Sentence of the Day
It is through exchange that difference becomes a blessing, not a curse.
Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, Jonathan Sacks quoted in McCloskey’s The Bourgeois Virtues.
Hat tip to Steve Horowitz at The Austrian Economists who rightly says "Have the benefits of specialization and exchange ever been presented more concisely and beautifully than in that one sentence?" Maybe this should be sentence of the year.
Intelligent Design and Evolution
A few years ago I wrote (follow up here):
Suppose that you find a watch in the forest. If you know there is
no watchmaker then the theory of evolution is a brilliant and
compelling explanation for the presence of complexity without design.
But suppose that you know a watchmaker exists then surely the simplest
and most compelling explanation is that the watchmaker made the watch.
Any other explanation, particularly one so improbable
as evolution would seem to be preposterous and beside the point.Thus for someone who knows, really knows, that
god(s) exists (and there are many people who claim to know that god(s)
exists) then some form of creationism follows as a
rational deduction from the premises. It’s no point telling these
people that creationism is unscientific because given the premise that god(s) exists creationism is scientific.
If god(s) exists then evolution is almost certainly false, if not in
every particular then surely in the grand claims of a undesigned
nature.
Not surprisingly the argument created a firestorm of opposition (see the many nasty comments on the two original posts). Thus, I am quite pleased to see that renowned philosopher Thomas Nagel writing in Philosophy and Public Affairs has recently made the same argument. Nagel writes:
What [Intelligent Design] does depend on is the assumption that the hypothesis of a designer makes sense and cannot be ruled out as impossible or assigned a vanishingly small probability in advance. Once it is assigned a significant prior probability, it becomes a serious candidate for support by empirical evidence, in particular empirical evidence against the sufficiency of standard evolutionary theory to account for the observational data…
…Judge Jones cited as a decisive reason for denying ID the status of science that Michael Behe, the chief scientific witness for the defense, acknowledged that the theory would be more plausible to someone who believed in God than to someone who did not. This is just common sense, however, and the opposite is just as true: evolutionary theory as a complete explanation of the development of life is more plausible to someone who does not believe in God than to someone who does.
Nagel has much more of interest to say about teaching science given that ID is scientific if one accepts belief in god.
Hat tip to Robin Hanson’s post, Intelligent Design Honesty, at Overcoming Bias.
P(tax hike / McCain) = 0.74
Greg Mankiw has run the numbers and “according to the Intrade betting, we are likely to see a significant hike in the top income tax rate even if McCain is elected President.” As Greg notes this is actually a lower bound.
Why Libertarians Should Vote for Obama (1)
First, war. War is the antithesis of the libertarian philosophy of
consent, voluntarism and trade. With every war in American history
Leviathan has grown larger and our liberties have withered. War is the
health of the state. And now, fulfilling the dreams of Big Brother, we are
in a perpetual war.
A country cannot long combine unlimited government abroad and limited
government at home. The Republican party
has become the party of war and thus the party of unlimited government.
With war has come FEAR, magnified many times over by the governing party. Fear is pulling Americans into the arms of
the state. If only we were better at
resisting. Alas, we Americans say that
we love liberty but we are fair-weather lovers. Liberty will flourish only with peace.
Have libertarians gained on other margins in the past eight years? Not at all. Under the Republicans we have been sailing due South-West on the Nolan
Chart – fewer civil liberties and more government, including the largest new
government program in a generation, the Medicare prescription drug plan, and
the biggest nationalization since the Great Depression. Tax cuts, the summum bonum of Republican
economic policy, are a sham. The only
way to cut taxes is to cut spending and that has not happened.
The libertarian voice has not been listened to in Republican politics for a
long time. The Republicans take the libertarian wing of the party for granted
and with phony rhetoric and empty phrases have bought our support on the
cheap. Thus – since voice has failed – it is time for exit. Remember that if
a political party can count on you then you cannot count on it.
Exit is the right strategy because if there is any hope for reform it is by
casting the Republicans out of power and into the wilderness where they may
relearn virtue. Libertarians understand better
than anyone that power corrupts. The
Republican party illustrates. Lack of
power is no guarantee of virtue but Republicans are a far better – more libertarian –
party out-of-power than they are in power. When in the wilderness, Republicans turn naturally to a critique of
power and they ratchet up libertarian rhetoric about free trade, free
enterprise, abuse of government power and even the defense of civil liberties. We can hope that new leaders will arise in
this libertarian milieu.
Big Mac Attack
No country with a McDonald’s outlet, the theory contends, has ever gone to war with another….
Thomas
Friedman, who invented the theory in 1996, said people in McDonald’s
countries "don’t like to fight wars. They like to wait in line for
burgers."…The Russia-Georgia conflict has finally blown this theory out of the water.
From the Guardian. Clearly the theory was over-identified. Perhaps no two countries with Taco Bell’s every go to war with one another.
Hat tip to Chris Blattman.
Rational Spelling
Here’s a great, little video from Ed Rondthaler former president of the American Literacy Council and author of The Dictionary
of Simplified American Spelling. Loyal readers will know that simplified spelling or what I call rational spelling holds a special place in my heart.
I worry that the tyranny of spell checkers impedes evolution towards rational spelling.
Hat tip to Boing Boing.
Tabarrok in Variety
"Unstable characters run amok in Tabarrok’s oddball oeuvre…"
Apparently, my movie producer brother and I have more than family in common!
Here and here are previous MR posts on my brother’s oddball oeuvre.
Nationalism
What do you get when you plot the genetic fingerprints of more than
1000 Europeans on a grid? An image that looks surprisingly like a map
of Europe. The findings reveal that our DNA contains a sort of global
positioning system, which researchers can use to pinpoint where in the
world both we and our relatives came from…."I couldn’t believe the picture was so clear," says Carlos
Bustamante, senior author and statistical geneticist at Cornell
University. "I, for one, fell off my chair." Italy and Spain clearly
had their own cluster of genetically similar individuals, for example,
and there were even distinctions between French-, German-, and Italian-
speaking populations within Switzerland.The results make sense,
says Bustamante. Because people in a region are more likely to marry
and mate with each other–a factor that may be largely due to shared
language–that gene pool will evolve as a separate cluster that
corresponds to a place on the globe, he explains. "You don’t randomly
mate within Europe. … If you live in Strait of Gibraltar, you’re more
likely to marry someone in Spain versus someone in Moscow."
That’s Science reporting on a new paper, Genes Mirror Geography with Europe, in Nature.
Good Money
At the dawn of the industrial revolution as workers left the fields and moved to industrial employment the demand for a means of payment increased dramatically. Workers, once paid in kind, needed to be paid in a medium they could use to buy the necessities of life. Small-tender bank notes, however, were illegal and in Great Britain the production of coin was monopolized by the Royal Mint which failed to provide enough high quality coin to meet the demands of workers and business. Silver coin, despite the efforts of Sir Isaac Newton, was overvalued and fled the country. Gold was too expensive to make coins suitable for workingmen and the Mint could not or would not produce high-quality copper coins.
Good Money is George Selgin’s explanation of how enterprising button makers solved what Sargent and Velde called The Big Problem of Small Change thereby making the industrial revolution possible. Selgin is a monetary theorist so you might expect a dry account of monetary history but the mint-battle between Matthew Boulton, whom Wired once named the ultimate CEO, and copper-king Thomas Williams propels the story forward. If you can imagine, Good Money is something of a cross between Friedman and Schwartz’s A Monetary History of the United States (although not as broad in scope) and a business epic like Barbarians at the Gate. I also liked how Selgin draws on newspapers, novels, limericks and tavern songs to illustrate the problems and events of the time. This bard was both a good economist (he has Gresham’s Law!) and public choice scholar.
‘Tis Gold buys Votes, or they’d have swarmed ere now,
Copper serves only for the meaner Sort of People
Copper never goes at Court
And since on Shilling can full Twelve Pence weight,
Silver is better in Germany
‘Tis true the Vulgar seek it, What of that?
They are not Statesmen,-let the Vulgar wait.
The money problem influenced and was influenced by all of the major events of the day so Good Money is also an economic and political history of the industrial revolution. Here’s an interesting tidbit. Company stores were not so much a way for firms to rip off employees (why not just pay them less?) but were rather a means of economizing on coin. Selgin shows how the shortage of coin sheds light on a number of other otherwise peculiar business practices.
What lessons can be drawn from the history of private coinage? Private money circulated only if it was voluntarily accepted as a means payment. Thus the primary problem faced by private firms was how to create trust and credibility. To encourage circulation, for example, issuers promised to redeem their tokens in gold (which the Royal Mint did not). In turn, the promise to redeem gave producers an incentive to make their coins difficult to counterfeit, which they did by making the coins beautiful – numismatists will appreciate the full-color illustrations of the private coinage produced by Boulton and his rivals – as well as technologically advanced.
Today, the big problem of small change is no longer such a big problem, although shortages of wanted coin continue to occur sporadically around the world (e.g. here and here) as well as surpluses of unwanted coin. Nevertheless, the basic problems of private coinage were trust and credibility. Modern issuers of digital cash face the same problems and thus Selgin’s history is a valuable reminder about the scope and potential of alternative monetary institutions.
Full Disclosure: I was enthusiastic about Good Money when I read it in manuscript which is why it is published by the University of Michigan Press and co-published by the Independent Institute where I am director of research (n.b. you can buy Good Money at the previous link at a small discount to the Amazon price).
Econometrics of Bigfoot and UFOs
Peter Leeson is posting over at Freakonomics on the econometrics of bigfoot and ufos, he finds that states with a lot of ufo sightings also have a lot of bigfoot sightings. Unfortunately, Leeson draws entirely wrong conclusions from his research. If he wants to explain his results, my young colleague needs to study the classics.
Powerful Women: Does Exposure Reduce Bias?
We exploit random assignment of gender quotas across Indian village councils to investigate whether having a female chief councillor affects public opinion towards female leaders. Villagers who have never been required to have a female leader prefer male leaders and perceive hypothetical female leaders as less effective than their male counterparts, when stated performance is identical. Exposure to a female leader does not alter villagers’ taste preference for male leaders. However, it weakens stereotypes about gender roles in the public and domestic spheres and eliminates the negative bias in how female leaders’ effectiveness is perceived among male villagers. Female villagers exhibit less prior bias, but are also less likely to know about or participate in local politics; as a result, their attitudes are largely unaffected. Consistent with our experimental findings, villagers rate their women leaders as less effective when exposed to them for the first, but not second, time. These changes in attitude are electorally meaningful: after 10 years of the quota policy, women are more likely to stand for and win free seats in villages that have been continuously required to have a female chief councillor.
The Myth in Paperback
Just in time for the conventions you can now buy Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter in paperback. If McCain wins I predict Caplan will be in high demand as half the population dazedly asks what went wrong? If Obama wins the great and the good will sigh with relief and the Bush years will be written off as an aberration of democracy since righted.
Economic Philately
Which stamp predicts development and which stamp dissension?
For the answer, Chris Blattman points us to Michael Kevane’s paper on stamps and development.
An analysis of the imagery on postage stamps suggests that regimes in Sudan
and Burkina Faso have pursued very different strategies in representing the
nation. Sudan’s stamps focus on the political center and dominant elite (current
regime, Khartoum politicians, and Arab and Islamic identity) while Burkina
Faso’s stamps focus on society (artists, multiple ethnic groups, and
development). Sudan’s stamps build an image of the nation as being about the
northern-dominated regime in Khartoum (whether military or parliamentary);
Burkina Faso’s stamps project an image of the nation as multi-ethnic and
development-oriented.
Markets in Everything: Panhandling
In Memphis, a local FOX News reporter, Jason Carter, donned old
clothes and hit the streets earlier this year, earning about $10 an
hour. “Just the quasi-appearance of being homeless filled my cup,”
Carter observed. That all the money is beyond the tax man’s clutches
adds to the allure of professional panhandling.Carter prepared for his stint on the street by surfing the Internet,
where a variety of websites dispense panhandling advice. NeedCom, for
example–subtitled “Market Research for Panhandlers”–offers tips from
Baker and other pros on how to hustle. The website’s developer, Cathy
Davies, wants it to get people “thinking about panhandling as a
realistic economic activity, rather than thinking that panhandlers are
lazy or don’t work very hard.”
More here, overly sensationalistic but interesting in parts.
Thanks to Tim Groseclose for the pointer.
The Return of the Zombie
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that there is only a 7% probability that someone born in 2000 will receive their Social Security benefits as promised today. The better news is that with a probability of 58% the cut in benefits will be 20% or less.
Since the CBO isn’t trying to predict future policy, these "probabilities" should be taken with more than a grain of salt. Sill these numbers are an arresting way of presenting the basic data on projected Social Security revenues and scheduled payments.
Hat tip to Paul Krugman.