Benjamin Barber’s *Consumed*
There is actually [sic] a restaurant in New Jersey called Stuff Yer Face, and fast food generally is about stuffing your face: about nutrition, fueling up, taking in the calories, food as instrumentality, eaters as mere animals responding to biological imperatives.
The subtitle of the new book is How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantalize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole. Here is the restaurant’s home page, with sound.
Where are the economic historians?
Read Eric Rauchway’s excellent post. Excerpt:
Economic history might have moved out of history departments for market reasons as well. If, to pursue economic history, you had to master technical skills that would make you eligible for an appointment in an economics department, you would probably prefer that to an appointment in a history department: economists get paid more because they’re eligible for employment in government and business as well as universities.
Some of the economic historians are coming to George Mason; this year we hired John Nye, Werner Troesken, and Gary Richardson. New hire Peter Leeson does some economic history as well. We’ve gone from a minor player in the field to a top department for economic history.
But will they be fun at lunch?
When will liberty’s day arrive?
Life without socks would be… "undignified," but no one recommends government provision or even sock vouchers. Relative to income, socks are sufficiently cheap. There is some inequality of socks, but it seems that just about everybody — even the poor — "has enough." We don’t even force people to buy socks for their kids.
Might there come a time when health care and education fall under the same rubric?
Yes, I know that, due to rising labor costs, health care and education might continue to eat up an increasing percentage of national income. But still, can’t "rich enough" people make do? Living in Aspen might cost half your income, but if you’re a multi-millionaire no one weeps for you.
Of course today’s poor aren’t rich enough for us to remove government aid. But when will the splendid era of libertarian freedom be possible? Today’s poor are much richer than the poor fifty years ago, and the poor of the future are likely to be richer yet. Won’t the welfare state, at some point, simply become unnecessary?
Readers, please tell me in the comments when the time will come for dismantling the welfare state. Will you sign your name to a pledge:
"I am a left-winger, but only until 2078"?
More elegant would be:
"I’m a 2096 libertarian."
Social democracy is but a mere transitional strategy.
If this were 1890, what Year of Libertarian Freedom would you have named?
The funniest sentence I read today
Incubus is a 1965 horror film that was filmed in Esperanto and starred William Shatner.
Via Jason Kottke. The first link includes a pretty amazing trailer for the film.
Boomsday
The new Christopher Buckley novel Boomsday concerns a blogger — Cassandra — who proposes that a cash-strapped, demographically-burdened society pay old people to do themselves in. The elderly are to kill themselves for tax breaks. In Swiftian fashion we can improve this idea by convexifying the choice. Let’s make it a risk and subsidize sky-diving for the non-working elderly.
There are two positive externalities from the resulting deaths; first, a bequest of material wealth passes to other individuals, second, the deadweight loss of taxation falls. The negative externality from the death falls upon other family members and friends; whether the would-be victim internalized those costs in the first place is difficult to calculate. Have I mentioned that economics has few good ways of modeling two-way altruism and keeping the standard welfare theorems intact? Distribution and efficiency are no longer separate, but hey that’s the real world.
Here is a New York Times review. Buckley is one of the most entertaining public speakers I have heard, hire or go hear him if you can.
Markets in everything, California edition
Californians appear willing to pay $4,000 more for used gasoline-electric hybrid vehicles that have state-issued carpool stickers than for hybrids that don’t.
Here is the full story.
The French economy and health care system
The French economy may be messed up in many ways, but at least you can’t complain about their health care system.
So wrote one MR commentator, that is my paraphrase I can’t find the exact quotation.
It is worth noting that the French health care system and the failings of the French economy are closely linked. The French economy is notorious for its resource immobility. It is hard to switch sectors, hard to switch jobs, and hard to switch regions. The upshot is that when government taxes factors of production, or caps the price they command, those factors usually have nowhere else to go other than to consume more leisure. This makes it easier to cap health care prices and doctors’ wages: everything is frozen in place.
The more mobile American economy would find it much harder to tax skilled labor and doctors. For related reasons, American transfer programs tend to be more expensive per
dollar of redistribution, less easily based on the provision of quality services at low prices, and they require more complex bells and
whistles. NB: This is an argument for not trying to copy Europe, not an argument for trying to copy Europe. Call it a cost of resource mobility if you wish.
The more a European government takes advantage of immobility, the harder it is to break a vicious economic circle. Instituting French factor mobility, even were it possible politically, would cause low-price, low-wage sectors to decline in quality. Factors would flee to more entrepreneurial sectors. In the meantime, pushing everyone into more leisure lowers wealth and makes it harder to finance a "grand bargain" of palatable economic reforms. The economy will remain stuck, stuck, stuck. Some sectors will enjoy a captive audience of skilled labor.
I have spent several months of my life in France, and I do understand that life there is truly splendid in many ways. But it is hard for me to believe that the French system — viewed as the organic whole it is — is the best way forward for the United States.
Don’t get stuck in that kindness rut
…conventional wisdom suggests keeping a daily gratitude journal. But one study revealed that those who had been assigned to do that ended up less happy than those who had to count their blessings only once a week. Lyubomirsky therefore confirmed her hunch that timing is important. So is variety, it turned out: a kindness intervention found that participants told to vary their good deeds ended up happier than those forced into a kindness rut.
Here is more.
Assorted links
1. Composers Steve Reich and Glenn Branca are blogging.
2. Why Barack Obama won’t win, via Matt Y.
3. Wiggle your eyes back and forth to improve your memory.
Department of Why Not
In England, this new cognitive approach to psychosis and the efforts of Hearing Voices Network are independent of each other, and are sometimes at odds. H.V.N.’s leading members, for instance, frequently criticize even sympathetic academic researchers for being insufficiently political. Yet both approaches share a similar purpose in seeking to place voice-hearing within the continuum of normal human experience – one, in order to better treat patients, the other, out of a firm conviction that hearing voices need not interfere with leading an otherwise “normal” life. [emphasis added]
Of course that refers to hearing voices that aren’t actually there. Here is the full and fascinating story. It advises people who wish to talk back to the voices to carry around cell phones.
How extreme must a single weirdness be, before a person can’t much function in the real world or be counted as "normal"?
Safety nets
From the loyal:
Safety nets, what kind (if any) is desirable.
Yes, we should have a safety net. This is a huge topic, but here are a few select points:
1. The more time a person has spent working in private philanthropy, the less likely he or she is to think that private charity can substitute for the government’s safety net.
2. It remains a puzzle why we don’t have more insurance for long-term risks to health and income, but we don’t. In the meantime we have to assume institutional failure.
3. I am a fan of David Beito’s Tocquevillean work on workingman’s societies and private club insurance in early 20th century America. But it is a tale of how insurance institutions changed over the course of a century, and not a new recipe for how market completeness was on its way until government botched it.
4. Some societies, such as in East Asia, use the family to pick up a greater share of income and health risks. I doubt if the highly mobile United States could do the same, but even so this option is costly. Most of all, the welfare state liberates the productive and the creative from their sometimes burdensome family ties. The welfare state is the Randian’s secret dream, and that is what clinches the case for a government safety net.
5. I’ll invoke an argument from authority for my libertarian readers and note that both Hayek and Friedman favored a governmental safety net.
6. A safety net (strict Asian families aside) is probably a prerequisite for a well-functioning capitalist democracy, even if its curative powers are sometimes overrated.
But on the other side of the debate, we are all going to die. Nasty outcomes await us, no matter how much is spent on a safety net. The "You can’t let that happen to a human being" posturing isn’t especially helpful. We cannot rely on a safety net to remedy every human tragedy, but if society is rich enough, let’s do some safety net.
#34 in a series of 50.
What is wrong with the World Bank?
I am a fan of Sebastian Mallaby’s The World’s Banker, a biography of Jim Wolfensohn’s tenure at the World Bank. Jeffrey Hooke’s The Dinosaur Among Us: The World Bank and its Path to Extinction is the next excellent book on this institution. Do you want to know exactly why the Bank doesn’t do better, explained in language of property rights and incentives?
I read Hooke as placing the final blame on the very active role of the Board in the Bank’s regular operations. The incentive is to have the Bank lend lots and create contracts which funnel money back to corporate interests in the U.S. and Western Europe. As a result Bank loans don’t embody much accountability and the loan or aid recipients can game the system and turn it toward their own political ends and away from growth enhancement.
Contrary to what the title of the book might imply, Hooke wishes to reform rather than eliminate the Bank. This is not "one of those libertarian rants," and it can be read with profit by all. Hooke has spent six years working at the Bank and he knows his material very well.
And if you think, as I do, that most books should not exceed 100 pages, you will like this one all the more. Recommended.
My favorite things German: J.S. Bach
One reader requested "My Favorite Things German" for weeks (possible, but yikes), instead he’ll get selected tidbits, today is J.S. Bach.
1. Organ music: I favor the Trio Sonatas, most of all by Christopher Herrick. After that, buy any collection by Herrick or Peter Hurford.
2. Brandenburg Concerti: I don’t like most recordings of these; they either sound like sewing machines or they are whiny. But both Felix Prohaska or Otto Klemperer are supremely musical with these pieces.
3. Keyboard music: Go for piano not harpischord. For Well-Tempered Klavier get the dreamy Samuel Feinberg or Richter, for the English Suite in A Minor get Glenn Gould, for the Partitas get Glenn Gould, for the Goldbergs get both Gould recordings. Best of all is the Art of the Fugue, for piano, by Grigory Sokolov.
4. B Minor Mass: Gardiner or Herreweghe.
5. St. Matthew’s Passion: Klemperer (the best voices), Suzuki (all-Japanese, and fantastic), or Herreweghe.
6. Solo Violin music: Get the second Nathan Milstein set, the stereo recording. Perlman’s version is technically perfect but doesn’t sound like a real violin.
7. Solo Cello Suites: Rostropovich is romantic, Starker is analytical, and Navarra is underrated.
That, in my view, is the truly essential Bach. I’ve never developed the same love for his Cantatas, too many of them were churned out or recycled. They were better to buy on LP, when you could get one excellent cantata on each side. Most of the available CD cantata collections contain a fair amount of chaff.
#33 out of 50.
French health care
Many people (Jon Chait also) argue that France has the best health care system in the world.
As of 2003, the average income of a French physician was estimated at $55,000; in the U.S. the comparable number was $194,000.
A visit to a GP’s office (half of the doctors in France are GPs) had a reimbursement capped at 20 Euros, again circa 2003. It is not hard to pay ten times that amount in the U.S.
Did I mention that health care is a labor-intensive industry?
This is the major reason why French health care is cheaper than U.S. health care. France also spends less per unit on other inputs, such as prescription drugs.
Note that France still spends more than all or most other European systems, namely about 11 percent of gdp.
When comparing health care outcomes, France only does slightly better than many Mediterranean countries with obviously non-enviable health care systems. It is not obvious that France does better on health care outcomes than Japan, again a country with non-enviable health care institutions. In other words, France spends lots of money making people feel good about their health care processes, with only very marginal measured health care results. The United States also spends money on customer comfort, albeit in a more expensive and less egalitarian way.
It is easy to argue that the French system is better than that of the United States. But a defender of the French system must, in reality, fight "a war on two fronts," to paraphrase Derek Parfit. The French system does not, by the standards which have been erected in the debate, appear noticeably better than many other cheaper systems around the world. It does spend more money producing "customer satisfaction" and papering over some of the obvious inhumanities of the cheaper systems. That’s why it is easy to hold up as a model.
The disconnect arises because single-payer defenders wish to use international data to compare health care systems — France > U.S. — while pushing under the table the more radical (apparent) implications of that data, namely that France is spending far too much as well.
If we are going to be umm…transitive here, let’s have the debate where it belongs: expensive health care with marginal impact on measured health outcomes vs. saving lots of money and giving people much less in the way of health care services. I do think there is a good case for the latter, though looking toward the future I would myself prefer the former.
I might add I do favor taking action to lower doctors’ wages in the United States. Letting in a greater number of qualified foreign doctors is step number one. But if we’re going to criticize the U.S. system for its costliness, let’s put the blame where it belongs.
European secularism
Why is Europe becoming ever more secular?
As in American academia, European secularism is a mark of identity and (supposed) reasonableness. Europeans are surrounded by Islam on one side, Russia on another, and the United States across the ocean. Reasonableness is a natural identity for their smart people to slot themselves into. Yes state churches have made European religion bureaucratic and sluggish, but that is not the main story. Competitive religious alternatives, albeit unfunded by government, could have sprung up and captured hearts and minds but they didn’t.
Nonetheless the rise of European secularism will be reversed. Most people are only casually religious, but a chunk of every society has a tendency to be enthusiastically religious. European religions will restructure and make a comeback, at least among this chunk. Unlike in times past, I doubt if this segment will have the social status to pressure many others to go along, but it would still represent a fundamental shift in the European intellectual climate. This development would probably happen immediately, if not for the European fear of becoming too much like the United States. In any case the identity of reasonableness is not a sustainable meme for so many people in the long run; it doesn’t demand enough from its adherents. Hume wrote of cycles between monotheism and polytheism, had he lived later he could have tossed secularism into that mix.
And then there is Islam.
#32 out of 50.
By the way, Happy Fiftieth Birthday to the European Union. For all its bureaucracy, it has done more for human liberty in the last ten years than any other institution. I mean "enlargement" and Eastern Europe, of course.