Daniel Klein categorizes classical liberals

Here is the abstract:

To participate in establishment political culture one must win recognition by the establishment. Classical liberals have to choose between forthrightness and establishment respectability. Klein will present a framework for distinguishing three types of classical liberal prophets:

  • Challengers focus on fundamentals and point to major policy reforms, notably abolitions. They attack the establishment and its entire culture, and seek to influence the young. Examples: Thomas Paine, Frederic Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises, Thomas Szasz, and Murray Rothbard.
  • Bargainers point to incremental liberalization and obscure the deeper principles. They enjoy mainstream position and seek to influence the currently influential. Examples include Friedrich Hayek, Aaron Wildavsky, Richard Epstein, and Tyler Cowen.
  • Royalty: Whereas the first two types are critics who feel somewhat alienated from establishment culture, royalty are those who enjoy cultural pre-eminence, particularly high academic prestige. Royalty ride a sense of ascendancy. They downplay radicalism. The leading examples are Adam Smith and Milton Friedman.

        Klein will develop two ideas:

1. In the current ideological climate there is little prospect for classical-liberal royalty. In fact, Milton Friedman was something of an aberration.

2. Challengers and bargainers sometimes regard each other with disdain and mistrust. But both are vital to the advancement of their common cause.

Here is the full paper, entitled "Mere Libertarianism: Blending Hayek and Rothbard." 

I view my own writings as less strategic and less "negotiating" than Klein’s analysis would indicate.  Of course Klein has the right — I would say the duty — to read an author as he pleases and not as that author would self-describe.  After all, we all know that Melville’s "Bartleby" is really about the contagious nature of homosexual obsession.  It really is.

Addendum: Dan Klein informs me this is an abstract for a related talk, not for the paper itself.

The Case for Mindless Economics

Faruk Gul and Wolfgang Pesendorfer, of Princeton University, defend neoclassical economics against behavioral economics.  They write: "Neuroscience evidence cannot refute economic models because the latter make no assumptions and draw no conclusions about the physiology of the brain."  Their lengthy and defensive piece denies that economics has to concern itself with the content of preferences, or with the content of human irrationality. I am more than willing to admit that the merits of behavioral economics remain an open question.  But if this is the best neoclassical economics can do in defense, we are all in a bit of trouble.  On a related note, here is a short piece on what it is like to have your brain scanned.

Thanks to Dan Houser for the pointer.

The Scots are sick

David Bell and David Blanchflower report:

On almost all measures of physical health, Scots fare worse than residents of any other region of the UK and often worse than the rest of Europe. Deaths from chronic liver disease and lung cancer are particularly prevalent in Scotland. The self-assessed wellbeing of Scots is lower than that of the English or Welsh, even after taking into account any differences in characteristics. Scots also suffer from higher levels of self-assessed depression or phobia, accidental death and suicide than those in other parts of Great Britain. This result is particularly driven by outcomes in Strathclyde and is consistent with the high scores for other measures of social deprivation in this area. On average, indicators of social capital in Scotland are no worse than in England or Wales. Detailed analysis within Scotland, however, shows that social capital indicators for the Strathclyde area are relatively low. We argue that these problems seem unlikely to be fixed by indirect policies aimed at raising economic growth.

Here is the full paper, but there is no dummy variable for who eats deep-fried Mars bars.  Here is the Strathclyde Hilton.  On another note, I’ve long thought that the Scots and Irish are central to understanding the evolution of the American national character.

Elsewhere on the NBER front, here is a new paper on self-deception and voting.

How quickly should I go through my stock of Battlestar Galactica?

The Hotelling rule tells us to consume a stock so the shadow value rises at a rate commensurable with the rate of interest…or something like that.  C’mon, let ‘s get real.  Here are a few options:

1. Set aside one day for a BSG fest.  I would lose the pleasures of anticipation, so no way.  (Would you want all non-currents-events-specific MR posts available all at once?)  The pleasures of memory would be weaker as well.

2. Have a strict rule, such as one a day.

3. Have a stranger impose a rationing pattern.  Sometimes we call this stranger the Science Fiction Channel.  But what about the accumulated stock of programs on DVD?

4. Watch it when your wife lets you (not an issue for those that have married well).

5. Refuse to watch the last episode, in an attempt to deny your mortality.

6. Watch them at an increasing rate.

#3 is appealing, but so far I am opting for #6.  Comments are open, if you wish to rationalize what you already have done.

Addendum: This question will become more important.

Friggonomics

Here is a data base on legal Nevada prostitutes.

The average rate is about $400 an hour, and the average customer believes he is getting a woman 31 years of age.  I won’t summarize the rest, but there is a table of correlation coefficients for many variables.

Here is a concluding excerpt:

I have been informed of many instances of guys walking into a legal
Nevada brothel, picking a lady and going back to her room to negotiate,
and then quoting to her the averages I found in previous surveys. This
is not good negotiating strategy, a topic I usually prefer not to give
advice on.

Thanks to the excellent Cynical-C blog for the pointer; they swear they found the data by accident.  And here is a good piece on whether Heidi Fleiss’s brothel for women will succeed, I predict no.

How to drink less (more?)

Pour into a tall, vertical glass:

If you pour champagne into a tall, slender glass, you’ll probably serve yourself less than if you pour it into a short, fat glass. But the human mind plays tricks, so you’ll almost surely think it’s the other way around.

Brian Wansink, professor of marketing, applied economics and nutritional science at Cornell University, has spent years studying how the shape of containers influences our consumption, and he has weighed in with a new study just in time for New Year’s celebrations.

In the study, published in the current issue of the British Medical Journal, Wansink and Koert van lttersum, assistant professor of marketing at Georgia Institute of Technology, demonstrate that even professional bartenders get the amount wrong much of the time, although their expertise improves with experience.

Three separate studies yielded similar conclusions, regardless of the beverage. Teenagers concerned about their health poured less fruit juice when they were given tall, slender glasses than when they were given short, squat tumblers, although they believed the opposite was true.

What is at work here is how we measure quantities in the mind’s eye, Wansink says. We tend to rely more on a vertical than a horizontal measurement, so it appears at first that a taller glass holds more than a shorter one, even if the short glass is wider. "Elongation," to use the researchers’ word, is the trickster here.

Here is the full story, and thanks to www.geekpress.com for the pointer.

Modal wives and why it is hard to marry well

I define a modal wife (or husband) as a person you would have married (could have married?) had you met them at the right time, unattached, and under normal life conditions.  The number of modal wives is typically greater than or equal to the number of real wives, although clever philosophers will recognize possible [sic] counterexamples. 

Under one view, you have hundreds or thousands of modal wives, most of whom you never meet.  (How many does the average person meet, how soon do you know when you meet one, and how confused would you be if they were all in the same room at once?)  Your correct dating strategy is to cast your net very widely, and hope to find and marry one of these people. 

Under another view, modal wives are no big deal.  Your so-called "modal wives" are no better for you than, say, the best woman you could pick out of a lot of thirty eligibles.  The key inputs for a good marriage are attitude and a minimum degree of compatibility, not search and discovery.

If this is true, searching for modal wives, or perhaps even thinking about the concept, can make you worse off.  The quest for the perfect mate makes it harder to come to terms with what is otherwise a compatible marriage.  Which perhaps is all you are going to get anyway.  Marriage is good for you, and don’t be too fussy, this is not iTunes.  Too much choice, or too much perceived choice, is problematic.

The two views offer directly conflicting advice (TC: My views are closer to the first position, although attitude remains all-important).  Yet we may be uncertain which view applies to us and to what extent.  You could put all your eggs in one basket and pursue just one strategy, but what a risk if you are wrong.  You could act upon some weighted average of the two views; I suspect this is what most people do.  But then the two strategies are constantly undercutting each other.

That is one reason why it is hard to marry well.

Addendum: Here is a good post on Deception Island, and do also read the excellent comments thread on this post.

Which sport has the most upsets?

Soccer looks random to my untutored eye and perhaps it is:

Eli Ben-Naim, Sidney Redner and Federico Vazquez at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico decided to look at unpredictability of results – how often a team with a worse record overcomes an apparently superior one – as the best measure of how exciting a league is. "If there are no upsets, then every game is predictable and hence boring," says Ben-Naim.

The team analysed results from more than 300,000 games over the last century from the US’s national hockey, football, baseball and basketball leagues and the top English football league. Rugby and cricket were omitted because they do not have a big following in the US.

Their results showed that the "upset frequency" was highest for soccer, followed by baseball, hockey, basketball and finally American football. But when they looked only at data from the past 10 years, the English football Premiership and baseball swapped places, which suggests that soccer might have become more predictable in recent years.

Here is the story.  I have long favored basketball.  In any given year, barring major trades or injuries, only three or four teams (if that) have any chance of winning the title.  You know who the titans are, and you know who the peons are.  Limiting randomness and divvying up the ponds in this fashion boosts suspense and status.  The old Celtics-Lakers match-ups were ideal.  The league is driven by star teams and players, so let’s promote those stars.  Chess has the same property, but a few good pitching nights can turn a World Series around.

The implied prediction is that basketball and football will have large bases of casually informed fans, typically relying on mass media.  Baseball and soccer will have more fanatics, more trivia contests, and will be more deeply rooted in niche media.  You have to know about many players and teams to figure out what is going on, who is likely to win, and why.

The final fall of music copyright?

The Viktoria Institute in Gothenburg, Sweden, is working on a concept they call PUSH MUSIC, which is software that automatically shares music files with nearby users who have similar tastes. It monitors the listening history of the user, and develops awareness about what kind of new music he might like. The concept envisions Wi-Fi-enabled music players that automatically establish a peer-to-peer connection, enabling people to either "browse" the music collections of others and take a copy of whatever they like, or — here’s the magic part — just automatically receive music the software has selected for you.

Here is the link, and comments are open for those who know more about this.  Here are the comments from www.digg.com.  Can you be liable if some other listener "pushes" stolen property onto your computer?  Will the risk of passing malicious code make this unworkable?