Hypergamy is the word of the day.

Yes, men are also, to their own detriment, continually surrounded with images of exceptionally attractive women. But this has less practical import, because–to say it once more–women choose.

Or:

The decline of matrimony is often attributed to men now being able to “get what they want” from women without marrying them. But what if a woman is able to get everything she wants from a man without marriage? Might she not also be less inclined to “commit” under such circumstances?

This essay is not politically correct and at times it is misogynous and yes I believe the author is evil (seriously).  The main behavioral assumption is that women are fickle.  So they are monogamous at points of time but not over time; Devlin then solves for the resulting equilibrium, so to speak.  The birth rate falls, for one thing.  The piece also claims that the modern "abolition" of marriage strengthens the attractive at the expense of the unattractive.  Some of you will hate the piece.  I disagree with the central conclusion, and also the motivation, but it does seem to count as a new idea.  If you’re tempted, read it.

I thank Robin Hanson for the pointer.

Silly questions to bug people with

You devote two hours a week to sports fandom, you say?  How much would you have to be paid to give those two hours up?  You’ll be paid in terms of extra time.  So if you give up your two hours of sports fandom, the benevolent genie gives you three hours for something else, whatever is your next best activity or activities.  That means a net gain of an hour a week and a time rate of return of 50 percent.  You won’t do that?  How about four hours back and a time rate of return of 100 percent?  Nope.  Really?

Sports must be fun.  Well…why aren’t you watching more sports?

OK, go draw your marginal utility curves and show your MU for sports first way above your MRS and then dropping off a cliff.  What’s the hard-to-substitute-for "Lancastrian Z good" that makes sports so imperative for two hours but so inessential for three?

The language tax

Or should I have called this post "The language subsidy"?  Anyway, here is the latest from David Albouy, courtesy of the NBER:

The wage differential between Francophone and Anglophone men from 1970 to 2000 fell by 25 percentage points within Quebec, but only by 10 points Canada-wide, largely because the wages of Quebec Anglophones fell by 15 points relative to other Canadian Anglophones. Accordingly, the Canadian measure of the Francophone wage gap better reflects the changing welfare of Francophones than the Quebec measure. Over half of the reduction in the Canadian Francophone wage gap is explained by rising Francophone education levels. In Quebec, the declining number and relative wages of Anglophone workers is best explained by a falling demand for English-speaking labour.

Here is the paper.

Freedom Fries Under Attack

The Los Angeles council has just passed on ordinance banning new fast food restaurants in a poor section of South/Central LA.  William Saletan calls it Food Apartheid and writes:

We’re not talking anymore about preaching diet and exercise, disclosing
calorie counts, or restricting sodas in schools. We’re talking about
banning the sale of food to adults….It’s true that food options in low-income neighborhoods are, on
average, worse than the options in wealthier neighborhoods. But
restricting options in low-income neighborhoods is a disturbingly
paternalistic way of solving the problem.

Milton Friedman once said:

I don’t think the state has any more right to tell me what what to put in my mouth than it has to tell me what can come out of my mouth.

Friedman was talking about drug prohibition but today the target could just as easily be food prohibition.

Hat tip on the Friedman quote to Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek.

My favorite things Ohio

I’m hardly here for long, so here goes:

1. Author: There’s Sherwood Anderson and William Dean Howells and Toni Morrison; I’ll pick the latter though none are true favorites of mine.   

2. Director: Wes Craven remains underrated; I still like his The Serpent and the Rainbow, among others.  I can’t think of a notable movie set in Ohio, can you?

3. Painter: George Bellows’s reputation has shot up in the last twenty years; here’s an unusual Bellows print.  I very much like the botanical paintings and prints of Jim Dine, although I can’t find a good one on-line.

4. Popular music: I can’t think of much…Boz Scaggs doesn’t count nor does Peter Frampton.  Lonnie Mack’s The Wham of That Memphis Man! is one of the least known great albums.  Doris Day is a very good singer and do see Pillow Talk if you don’t already know it.

5. Jazz: There is Art Tatum, especially the early Capitol work, not so much the later Pablo recordings.  Billy Strayhorn was often behind the best Duke Ellington arrangements.

6. Classical music recording: George Szell’s Beethoven’s 3rd remains a landmark recording, or try his Piano Concerti set with Leon Fleisher.

7. Philosopher: Willard van Orman Quine. most of all Word and Object.  Now that’s a favorite.

8. Sculptor: Maya Lin did the Vietnam Memorial though she hasn’t had much of a second act.

The bottom line: The achievement from this state is remarkably well-distributed across different artistic fields and genres.  Why?  Is it because the state has so many different cities of at least middling size?  Or is it because the state straddles the East and the Midwest?  Sadly there is no Cincinnati chili for me this time.

Addendum: Angus of Ohio comments.

What I Haven’t Been Reading

1. Red State Blue State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do, by the consistently impressive Andrew Gelman.

2. Global Catastrophic Risks, edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic; so many smart, virile young men, all writing about destruction.

3. Prosperity Unbound: Building Property Markets with Trust, by Elena Panaritis.  An update on the debates on Hernando de Soto and the associated land and property issues.

4. The Mirrored Heavens, by David J. Williams.  A science fiction story for people who take the idea of space elevators for granted.

5. The Household: Informal Order Around the Hearth, by the noted law and economics scholar Robert C. Ellickson.

If I’m not reading them, it’s because I’ve been spending my time with Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Norris’s McTeague, both for my Liberty Fund conference in Cleveland.

Getting serious

Saudi Arabia’s religious police have announced a ban on selling cats and dogs as pets, or walking them in public in the Saudi capital, because of men using them as a means of making passes at women, an official said on Wednesday.

…Othman said that the commission has instructed its offices in the capital to tell pet shops "to stop selling cats and dogs".

Here is the full story.  This is, of course, a net benefit for the offenders to date.  The newly created artificial scarcity increases the conversation value of the already owned animals and also confers a positive wealth effect on the wrongdoers.  Is it not better to stop xxxx by giving everyone a pet and thus eliminating its conversational value?  By the way, if this edict is enforced, we can expect an increase in the pet birth rate and also a greater number of abandoned pets.

The final question, of course, is how do you use a pet cat to make a pass at a woman?  I’ve heard of people walking their cats, but I expect it is not an easy experience.  To limit sex, cats should be subsidized, not taxed.  No?

John Cochrane on the Milton Friedman protest letter

Read John’s response here (the original letter is here).  In my view the damning bit is this one:

…it is to me sadder still how atrociously written this
letter is. These people devote their lives to writing on social issues, and
teaching freshmen (including mine) how to think and write clearly.  Yet
it’s awful.

Recommended for those who like polemic and mutual recrimination.

I thank a loyal MR reader for the pointer.

David R. Henderson asks

This is from the comments and in the context of the financial market bailouts:

"Why aren’t you free-marketeer crusaders screaming your heads off?!"

My answer is that I have been. Reporters have interviewed me about it and sometimes they report my "screams" and sometimes they don’t. Re Tyler’s blase response, I’m reluctantly coming to the conclusion, after having read his site almost daily for over a year, that Tyler is not a free-market crusader. He’s a first-rate economist, but his passion seems to be almost solely about the analytics rather than the policies.

Am I wrong, Tyler?

I would note a few points:

1. I have very much favored the "bailouts" to date.  I don’t favor that they were necessary but of course that latter attitude may or may not be libertarian in its derivation.

2. My tone stems from my personality, namely that I rarely get mad.  And in any policy debate, I don’t assume that the people on my side intellectually are somehow morally superior or more honest.  In any particular case I usually give that 50-50.  It’s also worth noting that perhaps we shouldn’t judge partisanship from tone, just as we shouldn’t judge linguistic fluency from the quality of a person’s accent (which we tend to do).

3. A good blog should be subversive and help you see the faults in the author’s own positions.  Ask whether the blogs you are reading in fact provide that service.  Self-subversion ought also, in the long run, to benefit liberty and other important values.

4. I think very often in international terms, so I see even most left-wing Americans (e.g., Ezra Klein) as having a relatively similar world view to my own.  Why focus on the local political conflict when so many presuppositions are shared?  When it comes to all-important questions about "how should we live?" it may well be that Ezra and I are pretty close together.  We should attach greater value to those commonalities of perspective.

5. I am very libertarian compared to the American center but moderate compared to most libertarians.

I am not sure I have answered David’s question.

Why did the HMO revolution fail?

Mark Thoma cites this passage from Paul Krugman:

During the 1990’s it seemed, briefly, as if private H.M.O.’s
could play that role. But then there was a public backlash. It turns out that
even in America, with its faith in the free market, people don’t trust
for-profit corporations to make decisions about their health.

Read the whole link for a recap of Mark’s debate with Arnold Kling.  In my view what people objected to was not the for-profit status of HMOs per se but rather that they could be told they can’t get all the care they want.  That view will remain.  That’s one reason why covering 45 million or so additional Americans will lead to rising rather than falling health care costs.

On the administrative expenses of private health insurers, that is, at best, a one-time savings and health care costs still will be rising.  It’s also hard to argue that a) the really sick people are often denied care or coverage by private insurance, and b) we can pick up those same people and still lower total costs.  It’s the sick people who account for most of the costs, at any margin, and most of those costs come from medical procedures.

As the possibility of a real Democratic majority draws closer, expect to see more and more cognitive dissonance on this issue.  There’s a perfectly coherent case for greater government involvement based on the desire to spend more resources to alleviate the financial insecurity of many sick Americans.  But you are going to hear the "free lunch" version of the argument instead, based on the belief that the properties of American and European health care systems are somehow interchangeable at will.

That said, people on my side of the issue should admit that we could lower overall health care costs (or at least slow their rise) by having a true single-payer plan and putting most doctors on fixed salaries in small cooperatives, thereby altering their incentives to spend on wasteful capital expenditures.  (How many years would it take for costs to fall?)  That’s not, however, what we’ll be getting, so beware the bait and switch.  Under any plausible health care reform scenario, health care expenditures in America will rise rather than fall.  If only we had a betting market on this…

Addendum: Here is Arnold’s more direct reply.  Here are related remarks from Megan McArdle.

The ancient Greek computational mechanism

We now know a little more:

After a closer examination of the Antikythera Mechanism, a surviving marvel of ancient Greek technology, scientists have found that the device not only predicted solar eclipses but also organized the calendar in the four-year cycles of the Olympiad, forerunner of the modern Olympic Games.

The device also had a likely connection with Archimedes.  Here is the full story.

Why blogs should cover some topics randomly

Think of a blog as competing with both Google and Wikipedia, among other aggregators.  If you knew you wanted to read about "the minimum wage," you could bypass Tyler and Alex and Google to the best entries (some of which might include us, of course).  But with Google and Wikipedia you must choose the topic.  A good blog writer can randomize the topic for you, much like a good DJ controls the sequence of the music.  Sometimes you might trust us more than you trust other aggregators, but we can’t count on that and arguably the other aggregators improve at a rate faster than we do.

Flying puffin!

Sentences to fear

Covered bonds issued by "too big to fail" banks are basically equivalent to mortgage backed securities guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie.

Here is much more, though I cannot see that the credit of the United States government is in danger.  There is a) the printing press, and b) our location on the left side of the Laffer Curve.  The point remains that additional debt for the major banks, while arguably necessary, weakens the off-balance sheet position of our government.