Month: June 2015

The continuing travails of Republican state-level fiscal policies

Lawmakers are stymied over how to pay for road and bridge repairs without raising taxes or fees, which Mr. [Scott] Walker has ruled out. The governor’s fellow Republicans rejected his proposal to borrow $1.3 billion for the roadwork, arguing that adding to the state’s debt is irresponsible.

In other words, Walker also has yet to come up with a state-level fiscal policy which consistently melds spending and taxing decisions; Trip Gabriel at NYT has more to say.  As I argued earlier, these approaches to fiscal policy at the state level are not in every instance perfectly thought out.  Just to be clear, this is not just a Republican vice: the Democrats have run the finances of states such as Illinois in a manner which is not entirely enviable.

Wednesday assorted links

1. Is a five-year humanities degree even possible?  What a radical idea.

2. Do conservatives or liberals demonstrate more self-control?, more here.  Speculative.

3. The Behavioral Economics Guide, 2015.

4. From Taylor Swift to a pencil box, more here.

5. Video of my talk on the future of labor markets, from Porto, Portugal.

6. John Cochrane on Greece.

7. The L.A. County minimum wage hikes seem to be stalled.

Churches against Prohibition

The New England Conference of United Methodist Churches, a group of 600 churches, has issued a resolution calling for an end to the war on drugs. The resolution draws on ethical principles and also a remarkably astute reading of economics and social science:

Whereas: The public policy of prohibition of certain narcotics and psychoactive substances, sometimes called the “War on Drugs,” has failed to achieve the goal of eliminating, or even reducing, substance abuse and;

Whereas: There have been a large number of unintentional negative consequences as a result of this failed public policy and;

Whereas: One of those consequences is a huge and violent criminal enterprise that has sprung up surrounding the Underground Market dealing in these prohibited substances and;

Whereas: Many lives have been lost as a result of the violence surrounding this criminal enterprise, including innocent citizens and police officers and;

Whereas: Many more lives have been lost to overdose because there is no regulation of potency, purity or adulteration in the production of illicit drugs and;

Whereas: Our court system has been severely degraded due to the overload caused by prohibition cases and;

Whereas: Our prisons are overcrowded with persons, many of whom are non-violent, convicted of violation of the prohibition laws and;

Whereas: Many of our citizens now suffer from serious diseases, contracted through the use of unsanitary needles, which now threaten our population at large and;

Whereas: To people of color, the “War on Drugs” has arguably been the single most devastating, dysfunctional social policy since slavery and;

Whereas: Huge sums of our national treasury are wasted on this failed public policy and;

Whereas: Other countries, such as Portugal and Switzerland, have dramatically reduced the incidence of death, disease, crime, and addiction by utilizing means other than prohibition to address the problem of substance abuse and;

Whereas: The primary mission of our criminal justice system is to prevent violence to our citizens and their property, and to ensure their safety, therefore;

Be it Resolved: That the New England Annual Conference supports seeking means other than prohibition to address the problem of substance abuse; and is further resolved to support the mission of the international educational organization Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) to reduce the multitude of unintended harmful consequences resulting from fighting the war on drugs and to lessen the incidence of death, disease, crime, and addiction by ending drug prohibition.

Greece fact of the day

What depresses us is how little attention has been paid to one major area of Greek government spending that seems ripe for the ax: defense spending.  Greece spends a whopping 2.2% of GDP on defense, more than any NATO member-state save the United States and France.  Bringing Greece into line with the NATO average would alone achieve ¾ of what the IMF is demanding through pension cuts.

There is more here from Benn Steil and Dinah Walker.  And here is further discussion of the issue.

What I’ve been reading

1. David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules: on Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy.  Don’t judge Graeber by his mistakes or by how he responds (doesn’t respond) to criticism.  This one is still more interesting to read than most books.  In fact, most of us quite like bureaucracy.

2. John Gray, The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Inquiry into Human Freedom.  The usual dose of pessimism, with a choppier argument and a slightly larger typeface than usual.  It induced me to order Mr. Weston’s Good Wine.  In any case, I’ll still buy the next one, engaging with John Gray if nothing else has become a ritual.  I once predicted to Jim Buchanan that John would end up converting to Catholicism, but I still am waiting.

3. Juan Goytisolo.  I’ve tried to read a bunch of his books, so far they all bore me, in both Spanish and English, the fault is probably mine.  Various sophisticates suggest he is great, should I keep on trying?

4. Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.  He is one of the best non-fiction essay writers, and he remains oddly underrated in the United States.  It is no mistake to simply buy his books sight unseen.  I think of this book as “happiness for grumps.”

5. Harry G. Gelber, The Dragon and the Foreign Devils: China and the World, 1100 B.C. to the Present.  No, this isn’t the best Chinese history book.  But it is the one most written in a way that you will remember its contents, and in this context that is worth a lot.

Why do waiters clear your plates away so quickly?

It’s possible that there’s an economic impetus behind it. “The price of land is going up, which pushes up the value of each table,” said Cowen. “That makes moving people along more important.”

A similar trend, after all, sees many restaurants hoping that diners don’t order dessert, because the course isn’t terribly profitable and it encourages people to linger.

But maybe waiters are clearing individual plates because they believe that’s what customers want. I have heard as much from servers and restaurateurs.

Yet I have heard many people complain about this policy.  It’s almost as if the staff labor is unwilling to let their idle time go unused, perhaps for fearing of signaling shirking.  And so they must do something, which means taking your things away.  What other motives could there be?  My biggest pet peeve actually is when they pour more of your drink into your ice than a Hotelling rule would suggest for an optimal pace of temperature equalization.

That is from Roberto A. Ferdman.

Addendum: Kevin Drum comments.

China fact of the day

Qing Dynasty measured some 14.7 million square kilometers in 1790…The two biggest countries in western Europe were under 0.7 million in the late eighteenth century.

That is from Philip T. Hoffman’s new and interesting Why Did Europe Conquer the World?, here is the book’s home page.  Hoffman does note, however, that if we count empires the Spanish empire was during that time larger than China.

Is there a new Obamacare political equilibrium?

A Supreme Court ruling could gut an important facet of the Affordable Care Act as early as this week, but you wouldn’t know it from what the Republican presidential candidates have been talking about.

In the lead-up to the key 2012 Supreme Court ruling on health care reform – in which the justices decided the penalty paid by anyone without health coverage was a tax, and therefore constitutional – Republicans were abuzz about the possibility that the law could be overturned, and the issue featured prominently in campaign trail rhetoric.

But this time the GOP candidates for president have uttered barely a peep, even though the high court could decide the federal government cannot subsidize health insurance purchased through the federal exchange, which would leave millions of people without insurance and effectively unravel Obamacare as we know it.

That is from Rebecca Berg.

Can Wikipedia survive the spread of mobiles?

 One of the biggest threats it faces is the rise of smartphones as the dominant personal computing device. A recent Pew Research Center report found that 39 of the top 50 news sites received more traffic from mobile devices than from desktop and laptop computers, sales of which have declined for years.

This is a challenge for Wikipedia, which has always depended on contributors hunched over keyboards searching references, discussing changes and writing articles using a special markup code. Even before smartphones were widespread, studies consistently showed that these are daunting tasks for newcomers. “Not even our youngest and most computer-savvy participants accomplished these tasks with ease,” a 2009 user test concluded. The difficulty of bringing on new volunteers has resulted in seven straight years of declining editor participation.

In 2005, during Wikipedia’s peak years, there were months when more than 60 editors were made administrator — a position with special privileges in editing the English-language edition. For the past year, it has sometimes struggled to promote even one per month.

The pool of potential Wikipedia editors could dry up as the number of mobile users keeps growing; it’s simply too hard to manipulate complex code on a tiny screen.

That is from Andrew Lih.  We do indeed face the danger that the quality of our digital universe may be deteriorating.  The inframarginal users who are benefiting are those who highly value texting, Facebook, and mobile access.  The relative losers include…?

Burliuk

Greece facts of the day

“There’s a real issue of moral hazard . . . Around 70 per cent of restructured mortgage loans aren’t being serviced because people think foreclosures will only be applied to big villa owners,” one banker said.

Dimitris, formerly a high-flying advertising executive, sold his brand new loft conversion at a knockdown price to help pay off debts when his agency folded three years ago.

“I still owe money on the car and motorboat I can’t afford to use. Even a holiday loan I’d forgotten about,” he says. “I’m living with my mother looking for work and waiting for the bank to come up with another restructuring offer.”

That is from Kerin Hope at the FT.

Monday assorted links

1. Ben Bernanke on the no-hitter he saw.

2. The culture that is the Leningrad Cowboys Red Army Choir (song, bad).

3. Brink Lindsey on reforming regulation to boost American economic growth.

4. “…many social and personality psychologists said that they would discriminate against openly conservative colleagues. The more liberal respondents were, the more they said they would discriminate.”

5. What percentage of cross-state differences in per capita gdp stems from human capital differences?

6. Parts of Sicily are offering free houses.

7. SCOTUS strikes down the forcible appropriation of raisins.