The discussions of copying norms and new bloggers reminds me of something. Well, several things. First, it reminds me to urge you to check out the Economics of Contempt blog, a new econ blog. Its shadowy proprietor and I had a rather . . . er . . . spirited exchange last Thursday regarding the Coase Theorem (If you're not familiar with the topic, I highly recommend this interview with Professor Coase from Reason). He argued that libertarians invoke the Coase Theorem much too freely, when it cannot actually be fully applied to the real world.
I replied that while I think the theorem does have a lot of valuable insight to offer into economic and regulatory problems, I quite agree that it is far too often applied profligately. In a world with unequal endowments and non-zero transaction costs, you need a lot of modifications before it can be usefully applied. However, in the conversation in question, zero transaction costs were among the more reasonable assumptions being made--it was one of those conversations where by the time you're done, you've had to give everyone an in-brain computer in order to fully explore the basic philosophical questions. I didn't mention this because it wasn't really germane to the point of the post, which was about normative justice intuitions, not The Coase Theorem and Land Use.
He updated his post, and we parted friends.
The next day, as you may recall, Kathy G. unleashed a rather . . . er . . . spirited criticism of the same post, with basically the same point: the Coase Theorem isn't realistic. We . . . well, I wouldn't say we parted friends.
Which brings me to the second thing I was reminded of: an email I received from the Economics of Contempt's shadowy proprietor the other day.
I saw that you linked to a post by Kathy G in which she trashes you for not having the courtesy of linking her. Well, I thought you'd be interested to know that Kathy G actually stole her post about the Coase theorem from me (I write the Economics of Contempt blog that you commented on yesterday). I looked at my blog traffic last night, and I thought it was odd that there was someone from Chicago who had looked at my post about your use of the Coase theorem 5 times, because I really didn't think it was THAT interesting. And when I read Kathy G's post about the Coase theorem and saw that she used the exact same obscure Ronald Coase quote from 1981 that I used, it was a dead give-away. I looked at her traffic, and sure enough, she has the same IP address as the person who looked at my post about the Coase theorem 5 times yesterday. I find it hugely ironic that she would excoriate you for not linking to her on one day, and then lift the majority of her post from someone else without linking to them the next day!
I honestly don't care whether Kathy G links to me or not -- I had never even heard of her until today. I started writing my blog to amuse myself, not to gain internet recognition. And I'm not big on calling people out for their linking practices, since I'm a little unsure of the proper linking etiquette myself. But if you're going to attack someone for not following the proper linking etiquette, you should probably wait at least 24 hours before you steal a post from another blog without linking to it.
In a follow up email, he added:
Here's why I'm 99.99% positive Kathy G was the person from Chicago who looked at my post 5 times yesterday (other than the fact that she says on her blog that she's from Chicago). The person's IP address was [redacted], and that was also the IP address of the first two entries from Chicago I saw on Kathy G's blog this morning. That person found my post the first time by searching for "'preference maximization' and coase," and Kathy G harped on your use of the phrase "preference maximization." The third time that person looked at my post she had searched for "mcardle coase transaction."
Kathy G used the same two quotes from Coase that I did, including the really obscure 1981 quote. Of course, Kathy G also quoted Coase's next sentence from the 1981 essay, which I didn't, but that's probably because I LINKED TO the paper when I quoted it.
I wrote in my post: "The Coase theorem "dictates"? ... It's a neat trick, and a lot of libertarians I know use it, but it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the Coase theorem."
Kathy G wrote in her post: "But to argue that the Coase theorem "dictates" anything in the real world, as per McArdle, is to grossly misunderstand it."
I think that's more than enough to say it was her, but you're probably a better judge of this kind of thing.
Note to all new bloggers: this sort of thing is generally, at least in the blogging circles in which I travel, considered to be rather poor form. Worse, indeed, than accidentally neglecting to provide a link to someone you have already conceded to exist.
That doesn't excuse me for forgetting the link--I shouldn't be so careless on that score. But if you use substantial parts of another blogger's post, you should mention that you found it somewhere else. Direct paraphrase without even attempting attribution is regarded with less horror by bloggers than it is by English professors . . . but not all that much less horror. Especially since linking a source is a lot faster and easier than footnoting.
The answer to the question I posed in the title is, basically, "Always!" As Nick Gillespie noted yesterday, "there's no cost to acknowledging sources—if anything, it's a sign of erudition and plugs an author into a broader network of thinkers." Besides, as he also noted, if you go over the line you're very likely to be caught.
As expected, the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates by another 25 basis points, and signalled a pause. Beyond that, who knows? The Fed wants to signal simultaneously that it will do whatever it takes to keep the financial system liquid--and that it will be tough on inflation. These goals are mutually exclusive. Monetary policy for the next six months will respond to whichever happens to worry the board most at the moment.
I don't mind legalizing polygamy (though I disapprove of the practice), but would such legalization prevent an FLDS type of episode? Maybe the goals of the perpetrators are rape, abuse, and power-mad intimidation, rather than polygamy per se ("polygamy: merely a means to an end.") In that case polygamy legalization won't limit their ability to set up isolated, authoritarian, quasi-state cult compounds for their nefarious purposes.
Alternatively, if illicit polygamy is a marketing point that draws people to the compound in the first place, legalization may well help. Oddly legalization helps most when the religious belief (in polygamy) is relatively sincere and the abuse accumulates through evolutionary processes of increasingly bestial behavior; legalization helps least when the religious belief in polygamy is for cynical reasons of control and could easily be replaced by some other marketing point.
Is there entry into the market for polygamist cults? The FDLS and similar churches are no doubt attractive to a certain sort of man, but the leaders of cults generally want to suppress the supply of males competing with them. It seems to me that these cults largely increase by high birthrates, exit prevention for female members (via early impregnation), and forced exit for young males.
What little I know about cults indicates that male leaders do not advertise their sexual exploitation of female members. In the case of plural marriage, Joseph Smith didn't start practicing it until the mid-1830s, when his church already had several thousand members; other church leaders adopted the practice in the 1840s, when the group was more established and the membership numbered in the tens of thousands. The practice was not mentioned to the public until ten years after that. This would seem to indicate that the practice evolves in authoritarian, remote religious communities to which people are attracted for other reasons.
As I understand the history of the Mormon Church--though Will knows it much better than I--the Mormons were getting attacked by their neighbors and migrating to ever-more-remote locations long before said neighbors knew about the multiple wives. They didn't announce the practice publicly until after the trek. And they renounced it when they needed to be integrated into the rest of the country.
If polygamy were legal, the men in the FLDS still couldn't do what they wanted, which is to have sex with young girls. For that, you need mental control over the girls and their parents. I don't see the legality of the practice as reducing the incentives to act as the leadership did--they weren't hiding from the law, they were hiding from anyone who would tell women they had other options. Besides, from what I understand, polygamy is rarely the only weird and illegal practice that such cults engage in.
Like Tyler, I don't mind legalizing polygamy, though I'm pretty sure I'd never consider the practice personally. But I'm skeptical that this would prevent things like the FLDS's 13-year-old brides.
Update Incidentally, that post has the funniest comment I've read all week:
d.cous., if a society allows young men to study engineering, it does not care enough about 'disenfranchised young men' to warrant a ban on polygyny.
Of course, I immediately thought of this internet treasure:
Woo: apparently, the DC metro area is going to get the Silver Line to Dulles after all. This is great news--not only do we desperately need more rail capacity, but also, rail to the airport is one of the most obvious slam dunks. No one wants to pay $100 to park their car for a week.
Boo: on the other hand, the line is only going to run to Falls Church. This is the same stupid decision that New York made, running the airport train to Jamaica rather than into Penn Station or Grand Central. No one wants to change trains six times with a week's worth of luggage, either. Plus, the DC metro system desperately needs more central capacity. It's time to bite the damn bullet and build another bridge or tunnel across the Potomac.
National Geographic's Yourshot section, where a friend works, has been nominated for a Webby award. Please go vote for them, not because it's run by my friend (well, not entirely for that reason), but beacuse it's an awesome idea: National Geographic lets amateur photographers send in their photos, and publishes the best of them on the web. This kind of interaction between amateurs and major media outlets should be encouraged wherever possible, especially when the result is the dissemination of really neat photographs.
I'm with James--I think Al Franken made an honest mistake, and that mistake was trusting his accountant not to be an utter fool. It's all very well to say that he should have checked, but tax law is insanely complicated and getting more so every year--most of us don't have time to be a tax attorney and a success in another career.
I would wager that most of the people piling on do not have a great deal of 1099 income earned in a variety of states. It took me basically an entire day to do my taxes this year, and I only had to deal with two, New York and DC. Allocating income between them, calculating the differing deductions for each state, figuring out which business deductions I was entitled to against my freelance income, and which could be applied against my salary . . . hours of fun for the entire family. And the problem is getting worse every year as the tax codes get more and more complicated at the state, federal, and local levels.
Serves you right for doing them yourself, one of you is about to say. Get an accountant.
For the longest time, the conventional wisdom in analyst circles was that auto manufacturers were "banks with a manufacturing subsidiary". Detroit didn't make its profits on the cars--they were sort of like loss leaders for the juicy auto loan business.
That's why it's been so surprising watching GM's travails with the spinoff of GMAC. Two years ago, GM sold 51% of the business to private equity firm Cerberus, the same folks who bought Chrysler. The deal was not only supposed to give GM some much-needed cash, but also boost GMAC's credit rating by severing it from the auto giant's woes.
This has not quite worked out as planned. GMAC's debt dipped into junk territory thanks to its residential mortgage unit. Meanwhile, it is still hoovering money out of GM's balance sheet. Last March, the company had to transfer $1 billion to the ailing finance company to shore up its financials, as per the terms of its deal with Cerberus.
This morning GM announced a $3.3 billion dollar loss. (To put this in perspective, they lost basically the entire annual GDP of Rwanda in a single quarter.) Hundreds of millions of it stems from losses at GMAC; hundreds of millions more are related to ongoing problems at Delphi, the auto parts supplier that GM spun off a few years ago.
Perhaps the most frightening part is that this is actually better than many analysts were expecting--the massive hemorrhage has brought forth cautious optimism. Now if only they could make a car someone wanted to drive . . .
One of the aspects of the rising price of fossil fuels that I haven't seen written about much is the fact that chemical fertilizer is largely made from natural gas. That's going to put pressure on food prices--and it suggests a natural end to the green revolution, even if that end is some time away.
The New York Times has an article on that subject today. Rising demand for grain, especially to produce the meat demanded by newly richer Asians, is bumping up against short-term inelasticity of supply. Obviously, that's going to feed back into food prices.
I wonder if it won't also start feeding back into clothing prices--cotton is an extremely nitrogen hungry plant. And I believe that most synthetic fibers are also derived from fossil fuels.
When I think of the oil economy, I usually think of innovations in transportation, or electric power. I rarely consider how much oil has freed us from the basic concern about eating and putting clothes on our back.
This conversation about drug legalization was long and wide ranging. One possible view is that gangs exist wherever there is poverty; if it isn't drugs, it's sugar or milk or whatever they can control. The essential ingredient for gangs, in this view, is a large supply of young men with few alternatives in the legal economy.
In the middle was Tyler, arguing that legalizing drugs would reduce crime, but not by that much, because the gangs would persist.
On the other side was me, arguing that the crime reduction benefits should be large.
I've been thinking a lot about this over the last few days. It still seems to me that gangs are hard to support when there is good policing. Gangs flourish in places like Rio because the police force is corrupt and doesn't care about the favela inhabitants. They flourish in drugs and prostitution because contracts are not legally enforceable--if you can't sue to get the drugs you're owed, you need to use violence. Since there is safety in numbers, you get a gang.
As it happens, I'm reading The Bottom Billion, Paul Collier's excellent book on poverty traps in the developing world. As you can imagine, it has something to say on the subject of lawless bands of young men preying on the populace. A lot of it backs up the first position. "Civil war," Collier says, is much more likely to break out in low-income countries: halve the starting income of the country and you double the risk of civil war."
He expands:
. . . according to psychologists, on average about 3 percent of any population have psychopathic tendencies, so you can be sure that some of those in the recruitment line will be psychopaths. Others will be attracted by the prospect of power and riches, however unlikely; if the reality of daily existence is otherwise awful, the chances of success to not have to be very high to be alluring. Even a small chance of the good life as a successful rebel becomes worth taking, despite the high risk of death, because the prospect of death is not so much worse than the prospect of life in poverty.
Later he notes:
So what characteristics did make people more likely to engage in political violence? Well, the three big ones were being young, being uneducated, and being without dependents. Try as one might, itis difficult to reconcile these characteristics of recruitment with an image of a vanguard of fighters for social justice.
And even if you nominally resolve the source of the conflict, that doesn't necessarily end the violence:
Once a war has begun, the economic damage undoes the growth achieved during peace. Worse, even aside from this economic damage, the risk of futher war explodes upward. Civil war leaves a legacy of organized killing that is hard to live down. Violence and extortion have proved profitable for the perpetrators. Killing is the only way they know to earn a living. And what else to do with all those guns? . . . the emerging pattern seems to be that guns become cheap during conflict because so many get imported through official and semiofficial channels that a proportion of them leak onto the informal market. The legacy of conflict is cheap Kalishnikovs . . .
The end of the political fighting ushers in a boom in homicides. Presumably, this is part of a wider surge in violent crime.
So at least in the early stages, this seems to indicate that legalizing drugs wouldn't reduce crime too much; indeed, by disrupting a somewhat stable market, it might increase crime.
But over the long run, I think Collier's evidence supports my position. At the same time that he tells us that rebels are often attracted to money and power, he adds:
The key point of Weinstein's research is that in the presence of natural resource wealth--oil, diamonds, or perhaps drugs--there are credible prospects of riches, so that some of the young men in the queue to join will be motivated by these prospects . . .
Slightly later on, he says:
And where are the violent groups most likely to form? One might think it would be in the districts that are most deprived of social amenities, for that is supposedly what it is all about--oil wealth being stolen by the oil companies and the federal government instead of being used for the benefit of local communities. But Aderoju found that . . . there was no relationship between the social amenities that a district possessed and its propensity to political violence. Instead, the violence occurred in the districts with oil wells.
This suggests that an opportunity for economic rents--like, say, a line on a way to import a highly illegal substance--at the very least increases the supply of potential gang members, and gang violence.
There's also the fact that we seem to be exporting our drug-related violence elsewhere; according to the book, 95% of the world's supply of hard drugs are produced in conflict countries. Obviously, this is in part because conflict generates a zone outside of government control--but given the observation that violence clusters in areas where there are economic rents, it seems plausible to say that profits from the drug trade also increase the incentives for violence.
So I stand by my conclusion that the social benefits of legalization would be large, both here and abroad. It would not be without cost--I find it hard to believe that you wouldn't see more drug addicts if we legalized them. But the spectacular violence associated with vice trades, and the glamor drug rents lend to criminality, seem to outweigh the social cost of more drug abuse.
Of course, this does raise the question of what all those young men will do with themselves.
Update One participant emails:
On the one hand you argued that the drug wars implied huge wasted rents leading to crime. On the other you cite Levitt etc on the low returns to drug dealing. These two positions cannot be reconciled. If there are mostly winner take all rents in drug dealing, and the average returns are small, then the artificial rents due to drug control cannot, ipso facto, be large. Thus, one has to ask, if small rents with winner-take-all markets are sufficient to generate this huge amount of crime, then (probably) smaller rents due to legalization (and having to find substitutes) should still be sufficient to generate gang problems in the absence of a cure to the policing problems in poor areas with dysfunctional groups.
My response is that it all depends on the relative opportunities--absent the drug rents, would other rents be high enough to attract so many people into the tournament? Or would the legal sector become relatively more attractive?
That's an empirical question that I don't think we can answer without legalizing drugs and waiting fifteen years. But I suspect that there is a tipping point--that the gangs are supported in part by the fact that so many young men in their neighborhoods are criminals, which creates a culture hospitable to criminals. If you start moving more young men into legal work, you may hit a tipping point where criminality becomes stigmatized, and the social institutions that support it collapse. I'm not saying that there would be no criminals, obviously, but that the dominance of crime in some areas would cease.
Still, this is a very good point that I'm still pondering.
By request: a long post in which I link Kathy G several times
Kathy G has been repeatedly taking me to task for not linking her post on monopsony. I don't like to make a policy of linking to people who whine that I am not linking to them--indeed, rather the opposite. (Other new bloggers take note). But in this case, I actually tried to link to her; I just forgot to paste in the link, which I do all too often, a careless habit that I am trying to curtail. So, fair enough.
Hereareall Kathy G.'s posts on monopsony, at least as far as I am able to determine.
Another note to new bloggers: you've heard that "blogging is a conversation". Unfortunately too true. By the time you've been doing this for six years or so, you will often sort of forget that the conversation you are having now is not with the same people you were talking to four years ago. You will thus find yourself accidentally referring to past arguments as if everyone reading the current post had lived through them with you. Just as you do in a bar at 2 am when everyone's been arguing for a while, you will, without quite realizing it, make references that are only really comprehensible to a few long-time readers.
I hear economists on the left endorse a monopsony model of minimum wage employment that sounds frankly ludicrous to me, and should to anyone who has worked in fast food or retail--how could employers in industries that fragmented, with turnover rates well over 100%, possibly collude? On the other hand, it's a pretty plausible model for academic environments where a squillion graduate students are all chasing three jobs.
When I wrote this I was thinking of a very long-ago debate that raged through blog comments on my very first blog, the one with the eye-searing candy-colored pastel boxes, using an extremely buggy comment system that I don't even think exists any more. Back then, we didn't have all these bells and whistles that you ungrateful kids take for granted--why, I had to carry water for the comments uphill three miles, and then boil it over an open fire . . .
Price inflation gauges eased in the first quarter. For instance, the price index for personal consumption expenditures rose by 3.5% after increasing 3.9% in the fourth quarter. The PCE price gauge excluding food and energy rose 2.2%, after increasing 2.5% in the fourth quarter.
It's usually best to specify that you're using an annualized quarterly figure, or a year-on-year figure . . . otherwise, the readers are apt to start stockpiling gold in the basement.
On a more serious note, the economy actually grew last quarter, albeit by a miserly 0.6%. Outright recession is starting to feel somewhat less likely to me, though even if we technically dodge two quarters of economic contraction, I expect we'll see very slow growth for some time to come.
There's also the problem of how much of that inflation is rising oil prices, and the resulting productivity shock therefrom, and how much of it is Helicopter Ben opening the monetary spigots. The Fed is expected to cut again today, but if they let inflationary expectations get well and truly established, the cure will be worse than the disease.
I defy Jeremiah Wright: I have always clapped syncopated. And there is no chance that I have any cultural or genetic African heritage--indeed, if I were any whiter, you could use my albedo to end global warming.
Luckily, I'm not running for president, so no one will bring it up. I mean, except me.
Just got off the McCain campaign's conference call on its health care agenda. No earth shaking news, but it was interesting listening to the campaign defending its choices.
The plan's heart is mostly in the right place: break the link between employment and health care, make the plan revenue neutral (ish), change Medicare reimbursement so that we pay for results rather than procedures.
The problem is, it's heavier on theory than practice. Every health care economist in the country wants to pay for health rather than treatments. The problem is, health is very hard to measure--as David Cutler told me, "Health care and education are the two fields where output is hardest to measure. It's not surprising that costs in those areas are increasing much faster than inflation." When output can't be measured, input will be.
Medical care, like education, is also dependent on inputs from the clients. You will have a frantic political battle from doctors against any proposal that makes their income dependent on how many of their diabetics really give up the corn chips.
Likewise, the campaign didn't really have a good answer to the pooling problem: what happens to people with expensive pre-existing conditions when they have to buy insurance on their own? That's one of your primary lobbies for universal health care; I doubt the McCain plan will satisfy them.
The senator is proposing one thing that I think is a terrible idea, pharmaceutical reimportation. Naturally, this is the part of his health care plan with the highest probability of passage.
President Bush is having a press conference on the economy this morning. For the life of me, I can't imagine why. No one is exactly waiting with bated breath for his crack assessment of the nation's economic problems--this is not what we pay the president for. And he's not going to do anything about them, because he's already a lame duck. Nonetheless, I, like all the other reporters, will dutifully discuss this press conference as if it mattered.
Avoiding minor plagiarism is an occupational hazard of writing. There are only so many ways to say "Trichet told a press conference that monetary policy would continue to be tight for the rest of the year"; if you weren't at the press conference, you're going to end up using some close variant on a phrase that probably appeared in half the copy filed about it. To whom do you attribute it, if anyone?
This, however, is not minor, and also, not hard to avoid. I've very much enjoyed some of Joseph James Twitchell's work, and now it's clear why; he stole large chunks of it from some of my favorite writers, like Virginia Postrel and Grant McCracken.
I'm really not very sympathetic to writers who do this, and then claim that their note-taking was somehow at fault. I can recognize my own writing from 100 yards away, even if I don't remember having written it--when I go through my old blog, I don't need to look at the author line to discern which was written by Mindles, which by me. Indeed, writing style is so consistent that I can finish long-forgotten passages in my head before I've read to the end. I find it very, very hard to believe that Steven Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and now James Twitchell read these passages in their notes and then thought that they had written them. It's plausible to me that a particularly vivid phrase might occur to you as if you had coined it. It is not plausible to me that you accidentally remembered several paragraphs of someone else's work.
This sort of thing is particularly sad because Twitchell has written some vivid and interesting work--I particularly remember his descriptions of taking his wife and daughter shopping at luxury stores. It's not that he can't write; he chose not to.
Update Nick Gillespie's thoughts are, as always, well worth reading.
Update II Broader thoughts on plagiarism from Glenn Reynolds.
Update III James, not Joseph. Joseph Twichell was Mark Twain's close friend.
I just got my first 401 419 scam email from China. I can sort of understand how these emails might have worked three years ago, but at this point, everyone gets at least a few a day. This should breed a certain cynicism in the recipients. So who are all these people who have just gotten their first email accounts, and also, not watched any television or read any newspapers for the past five years?
Alex is holding a contest for the most overrated and underrated presidents in history. Like Ross, I'm concentrating on 20th century presidents, since I don't think you could even call people like Franklin A. Pierce "rated", much less calculate the degree of error.
Most overrated: FDR. Every time I contemplate what the country would look like had Senator Robinson lived to shove the court packing scheme through Congress, I get the cold shivers.
Most underrated: Jimmy Carter. Yes, I said Jimmy Carter. Carter's foreign policy . . . well, 'nuff said. But Carter was actually in many ways the architect of the economic changes that Reagan got credit for. It was Carter who appointed Paul Volcker to the Fed, thus giving the institution the backbone to finally get serious about inflation. And it was Jimmy Carter who started the ball rolling on deregulation, despite the fact that many of the regulated industries employed a lot of the Democratic base. Carter is credited with the awful economy of the 1970s, even though he had no control over inflation or oil prices.
As a post-president, I wish he would stop trying to conduct his own foreign policy and go back to building houses for poor people. But as a president, he wasn't nearly as bad as most people believe.
Right Wing News interviewed me this weekend for an article on dating conservative women. No great insights, but you do get to learn about shooting rats at the dump.
Arnold Kling summarizes quite succinctly just how much the stars aligned to put Obama in the lead:
Since my father's death, I have been trying to think about how to articulate his views on politics. Insider politics, as exemplified by Congressional earmarks defended here, struck him as normal and rational. Outsider politics, coming from libertarians or other radicals, struck him as irrational.
For the public at large, he took seriously the results of studies of voting behavior. Based on those, he predicted that Obama would not win the nomination, much less the Presidency. Historically, one's vote can be predicted quite well by one's parents' party affiliation, by one's ethnic group, and by one's economic class, in that order. I don't think my father took into account the Democratic Party's rules, which worked out this year to the detriment of Clinton by putting caucuses in states that she might have won as primaries, by negating a state with a large elderly population (Florida), and by negating a state with a large blue-collar population (Michigan).
Arnold thinks that as soon as the dust has settled, the party will unite behind the nominee.
I would guess that this will be less true of a Hillary Clinton nomination than of a Barack Obama nomination. The identity politics just doesn't resonate the same way for her base. For reasons that I can't quite articulate, I think that even the sixty year old women who strongly personally identify with her will be less angry and disappointed with a Clinton loss than blacks will at an Obama loss. If Kennedy had had the nomination snatched from him at the last minute because the party elders thought a Catholic couldn't win--or worse, because some Democratic voters were uncomfortable with a Catholic president--you'd have had a great deal of trouble motivating Irish-American turnout come November.
There are also the swingy Democrats who liked McCain in earlier Republican primaries. Those people are in the Obama camp right now. The war has changed the picture somewhat, of course, but Hillary will have a much harder time keeping Obama's supporters from defecting to the other side than he will hers. Obama also appeals to some of McCain's support among independents.
That said, I'm overall unconvinced by the large numbers of people who say that they'll vote for McCain if their candidate doesn't win. Most of them will fall back in line, and of the ones who don't, most of those will stay home. What problem there is comes down to turnout. If Barack Obama is the nominee, I expect that blacks will react the way the Irish-Americans, and to a lesser extent the Catholic community, did about Kennedy--i.e. if they had to stand in line on a bed of hot coals to vote for him, they'd happily do it. You'd barely need an urban turnout machine. Hillary motivates some women this way, I think, but not as many, and too dispersed to do the party much good.
Meanwhile, if Clinton is the nominee, the Republican turnout problem is largely taken care of--even people who are sick of Bush and don't much care for McCain will hustle to vote against her. No obstacle will be to great for those people to overcome; the polling place could be destroyed by a flash flood, and they'd just swim to the next town.
But it's not clear to me how big a problem this is for either party. The election still seems mostly like a referendum on Bush. Which spells Democratic victory in November.
It turns out I have three friends who just ran half-marathons this morning, all of which I heard of within three minutes of each other through three different messaging formats. Congratulations Matt, Rick, and Catherine. Better you than me.
We now return to your regularly scheduled execution
I heard something that sounded very odd on the radio yesterday: news that Florida's governor had expressed his "gratitude" that lethal injection was once again legal, and his intention of getting a death warrant out there as quickly as possible.
I oppose the death penalty, for somewhat idiosyncratic reasons. Some of those reasons are well captured by the passage in The Plague where Tarrou talks about his father.
I was at lunch with some blog people today, one of whom wants to recruit an economics blogger and asked for names. I basically drew a blank. All of the high-traffic economics bloggers I read are either professors, in some similarly rewarding profession, or already tied up by a media organization.
I think this is becoming broadly true of the wider blog world: the biggest bloggers are either professionals, or they have an even more lucrative job. I blogged the primary from Matt's house on Tuesday, and almost everyone in the room were being paid to blog. Two years ago, we were all amateurs. That's a skewed sample, of course, but all of us had relatively widely read blogs not only before we took a salary, but before we knew each other. I don't mean to say that there are no high trafficked policy blogs not run by professors or professionals, since this is clearly not true. But the numbers seem to be dwindling. And most of the obvious people of whom I would have said to any media organization "You should hire this blogger" seem to have been hired. I expect the rest to follow soon, since there are fewer arbitrage opportunities. There's a lot more amateur talent remaining in other fields, like science blogging, but I wonder how long this will last.
I'm not sure what this means for the blogging world. It's still largely an amateur medium, but it's hard to see how many new bloggers can compete with someone who gets paid to do it, unless they are independently wealthy or have a job, like journalism or academia, that routinely throws them a lot of bloggable material. Will it become as hard to break into blogging as it is to break into print?
The good old days weren't always good, and tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems
Lots of people, including [cough] me [/cough] argue that the current administration is gutting the fourth amendment. They also argued that the last administration was gutting the fourth amendment--the lefty lawyer I worked for in Philadelphia was quite eloquent on the topic at the time. Bush I gutted the fourth amendment, also Reagan, Carter, Ford, and Nixon. Well, actually, their supreme courts did. That fourth amendment sure has a lot of guts.
Orin Kerr points out that this is a slight bit of romanticism:
I wonder, though, when exactly were the "good old days" of the Fourth Amendment? Clearly the "good old days" of the Fourth Amendment could not be from 1791 to 1961, before the full application of the Fourth Amendment to the states. Before 1961, the Fourth Amendment didn't do much, as most police work was state local and the Fourth Amendment either didn't apply at all (until 1949) or didn't make any difference in practice (from 1949 to 1961). In 1961, with Mapp v. Ohio, the Fourth Amendment suddenly became a hugely important control on routine police investigations: Maybe if you want to pick a time of the "good old days" of the Fourth Amendment, you say 1961.
But no, that can't work. 1961 was before Berger and Katz, before the "reasonable expectation of privacy" test and before the Fourth Amendment applied at all to bugging or wiretapping. So the good old days probably don't include from 1961 to 1967. Maybe we want to start the good old days on December 18, 1967, when the Supreme Court handed down Katz.
Maybe. On the other hand, the record in that period is sort of mixed. A few months before Katz, on May 29, the Supreme Court had dramatically expanded the warrant power and overruled the mere evidence rule in Warden v. Hayden. And just a few months after Katz, in Terry v. Ohio, handed down June 10, 1968, the Supreme Court took a significantly watered down approach to the Fourth Amendment to regulate police/citizen interactions on the street. It's kind of hard to know how you balance these cases: for example, was Terry a gutting of the full Fourth Amendment protection, or an expansion of the Fourth Amendment to street enounters? I think it's pretty mixed record to find the real high point of Fourth Amendment protection.
The Supreme Court's record since 1968 is also somewhat mixed. It is clearly correct that there are some cases that clearly narrowed Fourth Amendment protection, like United States v. Leon. But a number of the cases that critics say "eviscerated" the Fourth Amendment simply refused to expand Fourth Amendment protections or addressed issues that had never been resolved, like the many cases on aerial surveillance. And then there were also some cases that expanded protection, like Payton v. New York or Kyllo v. United States.
If you had to identify a "high point" of Fourth Amendment protection, I suppose you might pick the window from December 1967 to May 1968, or maybe the six years from December 1967 until some of the pro-law enforcement decisions of the Court in 1973.
This reminds me of P.J. O'Rourke's description of the Vasa, a restored ship on display in Stockholm:
The Vasa was, as the guidebook put it, "the mightiest royal warship of her times". The Vasa's wreck was discovered in 1956, and she was raised almost intact after five years of work by diving crews. The hull was enclosed in a shed and sprayed with wood presesrvative for another seventeen years. Then restorations began and finally, in 1990, the Vasamuseet opened, a noble, copper-sheathed, tent-shaped structure housing the ship and seven floors of displays and exhibits. Which is all well and good. However, the Vasa was launched on August 10, 1628, sailed 1,400 yards, and sank like a brick. "The mightiest royal warship of her times"--her times being August 10, 1628, from 4:30 until 5 in the afternoon.
It also puts me in mind of something I wrote a while back:
I'm thinking of the purveyors of political and social doom. A few weeks ago, I was talking to a libertarian who was arguing that the Patriot Act was a one-way ticket to totalitarianism. We were violating fundamental rights that had been enshrined in the constitution for 200 years, and once we'd given them up, it was going to be a short step on the slippery slope to a police state. I share her fear of government intrusiveness. But this a markedly ahistorical view of the constitution and the liberties it allows us to enjoy, which is no more accurate for its extreme prevalence in libertarian circles. There is no primal state of liberty, created by the Constitution, from which we have slowly but inexorably been moving away. Liberties have been granted, and taken away, and granted again throughout the history of our country. Just off the top of my head: Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, the Palmer raids, the detention of the west coast Japanese in camps during World War II, the committment of anyone FDR or one of his minion's thought was especially dangerous to the war effort to St. Elizabeth's mental hospital during same, the McCarthy hearings--see this wonderful Richard Posner piece for a more elegant exegisis of the history of American liberties. The shape of liberty has changed over the 200 years of our existence, expanding in some places and contracting in others. There is no libertarian eden, located somewhere in the American past, from which we are now fallen, or falling.
Now, this doesn't mean that the Patriot Act is a good thing. But the fact that we have the Patriot Act now does not mean, as many libertarians ardently argue, that we will always have the Patriot Act. If the Patriot Act is bad, we should vigorously fight it. But there is no need to construct doomsday scenarios in which the existance of the Patriot Act consigns us to a totalitarian future.
Not to dump on libertarians exclusively, because everyone seems to do it. Social conservatives think we're doomed because the institution of marriage has been dangerously undermined, and is therefore likely to disappear entirely, along with God, patriotism, and the super-sized big mac meal, if we don't do something, quick. A large number of wonkish types (including, on odd days, me) spend a lot of time worrying about the possibility that our old-age entitlements will drive us into disastrous bankruptcy; few of us stop to reflect on the many, many unsustainable economic trends that have worried policy wonks right up until the moment that the impending doom suddenly solved itself under the inexorable logic of Herb Stein's famous dictum: "If something can't go on forever, it won't." Many liberals, like Paul Krugman, think that we nearly got into socioeconomic eden sometime around 1966, give or take, and have been staging a fast retreat towards armageddon ever since; marginal tax rates and some forms of social spending here take the part of doom-bringer, even though on every measure except simple inequality, the lives of the poor and the middle class seem to be richer in material goods, leisure, and quality of work than they were in the Golden Era of America's Middle Class.
That's not to say that liberals shouldn't want more progressive taxes and social spending, policy wonks more sustainably structured entitlements, social conservatives more traditional cultural values, or libertarians more freedom. It's perfectly reasonable to look at the way things are and say "they could be so much better if . . . " What we shouldn't do is compare our present to some highly airbrushed past, or mindlessly extrapolate trends, and thereby hastily conclude that we're all going to hell in a handbasket.
Just to reiterate: I do not like the Patriot Act. I very much do not like it. But I dislike it because it gives the state powers I don't want the state to have, not because I think it's a short step from here to Nazi Germany. It's a lot of pretty long steps from here to Nazi Germany (or Stalinist Russia), and thank God for that. It means we still have time to repeal the damn Patriot Act.
I think I'm going to stop paying attention to trade in this election. Fast track is dead, and I see no hope of its revival. Doha is in Cheyne-Stokes. Congress is intent on killing bilateral trade deals, and gearing up for FarmFEST 2009: Rumble in the Cornfield. Most trade is, thankfully free; that which isn't, just isn't going to get much freer in the foreseeable future. All the current trade deals we are considering we're concluding were sealed under fast track authority (which forces Congress to vote up or down on agreements without amendment; practicaly, without it trade deals are impossible.) It doesn't really matter what the president thinks, because Congress isn't having any.
Support for free trade is, I think, a character issue--and for this, I give John McCain kudoes. But I see no reason to vote as if trade liberalization were a live concern. It's more in the category of motherhood, apple pie, and that can-do American spirit.
This is a fascinating case: when you bid at a charity auction for a unique item, how much of the bidding price can you claim as a tax deduction? My instinct is to say that the price you paid is the fair market value. But I'm sure tax experts would disagree.
Kathy G worries that I failed to point out that perfect Coasean conditions never hold in the real world. This is absolutely correct. There are also no universes composed entirely of two identical spheres. Additionally, the inalienable rights with which all men are self-evidently endowed are frequently, in practice, alienated. I regret the omissions.
Kathy G. is further confused by the concept of "preference maximization". Often when I speak to non-economists, I try to explain things in the terms that they are most likely to understand, rather than the terms that appeared in my Micro textbook. I find this helpful, because almost none of them have read my Micro textbook. Luckily, the person I was talking to was not among those who failed to understand what "preference maximization" meant. Indeed, so far as I can tell, Kathy G. is an army of one in this respect. But confess I have not done a comprehensive research survey; I am relying entirely on the absence of confused emails, comments, or blog posts from anyone besides Kathy G.
For those who, like Kathy G, did not understand it the first or second time, the idea is that absent transaction costs, no matter who you endow with the initial bargaining right, the person with the strongest preference will end up with that preference satisfied. I regret the lack of clarity.
Kathy G additionally says I should have specified that Coasean bargaining is impractical in the absent of clear property rights. I thought that went without saying, since the discussion revolved around who had a clear property right. I regret the error.
Kathy G. avers that the Coase Theorem does not "dictate" anything. Please white out the word "the Coase Theorem dictates" on your screen and replace with "the Coase Theorem would seem to indicate". I regret the infelicitous choice of words.
Finally, Kathy G. says that I should not have tried to apply the Coase theory willy nilly to the real world. This is a very important point. Unless you are a trained economist, like Kathy G., the safest thing to do is only apply it to imaginary worlds. For instance, the sort of world that you are usually discussing when you speculate on the wisdom of giving people unlimited rights in either noise, or the freedom therefrom. I regret any injuries, financial setbacks, broken friendships, harsh words, marital problems, community board showdowns, lawsuits, or blood feuds that may have resulted from unwise attempts at home Coasean bargaining.
I find this argument thoroughly unconvincing. One could as easily argue that the purpose of torture is to satisfy our strategic objectives in Iraq and Afghanistan. The proper answer to which is, who cares? It's wrong.
Consider the results of the firebombing of a city for which the justification was sapping the will of civilians to make war:
"We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from.
I cannot forget these terrible details. I can never forget them.
Now my rnother possessed only a little bag with our identity papers. The basket with the twins had disappeared and then suddenly my older sister vanished too . Although my rnother looked for her immediately it was in vain. The last hours af this night we found shelter in the cellar of a hospital nearby surrounded by crying and dying people. In the next morning we looked for our sister and the twins but without success. The house where we lived was only a burning ruin. The house where our twins were left we could not go in. Soldiers said everyone was burnt to death and we never saw my two baby sisters again."
"Only someone who has been in such a sea of flame can judge what it means to breathe in such an oxygen-deficient atmosphere . . . while battling against terribly hot, constantly changing currents of fire and air. My lungs were heaving. My knees began to turn weak. It was horrifying. Some individuals, especially old people, started to hang back. They would sit down apathetically on the street and just perish of asphyxiation."
"Margaret Freyer, for instance, ascribed her survival once she had left the doomed cellar on the Struvestrasse--the streets were already like ovens--to the fact that she had chosen to wear knee boots when she went outside that winter night to visit a friend. In the heat, the tar on the streets melted. Others who tried to flee through this viscous quagmire rapidly lost their slip-on shoes, even their lace-ups, which stuck in the tar. Their feet were so badly burned they could no longer move. They died."
"Hundreds of desperate human beings, some already on fire, found their way to the Altmarkt. They plunged gratefully into the apparent safety of the cool, plentiful water. As the night wore on, however, the searing air of the surrounding conflagrations and the accumulated effect of all the burning human beings who had crowded into the reservoir began to have an effect. The heat within became intolerable, the air unbreathable. In the tank, hosts of survivors, many injured, many poor or nonswimmers, tried to clamber out again, only to find that the Altmarkt reservoir had not been built as a swimming pool. There were no bars or handles, no ladders. On the contrary, the sides of the reservoir were smooth cement, upon which it proved almost impossible to obtain a purchase.
. . . a very few of the strongest swimmers and nimblest climbers managed to get back out. The great reservoir in the Altmarkt was both a terrible place of struggle that night and . . . a watery grave for hundreds of unlucky people.
The next day, when rescue gangs cleared their way through the square, half the huge quantity of water had evaporated. A macabre ring of charred corpses surrounded the reservoir; those were the bodies of th
