’t (and didn’t) stand long; he will (and did) grab his board and run, grinning, to the water.

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The Three-Sided Coin

I thought up the following puzzle today. Since I came up with it myself, I don’t know whether it’s difficult or not, so I’m posting it here to find out. My solution is not the only solution, but I suspect that all viable solutions will rely on the same basic principle. Here goes:

Using only a coin, how can you generate a probability equal to exactly one-third?

Here’s more context, if you feel the need for it:

Suppose you want to vacation at the beach, mountains, or desert. You want to choose your destination randomly, with equal chances for all three outcomes. Your only randomization device is a coin. What should you do?

If you think you have the answer, please email it to me at the address listed in the right-hand column. Also, give me an estimate of how long you had to think about it (be honest!). PLEASE DON’T POST YOUR ANSWER IN THE COMMENTS SECTION. I will post an update later with the (or a) solution, along with the name of the first person who got it. I’ll post multiple solutions if they rely on different principles, though I don’t think that will happen.

Let me head off one obvious, but incorrect, solution. “Flip one coin. If it comes up heads, go to the beach. If it comes up tails, flip the coin again, and go to the mountains if it’s heads and the desert if it’s tails.” This solution fails, because it generates one-half probability of beach, and one-quarter probability (each) for mountains and desert.

UPDATE: I've made a new post with the answers. Thanks to everyone for their responses. Please, no more emails!

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Curious Georgist, Part 2

As promised, I have some further thoughts on the Georgist land-tax proposal.

Basic tax theory says the best tax, from an efficiency perspective, is one that has the least impact on people’s actual choices. Thus, some economists have argued that sin taxes are desirable precisely because so many people will not be induced to refrain from sin – they’ll drink and smoke just as much as they always did. As a result, it’s possible to extract tax dollars from them without causing much deadweight loss from deterring activities that people clearly consider valuable. Of course, some people do reduce their activity levels in response to sin taxes, which means these taxes aren’t free from inefficiency. An even more efficient tax is the head tax, which you must pay just for living. This tax can only be avoided by suicide, an option that few people will choose to exercise on the margin (that is, very few people would get pushed off the ledge by the imposition of the head tax who would not have jumped anyway). (Okay, emigration would also allow one to escape a head tax.)

The problem with efficient taxes is they tend to be highly inequitable, or at least regarded as such. Sin taxes fall solely on those who engage in socially disapproved behavior. A head tax imposes the same burden on everyone, regardless of ability to pay. (If the tax is calibrated to your income or wealth, then it’s not a true head tax – it’s a form of income tax dependent on yours or your ancestors’ productive behavior.)

So we come to the Georgist proposal to impose a tax on land. Since the quantity of land is fixed, the Georgists argue, the land tax does not reduce incentives to create anything. As with other efficient taxes, the burden will – as I argued in my previous post – fall disproportionately on those who own land at the time of the tax’s imposition (not on subsequent owners, even though they will be responsible for sending the checks). But, the Georgists argue, such expropriation is justified because the land rightly belongs to the public – not the “owner” – anyway. I responded to that claim as well, noting that many current owners have purchased their land with the fruits of their labor. In this post, I’ll focus on the incentive issue.

David Youngberg has already anticipated one point I wished to make: while land is fixed, space is not. Space can be created, as when taller apartment buildings expand available living areas. Micha Gertner, commenting on Julian’s post, made a different point: not all land is currently known to us, and discovering land creates value. Taxing the value of land reduces the return to investments in discovery.

But there’s another objection I consider more important: that a tax on land can discourage the development and improvement of land. Anything that improves the land increases its market value, causing the tax to rise as well. Some efficient improvements on the margin, ones for which the added value is greater than the cost, will be forgone because the tax reduces the perceived value.

Georgists anticipate this argument, and say that the tax should not be on the whole property value, but on the “ground rent,” meaning the value of the land net of any improvements. The problem, however, is that the ground rent is essentially impossible to calculate, because it cannot be meaningfully separated from the value of improvements. To establish the ground rent, you have to find the value of “unimproved” land that is similar to the property in question in all other respects. In most (or at least very many) realistic cases, that is impossible because similar land will tend to be used similarly.

More importantly, plots of land tend to be highly unique. Rarely is any piece of land is exactly like another in all respects, including location, view, amenities, soil quality, ad infinitum. Even if there exist some types of property that are effectively identical – say, all the plots in a line of tract houses – many others differ substantially. Consider, for instance, a plot of land at the top of a mountain with a glorious ocean view. This plot is distinct from all the other nearby plots of land that are not at the peak. (And all those within a stone’s throw of the peak differ from those a little further down.) Suppose that someone has built a glorious mansion on this plot. The market price of this property will exceed that of all nearby properties for two reasons: first, because of the better location, and second, because of the nice house. The key point is that the two sources of value cannot be distinguished. And while this is an extreme example, what’s true here is true to a lesser extent for most properties in the developed world.

Even if it were in principle possible to calculate the “ground rent” on land and tax only that, politically it’s a dead letter. In reality, no jurisdiction I know of has ever implemented a ground-rent tax instead of a standard property tax, and the reasons are obvious enough: too large a share of the value of property comes from the improvements, not the land. It’s both easier and more remunerative to tax the market value of land, which is much more readily available. And even with this sort of tax, as property owners know well, government assessors have a strong incentive to overestimate the value of land in order to maximize tax receipts.

In reality, then, land taxes are property taxes, and property taxes do create some negative incentives. It might be true that they are less pernicious than those created by some other taxes, such as income taxes and tariffs. But let’s not pretend that land taxes are indifferent or, as the Georgists suggest, benign sources of government revenue.

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Britney Takes a Vow

Britney Spears attracts much well-deserved criticism, but I agree with her on this one. Some people are claiming that Britney is not really married, despite Sunday night’s surprise ceremony in a private home in Studio City (where I live!), because she and her intended haven’t filed a marriage license yet. Britney’s response?

“I know we're not completely legal until we file the license, which we’ll do next week,” the 22-year-old pop star said. “But in a real sense, a spiritual sense, we're married.”

And she’s right. Marriage does not depend for its existence on the recognition of the state. Marriage is, at its fundament, an ethical commitment between two (or more if you swing that way) individuals. If the parties choose, they may wish to make a legal commitment as well, but the acts are in principle distinguishable. To say that Britney and her beau are unmarried simply because they haven’t filed a license with the state is to confuse the promise with the enforcement mechanism.

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Curious Georgist, Part One

A couple of days ago, Julian made a post on Hit & Run inspired by an email discussion we’d had (with some other libertarian friends), inspiring a lengthy comments thread. Commenter Jason Ligon’s take on the matter is darn close to mine, so I won’t expand on it. However, another commenter (Scatalogicus) raised a different topic of interest: the Georgist proposal to fund government entirely via land and property taxes. I have a few comments to make on the subject.

1. Georgists are correct to claim that a tax on land differs from other taxes. Specifically, whereas taxes on other things (such as goods or labor) increase their price to the buyer, a tax on land decreases the price of land to the buyer. Why? While taxes are often regarded as taxes on specific people, they are really taxes on transactions. A cigarette tax only gets paid if cigarettes get sold, for instance. But a tax on land is different because no transaction is required – if you own land, you pay the tax. When you sell the land, the tax burden is transferred along with the title to the buyer. Realizing this, the buyer won’t pay as much as he would have for land unencumbered by the tax. Suppose the present discounted value of the land is V, and the present discounted value of the tax attached to it is T. Then the buyer won’t willingly pay more than V – T. Thus, the tax liability is capitalized into the value of the land. The Georgists are therefore correct to claim that land taxes drive down land prices.

2. What Georgists often fail to realize is that the entire burden of the tax is carried by the owners at the time of the tax’s imposition. This is not obvious, because current land owners pay taxes each year, despite the tax having been imposed years ago. But the capitalization logic above shows that the current owners were compensated for the tax burden by having been enabled to pay a lower price to acquire the land in the first place. This means that creating a new land tax (or increasing the rate of an old one) effectively confiscates a portion of the wealth of those who own land at the time the tax is enacted (or increased). It is as though the government had claimed part ownership in the land for itself.

Also, some Georgists claim the lower land prices as a benefit of the land tax. The fallacy here is the mirror image of the fallacy that current owners carry the burden of the tax. In general, the tax liability exactly balances the reduction in price, for a net effect of zero on those who acquire land after the tax’s imposition.

3. Smart Georgists recognize the two points above. At this point in the discussion, they will usually claim that it is fair and just for “society” (i.e., the state) to claim partial ownership of the land, because nobody creates land – it just exists. They argue that the owners of land have expropriated the public by removing land from the commons and taking it for their own use. For reasons I will discuss in my next post, the notion that land is never created is misleading – but for now, suppose it's true. It is nonetheless false to assume that current land owners (at the time of the tax's imposition) did the expropriation. In general, current owners have acquired the land in some other way – either through inheritance or purchase. If they inherited it, their ancestor either inherited or purchased it. Keep going back in time, and in general you’ll find a purchaser at some point in the land’s history. Rarely has a parcel of land been removed from the commons and delivered in an unbroken chain of pure inheritance through multiple generations all the way to the present. (The best examples I can think of are lands claimed by conquest and still owned by the government.)

So what? Well, if the owner of land at the time of the tax’s creation purchased it from someone else, then the wealth expropriated by the tax most likely did not derive from the removal of land from the commons. It could just as easily have resulted from labor. Suppose, for instance, that a school teacher works for many years to accumulate enough money to buy a home. Then the property tax rises. That tax takes a portion of the teacher’s labor-created wealth.

The irony here is that other taxes (income, sales, etc.) are typically regarded as taxes on people, whereas the property taxes are regarded as taxes on things. The truth is nearly the opposite. Income and sales taxes can in principle be avoided, even after their imposition, by avoiding the transactions to which they attach. Admittedly, it’s not always easy – few people could live without a job. But a property tax falls on the owners of land at the time of the tax’s creation, who have no prospect of escaping it. They can sell the land, but only at a reduced price, so the tax loss travels with them. The land tax can only be dodged by anticipating it and selling the land early. And even then, the dodge will only be successful if others don’t expect it (otherwise, the expected tax liability will be capitalized into the land), and it only succeeds by shifting the burden to the less-foresighted person who buys the land.

Lest I be misunderstood, I’m not claiming that land taxes are necessarily worse than other taxes. In comparison, land taxes might be the least of all evils (taking as given that the state will raise revenue one way or another). But even the advantages relative to other taxes are exaggerated by the Georgists – as I’ll discuss in my next post (in which I’ll also attempt to work in a Man in the Yellow Hat reference).

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Newcomb's Paradox: Being and Doing

I just encountered a decision problem that I’d never heard before, though I’m guessing philosophers probably know all about it. I found it in a book by psychologist George Ainslie, who quotes it from philosopher Robert Nozick, who credits it to physicist William Newcomb. Here is my paraphrasing of the problem:

A Powerful Being with the perfect ability to predict your choices sets two boxes in front of you. In Box A, there is $1000. In Box B, there is either $1 million or nothing. You have two options: either (1) collect the contents of both boxes, or (2) collect the contents of Box B only. If the Being predicts that you’ll choose (1), he puts nothing in Box B. If he predicts you’ll choose (2), he puts $1 million in Box B. The Being fills the boxes before you make your choice, but again, he can perfectly predict what you’ll do. So what do you do?

I won’t try to discuss everything that’s brain-twisting about this story, such as its implications for free will and determinism. I’ll just point out the paradoxical part. In choosing, you have to ask yourself, “What kind of person am I?” And no matter what you answer, you’ll want the answer to be something else at some point in the process. If you are a Box-B-Chooser, then the Being will put money in both boxes, and then you’ll wish you could become a Both-Boxes-Chooser after the Being fills the boxes (because $1 million + $1000 is better than $1 million). If you are a Both-Boxes-Chooser, then the Being will put money only in Box A, and then you’ll wish you could become a Box-B-Chooser before the Being fills the boxes (because that will cause the Being to put $1 million in Box B after all).

As fun as that problem is, I also like this simpler variation, which is actually my original (mistaken) interpretation of the story. (I don't know if Nozick or Newcomb considered it; Ainslie did not.) In this version, the Being is somewhat more malevolent:

A Powerful Being with the perfect ability to predict your choices sets two boxes in front of you. In Box A, there is $1000. In Box B, there is either $1 million or nothing. You can choose Box A or Box B, but not both. If he predicts you’ll choose Box A, he puts $1 million in Box B. If he predicts you’ll choose Box B, he’ll put nothing in Box B. The Being fills the boxes before you make your choice, but again, he can perfectly predict what you’ll do. So what do you do?

Here, the paradox is more straightforward, because there’s no difference in when (before or after the Being fills the boxes) you want to change who you are. If you are Box-A-Chooser, the Being puts $1 million in Box B, and you’ll therefore want to become a Box-B-Chooser after the boxes are filled (to get $1 million instead of $1000). If you are a Box-B-Chooser, the Being puts nothing in Box B, and you’ll want to become a Box-A-Chooser after the boxes are filled (to get $1000 instead of nothing).

My brain hurts.

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The AALS v. Howard Law School

What does the AALS have against Howard Law School? As I related below, the AALS has configured its search engine to allow law schools to search only for female or minority job candidates. Granted, I question whether a law school could use that feature without violating anti-discrimination laws. But let us generously suppose that a law school might legally search for candidates having certain genes in an effort to increase the diversity of its faculty. Why, then, does the AALS stack the deck against Howard Law School?

Judging from this photo directory, Howard might want to diversify its faculty by hiring some pale-skinned professors. On a rather cautious accounting, at least 22 of Howard’s 36 faculty—61%—tout relatively recent African ancestors. (By most accounts, of course, all our family trees ultimately take root in Africa.) Only about 6 of Howard’s 36 faculty members obviously descend from mainly Northern European stock. The inherent uncertainties of racial and ethnic classifications make these mere guesses, of course. It nonetheless seems quite clear that if Howard, like many schools, aspires to have its faculty reflect the racial and ethnic make-up of the whole of the U.S., it has to hire a good many more light-skinned people. Why, then, does the AALS make it so hard for Howard to do so?

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Preferred Preferences Policies

That worthy pseudonymous commentator, Trumpit, again asks a question worth answering, this time in response to my recent post about achieving diversity without discrimination. Although I began to answer his comment with one of my own, I found myself writing enough for a blog post proper—namely, this one.

Trumpit read my prior posts on the topic to indicate that I am “de facto opposed to affirmative action.” I wouldn’t put it that way. I take “affirmative action” to include both outreach, which I ardently support, and preferential treatment, which I generally oppose. Why “generally”? Because I am against preferential treatment only: 1) by state actors (taking that term broadly, as anti-discrimination law does); and 2) by private actors if the state allows preferences to be afforded only to certain categories.

I am against preferential treatment by state actors for a variety of reasons, both on grounds of rights (e.g., those protected by the 14th Amendment) and prudent public policy (e.g., the dangers of encouraging race-based politics). On the other hand, I think private parties should have the right to associate with whomsoever they choose, for reasons good, bad, or indifferent. It follows that they should have the right to discriminate on the basis of race or sex, whether for or against currently favored classes.

Taking me to oppose all preferential treatment, Trumpit asks, “How then do we get black/brown kids out of the Ghetto then?” I share his concern about the opportunities afforded to certain minorities in the U.S. But I do not think it appropriate to mask the harms inflicted by other causes--most notably by monopolistic government education--by violating the rights of third parties who did not cause those harms. Nor, as my use of "mask" indicates, do I think it constitutes good policy in the long run.

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"Heads Will Roll"

While driving home, I heard on the radio that Dan Rather and CBS News had apologized for relying on the clearly forged National Guard memos. CBS will be performing an internal investigation, and one CBS official was quoted (or maybe paraphrased) as having said “heads would roll” over the incident. As I drove, I thought idly about how glad I am to live in a country civilized enough that a grisly expression like “heads will roll” has come to mean people getting fired – and “head-hunting” actually refers to people getting hired.

As if to punctuate my thoughts, I came home to find this ghastly story on the news.

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Diversity Without Discrimination

In the comments to my earlier post about how the AALS allows law schools to search only for women or minority job candidates, the pseudonymous “Trumpit” asks, “Suppose I want to hire a female or minority law professor (I know I'm in the minority for wanting that!), then how do I go about it without stepping on any(white)bodies toes?” That excellent question deserves an answer, one different from this: “You go out looking for a female or minority law professor, anti-discrimination laws to the contrary notwithstanding, and feel pretty damned lucky if you manage to hire the one you want!”

Contrary to Trumpit’s assumption, women and minority law professors are very much in demand. Law schools want to hire them so much that they favor them over pale-skinned male candidates. Perhaps I'll follow up later with a post offering detailed proof of that claim. For now, though, I'll focus on Trumpit’s question.

In the first place, I would say that if you set out specifically intending to hire a woman or minority, you are engaging in sexual or racial discrmination. In that event, you could not honestly say that you are an equal opportunity employer. You would have already ruled out, or at least ruled against, certain employees because you are discriminating (i.e., "choosing") against them on the basis of sex or race.

In the second place, supposing that you set out intending only to diversify your faculty, I would say that: a) you can properly aim only to increase the diversity of viewpoints held by your faculty as a whole; and b) you cannot properly use sex, race, or ethnicity as a proxy for diversity of viewpoints. Only viewpoint diversity helps education. Building a superficially diverse faculty that, in fact, uniformly grew up in upper middle class U.S. households, attended top-notch educational institutions, and holds moderately left-wing political views does not add a whit to your students’ education. To assume that a faculty member will have interestingly different views solely because of his or her particular genes, moreover, demonstrates exactly the sort of prejudgement that anti-discrimination laws aim to correct.

What to do, then? First, engage in outreach, making sure that a variety of candidates learn about your job search. Next, search for viewpoint diversity, whether or not it lines up with sex or race. Lastly, work for educational reform to liberate those minority communities now held in the thrall of the teachers' unions, so that you might someday discover that paler folks are not overrepresented among those who boast the best credentials for going into law school teaching.

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Relationship Cycles

[Apologies in advance to anyone who finds this post sexist. I'm just having a bit of fun here.]

Recently, I casually mentioned to a group of guy friends that I thought many guys would be happiest with a 3-day-a-week girlfriend. Everyone present agreed. Some also expressed the suspicion that most women want a 7-day-a-week boyfriend. I bought this at first, until I realized women couldn’t possibly like us that much. Naturally, I have another theory.

I figure that everyone, men and women alike, derives diminishing marginal utility (MU) from relationship time. But the MU diminishes more quickly for men than for women. The figure below illustrates the difference.

For men, the MU of relationship time is given by MU(RM). It crosses the MU of alternative activities, MU(A), at 3 days per week. For women, the MU of relationship time is given by MU(RW), and it crosses MU(A) at 5 days per week. Thus, women’s optimal number of relationship days exceeds that for men, but it’s still less than 7. (Slightly different assumptions could generate essentially the same conclusion. For instance, men and women could have the same MU of relationships, but men could have a higher MU of alternative activities, thus generating the same qualitative result – a lower optimal number of relationship days per week.)

But what explains the perception that women want 7-day-a-week boyfriends? Now we come to my theory of relationship cycles. When two parties to a relationship have different preferences about timing, even a small divergence can create the illusion of a much larger one. Say that Harvey and Matilda have spent three days straight together. At this point, Harvey requests some alone time. If Matilda agrees (despite her desire to continue another couple of days), both parties get to reset their relationship clocks. Once Harvey and Matilda reconvene, say, four days later, Harvey’s and Matilda’s relationship-time MU’s have both risen back to their initial levels. But in another three days, Harvey will be asking for alone time again. Matilda never has to ask for alone time, because Harvey is always satiated sooner. Thus, the pattern of interactions creates the appearance of one-sidedness: Harvey keeps asking for alone time, while Matilda always want more together time.

The pattern would emerge even for a smaller difference; e.g., if Matilda’s optimum were 4 days per week, Harvey would still always want alone time earlier. And if the pause in between meetings is shorter, the effect gets stronger: since Harvey hasn’t had enough time to “decompress,” his MU of relationship time hasn’t risen all the way back to its start value, and so he reaches the saturation point even sooner.

The phenomenon of relationship cycles occurs in other interactions as well. Take phone call frequency. Say Ted would like to talk on the phone every two days, whereas Sheila would like to talk every day. You might think Sheila would call Ted about two-thirds of the time – but in fact, she will call him every time. If they talk on Monday, Ted plans to call on Wednesday; but then Sheila calls him Tuesday. His clock reset, Ted plans to call on Thursday. And then Sheila calls on Wednesday. Eventually, Sheila decides Ted doesn’t care about her, because he never calls.

Or consider sex frequency. Terry would like sex every other day, whereas Pat would like sex about twice a week. If they were separated for a week, Pat might initiate sex. But when they are in regular contact, Terry will always initiate before Pat does. Each time they have sex, both sex clocks get reset, and Terry’s fuse burns faster. At some point, Terry begins to doubt Pat’s affection, because Pat never initiates sex.

At this point, it seems natural to discuss the need for communication and compromise in a healthy relationship. But I’ll leave that to the experts.

UPDATE: I described the basic theory. Alex Tabarrok provides the empirics. And Eric Rasmusen extends the theory with a little Bayesian updating.

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Desperately Seeking Only Women and Minorities

The American Association of Law Schools (AALS), helps law schools connect with people who want to become law professors. Toward that end, the AALS runs the Faculty Appointments Register (FAR), a database to which each job candidate can submit a one-page, standardized form describing where he or she went to school, worked, and so forth. The FAR form asks candidates to identify their sex and ethnicity.

The AALS allows law schools to search the FAR forms online through an interface that allows you to, for instance, pull up only candidates who have gone to particular schools, passed certain bar exams, held judicial clerkships, and so forth. The AALS interface also allows schools to sort candidates by sex or ethnicity. Interestingly, though, that interface allows only certain sorts of searches. Under the heading of sex (“Gender” in AALS-speak), the only options are “No Preference,” or “Female.” Under the “Race/Ethnicity” heading, the only options are “No Preference,” or “Minority.” You thus cannot search for male or non-minority candidates.

Why does the AALS offer such curiously circumscribed searches? I am not sure, and right now I do not intend to speculate. For now, I am content to wonder whether it can possibly be legal to discriminate between job candidates by making it harder to find males and non-minorities. Or, to put it in complementary terms, I wonder whether it can possibly be legal to encourage the preferential treatment of women and minorities.

Perhaps I am silly to even raise the question. Surely an association of law schools would not misunderstand their obligations under federal and state laws forbidding discrimination on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, or national origin! Why, the AALS’s own Bylaws say, at section 6.3.a, “A member school shall provide equality of opportunity in legal education for all persons, including faculty and employees with respect to hiring . . .without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, disability, or sexual orientation.”

Could an organization such as the AALS itself be violating laws that forbid sexual or racial discrimination in hiring? Call me a legal simpleton, but the question really does throw me for a loop. I guess that we won’t really know for sure unless somebody brings a lawsuit, one that might helpfully resolve this seeming legal paradox.

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More Healthcare Blogging

For anyone who likes healthcare-related blogging (and don’t we all?), I have three sites to recommend. The first two, Proximal Tubule and Galen’s Log, both have a free-market perspective. The third, Matthew Holt’s Health Care Blog, is somewhat less market-friendly but still informed by a sensible perspective (one that does not, for instance, assume that everyone has a fundamental right to free stuff). Thanks to Trent McBride, who posts on the first two, for bringing all three to my attention.

And now that I’ve thanked Trent, I’d like to disagree with him about something. He apparently shares Tyler’s concern that HSAs will tend to inflate healthcare spending:

But Matthew [Holt] is right to point out that, in a world with HSA's, people will purchase more health care than they "need." Tax breaks for certain behaviors or purchases does falsely increase the demand for those things.

Trent’s agreeing with part of Matthew Holt’s negative assessment of HSAs, in which he says:

There is no reason that health care premiums should be bought with pre-tax dollars (and for that matter there's no reason that housing loans should be too). … It also means that we spend marginal dollars on health care when we should be spending on something else. But I guess they [the WSJ] missed that day in micro-economics class when MR=MC was brought up.

The basic complaint is correct: when you give a tax break to health services without giving the same tax break to other goods and services (like food, clothing, and entertainment), you encourage people to consume too much healthcare and too little of those other things. Matt and Trent’s point, if I reconstruct it properly, is that tax-free HSAs expand the tax break on healthcare even further, and that will exacerbate the problem.

Why doesn’t this bother me? Because the status quo ante (that is, the tax code prior to the new HSA provisions) allowed people to get as much healthcare as they wanted tax-free anyway, so long as they got it in the form of health insurance. There is no additional health service that is made tax-free under HSAs that couldn’t have been gotten tax-free in a comprehensive (low deductible) health insurance plan. And that was (and still is) precisely the problem: people can and do purchase health insurance plans covering all varieties of health service, including routine care, prescriptions, therapy, ad infinitum. Allowing people to buy the very same health services with HSA funds does not constitute an expansion of the tax distortion. It just means they can get the same tax-free services by a different route – one that, as I’ve argued before, has more efficient incentives.

I would feel differently if HSAs increased the size of the tax advantage or gave tax-free status to some variety of health service that didn’t have it before. But that’s not the case. The health services in question are the same; only the manner of purchase is at issue.

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Best. Linguistics. Post. Ever.

Just read it. I laughed my ass off. My hat's off to Neal.

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Hoorays for HSAs?

Tyler is less optimistic about Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) than I am. Tyler predicts that too few people will make use of them to have any substantial macro effect. I hope he’s wrong, but his predictive powers may exceed mine.

I suspect Tyler’s incorrect to say that “the ‘encourage health care expenditures’ effect would swamp the ‘encourage high deductibles’ effect.” Any increased spending effect would have to result from a greater willingness of patients to incur health expenditures under this type of plan relative to low-deductive plans without HSAs. But in a low-deductible plan, most health services are (nearly) free to the patient at the point of service. The patient has little monetary incentive to refuse them. With an HSA, on the other hand, the patient faces the full cost of care at the point of service (for most services). Spending money from the account means reducing the amount rolled over into an IRA at the end of the year. So unless the law of demand fails to hold for health expenditures, there is good reason to believe that spending would decrease under HSAs. Moreover, even if people plan to spend the entire amount in their HSAs, which seems to be Tyler’s concern, they will still have good reason to make those dollars stretch as far as possible. That means they’ll start shopping around and asking doctors for prices to compare. As consumers become more price sensitive, the pressure will tend to push prices down.

(I admit that this effect will only occur if a significant number of people switch over to plans with HSAs; but Tyler says the “encourage health expenditures” effect would outweigh the “encourage high deductibles” effect even if HSAs became common.)

Tyler also says it would be better to remove the initial tax distortion than correct it with a new one:

Should the government subsidize high-deductible insurance policies? Probably not in the abstract. Of course this subsidy may offset the tax advantages of low-deductible plans, but again a simpler solution is available, namely to eliminate the original distortion.

In principle, I agree. But in political reality, the tax-exempt treatment of health insurance will never go away. Any proposal to start taxing health insurance benefits would go over like a lead balloon. Given that constraint, the best way to fix the incentives is to give all health expenditures – whether in the form of insurance or direct payments to providers – the same tax treatment. That’s essentially what HSAs do. It would be nice if leftover money in HSAs rolled over into your bank account instead of your IRA (thus giving people a more immediate incentive to economize on health expenditures), but the HSA policy is still a major improvement over the status quo.

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Now Let's Sue McDonald's for Anorexia

Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are promoting McDonald's Happy Meals. In France, by the way.

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Thomas the Zombie Tank Engine

My boy, Kai, obsesses over Thomas the Tank Engine as only a toddler can obsess. I often wake up to the sound of his cheerful wee voice saying, somewhere off in the darkness at the edge of my bed, “Choo choo! Bideo! Peeeees?” (Translation: “Might I please watch, yet again, that charming video relating the adventures of Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends?”)

Although I don’t let Kai start his day with Thomas the Tank engine, he does usually get to watch one or both of his two videos each day. As a consequence, I usually end up watching them, too. My repeated observations lead me to conclude that Thomas the Tank Engine relies on some very disturbing notions of moral causation.

That philosophical weirdness arises from the quasi-zombie nature of the main characters. They are machines—train engines, a bus, earth-moving equipment, and so forth—that operate largely at the whim of human direction. They labor under both the verbal commands of white-collar bosses, such as Sir Topham Hatt, and the direct physical control that engineers, brakemen, and other blue-collar workers evidently wield over Thomas and his clanking friends.

Notwithstanding those two human sources of control, the non-human characters also enjoy some freedom of action. They clearly hold their own opinions. They chat, argue, joke, and—surprisingly for a show that enjoys a reputation for teaching children good values—frequently bitch and back-bite. More than that, though, Thomas and the other machines sometimes act on their whims, rolling along the tracks in search of one another, playing mischievous pranks on fellow machines, or racing each other through the verdant hills of the Island of Sodor.

The resulting, bizarre mixture of servitude and independence shows clearly in “A Spotless Record,” a tale relating the hazing of a new engine, Arthur. Sir Topham Hatt introduces Arthur as an engine with a spotless record of on-time arrivals and flawless deliveries. Setting to work, the up-tight Arthur quickly takes offense at the rude singing of some freight cars he has been assigned to pull. Thomas, piqued by Arthur’s reputation and prim manner, decides to have some fun with the newcomer by telling him that Hatt doesn’t like railroad cars to sing. Arthur thanks him, leaves the rail yard with the onery cars in tow, and berates them to hush up. Offended, the cars make Arthur lose control on the way down a steep hill. He smashes into a train parked at the hill’s base, utterly demolishing a number of cars. Thomas, a witness to this mishap, confesses to the irate Hatt that he caused the accident by tricking Arthur. All ends well with Hatt laughing off the matter and Arthur forgiving Thomas.

Consider a few of the moral mysteries in “A Spotless Record”: Why should Thomas take the blame for Arthur’s over-reaction to the freight cars’ harmless singing? Aren’t Arthur and the cars in fact to blame? How did the cars, lacking all motive force, cause Arthur to lose control? Moreover, how did those cars overcome the control exercised by Arthur’s engineer and brakeman? And, gruesomely, why does no one express the slightest concern about the apparent slaughter of several cars?

Granted, these puzzles of moral agency appear to have no impact on my boy. But, given that I also have to watch Thomas the Tank Engine, they certainly vex me. And who knows what deep and insidious effects exposure to such philosophically confused stories might be wreaking on his psyche?

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Death on the Cheap

MSN Money provides some valuable advice for minimizing funeral expenses. Among other things:

• “Shop around. Many survivors also don’t shop around for deals because they consider bargain-hunting an affront to the dead. Getting fleeced, however, is hardly a noble tribute. Even a couple of quick calls to compare prices once a relative dies is worthwhile."
• “Choose ‘direct cremation.’ Direct cremation simply means that the deceased is promptly cremated, without a funeral service or public viewing. ... Embalming -- the temporary preservation of the body by injecting chemicals -- is unnecessary under most circumstances, if the body is promptly taken care of. Avoiding this expense can save several hundred dollars.”
• Avoid the guilt trap when buying an urn or other ash-holder. “Some funeral homes try to guilt families into buying more expensive urns by stamping ‘temporary container’ on the outside of the cardboard or plastic box that the remains are returned in,” says one consumer advocate. Consider buying a nice piece of pottery instead.

Read the article for more. One bit of advice sounds wrong to me, however:

An increasingly popular way to take care of funeral arrangements is to pay a funeral home in advance for a package of services. Many consumer advocates don’t recommend prepaid plans, saying consumers are not well protected. Only New York state has sufficiently stringent rules about prepaid plans, says the Funeral Consumers Society's Slocum.

Unless the prepayment contracts are not enforced, I’m not sure what kind of “protection” is required. Waiting until someone’s dead to buy the casket, plot, etc., is like waiting until it rains to buy an umbrella – you’re asking to get squeezed. Someone who shops early sends a strong signal of being a price-sensitive customer, and price-sensitive customers almost always gets better deals in other industries. For instance, people who demonstrate a willingness to switch long-distance carriers invariably get lower rates. Those who stick with the long-distance carrier they’re assigned upon getting new phone service end up paying the highest rates possible. Moreover, people are often both busy and distraught upon a loved one’s death, and the funeral industry will happily take advantage of that. Better to go shopping for death supplies when you have the time and emotional energy to do it right.

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Sodomites and Sadomasochists

Eugene, at his sarcastic best, uncovers the shocking fact that marriage between sadists and masochists is legal in all 50 states. Oh yeah, sodomites can marry, too -- as long as they're not of the same sex.

And as long as you're in a frisky mood, check out the third photo in this array of real estate for sale. Look through the window. (Thanks to Radley for the pointer.)

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Cellular Intimacy

This fun little news story offers some ruminations about how technology, far from alienating us from one another, can in fact encourage mutual affection. Most of the predicted developments strike me as silly. Networked mood rings and glowing pillows? But the article begins with an observation that struck me as original and true: Cellphones have encouraged intimacy by freeing us to converse more privately than we often can on wired phones. As noted by James Stewart, a senior research fellow at The Institute for Studies of Science, Technology and Innovation at the University of Edinburgh, “In the past when handsets were fixed to desks at work or in the hall at home everything said on the phone was semi-public.”

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Regulatory Inflammation Syndrome

What do you get when you combine pervasive regulation with zealous enforcement? You get the legal disease currently afflicting California: regulatory inflammation syndrome. Policy doctors pin the cause on California’s Unfair Business Competition Law, Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code section 17200. For the cure, they offer Proposition 64, medicine that California voters will decide to take or reject in the next election.

I plan to vote for Prop. 64, which I regard as necessary relief from the rash of lawsuits currently afflicting California businesses. I suspect, though, that Prop. 64 treats merely a symptom of a California’s regulatory disease. The problem lies in too many regulations, rather than simply in their over-zealous enforcement.

In very brief, section 17200 empowers any lawyer to act as a “private attorney general”empowered to sue businesses for a very wide range of regulatory violations. A business found guilty under section 17200 may have to disgorge all its ill-got gains and pay the fees of the winning attorney. Attorneys bringing section 17200 suits need not act on behalf of a wronged client or even prove that a member of the public has been harmed or deceived. Many suits have been brought for minor or technical violations of state law, such as failing to date an invoice. Not all such suits would survive litigation, of course, but that is seldom the goal. Rather, unscrupulous attorneys exploit section 17200 to squeeze settlements out of their victims—often small or minority-owned businesses.

For more information about section 17200 and the current effort to amend it, see this apparently objective view of Prop. 64, the arguments in favor of Prop. 64 offered by California Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse , or the arguments against Prop. 64 offered by the Consumer Attorneys of California.

As I said, I plan to vote for Prop. 64. Section 17200 plainly does encourage frivolous lawsuits, much to the harm of businesses and, consequently (if ironically), consumers. Nonetheless, it bears emphasizing that section 17200 would not prove so deadly a legal weapon if California’s excessive regulations did not give attorneys so many targets to aim it at. The problem with section 17200 is not that it punishes innocent businesses, in other words. Rather, 17200 makes it all too clear that California’s regulations makes nearly every business guilty of something.

Prop. 64 treats merely a symptom of California’s chronic regulatory inflammation. Even if Prop. 64 passes, California businesses will still risk being found guilty of doing nothing wrong. True, they will suffer prosecution less seldom than at present. That, however, will reflect not the achievement of justice but rather the degradation of the rule of law. Prosecutors will remain at liberty to hound unpopular or uppity businesses for trifling regulatory violations. Meanwhile, the bulk of the business community will cower in fear, buying favors or buying time in hopes of avoiding a like fate. Prop. 64, though perhaps necessary as emergency relief, thus ultimately threatens to aggravate the underlying legal disease.

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To Your Health

I found two useful articles today on taking charge of your own health decisions.

First, MSN reports that your children might not need orthodontic work as much your orthodontist leads you to believe. The growth of a child’s mouth will often alleviate crowding, open bites, and overbites without any need for intervention. Even if intervention is required, it doesn’t necessarily have to be early, since orthodontics can be nearly as effective when incurred later.

My sister went through many years of orthodontic misery, starting with “palate dividers,” “tongue reminders,” and other medieval torture devices as early as age six – and now, at age 23, she’s going through another round of braces, some of it to correct earlier orthodontic work. As a result, I have serious reservations about early intervention in orthodontics, and this article confirms many of my suspicions. Here’s the article’s bottom line: first, ask your orthodontist questions about why he’s recommending treatment; and second, don’t be afraid to get a second or third opinion.

Second, the mostly political website “The Price of Liberty” offers a plethora of health advice that’s worthwhile regardless of your politics. Among the seemingly obvious but too often ignored bits of wisdom:

• Do research on your doctor. Don’t assume a doctor is good just because he’s licensed.
• Make a list of questions for your doctor, and make sure you’re scheduled for enough time for the doctor to address them all.
• Medication can’t substitute for a serious investigation of root causes. Medications often merely treat symptoms, possibly masking the real problems.
• Get a complete physical on a regular basis. Have a list of items you want checked during the physical (the article provides a link to a comprehensive list), and make sure they all get done.

Also, the article provides a list of symptoms and conditions that demand attention from a doctor. This list is as useful for what’s not listed – the little aches, pains, and colds that need no professional attention – as for what is. For people who would rather not go to the doctor, it’s nice to know what actually calls for biting the bullet.

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Advice for the Hatfields... I Mean, the McCoys

This made me laugh. Read this post by Orin Kerr, and don't miss the crucial update. Funny how the simple advice doesn't seem so simple anymore, when both parties are supposed to follow it.

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Optimal Haircuts

How short should your barber or hairdresser cut your hair? I suspect a lot of people want a haircut that looks “just right” immediately after cutting. At least, that’s what the lady who cuts my hair (and who does a great job, by the way) always wants to give me. Yet that is obviously a suboptimal haircutting strategy. I always have to ask her to cut it shorter than feels right to her.

The farther your hair length is from the “right” length, in either direction, the greater is your disutility from bad hair days. Too short and too long are both troublesome. Let’s suppose the problem is symmetrical, so that (for instance) hair one inch too long and hair one inch too short are equally undesirable. For simplicity, let’s say your hair grows one-half inch per week, and you get one unit of disutility for each inch of difference from the right length. If you’re on a 5-week haircut cycle, and you start off with the right length, your total disutility is:

0 + 0.5 + 1 + 1.5 + 2 = 5

whereas if you got your hair cut an inch too short, your disutility would be:

1 + 0.5 + 0 + 0.5 + 1 = 3

Clearly, you’re better off asking for the shorter haircut, since that minimizes your disutility.

But it’s unrealistic to assume every inch of difference corresponds to the same amount of disutility. I’d rather have two weeks of hair one-half inch too long than one week of hair a whole inch too long, because a whole inch is more than twice as annoying as a half inch. If your marginal disutility is proportional to (say) the square of inches, the comparison above becomes even more stark. Starting with the right length, you get disutility of:

0 + 0.25 + 1 + 2.25 + 4 = 7.5

whereas if you started an inch too short, your disutility would be only:

1 + 0.25 + 0 + 0.25 + 1 = 2.5

In such a case, having an optimal haircutting strategy matters a great deal more.

Now consider the hastened haircut effect. If there’s some threshold disutility above which you simply cannot stand it any longer, you’ll break from your planned cycle and get an early haircut. Say your threshold is 2 units of disutility, and you start with the right length. Then, using the numbers above, you’ll cut your cycle short and have a haircut after four weeks instead of five.

A cynical person might suggest that your barber or hairdresser, in sending you out of the shop with the “perfect do,” deliberately tries to short-circuit your cycle to squeeze more haircuts out of you. But I’m not a cynic on this one. I suspect hairdressers just don’t trust you to attribute your great hair two weeks from now to the great cut they gave you today.

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WHO's Business Is Suicide?

The World Health Organization is calling for action to deal with the growing problem of suicide worldwide:

Suicide kills more people each year than road traffic accidents in most European countries, the World Health Organization is warning. And globally, suicide takes more lives than murder and war put together, says the agency in a call for action.

The death toll from suicide – at almost one million people per year – accounts for half of all violent deaths worldwide, says the WHO. “Estimates suggest fatalities could rise to 1.5 million by 2020,” the agency warned on Wednesday.

I have two complaints about this article. First, it claims that reducing access to suicide methods will reduce the suicide rate:

"It's important to realise that suicide is preventable," points out Lars Mehlum, president of the International Association for Suicide Prevention. "And that having access to the means of suicide is both an important risk factor and determinant of suicide."
…
The most common methods for committing suicide include swallowing pesticides, using firearms and overdosing on painkillers. Curbing access to these methods is a crucial factor in preventing suicide.

Now, if you’re going to make a claim like that, it would nice to have a little evidence. As it happens, I’ve done some research on this topic, and the evidence just isn’t there. Despite numerous studies, support for the conclusion that reducing access to a suicide method will reduce the suicide rate is mixed at best. Studies have frequently found a statistically significant relationship between access to a method and suicides by that method, but rarely have studies found a statistically significant relationship between access to a method and total suicides.

Second, WHO abuses terminology to justify its prescription for global action:

"Suicide is a tragic global public health problem,” says Catherine Le Galès-Camus, WHO’s assistant director general for non-communicable diseases and mental health. “There is an urgent need for coordinated and intensified global action to prevent this needless toll."

Now what, exactly, qualifies any given health issue as a “public health problem”? Suicide seems to me a quintessentially private matter. Yes, suicides do adversely affect the families, friends, and coworkers of the suicidal person. But the same is true of nearly anything that takes a person’s life, especially in a traumatic fashion. If the term “public health” is to have any meaning distinct from just “health,” either (a) there should be some non-trivial element of contagion involved, or (b) the issue should be closely connected to some public facility, such as the sewer system or public highways. At a minimum, the health problem should have substantially greater external effects than the typical illness.

Even if one buys that suicide is a public health problem – perhaps because suicides sometimes occur in clusters, indicating some degree of “psychological contagion” – what warrants WHO’s call for international action? Nothing about suicide makes it a “global” problem, except the mere fact that it occurs in every country. So does acne. Suicide is not transmitted from country to country. The suicide rate of one country is of no special concern to other countries, except in the trivial sense that compassionate people have a tendency to care about other humans’ deaths. Suicide is no more a matter of international concern than obesity – another fundamentally individual or (with a major stretch of the imagination) national concern that WHO has nonetheless dubbed a “public health problem” and a “global epidemic.” Looks like WHO has a chronic case of mission creep.

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Mmmm. Very Complex Multi-Phase System.

What is your favorite flavor of very complex multi-phase system? I'm not especially particular; I like almost all of them. I especially like chocolaty ones with chocolate chunks in chocolate, though.

Fortunately, for all of us who relish ice cream, scientists have been working hard to understand and improve it. Food engineering professor Rich Hartel offers this analysis: "Half of ice cream is air in the form of air cells. About two thirds of it is in the form of ice crystals. So it's a foam, it's a dispersion, [and] it's an emulsion—about twelve percent of ice cream is in the form of fat that's spread out in small globules. It's a very complex multi-phase system."

The same story linked to above describes how science has begun to make ice cream still more delicious. Of the food engineering innovations described, one especially caught my attention: Using ice-inhibiting proteins from winter wheat to help make ice cream extra creamy.

What, apart from the inherent delights of creamy goodness, makes that notable? It turns out that cryonicists worry a great deal about inhibiting ice crystals. Fewer ice crystals gives your patient a better suspension, which in turn increases the likelihood of the patient’s successful revival. It would surely help the development of such life-saving technologies if, as Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution suggests, someone would establish something like an X Prize for cryonics. If we can encourage the proper scientific research, we might look forward to enjoying better ice cream now and still better ice cream in the far, far future.

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Back in the Bits--Temporarily?

Thanks, Glen, for inviting me back to Agoraphilia! I enjoyed my visit back in August, and now look forward to settling in a bit more permanently. But maybe I presume too much. According to this recent report, the internet may not last much longer.

Well, ok, that perhaps takes the story's headline a bit too seriously. Even if, in fact, the Riemann hypothesis has been proven, it will at worse only greatly hamper the encryption presently crucial to e-commerce. On the upside, mathematicians will have reached a deeper understanding of prime numbers.

The story ends with a charming list: "Seven Baffling Pillars of Wisdom." Again, the title misleads. The list in fact offers seven (or six, if the Riemann hypothesis has been proven) profound puzzles. They thus represent black holes of ignorance rather than pillars of wisdom. But, like black holes, they inspire awe. And, again like black holes, they perhaps offer us portals to as-yet unexplored worlds.

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We Don't Need Another "Hero"

I saw “Hero” on Labor Day. Stunning visuals, beautiful choreography, amazing fight scenes… that’s what I went for, and that’s what I got. And if that’s what you want, by all means go see the movie.

Thematically, however, “Hero” left me cold. Patri Friedman at Catallarchy has already discussed some of the collectivist themes in the film, specifically the exaltation of individuals willing to sacrifice themselves to the collective good. But I wish to pose a different challenge: assuming that heroes should indeed sacrifice themselves for the greater good, what is the greater good in a political setting like that of this movie? Warning: spoilers ahead.

The action takes place around 200 B.C., just prior to the unification of China under the Qin (or Ch’in) dynasty. The primary conflict in the movie is between the King of Qin – who wished to conquer and unite the six warring nations of China – and those who opposed him, including the would-be assassin called Nameless (Jet Li). The opening words of the film seem ambivalent about which side is right, admitting the existence of heroes on both sides of the conflict and acknowledging the bloodshed caused by the Kind of Qin’s ambitions. But by the end of the movie, the true moral of the story becomes crystal clear. Nameless realizes that the King of Qin’s plan will unify China, thereby putting an end to war and bloodshed. He therefore refrains from assassinating the King, allowing himself to die instead.

But is it really true that unification improves the lives of the people? I’m not so sure. On the one hand, as the film indicates, unification can prevent the constant feuding of smaller states. On the other hand, unification also allows the concentration of political power over large numbers of people, and political power has a nasty way of getting used for evil as well as good. As the Qin history linked above says, the first Qin emperor accomplished many things, but…

Despite all of these accomplishments, Shi huangdi was not a popular leader. The public works and taxes were too great a burden to the population. It seemed that Shi huangdi could not be satisfied. Also, the nobility disliked him because they were deprived of all their power and transplanted. Finally, he banned all books that advocated forms of government other than the current one. The writings of the great philosophers of the One Hundred Schools time were burned and more than 400 opponents were executed.

I’m no historian, so I won’t make any strong claims about whether unified regimes have overall performed better – in terms of human rights and standard of living for the common people – than decentralized political systems. But based on my limited knowledge, I lean toward the latter. Western Europe, for instance, benefited greatly from power divisions among various states, among different layers of the feudal hierarchy, and between the state and the church. True, kings and dukes had a bad habit of conscripting the people to fight in innumerable pointless territorial wars. Still, in the long run, decentralization helped create the pockets of wiggle room needed for notions of freedom and human rights to take root. Meanwhile China, despite centuries of technological and scientific superiority to the West, languished under a parade of tyrannical regimes.

These are complex and difficult historical issues. Don’t expect any of them to be addressed in “Hero,” a movie of great style but dubious substance.

ADDENDA: Eugene Volokh and Ann Althouse both give "Hero" a negative review. Also, I just noticed that a commenter on the Catallarchy post (linked above) says the movie is propaganda for the PRC's "One China" policy vis-a-vis Taiwan, which is consistent with my complaint.

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Tom W. Bell: The Return

After Tom’s excellent guest-blogging stint last month, I asked him if he would like to join Agoraphilia as a permanent co-blogger, and he agreed. Expect to see new posts from Tom beginning this week.

Tom is all about value-added. Even during his guest period, Tom did his best to lure new readers and increase traffic to the site. And once he’d decided to join on as a regular co-blogger, he humbly suggested that I could possibly improve the site’s appeal with a few aesthetic changes – the results of which you can see now. I’m very pleased to have him aboard.

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Old and New Comments

I've now switched over to Blogger comments. In order to keep the existing comments from earlier posts, I've included an "old comments" link on each post as well. Ideally, I'd like to remove that link on new posts while leaving it intact on old ones -- but I couldn't find any way to do that.

If any tech-savvy reader out there can think of an elegant way to do what I want, please let me know. Here's a start: My Blogger template includes tags that look like [BlogItemCommentsEnabled] and [/BlogItemCommentsEnabled], which surround the link for Blogger comments. These tags make sure the Blogger comments link appears only if I've enabled comments for the post in question. So if there were some kind of "not" operator, which would have the effect of a [BlogItemComments-NOT-Enabled] tag, I could use it to make old comments show up only if Blogger comments had not been enabled for the post in question.

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Filler

The blogging muse abandoned me for a few days, but I did find a few links worth passing on.

1. Blargh Blog has extended my toilet roll analysis to cover rolls with any diameters for the tube and the whole roll.

2. While searching for something else, I ran across Eric’s blog. Just read the first few entries and you’ll get the idea.

3. Kieran at Crooked Timber wonders why Europeans get forearm crutches while Americans get underarm crutches – and then offers explanations in seven different paradigms. That he misses the simplest explanation only makes the joke funnier.

4. The Craphound explains why your silver-bullet proposal for fighting spam sucks (link courtesy of Tech Liberation).

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Toilet Training

Toilet paper rolls can fool you. You think you have a good quarter of a roll left, and next thing you know, you’re sitting on the pot trying to remember how to wipe your bum with just one square of paper.

The problem is that the toilet roll’s depth (i.e., thickness of paper on the roll) doesn’t diminish in a linear fashion. With an unused roll, you can get about three sheets in one rotation. But getting the same three sheets toward the end of the roll can take almost three rotations. A constant rate of use leads to an increasing rate of shrinkage in the remaining depth.

Using basic geometry and a measuring tape, I found the following:

• The diameter of a typical roll of toilet paper is about 10 cm, of which about 4 cm is space inside the tube and 6 cm is paper.
• The paper’s starting depth is about 3 cm (on each side of the tube), with 100% of the paper remaining.
• When the paper appears half gone, with 1.5 cm of depth, the actual fraction of paper remaining is only 39%.
• When the paper appears three-quarters gone, with .75 cm of depth, the actual fraction of paper remaining is only 17%.

But there’s more! I’ve derived formulae for the relationship between apparent fraction remaining (as measured by paper depth) and actual fraction remaining. Let X = apparent fraction remaining and Y = actual fraction remaining. Then:

• Y = [(3X + 2)^2 – 4]/21
• X = [sqroot(21Y + 4) – 2]/3

The first formula is probably the more useful, since you can use it to calculate the actual fraction left when you know the apparent fraction. The formulae still work for larger-than-usual rolls, if the tube is enlarged by the same proportion as the whole roll. (Otherwise, the formulae are a bit more complex.)

Now there’s news you can use!

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