Spot the Contradiction
Daniel Gross’s review of Sachs’ Common Wealth was bizarre. Consider this:
Even congenital optimists have good reason to suspect that this time
the prophets of economic doom may be on point, with the advent of
seemingly unstoppable developments like….the explosive growth of China and India.
Huh? What kind of upside down logic makes high growth rates proof of economic doom? Proving this was no idle slip Gross goes on to say:
Things are different today, [Sachs] writes, because of four trends: human
pressure on the earth, a dangerous rise in population, extreme poverty
and a political climate characterized by “cynicism, defeatism and
outdated institutions.” These pressures will increase as the developing
world inexorably catches up to the developed world. (emphasis added)
Silly me, I thought rising life expectancy, increasing wealth, and lower world inequality, which is what it means to say that the developing world inexorably catches up to the developed world, was a good thing. And then there is this:
The combination of climate change and a rapidly growing population
clustering in coastal urban zones will set the stage for many Katrinas,
not to mention “a global epidemic of obesity, cardiovascular disease
and adult-onset diabetes.”
Ok, climate change will create problems but how clueless do you have to be not to understand that a large fraction of the world’s people would love to live long enough to die from obesity and other diseases of wealth?
Don’t misunderstand, I know that growth brings problems. My dispute with Gross is not that he thinks the glass is half-empty and I think it is half-full; my dispute is that Gross thinks the fuller the glass gets the more empty it becomes.
Addendum: Dan Gross writes to say that he was summarizing Sachs’ argument. Point noted.
Local Bounties
One benefit of the economic downturn is that the number of people hoping to earn a reward by calling the police with a tip has increased, especially in regions with a lot of home foreclosures.
For tips that bring results, programs in most places pay $50 to $1,000,
with some jurisdictions giving bonuses for help solving the most
serious crimes, or an extra “gun bounty” if a weapon is recovered…“We have people out there that, realistically, this could be their
job,” said Sgt. Zachary Self, who answers Crime Stoppers calls for the
Macon Police Department.
The success of these local programs suggests similar international programs could also work.
Hanson on Bounties
Robin beats me to a story on bounties in the Washington Post. I couldn’t have said it better so here is his full post.
A Post article today, Bounties a Bust in Hunt for Al-Qaeda:
Jaber Elbaneh is one of the world’s most-wanted terrorism suspects. In
2003, the U.S. government indicted him, posted a $5 million reward for
his capture and distributed posters bearing photos of him around the
globe. None of it worked. Elbaneh remains at large, as wanted as ever.
…Since 1984, the program has handed out $77 million to more than 50
tipsters, according to the State Department. … In 2004, Rep. Mark
Steven Kirk (R-Ill.) visited Pakistan to assess why Rewards for Justice
had generated so little information regarding al-Qaeda’s leadership. He
discovered that the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad had effectively shut down
the program. There was no radio or television advertising. …In 2004, Congress passed a law authorizing the State Department to post
rewards as high as $50 million apiece — a provision with bin Laden in
mind. Last fall, Rep. Dan Boren (D-Okla.) went further, introducing a
bill that would raise the cap to $500 million. The State Department has
declined to boost the reward for bin Laden, arguing that more money was
unlikely to do any good and would only add to his notoriety.Let’s see, billions spent via ordinary means, and millions offered
in bounties, and it is the bounties they blame for Al-Qaeda’s notoriety
and failing to catch leaders? The billions are spent and gone, while
the millions in bounties we only lose when they actually work. How
then is this data suggesting we should prefer ordinary means to
bounties?
Here is one of my previous posts on bounties. The Rewards for Justice program has actually brought in some big catches.
Wheat Prices are Down
Rice prices remain high, however, although world production is up a little bit (data on rice). Hat tip to Carpe Diem.
CSI on Trial
…to judge by the most
comprehensive study on the reliability of forensic evidence to date,
the error rate is more than 10% in five categories of analysis,
including fiber, paint and body fluids. …DNA
and fingerprints are more reliable but still not foolproof….a 2005 study in the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology
suggests a fingerprint false-positive rate a bit below 1%, a widely
read 2006 experiment shows an alarming 4% false-positive rate.How can we preserve the
usefulness of forensic evidence while protecting the public when it
breaks down? The core problem with the forensic system is monopoly.
Once evidence goes to one lab, it is rarely examined by any other. That
needs to change. Each jurisdiction should
include several competing labs. …This procedure may seem like a waste. But such checks would save
taxpayer money. Extra tests are inexpensive compared to the cost of
error, including the cost of incarcerating the wrongfully convicted….Other reforms should include
making labs independent of law enforcement and a requirement for blind
testing. When crime labs are part of the police department, some
forensic experts make mistakes out of an unconscious desire to help
their "clients," the police and prosecution. Independence and blind
testing prevent that.
That’s forensics expert Roger Koppl writing in Forbes. If anything I think Koppl is being kind to CSI. Take bullet lead analysis a procedure used by the FBI for decades that turns out to have no scientific validity whatsoever.
Full Disclosure: Koppl’s op-ed is based on a paper in a book called Law Without Romance edited by Ed Lopez to be published by Independent Institute where I am director of research.
The Storm
The storm ravaged the city’s architecture and infrastructure, took
hundreds of lives, exiled hundreds of thousands of residents. But it
also destroyed, or enabled the destruction of, the city’s public-school
system–an outcome many New Orleanians saw as deliverance….The floodwaters, so the talk went, had washed this befouled slate
clean–had offered, in a state official’s words, a “once-in-a-lifetime
opportunity to reinvent public education.” In due course, that
opportunity was taken:…Stripped of
most of its domain and financing, the Orleans Parish School Board fired
all 7,500 of its teachers and support staff, effectively breaking the
teachers’ union. And the Bush administration stepped in with millions
of dollars for the expansion of charter schools–publicly financed but
independently run schools that answer to their own boards. The result
was the fastest makeover of an urban school system in American history.
That’s from The Atlantic just over a year ago. Guess what? It’s working. The storm is coming.
Letter to the NEJM
The issue of off-label prescribing is heating up again. A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine by Randall Stafford made the case for greater regulation. I am concerned that the benefits of off-label prescribing are not fully appreciated. Dan Klein and I wrote a letter to the NEJM – which they declined to publish – in response. Here’s the letter:
Dear NEJM,
R.S. Stafford writes that off-label prescribing “permits innovation in clinical practice … offers patients and physicians earlier access to potentially valuable medications and allows physicians to adopt new practices based on emerging evidence.” Nevertheless, he calls for greater FDA regulation.
In contrast, we argue that the efficacy of off-label usage suggests that less FDA regulation of first or on-label usage would increase innovation and offer patients earlier access to new medications.
Off-label prescribing is regulated by the judgments of doctors, medical researchers, industry, the patient community, and patients. This system offers patients a more nuanced approach to care than a top-down approach. We should extend this approach to new drugs as well as to new uses for old drugs.
Our perspective is bolstered by a large survey of physicians which demonstrates strong support for off-label prescribing and considerable support for reducing FDA regulations on new drugs.
Daniel Klein
Alexander Tabarrok
George Mason University
Fragments of Wisdom
… it is important that presidential candidates fear economists…
Brad DeLong, writing about why what a politician says about a minor policy like the gas-tax matters. Of course it is even better if the public are informed and on the gas-tax they seemed to have made the right decision.
It has electrolytes!
Yes, you really can buy it now. Brawndo. The line between irony and reality grows ever finer.
Appeasing the Gods
Economists say that people buy insurance to cover themselves if something bad happens. Some experiments by psychologists suggest that people buy insurance because they think it will prevent the bad thing from happening. John Tierney has more.
Get politically uninvolved!
The great P.J. O’Rourke:
All politics stink. Even democracy stinks. Imagine if our clothes were selected
by the majority of shoppers, which would be teenage girls. I’d be standing here
with my bellybutton exposed. Imagine deciding the dinner menu by family secret
ballot. I’ve got three kids and three dogs in my family. We’d be eating Froot
Loops and rotten meat.But let me make a distinction between politics and
politicians. Some people are under the misapprehension that all politicians
stink. Impeach George W. Bush, and everything will be fine. Nab Ted Kennedy on a
DUI, and the nation’s problems will be solved.But the problem isn’t
politicians — it’s politics. Politics won’t allow for the truth. And we can’t
blame the politicians for that. Imagine what even a little truth would sound
like on today’s campaign trail:"No, I can’t fix public education. The
problem isn’t the teachers unions or a lack of funding for salaries, vouchers or
more computer equipment The problem is your kids!"
Hat tip to Newmark’s Door.
Collier on the Food Crisis
Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion was my pick for best economics book last year (not written by a dear friend), it was smart, hard-hitting and unconventional. Collier hasn’t lost his touch as a great comment, more like an op-ed, on the food crisis over at Martin Wolf’s Economic Forum illustrates.
The remedy to high food prices is to increase food supply, something
that is entirely feasible. The most realistic way to raise global
supply is to replicate the Brazilian model of large, technologically
sophisticated agro-companies supplying for the world market…. There are still many areas of the world that
have good land which could be used far more productively if it was
properly managed by large companies…Unfortunately, large-scale commercial agriculture is unromantic. We
laud the production style of the peasant: environmentally sustainable
and human in scale. In respect of manufacturing and services we grew
out of this fantasy years ago, but in agriculture it continues to
contaminate our policies. In Europe and Japan huge public resources
have been devoted to propping up small farms. The best that can be said
for these policies is that we can afford them. In Africa, which cannot
afford them, development agencies have oriented their entire efforts on
agricultural development to peasant style production. As a result,
Africa has less large-scale commercial agriculture than it had fifty
years ago. Unfortunately, peasant farming is generally not well-suited
to innovation and investment: the result has been that African
agriculture has fallen further and further behind the advancing
productivity frontier of the globalized commercial model.
Read the whole thing. Many more oxen are gored.
Eminent Domain and Civil Rights
“[t]he burden of eminent domain has and will continue to fall disproportionately
upon racial and ethnic minorities, the elderly, and economically disadvantaged.”
Unfettered eminent domain authority, the NAACP concluded, is a “license for
government to coerce individuals on behalf of society’s strongest interests.”
That is the NAACP quoted in an op-ed by David Beito and GMU law prof Ilya Somin.
Hat tip to The Beacon.
Exporting Electrons
Everyone knows that Caterpillar is an exporter. But last week Google reported record profits and Google stock rose nearly twenty percent. Why were profits up? Google’s foreign revenues shot head of its U.S. revenues because of a weaker dollar. Google is an exporter. Who knew? And what does Google export? Patterns of electrons.
Thanks to David Levy for discussion.
Limited Liability
“The limited liability corporation is the greatest single discovery of modern times. Even steam and electricity are less important than the limited liability company”.
Professor Butler President of Columbia University, 1911.
"This limited liability corporation is the bedrock of the market economy…And what do we, the citizenry, get in return for this generous public grant of limited liability? Originally, we told the corporation what to do. You are to deliver the goods and then go out of business. And then let humans live our lives. But corporations gained power, broke through democratic controls, and now roam around the world inflicting unspeakable damage on the earth."
Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, Mother Jones 1999