Month: August 2006

What do we have reason to be uncertain about?

by  Tyler Cowen in

I can understand not wanting kids.  I can understand wanting kids.  What I cannot understand is not knowing whether you want kids.  Having kids and not having kids are not alike.  Not even close.  The choices are not remotely equivalent.  How do you answer the question with “Eh. You know, whichever.” How do you not know?

Here is more explanation, and here is a follow-up post, both from my current favorite theorist of rational choice.  From another direction, the newly unattached Jacqueline Passey is unsure where to live, yet she is sure about not wanting children.

I find it easier to be certain when comparing two similar items or courses of action.  I am sure that I prefer the Beatles to The Rolling Stones.  Both are British popular music groups from roughly the same period of time.  It is tougher to rank Charlie Parker relative to Dvorak.  I reluctantly opt for Parker.

Some uncertainty about children may stem from the difference between ex ante and ex post preferences.  You’re very happy having the kid when he or she comes but you did not care about that particular kid "in advance."  Some of the "uncertainty" therefore is faux; it represents a confusion about which perspective to report. 

Then there is the margin.  How many kids should you have?  I doubt if anyone is, ex ante, certain about this, although a few people may pretend to be ("Three is the number for me.").  But one extra kid is a huge, huge difference at the margin, especially if you are moving from one kid to two (or so I hear).  So it must be allowed that we can be uncertain about very drastic changes in our lives.

Most fundamentally, are indeed many people uncertain about having kids?  How might we define such uncertainty?  Surely we cannot trust our self-deceiving subjects to report their true intentions.  Medical issues and "finding a mate" issues aside, for most of us isn’t it "in the cards" whether we will have kids, no matter how much we hem and haw in advance?  (What is the function of the feigned uncertainty?  Does it make the later decision "easier to live with" if we first pretend to put up a fight?  Do we create an illusion of autonomy to feel in control?)  Would small changes in our lives lead to big changes in the outcome here?  I wonder.

What is personal uncertainty anyway?

Most of all, I am uncertain what we have reason to be uncertain about.

The Lady in the Water

by  Tyler Cowen in

It is probably the best movie this summer.  It creates its own world and draws you in.  Forget the bad reviews from writers who do not take obscure Catholic theological debates seriously (well…theology is not my cup of tea either, but I will pretend for the movie’s sake.  If you can accept the Jedi…).  The absurd parts of the film, like the descent of the monkeys, are supposed to be absurd.  It is about the miracle (yes miracle, as in miraculous) of the incarnation, the fact that anyone can be special, our stumbles toward the truth, the apparent arbitrariness of earthly justice, and most of all that we have no choice but to believe in something "absurd."  The strongest connection, of course, is to The Book of Job and then to Lewis’s Narnia.  The film also has a first-rate sense of humor, which is increasingly rare in Hollywood today.

Here is one good (Christian) review.  It is no surprise that the Catholic Kelly Jane Torrance also liked it.  Yet the movie bombed.  It is sad to think that Hollywood is about to neuter one of America’s most accomplished and original filmmakers.

Theories of Teenage Comparative Advantage

by  Tyler Cowen in

In high school, though, everyone suddenly seemed to realize that Sam Hellerman probably wasn’t going to grow any taller, and had kind of weird hair and a funny walk, and really didn’t have anything to offer that couldn’t be acquired much more cheaply and efficiently from someone else.  The market, which had once rewarded him slightly for being the same height as the average eighth grader, had now determined that his services were needed elsewhere, and so he ended up at the bottom of the totem pole and at my house every now and then palming Vicodins and swallowing them with some bourbon from Carol’s entertaining area.

That is from the witty King Dork, one of the hippest novels of the year.

Elsewhere in the new fiction department, I stayed up late to finish the much-heralded The Keep, by Jennifer Egan.  Imagine a shorter and more coherent version of John Fowles’s The Magus, but with periodic satirical pokes at eighteenth century gothic novels.  Here is a concordance of reviews, courtesy of Bookslut.

Our non-gay military

by  Tyler Cowen in

It appears that the family of Jared Guinther, an 18-year-old from Oregon, was trying to get him released from the army, which recruited him in spite of the fact that he is autistic. 
Guinther, who rarely speaks, "wasn’t even aware of the war in Iraq
until a recruiter enlisted him last fall to be a calvary scout, the
Army’s most dangerous job".  Guinther’s mother tried to intervene, but
the recruiter told her that he himself was dyslexic and that Jared
"doesn’t need mommy to make his decisions for him".

Here is further information.

Jeff Koons and the Test of Time

by  Tyler Cowen in

It will be so rich, 200 years from now, to look back at the art that Jeff is creating today. It might all look quite quaint and sweet, and the graphic quality will look retro. And, of course, the vacuum cleaners will look like pieces of a stagecoach. But it will let people know that we did understand the weirdness of our world.

Read more here.  I sympathize with Jeff Koons.  One of my goals in writing this blog is to help people understand the weirdness of our world.  Here is one sculpture by Jeff Koons; try this too.

The Dark Ages were Dark

by  Tyler Cowen in

It is currently deeply unfashionable to state that anything like a ‘crisis’ or a ‘decline’ occurred at the end of the Roman empire, let alone that a ‘civilization’ collapsed and a ‘dark age’ ensued.  The new orthodoxy is that the Roman world, in both the East and the West, was slowly, and essentially painlessly, ‘transformed’ into a medieval form.  However, there is an insuperable problem with this new view; it does not fit the mass of archaeological evidence now available, which shows a startling decline in western standards of living during the fifth to seventh centuries.  This was a change that affected everyone, from peasants to kings, even the bodies of saints resting in their churches.  It was no mere transformation — it was decline on a scale that can reasonably be described as ‘the end of a civilization.’

That is from Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization.  This recent book is the best integration of archaeology and economics I have seen; it is also a first-rate economic history in its own right, as well as a history of pottery.  Highly recommended for those who think they might like it.

Libertarians and Government Quality

by  Alex Tabarrok

Tyler is very wrong to say that libertarians assume that government quality is fixed.  On the contrary, I always assume that government quality can go way down.

Seriously, however, a large part of the libertarian/classical liberal program has been about designing institutions to improve government quality just look at Hayek’s the Constitution of Liberty or Buchanan and Tullock’s the Calculus of Consent.  The classicals, Montesquieu, Locke, Madison et al. were primarily focused on increasing government quality through constitutional design, things like democracy, division of powers, federalism, an independent judiciary and a bill of rights.  The libertarian program of improving government quality has been remarkably successful, and far more successful than any other program.

Are there other methods of increasing government quality?  Yes.  In my post on Fiasco, I wrote, "Should we be surprised that delays, errors and incompetence are more prevalent at the INS than at bureaucracies which must deal with citizens or which face competition from the private sector?" which implicitly gives two methods for raising government quality – giving customers a vote and creating a competitive benchmark.

Contra Tyler, libertarians are on the forefront of offering
ideas to improve government quality.  Term limits, flat tax (as a way
of reducing corruption not just an economic improvement), different voting methods, a balanced
budget amendment, openness and transparency, competition, increased
federalism, and unrestricted media are just a few ideas.

Tyler, in contrast, doesn’t give any hint of how to improve government quality and his examples are not very good. Tyler likes Finnish architecture.  Well it’s no surprise that if a lot of governments promote architecture one of them will produce something that Tyler likes. I think this is very cool but I don’t advocate bringing back the funders.  Same thing with the highway system or the Internet.  Sure, these were good investments but does government investment pay as a rule?

The grand libertarian program has improved government quality tremendously – so much so that we are well into the realm of diminishing returns but we can do better and libertarians are among the leaders in suggesting how.

Addendum: Glen Whitman replies to Tyler also.

The Libertarian Vice

by  Tyler Cowen in

Analytical vice, that is.

The libertarian vice is to assume that the quality of government is fixed.  The libertarian also argues that the quality of government is typically low, and this is usually the bone of contention, but that is not the point I wish to consider.  Often that dispute is a red herring.

If the quality of government is fixed, the battle is then "government vs. market."  Not everyone will agree with libertarian views, but libertarians are comfortable on this terrain.

But sometimes governments do a pretty good job, even if you like me are generally skeptical of government.  The Finnish government has supported superb architecture.  The Swedes have made a good go at a welfare state.  The Interstate Highway System in the U.S. was a high-return investment.  In the area of foreign policy, we have done a good job juggling the China-Taiwan relationship.  Or how about the Aswan Dam for Egypt?  You might contest these particular examples but I assure you there are many others.

The libertarian approach treats government vs. market as the central question.  Another approach, promoted by many liberals, tries to improve the quality of government.  This endeavor does not seem more utopian than most libertarian proposals.  The libertarian cannot reject it on the grounds of excess utopianism, even though much government will remain wasteful, stupid, and venal.  More parts of government could in fact be much better, and to significant human benefit and yes that includes more human liberty in the libertarian sense of the word. 

Libertarians will admit this.  But it does not play a significant role in their emotional framing of the world or in their allocation of emotional energies.  They will insist, correctly, that we do not always wish to make government more efficient.  Then they retreat to a mental model where the quality of government is fixed and we compare government to market.

It is possible to agree with the positive claims of libertarians about the virtues of markets but still think that improving the quality of government is the central task before us.  One could love markets yet be some version of a modern liberal rather than a classical liberal.  This possibility makes libertarians nervous, thus their desire to fix the quality of government in advance of making an argument.  (For one example of this, see Glen Whitman’s commentary.)

Libertarianism and modern liberalism differ in many regards, and usually I am closer to the libertarian point of view.  But I am also a contrarian by nature.  If you want to make me feel more like a modern liberal, just go ahead and commit The Libertarian Vice. 

To be fair, here is my post on the modern liberal vice.

Addendum: Here is a look at drug policy from both libertarian and liberal points of view.

The ten weirdest cosmologies?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Here is the list, courtesy of GeekPress.  But they are not trying very hard.  Here is one candidate:

3. Superfluid space-time

One of the most outlandish new theories of cosmology is that space-time is actually a superfluid substance, flowing with zero friction. Then if the universe is rotating, superfluid spacetime would be scattered with vortices, according to physicists Pawel Mazur of the University of South Carolina and George Chapline at Lawrence Livermore lab in California – and those vortices might have seeded structures such as galaxies. Mazur suggests that our universe might have been born in a collapsing star, where the combination of stellar matter and superfluid space could spawn dark energy, the repulsive force that is accelerating the universe.

Duh!  That’s not weird at all.  My favorite weird cosmology is missing from the list: time is an illusion, all possible universes exist, and that includes many universes with false memories and traces of a supposedly distant past.

Then there is always "elephants all the way down…"

I can’t help but wonder…

by  Tyler Cowen in

Press reports use the word "sophisticated."  And it seems cavalier to trivialize what appears to have been a major and serious danger.  And I hardly know any facts about the event.  But the more I hear about the plot, the more I wonder.  24 guys arrested, according to some 50 guys involved.  A whole bunch of them seem to spill all the beans right away and rat on each other in great numbers.  Um…a British sports drink (which one?).  I guess in theory you can trigger a liquid explosive with a flash camera.  The Internet certainly says you can.  How much practice did they have igniting actual explosions?  How much mid-air assembly of the procedure is required, and at what point do the scheming Pakistanis start to look suspicious?  Do the passengers just stand around and watch?

Of course if only one of the plots had succeeded it would have been terrible terrible terrible.  But, um, was this really a well-developed idea for a terror attack?  Just askin’, as they say…

Markets in everything, Paris Hilton edition

by  Tyler Cowen in

Hilton also told the magazine she collects $500,000 in fees just to show up at parties and other events from Las Vegas to Tokyo. Her best-paying gig, she said, was a recent Austrian appearance.

"I had to say ‘hi’ and tell them why I loved Austria so much," she is quoted as saying.

And why does she like Austria? "Because they pay me $1 million to wave at crowds!"

Here is the full story.