I'll Have a Big Mac, Three Disposable Planets, and a Large Coke, Please

I am proud and happy to announce that if everyone on the planet lived like me, we would need 6.5 planets -- this according to BBC News Online's Disposable Planet Quiz.

I suppose I should feel suitably chastened, trade in my car for a bicycle, become a vegetarian, reduce my electricity usage to what I can pull from solar panels in my windows, and (most important of all) support the recommendations of the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development.

I'm not buying. The Eco-Footprint approach relies on the same faulty assumptions behind Paul Erlich's _Population Bomb_ (which was supposed to explode a couple of decades ago -- what happened?) and other Malthusian nightmare scenarios. The quiz's result is based on the number of "biologically productive global hectares" available in the world, relative to how many I allegedly consume. There are, the site says, only 1.8 such hectares per person worldwide, whereas the average American creates an "Ecological Footprint" of 9.7 (I beat the average with a whopping 11.7!). The problem is that this term "biologically productive global hectare" is based only on current technology. How many hectares are biologically productive (that is, usable for agriculture or similar purposes) and how much they produce will undoubtedly change in the future. As the Quiz authors admit in their explanatory page, "Technology can alter the productivity of land, or the efficiency with which resources are used to produce goods and services."

But, you might say, we don't know technology will improve, so we have to assume current technology. I don't buy that, because market economies create powerful incentives for technological innovation. But even if we assume current technology, the Eco-Footprint still underestimates the productivity of the planet, because "the calculations assume that the technologies used in resource exploitation are the average of those prevailing in the world today." Remember that the incredibly low-tech agricultural techniques used in many underdeveloped nations of the world are included in that average. In short, the Eco-Footprint tells us nothing about what the planet's productivity would be if currently available technologies became more widespread.

In addition, as Julian Simon argued in his book _The Ultimate Resource_, "resource" is not a physically defined entity. A resource is whatever human beings have found a way to use productively. Things not currently perceived as resources will be so perceived with future technologies. (Think about the value of silica before the invention of silicon chips and fiber optics.) This is yet another reason why the fixed pie assumptions underlying the Eco-Footprint approach just don't fly.

So eat, drink, drive, live in a big house, blast your A/C, turn up the TV, and be merry.

ADDENDUM: In case you want to find out *your* eco-footprint, you might need these conversions:
Area: 1 sq m = around 10 sq ft
Fuel efficiency: 2 km/lit = around1 mile/gal
Thanks to Ravi Marur for pointing me to the Quiz.

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In the Frying Pan of Life, We Are the Frogs

In a class on regulation that I took as an undergrad, this factoid stuck in my head: in a typical year, Congress will pass about 300 laws; in the same period of time, federal regulatory agencies will pass approximately 10,000 new regulations. Check out Mike Powers's Federal Register Watch to get the answer to the author's well-put question: "What freedoms have you lost this week?" I hope this article is a regular feature, not just a one-time broadside.

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The Most Annoying Article I've Read in a Long Time

Apparently there is nothing that proponents of government subsidies for the arts won't say to protect the NEA. The most recent and outrageous claim? The arts will save us from terrorism! In an article in today's Chicago Tribune (requires registration and will be inaccessible in a week) titled -- no joke -- "NEA fights for its life -- and ours," theater critic Michael Phillips defends the NEA by implying that our very lives may be at stake. Arthur Miller, quoted in the article, says, "The arts can do more to sustain the peace than all the wars, the armaments and the threats and the warnings of the politicians." Right, that's why NEA officials are lobbying to have their offices moved to the Pentagon. If only Osama had been watching more NEA-funded programming on PBS, the World Trade Center might still be standing.

Okay, maybe I'm misinterpreting the author's rather vague argument. Phillips's real point, I suppose, is that the arts help us to heal. We're a wounded nation, and what we really need to make us better is … more artists on the government teat. Let's take a poll of people in the Washington, D.C., area to find out what government action would put them most at ease right now -- I'm sure a majority of them will say, "More large sculptures to hide behind."

Phillips has other arguments, if you can call them that. In the all-the-cool-kids-are-doing-it category, he observes that England's government spends $639 million a year on the arts compared to our "pathetic" $126 million. "America is a rather larger country than England. Why does it think so much less of itself as a cultural entity?" Yup, the measure of how much we value something is how much we make taxpayers cough up for it.

You might think the things we value most would be the things we pay for voluntarily, with dollars from our own pocketbooks instead of our neighbors'. But according to Phillips and others of his ilk, our values are revealed by what we're forced to do, not what we choose to do. Hence the failure of the article to mention the scads of money spent by consumers and private foundations on the arts and entertainment every year. A report produced by the NEA itself places consumer spending on the performing arts at $9.8 billion and motion pictures at $8.1 billion in 2000. Yet the only private efforts that attract the author's attention are the vaunted "public-private alliances" that the NEA uses to leverage its funds.

Do Americans really want and need more art and culture in their lives? I don't know, but I do know how to find out. Let them decide how to spend their own money, and see how they spend it. As an added bonus, we'll actually know what kind of art they actually want to see -- as distinct from what self-appointed cultural critics and government bureaucrats want them to see.

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Time and Again

In her latest column, Marilyn vos Savant answers a reader's question about overtime pay options. "Our employer gives us a choice of overtime pay: 1) pay at 1½ times our hourly rate; or 2) compensatory time off at 1½ times our overtime hours worked [I assume this is paid vacation time]. My co-workers say comp time is a better deal, because no taxes dilute the time off: One gets 100% of what one earns. I argue that comp time is taxed too. Which choice of overtime (personal preference aside) has more 'bang for the buck'?"

Marilyn responds: "Getting overtime pay is a way better deal. The tax argument is weak because that logic justifies not even working at all. You could say, 'Why should I trade my hours for pay if I must give a part of that pay to the government when I could just stay at home and keep all of my time for myself?' In short, saving on your taxes is a financially unsound reason not to work, regardless of the number of hours."

This kind of reductio ad absurdum argument doesn't work very well in situations where people's preferences can change at the margin. What's true for the last hour of work is not necessarily true for the first. It's entirely possible that a tax rate that doesn't deter you from working your first hour will deter you from working your 40th hour. Nonetheless, it's true that the tax issue isn't really important in this case - although the reader, not Marilyn, gives the right reason: the tax is assessed on vacation pay, too. But Marilyn's claim that taking the overtime pay is a "way better deal" cannot be justified.

For simplicity, let's suppose that vacation days are taken the same week that an overtime hour is worked. If you take option A (overtime pay), you work 41 hours (40 regular hours and 1 overtime hour). If your wage is X, then your pay is 40X + 1.5x = 41.5X. The average wage is 41.5X/41 = 1.0123X. If you take option B (extra vacation days), you work 39.5 hours (40 regular hours, minus 1.5 vacation hours, plus 1 overtime hour). But you get paid for 40 regular hours (the overtime pay has been sacrificed for the extra vacation time), so your pay is 40X. The average wage is 40X/39.5 = 1.0127X.

Notice that the average wage is *higher* if you take the extra vacation time. Not much higher, granted -- if your wage is $10/hour, we're talking about less than half a cent. But that, indeed, is the point: there is almost no difference between the two policies, in terms of the average wage. And what negligible difference there is in the average wage points toward the extra vacation time. On what grounds could Marilyn claim that overtime pay is a "way better deal"? (Note that I'm not claiming that taking the overtime pay is a worse deal. It does result in a lower average wage, but total compensation is higher because of the larger number of hours worked. My point is that this is not clearly better or worse.)

Allow me to run a couple of objections off at the pass. First, maybe I'm incorrect in thinking the "comp hours" are paid vacation hours. Maybe they're days you can take off without pay. In that case, I agree that option B isn't very good -- it lets you work an extra hour now (with no pay) in return for a reduction in your work hours later (also with no pay). In fact, that offer seems so lousy that I can't imagine that's what the reader meant. If someone has another interpretation, I'd love to hear it.

Second, it might be objected that I should look at the marginal difference between the two options rather than looking at the average wage. Okay: The difference in hours between the options is 1.5 hours, and the difference in pay is 1.5X. So the marginal wage is 1.5X/1.5 = X, the regular hourly wage. The question, then, is whether you want to sell a little bit more labor for the same wage you've been selling it for all along. Is that obviously a good (or bad) deal, as Marilyn suggests? I think not. It looks like Marilyn has fallen for the fallacy of argumentum ad logicam: because the tax argument was defective, she thought the choice it was advanced to defend was also defective.

(BTW, Marilyn's column appears online here, but for some reason the letter in question does not appear. I read it in Parade magazine.)

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The Nuke Kids on the Block

So it seems that North Korea has been developing nuclear arms technology after all, despite swearing up and down back in 1994 that they wouldn't. Is anyone surprised? Frankly, I don't keep up with foreign affairs as much as I should, so if you'd asked me last week if North Korea had nukes, I would have said, "You mean there's a chance they don't? Really?"

In any case, this further confirms my belief that the nuclear genie is out of the bottle, and it's pretty pointless trying to cram it back in. Anyone who wants a nuke will have one, as Tom Lehrer observed decades ago, and there's unfortunately not a heckuva lot we can do about it. Nuclear non-proliferation policy strikes me as being a lot like gun control: it's mostly successful in keeping weapons out of the hands of people (or governments) not terribly inclined to use them anyway.

On a completely unrelated note, I'm wondering if the hit count on this page would increase substantially if I changed the name to "Agora-feel-ya."

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On the Dollar Value of Human Life

In a recent post to the Volokh Conspiracy, Eric Jaffe asks for a means of putting a value on human life: "no matter how crass it may seem, we eventually need some means of valuing lives (or more likely, life-years) and of comparing that value to other disparate values. We do this in any event, and at some point it would aid clear thinking to bring it out into the open a bit more. Society will "spend" lives on lots of things, and it would be nice if we did so with some amount of introspection rather than just by bumbling along."

Exactly right. Some method, even if only a rough-and-ready one, is needed for valuing lives. Saying that a life has infinite value sounds awful nice, but clearly we don't believe it -- for if we did, we would never take even the slightest risk to our own lives. If your death has a value of negative infinity, and there is even the smallest probability of death from whatever activity you'd like to do (driving, riding a roller coaster, eating rare meat, whatever), the expected value of the activity is also negative infinity. Anything multiplied by infinity is infinity, and no finite benefit could possibly be large enough to outweigh an expected loss of infinite magnitude.

So I will humbly suggest the economists' metric for valuing human lives. For any given risk to human life, find out the minimum amount of money it would take to induce the average human being to accept the risk; call this value X. If P is the probability of death from this particular risk, then solve for the value of life (V) using the following equation: PV = X. For example, if the probability of death created by some risky activity is 5%, and it would take $50,000 to persuade the average person to accept this risk, then the value of life is $1,000,000. This value of human life would not work for all purposes, of course; it depends, among other things, on the size of the risk. The dollar value needed to induce the acceptance of risk most likely increases at a greater rate than the size of the risk; the person willing to accept $50,000 for a 5% chance of death would probably need *more* than $100,000 for a 10% chance of death. In effect, the value of life we use in our calculations would be situation-specific, but not arbitrary.

No, I'm not joking. We cannot avoid the problem of weighing lives. Virtually every human activity involves some risk of death to someone, and risk can never be completely eliminated. It can sometimes be reduced (by spending increasing amounts of resources on safety measures, by reducing activity levels, and so on), but eventually our risk-reduction efforts are subject to diminishing returns. We have to spend more and more to achieve smaller and smaller reductions of risk, and it would be infinitely costly to reduce risk to zero. So the question is not whether to have risk or not, but how much to have. Placing an infinite value on human life does nothing to address that question.

(This proposal is certainly not my own idea; see almost anything in the work of Kip Viscusi, among others, for further details on this approach.)

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Federal Department of Being Your Mom

So Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson is telling fast food restaurants to serve healthier food, as if it were any of his damn business. I suppose he feels entitled by his job title to lecture people about proper eating habits. And to make it worse, he doesn't even respect us enough to lecture us (the eaters of fast food) directly -- instead, he tries to browbeat the producers of fast food into serving us food that we don't want. I doubt Republicans will make a stink about Thompson's audacity, because, well, Thompson is a Republican. But I'll bet they'd raise holy hell if a Democrat in the same office urged restaurants to go vegetarian.

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Occam's Eraser

A colleague of mine suggests a simpler theory of why so many people stink at math: "Math is hard, people are stupid." I don't think this explains everything (such as why so many otherwise intelligent people I know can't deal with math), but it probably explains more than either of the more complicated theories discussed below. There are different forms of intelligence, after all, and perhaps the kind of intelligence needed for math is just more scarce. Of course, the real explanation is probably a combination "all of the above."

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Emoter Voter

Next month, Californians will vote on Proposition 52, which would allow voter registration on election day. This proposal is presumably based on the bogus notion, propagated by journalists and pundits every election year, that maximizing votes cast is the great desideratum of electoral politics. But when it comes to votes, I'm much more concerned about their quality than their quantity. Other things equal, I prefer to be governed by voters who have taken the time to consider the issues and think about them. There's no way to check for a voter's understanding of the issues, of course, but one simple proxy is to see whether she even had the forethought to get registered at least 15 days before the election. It's far from a perfect correlation, but at least it's something.

Lest I be accused of being undemocratic, it's worth noting that advance registration excludes no one from voting except those who *exclude themselves*. Anyone who wants to vote (and meets the other requirements) can do so if she just thinks ahead. Advance registration does not discriminate on the basis of race, gender, or political viewpoint. Yes, it does impose a filter on voters, but what's the matter with that? Age and citizenship requirements also impose filters. We impose them because we think that, on the whole, the pool of voters meeting them will be marginally more informed and thoughtful than would a broader pool. (This does not mean that I fully agree with all existing voting requirements, however. Consider this thoughtful commentary on the voting rights of non-citizens.)

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Money for Puffing

A jury in California recently ordered Philip Morris to pay a whopping $28 billion settlement to a 64-year-old woman with lung cancer. She started smoking 50 years ago, and she blames her choice on the company's failure to warn her of the risk.

I'm not sure when the tobacco companies started putting health warnings on their products, so it might well have been less than 50 years ago. And it's also possible that the companies had internal studies indicating that smoking was even more damaging than was publicly known at the time, so I'll leave that to the jury as well. What really irks me about this and similar cases is the presumption that anyone who starts smoking is utterly incapable of stopping, regardless of what new information emerges. Nicotine addiction is regarded as a force so powerful that it erases all control and responsibility on the part of the addict. Yet there are probably millions of people who have stopped smoking over the last 50 years. No, it's not easy, but the difficulty doesn't erase the responsibility.

There's an old rule of common law known as the "last clear chance" doctrine that would seem to apply here. The paradigmatic case involves a victim who gets hit by a train while walking on the subway tracks. The victim should not have been there, but the train engineer nonetheless has a responsibility to stop the train if he sees the (potential) victim. If the engineer fails to take this "last clear chance" to stop the accident, then he (or his employer) will be held liable for at least part of the resulting damage. Normally, this doctrine is used to limit the contributory negligence of plaintiffs, thereby placing greater liability on defendants. But if you apply the same reasoning in the case of smoking, the doctrine points in the other direction. It seems to me that the smoker is in the position of the train engineer. Even if the tobacco company did something wrong (withholding relevant health information), the smoker herself had the last clear chance to prevent the damage. Shoot, she had the last *one hundred* clear chances to prevent the damage, even if we estimate that you can only try to stop smoking once every six months.

I'm not a lawyer, so perhaps I'm misinterpreting or misapplying the last clear chance doctrine. But my overall point can be made independently: your responsibility to do the intelligent thing, to take action to avoid becoming a victim, does not end just because somebody else has already done something wrong.

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Why Johnny Can't Integrate, By Parts

In her most recent column (Parade magazine, 13 October 2002), Marilyn vos Savant takes up the question of "why more people don't understand math better than they do." Her tentative answer: "I believe that much of the problem lies in the lack of logic and reasoning skills. Math is just logic with numbers and symbols attached, and success with it requires the ability to reason effectively. But children usually are taught *what* to think, not *how* to think." That's a good partial answer (and I don't think Marilyn intended her answer to be exhaustive), but it should be taken with at least a grain of salt. For many years, the fad in pedagogy has been to emphasize understanding rather than outcomes. As Tom Lehrer once put it, "New Math" was based on the notion that "the important thing is to understand what you're doing, rather than to get the right answer." The problem is, math is a field in which understanding and accuracy are bound up together. You can't have one without the other, and accuracy is one (not to say the only) viable indicator of understanding.

In any case, I want to suggest another reason that so many people don't understand math (and this reason is meant as a complement, not a substitute, for Marilyn's). Math is one of those disciplines that builds heavily on itself. If you don't get arithmetic, you won't get algebra; if you don't get algebra, you won't get trig; and so on. Students often learn to hate math because of one really lousy teacher, and after that they never really catch up. If your American history teacher is horrible, that won't cripple your efforts in World history; but if you algebra teacher is horrible, your geometry and trig teachers may never be able to rescue you. The point, then, is that math education is much more sensitive to failure at any point in the learning process.

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Brothers in Arms

In Dr. Joyce Brothers's syndicated column yesterday, she replied to a mother whose 13-year-old son admitted to lying. His father wanted to punish him severely by eliminating all after-school activities for two weeks, thus threatening the boy's chance of getting on the basketball team. And what, you ask, was the boy's terrible lie? "My son told me, in private, that he lied to protect his friend, who had stashed a small bit of marijuana behind a locker in a gym. My son happened to be there when a teacher found it, and my son didn't report his friend." The letter is not entirely clear, but apparently the "lie" must have been something like, "I don't know who put that weed there." The mother asked Dr. Brothers if she agreed that the father's punishment was too harsh.

Brothers's reply? "I do agree, because even though your son was wrong, his intentions were honorable. As long as you're certain that your son himself isn't using, I believe some lesser punishment would be more suitable." Well, the good Doctor is headed in the right direction, but I don't think she goes nearly far enough. A better response would have been: "I agree, because your son did nothing wrong. Your husband's reaction is one more symptom of how the crazed drug-war mentality warps and perverts our values. When every citizen, young or old, is conscripted into spying on his neighbors and reporting his friends in order to crack down on a largely harmless drug, I say it's time to reevaluate our priorities. We may have to tolerate the insanity of the Drug Czar and his army of anti-drug zealots, but we don't have to lend him our support. Give your son a pat on the back, praise him for his loyalty to his friend, and congratulate him on his nascent ability to distinguish good rules from stupid ones."

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Suffer the Little Children

This editorial about child labor in less developed countries makes the excellent point, which I might have hoped would be obvious, that the typical alternative to child labor is not hugs and puppies, but prostitution and begging. If you ban or boycott the industries that provide opportunities for better child labor, you just push the children into worse child labor.

But wouldn't I rather these kids be in school? Yeah, and people in hell want ice water, too. School, unfortunately, is typically not an option for the children in question. Never let the best be the enemy of the good.

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X is a Roman Numeral, Right?

Eugene Volokh comments on the discovery of a heretofore unknown quasi-planet that's even smaller and farther out than Pluto. Apparently they intend to name it Quaoar, something out of American (specifically, Southern Californian) Indian mythology. Would it be terribly Eurocentric of me to suggest a name from Roman mythology for the sake of pure consistency? It just doesn't seem right to have nine planets (or quasi-planets if Pluto's demotion is a fait accompli) from the Romans and one from something totally different. I was thinking Faunus (Roman equivalent of the Greek Pan) would be appropriate, given the entity's quasi-planet quasi-asteroid status.

Then again, we have four days of the week named after Norse gods and only one (Saturday) named after a Roman god, as well as two not named after gods at all, so perhaps they're aiming at consistency of inconsistency.

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Effective Gun Control: A Cock and John Bull Story?

Opponents of gun rights have for years claimed Great Britain as the paragon of effective gun control. An article by Joyce Lee Malcolm in the November 2002 issue of Reason Magazine (unfortunately not available at ReasonOnline) casts serious doubt on that claim. Although the rates of murder and rape are still much higher in the U.S. than in Great Britain, it turns out that Britain now has substantially higher violent crime rates in every other category, from assault to armed robbery to burglary. Moreover, the rise in violent crime across the pond has followed the passage of ever stricter gun control laws, most notably the outright ban of all handguns in 1997. The article observes that "[y]our chances of being mugged in London are now six times greater than in New York" (p. 22).

This is journalism, of course, not social science. It would take a more careful study (like John Lott's work on concealed carry laws in the U.S.) to convince me that gun control laws are really to blame for Britain's rise in crime. But a couple of factoids in the article jumped out at me. First, for those who would focus on the murder rate and ignore the rest, it's worth noting that Britain has always had a relatively low murder rate, even in the days before either country implemented gun control laws: "A government study for the years 1890-92, for example, found only three handgun homicides, an average of one a year, in a population of 30 million" (p. 22). (I would be curious to know the homicide rate with all forms of gun.)

Second -- and this is the point that really piqued my interest -- the murder rate is calculated differently in Britain. "The FBI asks police to list every homicide as murder, even if the case isn't subsequently prosecuted or proceeds on a lesser charge, making the U.S. numbers as high as possible. By contrast, the English police 'massage down' the homicide statistics, tracking each case through the courts and removing it if it is reduced to a lesser charge or determined to be an accident or self-defense, making the English numbers as low as possible" (p. 25). Even so, the two countries' murder rates have been converging. In 1981, ours was 8.7 times as high; in 1995, 5.7 times as high; and in the most recent study (no year stated), 3.5 times as high (p. 25).

As a responsible academic, I should point out that none of this constitutes definitive proof that gun control causes more crime. Further research is required to separate out the effects of (for instance) business cycles, different policing strategies, severity of criminal punishments, etc. Rather, it means that gun controllers can no longer (fairly) make the opposite claim that gun control reduces crime. Their most famous exemplar isn't so exemplary after all.

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Makin' More Copies

Julian suggests a possible exception to my argument below about retroactive copyright extensions, and I think he's probably right, though I have doubts about the empirical significance of the special case he describes. Essentially, the creative works in question would need to have three characteristics: (a) they are improvements on existing works, and the improvements have a relatively high cost for the first production; (b) the resulting improved work has a relatively low (zero or nearly zero) cost of reproduction thereafter; and (c) the improved work is not copyrightable in its own right.

There a couple of reasons I doubt the empirical significance of cases like this. First, there are various ways in which condition (c) can be avoided. For instance, if you convert an old document into an html document without any other modification, that's probably not copyrightable -- but if you include your own original annotations, I believe it is copyrightable (again, assuming I'm not mistaken about the operation of copyright law). Similarly, cartographers distinguish their own maps from others' for copyright purposes by adding fictional towns and other unique features to their maps. Second, I have a hard time thinking of good examples that satisfy condition (a) without violating condition (c). It's interesting that Julian gives the example of converting old works into html form and posting them on the web, because Eldred (the petitioner in this case) is a guy who had been doing that very thing with works like The Scarlet Letter without remuneration, and the 1998 copyright extension prevented him from doing the same with more recent works. Point being, the initial costs are often low enough in cases like this that some people are apparently willing to incur them for free, which reduces the significance of the problem (if any). It strikes me that this is probably the same phenomenon that Julian (in a previous blog post that I can't seem to locate) identifies as the reason open-source programming can overcome the incentive problem: as the number of interested parties grows, the likelihood of having at least one person willing to provide a relatively low-cost service purely for reputational gain approaches one.

Nonetheless, I concede that there is a theoretical possibility of cases that meet all three criteria. Perhaps that's why constitutional scholars seem to be placing more emphasis on the freedom of speech challenge. If there is some chance that the law serves some economic function other than enriching the holders of copyrights about to expire, the Supreme Court might be willing to defer to the legislature on the interpretation of the Constitution's intellectual property clause. But a freedom of speech challenge means that the government must satisfy a standard higher than existence of a theoretical possibility in order to justify the restriction on expressive activity. At the very least, the retroactive extensions would seem to fail to meet the "narrowly tailored" requirement: they grant extended monopoly protection to all works whose copyright hasn't yet expired, regardless of whether they fit in the special case Julian has described.

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That's What Fiends Are For

Thanks to my old buddy Julian Sanchez for giving my blog a shout out on his. Julian's blog was, by the way, one of the blogs that inspired to me to create my own.

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The Supreme Courtmeister, Makin' Copies

I'm no constitutional scholar, but I think the petitioners' claim in Eldred v. Ashcroft makes eminent sense on economic grounds. The purpose of copyright (and other forms of intellectual property) is to "promote the progress of science and useful arts," as the Constitution puts it in Article I, section 8. This is consistent with the standard justification on grounds of economic efficiency, which is that the production of ideas is subject to a public good problem: once an idea is produced, anyone can use it without charge, meaning that the creator can't reap the full benefits of his creation (because others can copy the idea repeatedly, dissipating most or all of the profits). Copyrights create a temporary monopoly that allows the creator to claim some of those benefits after all, thus giving a greater incentive to create new ideas. Of course, monopolies have their own efficiency problems -- specifically, producing too little of the associated goods at too high a price -- which is why the term needs to be limited in time. Now, there can be a useful debate about the appropriate length of the copyright term, and there's no simple answer to that question. But what is clearly inefficient about the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998 (challenged in this case) and similar extension laws is the *retroactive* extension of copyrights on existing works. Retroactive extensions do nothing to encourage the creation of new works; they merely increase the monopoly inefficiency in their reproduction. In short, retroactive extensions are all cost, no benefit.

But I recently encountered an argument to the effect that retroactive extensions might serve some legitimate economic purpose after all. From an article (available at here if you have a subscription) by David Streitfeld in the L.A. Times Magazine of 22 September:

"Peermusic had acquired the catalog of Hoagy Carmichael and was working to 'rejuvenate it," as they say in the business. The studios were reacquainted with songs such as 'Stardust' and 'Georgia on My Mind'; negotiations were underway with a store chain to sell a line of products based on Carmichael's romantic allure; a musical is in the works. [paragraph] But if Bono falls, 'Stardust' goes in the public domain immediately, and 'Georgia' follows in three years. 'There's no incentive for us to do what we're doing if we don't have the opportunity to earn renumeration [sic]," says chief executive Ralph Peer II."

This argument sounds right at first but doesn't withstand scrutiny. If Peermusic creates new works of art based on Carmichael, such as a new musical or new artwork for T-shirts, that material is (unless I'm quite mistaken about the operation of copyright law) copyrightable. The retroactive extension of the copyright on Carmichael's work would only assure that Peermusic and other who wish to use it for new creative works would have to pay for it. That might be good from Peermusic's standpoint because it keeps out some of their competitors -- but it's bad for the consumers, who will be better served by many companies instead of just one providing them with reproductions and derivatives of Carmichael's work. Any reduction in Peermusic's incentives is more than balanced by the reduced cost to other companies that might wish to engage in similar activity.

An analogy: What if Whitney Houston were the only pop singer currently producing Christmas albums with old (public domain) Christmas songs on it? Her profits would probably be higher if she could exclude other pop singers from making similar albums, so naturally she would favor a law that makes it more expensive for them to do so. Allowing other singers to use old Christmas songs would reduce Houston's profits and hence her incentive to record those songs -- but the overall effect would be more pop singers doing more Christmas albums, to the benefit of consumers. The only justification for copyrights in this case is to encourage the creation of *new* Christmas songs --but retroactive copyright extensions do nothing of the sort.

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Bilingual Education and Other Non-Debates

I ran across this article in favor of school choice on the School Reformers website. It would be more persuasive if its chosen target were something other than an uncited article in Money magazine printed "some years ago." Still, the author makes a point not repeated often enough: "But, even if, to quote a former Pennsylvania Secretary of Education, 'every school a good school' were the norm, individuals should still be able to select one rather than another. Schools may be good without being identical or equally able to serve diverse interests."

Yes, school choice would help contain costs. Yes, school choice would tend to improve performance according to the usual measures (e.g., standardized testing). But the point here is that school choice allows … how can I put this … choice! Competition among schools offers the opportunity to escape the one-size-fits-all solutions offered by the public school monopoly. Consider the panoply of educational issues that currently masquerade as policy debates: bilingual education, single-sex education, mandatory uniforms, teaching of Black English (a.k.a. Ebonics), etc. Why should such matters as these be decided by the state legislature? In a system of school choice, parents could choose among the alternatives, selecting the school with the combination of rules and pedagogy that suits them best.

As just one example, take the case of bilingual education versus linguistic immersion. The real issue, I think most people on both sides would agree, is which method of instruction actually works better at educating non-English speakers. I don't claim to know which method is superior, but my strong suspicion is that it depends crucially on the individual student. So why the rancorous debate? Because everyone involved knows that the public schools will adopt a single policy for everyone. But it doesn't have to be that way. Allow school choice, and see which methods of language instruction pass the market test. Maybe only one method would survive, because schools that adopt it produce superior results and thereby attract more students (and imitators). Or maybe -- and this is my prediction -- there would be an equilibrium in which the market provides both types of language instruction, just as some colleges focus on liberal arts while other focus on professional and technical education. Take the same line of argument, replace bilingual education with any of the other issues above, wash, rinse, and repeat.

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The Apologia

So I might as well start by explaining the title. I notice that others have used the word agoraphilia to mean a variety of things, including arousal from having sex in public places. Can't say I'm opposed to that, but the origin of the title is different. In 1994, when Clinton was pushing his plan to nationalize healthcare, I read an article (can't remember the source) about various Congressional healthcare proposals. The author observed that what all the plans, including Clinton's, suffered from was "agoraphobia." He didn't mean fear of open places -- the usual definition of that word -- but fear of the marketplace. The Agora was, after all, where the ancient Greeks engaged in commerce (while fending off gadflies like Socrates). Well, if someone who fears the market is an agoraphobe, it stands to reason that an avid free marketeer like myself must be an agoraphile.

An added bonus: philosopher of science Karl Popper often referred to modern, liberal (in the broader sense of that term) civilization as "the open society." So even if one interprets agoraphilia to mean the love of open places -- not just the marketplace -- there's still a sense in which the term is appropriate.

And as long as we're having fun with ancient Greek, I've always been amused that the original meaning of the word "apology," as in Plato's "Apologia," was a defense or explanation -- not an admission of fault or regret. Thus the name of the current post.

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