Taxonomy of the Tax on Me

Looks like the Treasury Department is toying with the idea of implementing a consumption tax to replace the income tax. Ideally, that's a great idea. The current system, which effectively double taxes interest income (you get taxed once on the principal and then again on the interest itself), discourages savings and investment relative to consumption. I have heard some libertarians oppose switching to a consumption tax on grounds that it biases people against consumption in contravention to their true time preferences. But this argument is analytically incorrect, for the reason indicated parenthetically above. Paradoxical as it may sound, the consumption tax is neutral to the savings-consumption trade-off, whereas the income tax is biased.

However, I'm less than sanguine about the administration's planned approach. Instead of a straight-up sales tax, or a 100% income-tax deduction for savings and investment, they are leaning toward a value-added tax (VAT). The problem with a VAT is that it's not the least bit transparent. When consumers go to the store and buy goods, they will observe only the tax on the last bit of value added to their goods by the retailer; they will not see the accumulated effect of the tax on all the intermediate stages of the good. That's a bad idea. Taxpayers should regularly be made aware of exactly how many pounds of flesh they must hand over to the government, if only to know how pissed off they should be.

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False Advertising

Sunday evening I saw a political advertisement in favor of Prop 47. It starts with the talking head of Larry McCarthy, president of the California Taxpayers' Association (Cal-Tax), saying, "Prop 47 makes schools a priority, and it does so without raising taxes, and it does so through accountability. … Prop 47 is one of these rare opportunities where taxpayers and schools and kids and parents all can win." It ends with the following screen:
YES ON 47
BETTER SCHOOLS
SMALLER CLASS SIZES
(without new taxes)

What, pray tell, is this amazing plan that will improve the public schools without raising taxes? School vouchers, maybe? Charter schools? Nope -- Prop 47 would approve a new $13 billion bond issue by the state of California, with the money reserved for public schools construction and renovation projects. To claim this plan wouldn't raise taxes is disingenuous at best. If the state of California borrows money now, it has to pay it back later. Where will that money come from? Taxpayers, of course. At some point in the future, legislators will have to either (a) raise taxes, or (b) reduce spending on other programs to free up the necessary tax revenue. Just like any other new spending proposal.

McCarthy defends his claim like so: "In contrast to public finance insanity at the state and local level in California, Proposition 47 guarantees planning, cost containment, accountability and solid management in the spending of tax dollars for schools." But this is true only for the *new* funds raised by the Proposition. So far as I can tell, the Proposition does nothing to improve the efficiency with which existing funds (for education or anything else) are used. So even if the new funds are used with sparkling efficiency, public spending will still rise by the amount of the bond issue.

McCarthy continues: "It is our opinion that the only way this bond is a tax increase is to assume that, within the $120 billion a year in state and local taxes already paid, there is no opportunity to set different priorities. It is to say there is no chance to eliminate fraud and outrageous waste of tax dollars." Waste and fraud are, of course, rampant in the state government. But Prop 47 does not one blessed thing to remedy that situation! Providing the state with more funds to allocate creates no incentive to use existing funds more efficiently. Essentially, McCarthy's claim is that Prop 47 won't require new taxes *if* the state suddenly cleans up its act by eliminating waste and fraud from the budget. But if the state did that, then a new bond issue would be unnecessary, as the construction and renovation funds could come out of the savings.

Shame on McCarthy and Cal-Tax for false advertising. Perhaps they think Prop 47 is really a good idea, because the educational gains are worth the expense. If so, they should say so explicitly, instead of deliberately misleading voters into thinking they can have a free lunch.

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Stand Down

Back in 1992 or so, when I was still an undergrad, I attended an abortion rally in Washington, D.C. Apparently abortion rights were being threatened in some way at the time, though I really don't recall how anymore. I was (and still am) a supporter of abortion rights, so I went, and never have I felt more out of place in my life. The organizers of the rally turned out to be hard-core leftists with whom I shared almost nothing except our position on abortion. Indeed, I think a substantial number of the organizers were even communists (no exaggeration). During their speeches, they spent more time talking about the need for federally funded childcare, expanded welfare benefits, affirmative action for women and minorities, and a laundry list of other left-wing causes than they spent talking about abortion. I haven't attended a rally of any kind since.

That was a very long-winded way of pointing out that the most vocal advocates of an important cause can sometimes drive away potential supporters by sending the false impression that only certain types of people (specifically, radical left-wingers) support the cause. Such is the case with opposition to the invasion of Iraq. The most prominent anti-war activists often turn out to be communists, anti-globalization zealots, and so on, and this creates the false impression that opposing invasion of Iraq is a fringe position. But in truth, opponents of making war on Iraq come from across the political spectrum and from multiple ideologies. Bringing them together is the raison d'etre for Stand Down, a coalition blog whose purpose is to unite reasonable opponents of war from a panoply of political viewpoints. Take a look - it should be worth your while.

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IP Freely

Julian takes issue with libertarians (and others) who place intellectual property rights on the same plane as other forms of property. He contends that copyrights and patents "are not genuine property," and he worries that "we diminish the concept of property when we attempt to extend it beyond its rightful sphere."

Now, I'm with Julian and Larry Lessig in thinking that IP rights shouldn't be extended indefinitely and retroactively. But I don't take that position because IP rights are not really property at all. On the contrary, the only reason I support IP at all is that it's quite similar to regular property in the most relevant respects. I would not claim that IP rights are identical to the run-of-the-mill property rights, as there are significant differences -- but then again, there are significant differences even within traditional property rights. Property rights in land are different from property rights in water. Property rights in movable items are different from property rights in real estate. Fee simple ownership is different from ownership of the mineral estate. Self-ownership is different from world-ownership. Different rules apply for the definition and enforcement of all these different sorts of property.

Julian must have in mind some definition of property that includes all of these types of right, but excludes IP. I'm curious to know what that definition is. Property is not, after all, a Platonic form. Property is a catch-all term that refers to a variety of rules and institutions that serve the function of aligning economic incentives. And in this sense, IP and traditional property rights have much in common. Why, for instance, is it generally desirable for land to be owned privately? One huge reason is that without rights of exclusion, most any productive use of land would create positive externalities. If I cultivated apple trees, passersby could grab as many as they wanted, thus reducing the return to my investment of time, effort, fertilizer, etc. The "passerby tax" would induce me to plant fewer apple trees and spend less effort tending them. Similarly, the absence of copyrights would reduce my incentive to create new and interesting creative works. When the benefits of my effort (of whatever variety) are reduced by the free consumption of others, I lack an efficient incentive to expend that effort in the first place. Property is a means of internalizing the positive externalities.

Julian asserts that "the core of property -- which is in the first instance property in labor -- is the right to enjoy the direct benefits of that labor. It is emphatically not the right to prevent anyone else from enjoying the positive externalities of that labor, or indeed, to socialize the costs of internalizing those benefits." But why should we identify this one aspect of property, enjoyment of "direct" benefits, as its "core"? I'm not even sure what a "direct" benefit of labor is. Arguably, it might be the pure joy of using your hands (or brain) to create something, in which case we have an argument against virtually any form of property except self-ownership. All benefits of labor are in some sense indirect, so the question is how far we wish to extend ownership over the benefits.

Moreover, ownership of direct benefits of one's labor is an incredibly weak justification for property rights, which (if treated as a necessary condition for existence of property) would invalidate ownership of any asset that wasn't homesteaded through the "mixing of labor." This position would rule out the possibility of owning undeveloped assets such as forests. Say goodbye to the Nature Conservancy and other organizations that try to protect environmental amenities through private ownership.

J. then argues that another person's use of an idea I've created does not constitute "interference" with my well-being, because "I am made no worse off if some third party hears a song I've written, and plays it for her own enjoyment." Again, a very similar point could be made with respect to many traditional property interests. For example, if I drain a swamp on a piece of land, thus turning it into a great picnicking spot, I am not harmed by the picnickers' activities, at least if there are few enough of them. But denying my rights to the former swamp would substantially reduce incentives for people like me to drain swamps -- or make other land improvements -- in the first place.

I'll skip the discussion of the constitutional basis of IP, because it's obviously true that the origin of IP is not the same as the origin of other property rights, and move on to the question of whether IP is different because it creates a (temporary) monopoly. This, again, is not fundamentally different from other kinds of property. If I homestead a piece of land and put a fence around it, I claim a monopoly on that land. This monopoly may allow me to reap economic profit, particularly if the land is unique in some way. Yes, it's possible for other people with other pieces of land to compete some of my profits away, but that's also true for IP: other creative works can reduce the profitability of one's copyright. The question is how unique the asset is, and that question applies equally to both IP and traditional property.

Admittedly, IP does differ from traditional property in important ways. From an economic standpoint, the most salient difference is that ideas are non-rivalrous: their use by one person does not diminish the use by others. This is the "interference" point mentioned earlier, and it is the main reason that IP rights must be limited in duration. But as significant as that difference may be, I see no reason why it should be chosen as the essential distinction between "property" and "not property." There are, after all, some instances of traditional property that exhibit non-rivalry as well, such as bridges and roads in areas with relatively low population, or movie theaters on weekday afternoons. Should these be denied property status as well? I suggest we should instead recognize that property rights serve a variety of incentive-related purposes, only one of which is the rationing of resources subject to rivalrous consumption.

[As an aside, I should not be misinterpreted as agreeing with the arguments in Sonia Arrison's article that motivated Julian's reply. I think her bottom line is correct, but her reasons are less than sufficient.]

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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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