Month: August 2006

Fiasco

by  Alex Tabarrok in

In Fiasco, Thomas Ricks says the war on Iraq and subsequent occupation was ill-conceived, incompetently planned and poorly executed.  I have no quarrel with that.  What dismays me is that anyone expected any different.  All wars are full of incompetence, mendacity, fear, and lies.  War is big government, authoritarianism, central planning, command and control, and bureaucracy in its most naked form and on the largest scale.  The Pentagon is the Post Office with nuclear weapons.

If this war has been worse on these scores than others, and I have my doubts, we can at least be thankful that the scale of death and destruction has been smaller.  At the Battle of the Somme there were a million casualties and 300,000 deaths over the course of a few months.  If we remember previous wars more fondly this is only because those wars we won.  Incompetent planning and poor execution are not fatal so long as the other side plans and executes yet more incompetently. 

Is this a suggestion to put the current war in context?  Not at all. It is suggestion to put government in context.

Nozick’s experience machine

by  Tyler Cowen in

David Friedman writes:

Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State and Utopia, offers an interesting hypothetical; I don’t have a copy of the book ready to hand so will give you my version:

Someone invents an experience machine; get into it and you will have a fully convincing illusion of experience. Somehow, the inventor figures out about what your life is going to be like and makes you the following offer:

Get into my experience machine, spend the rest of your life there, and I will give you the illusion of a life slightly better than the one you would otherwise live. Your average income in the illusion will be a few thousand dollars higher than it would have been in reality, your wife a little prettier, your children slightly better behaved, your promotions just a little prompter. Your illusory summers won’t be quite as hot, or winters quite as cold.

As I (and Wikipedia) remember the thought experiment, your life [sic] is much better, a bit like the Hollywood movie of your choice, at the very least.

This thought question is supposed to refute utilitarianism, or at least its hedonistic version.  Pleasure isn’t everything, and authenticity counts too.

But for an economist, Friedman is oddly non-interested in the marginal questions.  At what age should you opt for the experience machine?  If it can give you eighty more years of subjectively perceived time on your deathbed, that is a no-brainer.  At what per capita income level should you prefer the machine?

Or say you don’t want the machine, but your acceptance will save five other people’s lives.  Would you proceed without guilt?  And how many lives should be needed to push you over the edge?

Is the experience machine example so compelling as a refutation of hedonism?  I think it puts pleasure squarely on the map as one value which matters and which is even undervalued in many circumstances.  Many of us are too reluctant to step into the machine rather than too ready.  Isn’t our general tendency to overvalue the illusion of control? 

Avian flu and social science

by  Tyler Cowen in

Yana and I are now in Vienna, as I will be attending a conference on the social science aspects of pandemics.  If you are a new MR reader, here my paper on the policy implications of avian flu.  Here is an executive summary of the piece.

And what is the latest on avian flu?  The Thais had pretended to solve the problem but they were lying.  The Vietnamese have made real progress.  The Indonesians still refuse to release much of the sequencing information from their samples.  One study suggests that the cases of human-to-human mutation show significant mutation of the virus.  (Here is a more optimistic take.)  For the first time, one of the reported vaccines — from GlaxoSmithKline — seems to have significant potential.  It is unknown how much the virus is spreading in Africa.  Except for Indonesia there is more good news than bad, but of course it is not the average which matters.  The badness of the worst news will determine how the world fares.  It is hard to imagine how a serious pandemic would play itself out in crowded and infrastructure-dysfunctional China or India.

For more information on all these points, see the new version of EffectMeasure blog.

My favorite things Austrian

by  Tyler Cowen in

I will restrict myself to the current borders:

Novel: Thomas Bernhard, Wittgenstein’s Nephew.  This book, set in an insane asylum, is hilarious and is perhaps the least known of the Continental masterpiece novels of ideas.  Der Untergeher [The Loser] is another brilliant book by Bernhard.  Yes I will put these over Musil and of course Kafka worked in Prague and doesn’t count.  Broch’s The Death of Virgil is a dark horse pick.

Music: This combination of category and place is a bit ridiculous, no?  Just to mix it up, let’s pick Schoenberg’s Op. 31, Variations for Orchestra, or Webern’s Symphony in C, or Piano Variations, Op. 27, played by Pollini or Uchida.  For Berg I’ll pick the Violin Concerto in A minor, or perhaps "Lyric Suite."

If we must look elsewhere, my favorite Mahler is the 9th, the live Karajan version.  Favorite Bruckner is the 8th, the first Karajan version and the Bruno Walter recording of the 4th.  Capriccio and Metamorphosen might be the most underrated Richard Strauss.  My favorite Schubert CD stars Ely Ameling and Jorg Demus, and then Schnabel or perhaps Clifford Curzon doing the last Piano Sonata in B flat.  The Hollywood does an amazing version of the String Quintet in C.  Britten and Pears recorded the ideal Die Winterreise.  I’ve yet to find the perfect version of Schubert’s 9th but I love Furtwaengler’s interpretation.  Favorite Haydn, if we can count him as Austrian, would be the last six piano sonatas and the String Quartets, Op.76.  Mozart I’ve already blogged.

Book about: How about Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, a beautiful portrait of declining Vienna by a man who killed himself?  Another good pick is Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna.  Carl Schorske is not to be forgotten either.

Draftsman: Egon Schiele did incredible drawings.  Try this one.  Here is a beautiful painting by Schiele, who died at age 28.

Movie, set in: It is hard to go against The Third Man, starring Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles.

Movie: What is the best Austrian movie?  Here is a list, good luck.  I’ve never seen one all the way through.

Movie star: Duh.

Here is an impressive list of Austrian scientists, including economists.  Karl Pribram and Rudolf Hilferding remain underrated as economists.  Mises is underrated as a theorist of public choice.  Hayek was arguably the first neuroeconomist.  Wieser anticipated much of modern "social economics."  Freud was a brilliant literary analyst.

The bottom line: There are gobs and gobs and gobs.  We haven’t even touched upon design.  But the overall trajectory is not exactly positive once you crack the mid-1930s.