My Secret Fear

My secret fear is that one day I will find myself working in Starbucks; the cashier will call out orders – double latte frappuccino, no whip, extra hot, tall; iced caramel macchiato grande; pumpkin spice crème with soy… I will become confused and disoriented, was that extra whip or no whip?  Tall or grande?  Soy or no soy?  What am I doing?  People will shuffle their feet impatiently, check their watch and stare at me with disdain as I struggle to keep up.  I will start to sweat – now people are frowning.  Aaarrgghh – take me back to my quiet office!

I try to remember my secret fear when the conversation at lunch turns to IQ and yes I tipped extra today.

What’s your secret fear?

MR Readers’ poll about Radiohead

How much did you pay?  Just let us know in the comments, and those of you who wouldn’t otherwise answer, please answer and help us defeat selection bias at least in part.  Just as the heroic Tim has done (please see the second comment), I’m sure he stands up to terrorists as well.

And it’s simple: just cook the cheeseburger in milk, what’s so hard about that?  Do note the burnt milk will ruin any good pan you use.  If you’d like to read some Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook is compelling even though it is one of those books which old school feminists feel no man can possibly like.  Just be wary of the date who tells you it is his all-time favorite book.  I’ve never been persuaded by Lessing’s science fiction but some of you will wish to try it.

My Favorite Things Maine

I don’t know this state very well, so I fear that this list is not, in fact, my favorite things from Maine.  It is what I think are my favorite things from Maine:

1. Writer: The first five volumes of The Dark Tower are amazing plus I love The Stand and Misery and The Dead Zone.  He’s not as good as Melville or Faulkner but few other American writers beat him.

2. Painter of seascapes: He’s not from Maine, but surely he counts because he painted there.  Try this one, or this one.

3. Painter: Marsden Hartley, this one is atypical.  There is also Andrew Wyeth, do you know the old saying "As usual, the truth lies somewhere in between"?

4. Poets: There is Longfellow, E.A. Robinson, and Edna St. Vincent-Millay, none of whom I much relate to but nonetheless I am impressed in the aggregate.

5. Best writer about spiders and swans: Duh.

6. Movie director: John Ford, with Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance as the classics.

7. Composer: Walter Piston is the only one I can think of, try this disc.

8. Beautiful woman: Liv Tyler.  Wasn’t she beautiful?  But when?  I can’t find any picture on Google to prove it…

The bottom line: For an isolated, underpopulated state, this is a pretty awesome line-up.  But hey, it’s cold up here!

Random rants

Most of all he has rotten diction (odd for a former actor), plus he had no idea what the market-oriented crowd wanted to hear.  Sell short.  I’m still predicting Giuliani; Hillary will do worse once the attack dogs gear up.  The fascinating but overlong Into the Wild is about, among other things, the weaknesses of family ties in the United States, and how people seek artificial family in response.  In a free society people must, to some extent, put principles of justice and political order above loyalties to clan.  This is why the idea of a free society attracts so few Russians, and also why their quasi-liberalizations have not been pretty.  The new Charles Taylor book is one of the best (implicit) responses to Greg Clark; it shows how radically a societal worldview can change over time and also why belief in God is no longer taken for granted.  Tell Me You Love Me keeps getting better and soon I will try the Yglesias-recommended Friday Night Lights.  Don’t be fooled by the good reviews for Michael Clayton, nothing is there conceptually.  I want to see more Michael Powell movies (is he today the least-known-most-important major director?), starting with Colonel Blimp.  I finally "get" what other people see in John Adams’s Violin Concerto.  No, good frying pans really don’t hold up for long and yes I have started cooking my cheeseburgers in milk.

The last three items I bought at Best Buy all were broken upon first inspection. 

Books John Nye should read

Since the 1990s the policies of the three major players (Taiwan, China, and the United States) have become unstable in many ways.  The possibility of a miscalculation by any participant with respect to the two others is quite high.  China thinks that Washington will not sacrifice Los Angeles for Taiwan, the United States that Beijing will not sacrifice twenty or thirty years of development for Taipei, and Taiwan that it can confront Beijing with a fait accompli and not suffer the consequences.  Those are three dangerous mistakes.

That is from Therese Delpech’s fascinating Savage Century: Back to Barbarism.  This book made a splash in France but has been virtually ignored in the U.S.  There haven’t been many reviews but here are some endorsements.

Two of the book’s major themes are a) don’t be fooled, the barbarisms of World War II and 20th century totalitarianism are not really behind us, and b) don’t expect Asia to be stable in the 21st century.  Highly recommended and yes it did remind me of John Nye.

Speaking of John, here is a Reason dialogue with John, covering his new book and also his description of GMU lunches.

Paul Krugman, pussycat

The Conscience of a Liberal is um…not that polemic.  It’s not that shrill.  There is an argument, to be sure, but the book has much more economic history than I had expected, and much more political history.

I’ve already blogged on The Great Compression; Krugman’s more detailed account in the book does emphasize the role of war, wage and price controls, and very high rates of taxation.  Normative questions aside, Krugman’s positive analysis isn’t as far from mine as I had been expecting from his blog post.

Some claims in the book are simply wrong: "…if there’s a single reason blue-collar workers did so much better in the fifties than they had in the twenties, it was the rise of unions."  (p.49)  Of course it was instead greater capital investment per head and better technology; if Krugman means relative status he needs to say so.  This conflation of relative and absolute magnitudes is a running problem throughout the first part of the book.

Most of all, today’s world — or even an extrapolated version thereof — isn’t nearly as like the Gilded Age as Krugman suggests.  Absolute standards of living really do matter, and most Americans today live very fine lives, or if they don’t the economy is not at fault.

Krugman writes of "the vast right-wing conspiracy" repeatedly, and in these moments he verges on the shrill.  But Bush receives virtually no attention; perhaps Krugman is simply sick of writing about the guy

Conservatism rose in the 1980s in large part because the mid to late 1970s were such an economic mess and because American had lost so much relative status internationally.  Krugman won’t face up to that; instead he blames the Republican manipulation of "the race card," even though at the time racial tensions arguably were lower than ever before.  Of course in a relatively close election any single factor can be called decisive but I found this discussion well below the standards of the political science literature, even the popular political science literature.

Krugman calls for single-payer health insurance, tax hikes, and raising the minimum wage.  He doesn’t come off as all that radical.

His theory of government failure is that wealthy right-wingers hijack the state to redistribute wealth to themselves, and that’s all we hear on what’s wrong with government.  That’s the part of the book I find hardest to swallow, but if you’re asking "should I read this?" the answer is yes.

My prediction: For lack of red meat, this book won’t sell nearly as well as Naomi Klein’s latest.  At my Borders, circa 4 p.m., they hadn’t even unpacked it.  "Yeah, we have that in the back somewhere, I haven’t seen it yet." was what the guy said.

My question:  Is Paul Krugman willing to come out and simply pronounce: "Margaret Thatcher turned the UK around and for the better"?  If so, how does this square with his broader narrative?  And if not, why not?

Addendum: Here is Ed Glaeser’s review.

Nobel Prize for iPod

I think what is most interesting about today’s Nobel prize in physics is how quickly the discovery of a new effect, giant magneto-resistance, led to real devices including the iPod.  From the totally unknown to the utterly familiar in less than twenty years.  The world really is speeding up.

The Nobel Prize Foundation has a very nice write-up of giant magneto-resistance and its applications.

Markets in everything, virtual reality edition

An Indian entrepreneur has given a new twist to the concept of low-cost airlines. The passengers boarding his Airbus 300 in Delhi do not expect to go anywhere because it never takes off.

All they want is the chance to know what it is like to sit on a plane, listen to announcements and be waited on by stewardesses bustling up and down the aisle.

In a country where 99% of the population have never experienced air travel, the “virtual journeys” of Bahadur Chand Gupta, a retired Indian Airlines engineer, have proved a roaring success.

As on an ordinary aircraft, customers buckle themselves in and watch a safety demonstration. But when they look out of the windows, the landscape never changes. Even if “Captain” Gupta wanted to get off the ground, the plane would not go far: it only has one wing and a large part of the tail is missing.

None of that bothers Gupta as he sits at the controls in his cockpit. His regular announcements include, “We will soon be passing through a zone of turbulence” and “We are about to begin our descent into Delhi.”

“Some of my passengers have crossed the country to get on this plane,” says Gupta, who charges about £2 each for passengers taking the “journey”.

The plane has no lighting and the lavatories are out of order. The air-conditioning is powered by a generator. Even so, about 40 passengers turn up each Saturday to queue for boarding cards.

Here is the full story, via Kottke.  The crew of six includes Gupta’s wife.  Get this:

Jasmine, a young teacher, had been longing to go on a plane. “It is much more beautiful than I ever imagined,” she said.

Addendum: Here is fun commentary.

Fun debates

The Economist will import its highly regarded debate series into America.  The first debate is November 10, in New York City.

The debators?  Will Wilkinson and myself against Jeffrey Sachs and Betsey Stevenson.  Here are the details.  The proposition is: "America is failing at the pursuit of happiness."

I hope to see some of you there.  Can you guess which side I am on?

The economics of malaria net distribution

In 2000, a world health conference in Abuja, Nigeria, set a goal: by
2005, 60 percent of African children would be sleeping under nets.  By
2005, only 3 percent were.

It turns out that handing nets out for free works much better than branding them, marketing them, and selling them, albeit at subsidized prices.  And when there are enough insecticide-laden nets in a village, mosquitoes avoid the place altogether (after the very first net, however, the mosquitoes simply move on to another nearby hut).

The sad fact is that the best insecticide-filled nets last no more than three to five years. And is this good or bad news?

…sales of malaria pills were way down.

Here is the full and fascinating story.  Eternal vigilance is the price of foreign aid, or something like that…

More on health insurance mandates

Megan McArdle writes:

Tyler wonders what will be done
with people who are required to by health insurance, but don’t. The
answer, I think, is "they’ll get treated". The object is not to play
chicken with people; we can’t make a credible committment not to treat
people without insurance (and thank god for that.) The object, as I see
it, is to force the people who care about things like legality to get
insurance rather than rolling the dice. The people who don’t care about
such things will continue costing us some fraction of the small amount
that caring for the uninsured currently costs us now. It may only be a
slight improvement, but it’s still an improvement.

"Improvement over what?" is my query.  I prefer taking the needy (some would say more than the needy, not I) and having the government directly provide health insurance for them.  I imagine a better and no-real-role-for-the-states version of Medicaid, at the expense of Medicare (lots of old people are wealthy) if it fiscally must be.  If it’s worth forcing X to buy health insurance and then subsidizing X, it is worth giving X health insurance directly.

Avoiding the mandate keeps the private insurance market relatively "clean," as it were.  Mandating private insurance means that the government has to regulate the content of that coverage and that private insurance will likely become more cumbersome and more contested and more expensive for everyone.  It means we will never have true insurance deregulation; private plans should be free to compete, innovate, offer catastrophic-only plans, sniffles-only plans, and so on.

The benefits of the health insurance mandate are otherwise small.  Many people care about "being legal" (the parents of uninsured 20 somethings?) but those people are probably the least likely to need the insurance.  And I am leery of having a law that we know in advance we are not going to enforce.  (It’s not as if you post a 25 mph speed limit knowing you will only pull over the young people who look like criminals; in this case we’re simply deciding on no enforcement or using some dubious bureaucratic tactic of differentiation across citizens.) 

And aren’t mandates more generally a dangerous and over-used practice?

So I say no, let’s not do it.  It might be better than doing nothing, but doing nothing is not the only alternative before us.  Doing nothing is not even the likely alternative at this point.  The mandates limit chances for better long-run reforms, though Matt and Brad will tell you this is single-payer, I will look toward insurance market deregulation.  Only one of us has to be right.

Addendum: Here is Ezra Klein on same.