Assorted links
New markets at Intrade.com
Here is the home page. As I post this, Bernanke's reappointment (a good idea) is running at 70, Waxman-Markey is running at 50, and health care reform at 35, c'mon people get the volume on those contracts up.
What is transhumanism?
Kyle Munkittrick writes to me and sets out what it would mean for transhumanism to arrive or succeed:
…Transhumanism is definitely more of a philosophy than
an objective, though it is a political philosophy like feminism or
libertarianism. There are specific goals, like extending life span,
creating true A.I., and animal uplift, and then broad ethical goals,
like ending suffering.
If I had to come up with specific criteria, however, I'd suggest the following three:
1.
Medical modifications that permanently alter or replace a function of
the human body become prolific. LAZIK eye surgery, internal
defibrillators, and prosthetic limbs are all examples. The key
difference is that these modifications would either result in a return
to initial quality (as in LAZIK) or enhance/augment the original
condition. Landmark moment: When a runner with prosthetic cheetah
blades competes in the traditional Olympics and wins a medal.
2. Our social understanding of aging loses the "virtue of
necessity" aspect and society begins to treat aging as a disease.
Concepts like "aging well" and "golden years" would be as
counter-intuitive as describing someone with cancer or MS as "diseasing
well." I have no idea what the consequences would be socially, but you
can bet things like "mid-life crises" and "adult learning" would take
on entirely new meanings or become meaningless. When we have a
generation of people expected to live to 150, that'll be a good sign
this is on the way to happening.
3. The recognition of an individual with citizenship and/or
personhood and the criteria for that recognition would change
dramatically from the status quo. Rights discourse would shift from who
we include (i.e. should homosexual have marriage rights?) to a system
flexible enough to easily bring in sentient non-humans. A good litmus
test for flexibility is: how would we incorporate an intelligent alien
race into our rights/ethics system?
Those are the three landmarks I'd look for when trying to answer
that question…I'm a big fan of MR, so it prides me
to see transhumanism as a topic you've enough interest in to mention.
Advocates, is that a good account?
I'm not a Luddite (at all) but I've never been taken by transhumanism as a systematic philosophy. I'm more worried that we will fail at "humanism," namely the simple requirement that we treat other people decently. It's worth asking whether the promotion of transhumanism makes us more or less likely to meet basic canons of decency and consideration. I would be more likely to favor a transhumanism that made us painfully aware of our personal vulnerability in a way that would expand our circle of benevolence. I worry that transhumanism can be used to cloak that vulnerability, assert its contingency, and instill a false sense of personal control or denial.
Was Michael Jackson a transhumanist (cut to 3:54)?
Regulation and Distrust
In an interesting paper, Aghion, Algan, Cahuc and Shleifer show that regulation is greater in societies where people do not trust one another. The graph below, for example, shows that societies with a greater level of distrust have stronger minimum wage laws. Note that the result is not that distrust in markets is associated with stronger minimum wages but that distrust in general is associated with greater regulation of all kinds. Distrust in government, for example, is positively correlated with regulation of business. Or to put it the other way, trust in government (as well as other institutions) is associated with less regulation.
Aghion et al. argue that the causality flows both ways on the regulation-distrust nexus. Distrust makes people turn to government but in a society with a lot of distrust government is often corrupt and this makes people distrust even more. Crucially, when people distrust others they invest not in the highest return projects but in human and physical capital that is complementary to distrust–for example, they invest in human capital that helps them bond with their group/tribe/family rather than in human capital that helps them to bond with “outsiders” and they invest in physical capital that is more difficult to expropriate rather than in easier to expropriate capital, even though in both cases the latter investments may be the all-else-equal higher return investments. Such distrust traps are quite similar to Bryan Caplan’s idea traps.
Thus, societies with a lot of distrust generate regulation and corruption and citizens who don’t have the skills or preferences to break out of the distrust equilibrium. Consider, for example, that in societies with a lot of distrust parents are less likely to consider it important to teach their children about tolerance and respect for others.
MJ, R.I.P
He's one of the few musicians I've been listening to since I was six years old. I've long thought I Want You Back is one of the best songs, period. She's Out of My Life has for a long time been a personal favorite, as is Girlfriend. Billie Jean survives being overplayed on muzak. Off the Wall is an underrated album, as is History. His personal legacy is perhaps a dubious one, but he was one of the great dancers and entertainers of his century and it is a shock to read of his passing. The J. Randy Taraborelli biography, despite stopping in the early 90s, is very good.
Today was not a good day for the 1980s (Fawcett, McMahon).
Markets in everything
http://www.facebook.com/jeffholton?ref=nf
Jeffrey Holton
seriously, yes, I will ghost-write status messages for $1 per message.
And yes, I'll make them interesting. I'll even give you a set of 12 for
$10. Let me know if you're interested, and you have a working PayPal
account. I can't promise they'll be TRUE, but they will be INTERESTING!
:)7 hours ago
I thank John Bailey for the pointer.
Collateral in everything
This is not in fact much of a lowering of credit standards:
A financial company in Latvia is offering residents loans secured by nothing but their immortal soul.
Riga-based firm, named Kontora, does not require credit history record or proof of employment. It grants loans of 50 to 500 Latvian lats ($100 to $1,000) to any adult after he or she signs the a very short agreement.
According to the agreement, the only security required of the borrower is their immortal soul, which they are asked to confirm as their previously unmortgaged property.
The loan is subject to one percent per day in interest until full repayment.
The period of full repayment is 90 days, and in case the borrower fails to return the money, the creditor gets full possession of his soul.
The full story is here. I thank cf for the pointer.
Assorted links
1. Why teenagers read better than you.
2. EconomicperspectivesfromKansasCity, a new blog, with an influence from Hyman Minsky.
3. Timelines for the crisis, from the New York Fed.
My *Fast Company* article, and no Google is not making us stupid
It is an adaptation of one part of Create Your Own economy; excerpt:
It's a common complaint that the Web makes us more impatient, but most
of us use it to track (or create) long-running stories and debates.
I've been following the career of folk-rock star Roger McGuinn for more
than 30 years, and now I use the Web for that. If anything, the essence
of Web life is that we are impatient to discover the next installment
in our planned programs of very patient long-term interest. That's a
kind of impatience we can be proud of, just as a mother might be
impatient to receive a call from her teenage daughter away at college.
It's a sign of caring and commitment, not superficiality.
Here is the link and full article.
Expanding the “Best Picture” pool to ten
Here is the story. With five entries there are usually only two or maybe three real contenders. Strategic voting is present but manageable. There can be split votes across a particular actor or genre. With ten entries it is much harder to tell which picture will win. Counterintuitively, it might be harder for "odd" pictures to be nominated because they might end up winning. Popular movies like The Dark Knight will win more often because it will be hard not to nominate them (it didn't even receive a nomination). The net incentive is to encourage florid and unusual blockbusters with both dedicated followings and lots of commercial success. The semi-serious and historically proper puffy bloated movie probably will be discouraged. Is that trade-off so terrible?
Nominating so many pictures was common in the 1930s and 40s and it did not have obviously disastrous consequences.
Here is a previous post on how an economist should think about the Academy Awards.
Fun things economists do in their spare time
"Unfortunately Yao's foot hasn't healed the way we had hoped at this
point and our next step is to consider what we can do to get Yao ready
for the start of next season," Yao's agent, John Huizinga, told KRIV-TV
in Houston. "Obviously he is disappointed."
Here is the story. Here is John Huizinga. Here are John Huizinga's best-known papers.
The dangers of the public plan
Ezra writes:
Paul Starr has an important column
today on the dangers of a badly designed public plan. The issue
essentially comes down to adverse selection. If the public plan becomes
a dumping ground for the sick and the old, it will be too costly for
the young and the healthy. Rates will go up, and conservatives will
point to the plans as costing X percent more than private insurance,
thus proving the inefficiency of the government.
That's exactly right I think, although I suspect Ezra sees it differently. I've still yet to see good reasons for expecting any equilibrium other than that one as outlined. I should add that some or maybe all defenders of the public plan can consider that an acceptable outcome: spend more money to cover more people and of course mostly from high-risk groups. But that's what it boils down to, not some kind of magical competition which will allow us to save on general health care costs without cutting back on real health care treatments.
Here are my previous posts on the public plan, see the first two links.
Markets in everything, also from the Carolinas edition
A buck-a-day — that's the incentive being offered to young girls to keep them from getting pregnant.
But it's not as good as it sounds — you also have to attend a weekly meeting. Here is more information.
Insightful books on politics, written by politicians
That is another question I was asked yesterday, here are a few nominations:
2. James Madison and John Adams, for the latter Discourses on Davila.
3. Some of Richard Nixon, scattered.
4. Ulysses S. Grant.
5. Tocqueville, J.S. Mill and some other political writers were also politicians of a sort but I am not counting them as I do not view their contributions as stemming so directly from their political experience. Along these lines, you could try John Kenneth Galbraith's book about being ambassador to India.
6. Winston Churchill is a beautiful writer and important historian but I am not sure how insightful he is about politics.
7. Denis Healey, Time of My Life.
8. I've yet to read the new book by Zhao Ziyang.
9. Willy Brandt, My Life in Politics.
My knowledge is weak in this area (here is a list of Canadian political autobiographies and I know not a single one) and Google is surprisingly unhelpful; what else am I missing? And why are there not more? Are politicians so drunk with self-deception that they cannot write insightful books?
Assorted links
1. Criticisms of the median voter theorem.
2. Tim Harford on *Create Your Own Economy*.
3. Taiwan starts to legalize prostitution.
4. Is there discrimination against female playwrights? There is a new economics study and you can read more here. I cannot find a link to the original research. Update: found here.