Bryan Caplan on the McCain/Clinton gas tax relief plan

You’ll find his contrarian take in The New York Times this morning.  It’s a second best, public choice argument: according to Bryan we are usually too nasty to energy companies in bad times, so sending them some excess profits is a bit of needed TLC.  McCain’s plan of course is better in his eyes because it doesn’t include the punitive windfall profits tax.  And without a gas tax holiday we might be tempted to do something worse.  Excerpt:

…even a “giveaway” to the oil industry sets a positive course for the
future. During the last crisis, the industry was a scapegoat for
scarcity. Politicians scrambled to stop oil companies from profiting
from the crisis, even though temporarily high profits end shortages by
giving businesses an incentive to figure out how to increase output.

Stephen Colbert dissents.  And here’s Bryan’s own summary of Bryan.  I don’t know the data on the average rate of tax paid by energy companies, compared to other endeavors, but looking at that would be one place to start.

The Fermi paradox revisited

I am still thinking about Nick Bostrom’s stimulating essay (and Robin Hanson’s precursor essay).  Nick of course is worried about finding signs of alien life, which would suggest that life has arisen many times, leading to the question "where are they?" and the fear that life dies out pretty easily.  For Nick it is cheerier, from our point of view at least, to think it is very hard for life to get underway in the first place.

In pondering the Fermi question, I often wonder if I am not simply missing the party, so to speak.  Most people already *do* think they see signs of an alien presence of some kind, of course defining that concept broadly to include The Gods.  So how can we say we don’t see "them"?  Maybe I, the agnotheist, don’t see "them" (Him?) but surely most other people think they do.

Doesn’t that make the Fermi paradox go away in a snap?  No one cites Blind Boy Blake and screams "He doesn’t see them!".

Another way of putting it is to say we don’t take David Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion seriously enough.  We really have just one data point, so who can say what "they" look like, or what kind of "display" they would have made for us?

Alternatively, I am struck by the tension between the Fermi paradox with the "We are probably living in a simulation" claim.  Both are popular with the same group of people because they are nerdy ways of making you believe something weird; in reality the two conundrums don’t fit together.  If you take the simulation option seriously, you again see the creators all around you, albeit in disguised or cloaked form.  Of course you had to use Bayesian inferential reasoning to see them, but what’s wrong with that?  Better than a telescope, some would say.  And since most people believe in God, the creators might even consider their artwork to be already "signed."  (I’ll note rapidly in passing that the arguments against the simulation hypothesis also strike at the Fermi worries, but establishing that would take lots of work.)

Either way, it seems we see "them," or ought to think we see them, even if that turns out to be a visual mistake of sorts.

Addendum: I liked Michael Goodfellow’s point:

After that first species gets control, it makes all the rules.  If it shells over all the stars, no other life can even develop, since all the planets are frozen solid.  If it wants to let biological evolution continue, it can do that, by avoiding stars with fertile planets.  It can prevent any other technology from arising (by monitoring all the planets where life is evolving.)  It can guide or change any life that it does find.

This may seem horrible to you — little robots putting all the stars out!  Spreading like a weed and killing or preventing any new life from developing.  But you’re looking at it the wrong way…The first species out there gets to decide the future, for every species that follows.  For lack of any other evidence, let’s hope it’s us.

Splendid, but I part company at the last sentence.  There is some other evidence (of the Bayesian sort) and I think the most logical assumption is — whether you believe in God or space aliens — to think of ourselves as their product, one way or another.

Or to put it yet another way, what’s the principle of individuation here?  Isn’t "seeing us" and "seeing them" more or less the same thing?

Hail David Hume!

Does the CPI understate inflation?

You’re hearing this a lot these days, most of all from Kevin Phillips.  David Leonhardt sets the record straight.  Here is one excerpt:

During the 1980s and 1990s, though, did you ever stop and marvel at what a small share of your paycheck you were spending at the supermarket? I didn’t. I also didn’t really notice that gas cost less in the late 1990s than it had in the 1980s. Yet lately, every time my wife or I pass a new benchmark for filling up our tank – $40, $50 and now $60 – we have a conversation about it.

Price increases are simply more noticeable – more salient, as psychologists would say – than price decreases. Part of this comes from the notion of loss aversion: human beings dislike a loss more than they like a gain of equivalent size. If you have to sell your house for less than you bought it for, you’re really unhappy. You hate that ground chuck now costs $2.83 a pound, but you didn’t notice that oranges are 31 percent cheaper than they were a year ago.

…The price of major appliances has been flat over the last year. Furniture is 1 percent less expensive. A decade ago, a basic four-door Toyota Corolla LE cost $16,018, according to the company. The 2009 basic model costs $16,650, and it’s a safer, more powerful, more fuel-efficient car than its predecessor.

To top it all off, most people don’t buy any of these items very often. “People tend to remember things they do frequently,” says Stephen Cecchetti, an economist at Brandeis University who studies inflation. “And what do you buy more frequently than gas and food?”

A Public Choice theory of Chinese food

Seth Roberts, citing Jennifer 8 Lee, writes:

Why did Chinese immigrants to America start so many restaurants? Because Chinese cuisine is glorious, right? Well, no. Chinese immigrants started a lot of laundries, too, and there is nothing wonderful about Chinese ways of washing clothes. As Jennifer Lee explains in this excellent talk, the first Chinese immigrants were laborers. They were taking jobs away from American men, and this caused problems. Restaurants and laundries were much safer immigrant jobs because cooking and cleaning were women’s work.

By the way, here is some work on immigrant complementarity with native labor.  George Borjas rebuts.

What I’ve Been Reading

1. Arts, Inc.: How Greed and Neglect Have Destroyed Our Cultural Rights, by Bill Ivey.  The concrete discussions of cultural issues are consistently interesting and thoughtful; the overall talk of cultural rights which frames the book is not even well-developed enough to be called absurd.  The book is best on copyright and least interesting on the NEA, which Ivey once ran.  Most of all the book reflects a creeping horror that the internet will make its entire series of debates irrelevant.

2. Apples are from Kazakhstan: The Land that Disappeared, by Christopher Robbins.  A substantive travel book about you-know-where; it is both fun and full of substance.  Recommended.

3. The Monetary Policy of the Federal Reserve: A History, by Robert L. Hetzel.  This is a very serious treatment of what is, from a historical point of view, an understudied topic.  Recommended; note that while the monetarist point of view is not heavy-handed, it may not appeal to everybody.

4. Philip Bobbitt, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century.  A lengthy and thoughtful volume on how WMD are *the* problem of the future, though I found it didn’t get me further to thinking through my views.  A good start, however, for those who don’t buy the premise.

5. 1001 Buildings You Must See Before You Die.  One of the best books for browsing I have seen, though don’t expect much from the index.  I was most surprised by the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Center in New Caledonia, have any of you been there?

Assorted links

1. Megan Non-McArdle quits blogging, at least for the time being. 

I’ve long felt that the routine of married life fits the routine of blogging very well; I really do wake up the same hour each morning, more or less.  If I weren’t married I would still blog but I would feel more conflicted about it and perhaps she does too.  ("You’re funnier on the blog" one loyal (and beautiful) MR reader once told me upon meeting.)  Dating and blogging either means the blog is a secret (but for how long?) or the potential partner "dates the blog" before dating you.  Do I really want to be explaining "Markets in Everything" on a first or second date?  ("No, I don’t want you as a prostitute.  Most of the entries are sad, or satirical, but there is a secret code to indicate the ones I approve of.  For further explanation, go to the middle chapter in Montaigne’s second book of Essays.")  Maybe the blog is more charming than I am and I would do better to send it on my dates but that’s still an odd place to be.  In any case my guess is that Megan Non-McArdle is doing the right thing by quitting.  We all wish Megan Non- well in her quest for Mr. Non-McArdle, and in her quest for everything else, etc.

Rappers on *The Economist* magazine

"The style in which they write is simple and concise, how do they get their sentences so precise?" the rappers wonder.

And the chorus is a gem, too: "He reads the Economist so he can get the gist, its solid competence gives him confidence that his intelligence is correct."

The rappers also weigh in on accusations that the Economist pushes a particular line: "Yes, they have a bias; it’s pro-democratic. And pro-free trade; they are very emphatic."

The source is Chris Blattman.

Fragments of wisdom

Yet economists talk much more about trade than they do about health care policy, because they think they know something about it in a way the laity don’t…don’t let economist’s tendency to overemphasize their areas of expertise distort your view.

I don’t agree with every claim in this Krugman piece, least of all his defense of you-know-who, but I think that psychoanalysis of economists is spot on.

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.

What is the best country music?

That is a request from Bill Russell, a loyal MR reader, and yes I will get soon to more of your requests.  I’m no expert, but my picks are as follows:

1. Hank Williams Sr., get both discs and don’t look back.

2. The Byrds, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, The Flying Burrito Brothers (the first two albums), plus Gram Parsons’s Grievous Angel.

George Jones and Bob Willis and Merle Haggard are all in my view somewhat overrated.

3. Louvin Brothers, Tragic Songs of Life (some call it bluegrass), Dolly Parton, Dock Boggs, Patsy Cline, the essential Johnny Cash (there’s lots of it), and the country/gospel of Elvis Presley.  Dylan’s country music is good but is not his strongest suit.

Arguably the best songs of Ryan Adams (alas they are scattered but "Amy" and "La Cienega Just Smiled" are two places to start; does anyone know a more general sourcing?) are as good as anything in the genre.  I like Lucinda Williams as well plus Shelby Lynne, most of all I Am Shelby Lynne.

Alternatively, the best collections from the 20s and 30s are mind-blowingly good; for instance try American Primitive on John Fahey’s Revenant label, or the Harry Smith collections.  That’s some of the best American music period though in some ways the blues shouts are closer to rock and roll than to country.

I might add the whole list comes from someone who was initially allergic to country music, so if that is you give some of these recommendations a try.  Just think of it as White Man’s Blues.

Theorems

Hillary Clinton’s proposal is particularly stupid, in my humble
opinion, because it tries to get the money back from the oil companies
with a windfall profits tax. Tax incidence is tax incidence: if the oil
companies can make consumers pay most of the excise tax, then probably
consumers can stick them with your windfall profits tax too.

I believe that is what they call "true enough."  Here is more.