Technology, positive liberty, and negative liberty
Randall Parker wrote an interesting sentence:
To state my argument at a philosophical level: Technological advances increase what one can do with one’s positive liberty and by doing that they increase the ease which people can violate negative liberty. This rift came as a result of reading a post by Tyler Cowen on positive and negative liberty.
He has further rapid speculations:
Will rejuvenation therapies lead to such a huge
boost in the world’s population that even the industrialized countries
will fall back into a Malthusian trap? On Darwinian grounds this seems
inevitable. I’ve previously argued that natural selection will reverse the trend of declining fertility in industrialized countries.
Combine that selective pressure with bodies that stay young for
centuries and a population explosion seems inevitable unless either
humans get wiped out by robots or a world government decides we do not
have an unlimited right to reproduce and enforces restrictions on
reproduction.What is nature’s only hope? That rich people decide that owning
their own unspoiled rain forests is a hugely status enhancing form of
consumption. Show your benevolence and wisdom by buying half the Amazon
and let your friends visit its untamed wildness.
The Improving State of the World
The subtitle is Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet, and it is written by Indur M. Goklany. Imagine an up-to-date version of Aaron Wildavsky and Julian Simon, in easily digestible form. On global warming, it won’t make Tim Lambert happy, but it not "denialist" either. A useful resource, recommended. Here is the book’s home page. Here are papers by Goklany.
Your Congress at Work
A new bill would give organ donors a medal. In other words, millions for medals but not a cent for compensation. If people weren’t dying it would be funny.
Thanks to Dave Undis at LifeSharers for the link. Unlike Congress, Dave is really doing something to solve the organ shortage.
Left-wingers should be the real supply-siders
This post is pure provocation, take it as you will.
The left often stresses how wealthy people have superior opportunities in life. They can save more, avoid debt, buy better educations, they have a better chance to start a company, and so on. Furthermore this is seen as unfair. Right?
To put the point in simple quantitative terms, equity yields an average of about seven percent, while holding debt claims yields a bit over one percent. Most poor people don’t hold much equity, or for that matter they tend to take out debt rather than hold it. Smart rich people stock their portfolios with equity quite heavily. So on average rich people get richer. That is even more unfair. Right?
OK, to oversimplifiy the numbers just a bit, rich people earn — at least — six to seven times more on their money than do poor people. Many of the poor earn negative rates of return.
The contemporary left often seeks to remedy this unfairness, but in the meantime it is true true true. Right?
So for each extra dollar we leave with rich people, the economy earns six or seven times more in net terms — at least — than if that dollar had been given to the poor.
"The rich people’s economy" doubles in size about every ten years or so. "The poor people’s economy" doubles in size about every sixty years or so, at best. After sixty years have passed, "the rich people’s economy" has done at least six times better, relative to its original starting point.
Now trickle-down effects from rich people are possibly quite slight. If a rich person creates a dollar’s worth of investment, the consumer surplus and wage-boosting effects from those investments won’t be more than 25 cents on the dollar, right? That means poor people get…
Well, it depends upon your assumptions. But how do you feel about this claim?
"I favor redistribution from the rich to the poor. It will make the poor better off for a few decades, but no more. After that point, the poor are worse off, forever, and by more each year."
Um…oops.
The more you emphasize the unfair differences between the capabilities of the rich and the poor, the more easily you fall into this trap. Redistribution is good for the poor only in the short run, and we haven’t even considered the traditional negative incentive effects on the rich.
Supply-side economics doesn’t have to be about assuming unrealistically large elasticities of substitution on the part of the wealthy. The real supply side story is about how different social classes use resources in different ways and to achieve different rates of return.
Right?
My favorite things German, Richard Wagner edition
1. Music: Riches galore, most of all gamelan music. My favorite CD of the soft, dreamy Javanese gamelan is Javanese Court Gamelan, on Nonesuch. Most gamelan music is from Bali. Golden Rain is one good pick of many, but virtually any gamelan CD without a half-naked woman on the cover will be excellent. Look for the French and Japanese labels in this area. For other areas of Indonesian music, there is a very good Smithsonian set of 20 CDs; the acoustic guitar music is especially interesting. Here is a one-CD sampler from that set.
2. Novel: Pramoedya Toer’s Buru Quartet (four volumes, but quite readable) is perhaps the least read great novel of the 20th century. On the surface it concerns imperialism but it is actually about what a life really consists of and how that life is defined. Reading each volume redefines the one that came before it. Like gamelan music, very highly recommended. The author "wrote" most of it during his 14-year stint in Buru prison, but most of the time without the benefit of pen or paper.
3. Food dish: This is a no brainer, Beef Rendang. In general the food from Sumatra is spicier. Get Sumatran Rijstafel when you can, it is better than Javanese though both are wonderful.
4. Textiles: A rich area, but the subtle colors and textures of Sumatra are tops. The early twentieth century is an especially strong time but the quality continues to be high. Textiles from Timor are not to be overlooked, although of course now they are independent. Here is one Sumatran image. Here is another nice piece. Try this one too.
5. Film: I have never seen an Indonesian movie, though in my defense I have never turned down an opportunity to see one either. Nia Dinata is currently a renowned Indonesian filmmaker. The reasonably good Year of Living Dangerously is the only movie I know set in Indonesia. Can you all help out here?
6. Painter: I like the Naive Art of Bali, so how about Nyoman Lesug? Sadly he is not well represented on the web. Dewa Putu Bedi is perhaps better known. Anak Agung Gede Sobrat is another option. Here are some other names to start with. But it is increasingly difficult to run across the better stuff.
The bottom line: Most people underexplore tthe culture of this region, relative to the quality of their best offerings. I am not yet sure, however, whether we should call it a "country."
How sociologists are studying economists
1. Fabio reports.
2. New blog on academic productivity, via Teppo.
3. There is a new edition of Road to Serfdom out, here are the original referee reports, by Knight and Marschak.
4. The contributions of Milton Friedman.
5. The essential John Nash, a new book.
The Old Way
Sharing was perhaps the most important element of the social fabric. Fear that others would not share was the constant preoccupation of many people. I remember a woman talking about sharing: "I am sick," said the woman as if speaking to herself although in fact she was speaking to my mother, who was nearby. "That is why I don’t go out for plant foods. I want my mother to give me some and she does not give me any. I am lying down sick. I am starving. If my mother were here, she would give me some plant foods…That place is far…The people who stay there are not people who favor others. Not sympathetic. They do not give food. When they see people from a far place coming to their place, their hearts do not feel good. I do not want to go to see those people."
That is from Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Old Way: A Story of the First People, a fascinating study of a hunter-gatherer society, the Ju/wasi in the Kalahari.
My favorite things Venice
1. Painting. This is, of course, a bit ridiculous. Three is gobs and gobs and gobs, but I have to opt for late Titian as the peak of painting, ever, by anyone. Except for Velazquez. Here is one image, here is another. Moving past the Renaissance, Tiepolo remains underrated; visit Wurzburg for one of Europe’s best artistic thrills. Rosalbe Carriera portraits are underrated.
2. Work of fiction, set in: Death in Venice, Thomas Mann, is the obvious pick, here is a long list of fiction set in Venice. There is Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and Henry James, The Aspern Papers, I’ll give the nod to the latter, unless we can count bits of Proust.
3. Movie, set in: Scroll down for a list. I love the best parts of From Russia with Love, and Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (really), but the clear winner is Orson Welles’s Othello.
4. Play, set in: Duh.
5. Techno group, named after: Venetian Snares, juicy stuff, high information content. Not for the faint hearted.
6. Music: Monteverdi will get his own post, Vivaldi bores me, Gabrieli is OK. Luigi Nono comes next, I like the Pollini recording of his work for piano and tape. There is Bruno Maderna as well.
7. Theatre: Carlo Goldoni, I once saw The Stag Hunt and loved it.
8. Writer: Casanova is fun to browse, more conceptual than you might think.
9. Librettist: Lorenzo da Ponte, who wrote Don Giovanni for Mozart.
The bottom line: Making this list was more interesting than I had expected. I have never felt "near" to Venice, but perhaps this trip — for a UNESCO conference — will change that.
When does Italy break free?
A loyal MR reader asks:
When does Italy leave the EC? What are the likely costs of doing so?
Italy won’t leave the EC anytime soon, why should they? I also don’t think Italy will leave the Eurozone. It does give them an overvalued currency, but that is only the nominal exchange rate. In the long run prices of exports can fall so the real exchange rate ends up where it should be. In other words, the problem will cure itself with the passage of time, noting that Italian wages and prices are often sticky. But everything adjusts, sooner or later. If Italy can live with the Euro today, tomorrow will be just a wee bit easier.
Leaving the Eurozone would make it very hard for Italy to borrow at good rates again. Plus the real value of their debt would rise considerably. Nope, I don’t think they will do it.
#whatever in a series of 50.
7-11 vs. gas stations
I try to avoid shopping anywhere but Whole Foods, Wegmans, Shoppers FoodWarehouse, and ethnic groceries. But several times lately I’ve stopped at food marts at gas stations. Each time I’ve noticed how much better they are than the average 7-11, most of all for selection. There are plenty of such marts, so I’m wondering why I should ever go to a 7-11 again.
Are the prices at the gas station food marts so much higher? Are my data points too few? Or is the rest of the world discovering this same truth?
Arnold Kling on the growth in government
1. Institutions are affected by technology perhaps even more than by ideology.
2. In 1800, the United States was a large country relative to the
transportation and communication technologies that were available at
that time. Further, it was very divided, both politically and
economically, over slavery. Thus, one does not see major national
institutions of any sort, private or public.3. The rise of powerful industrial corporations and the rise of a
large public sector in democracies over the past 150 years are results
of changes in technology. Economies of scale have increased, because
transportation costs have fallen and communication is faster and
cheaper.
I agree with #1-3. Here is more. I would add that American government grew big as soon as it had the technological ability to do so; that suggests to me that the latent demand for big government, for better or worse, was already in place. I await Brad DeLong’s book-length treatment of this topic.
It is not often a book just blows me away
Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction, by Thomas K. McCraw. It is beautifully written, suspenseful throughout, full of love and intrigue, a story of European migration, also a history of Harvard economics, reassesses Schumpeter’s thought, and is as good a biography of an economist as has ever been written. I do not make the latter claim lightly.
Mobsters, Unions, and Feds
My family [Genovese] made a lot of money from gambling and the numbers rackets. We got money from gambling, but our real power, our real strength, came from the unions [emphasis added]. With the unions behind us, we could shut down the city, or the country for that matter, if we needed to get our way. Our brugad [crime family] controlled a number of different unions, some of which I personally dealt with, some of which I knew about from other amico nostra. In some cases, we got money from our dealings with the unions, in some cases we got favors such as jobs for friends and relatives — but most importantly, in all cases, we got power over every businessman in New York. With the unions behind us, we could make or break the construction industry, the garment business, the docks, to name but a few.
That is mobster Vincent Cafaro, cited in James B. Jacobs’s excellent Mobsters, Unions, and Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement. This book, which is avowedly left-wing and pro-union, chronicles the grisly and underrecorded history of mob influence over unions. Today the mob’s presence in the Teamsters, the Laborers, the Hotel and Restaurant workers and the Longshoreman’s union has largely dissipated, but keep in mind why. Our government has spent the last twenty years busting these unions, using arrests, RICO, and federal monitoring and control. That should not be forgotten the next time you hear talk of new legal privileges for unions.
Italy, until recently
In Italy until recently, you could not get your hair cut on a Monday. You could not close a bank account without paying a hefty fee. You could not sell your motorbike unless a notary drew up some tortuously worded contract.
That is from The Financial Times, 28 February 2007, p.13.
A loyal MR reader
Colin Frazier, a loyal MR reader, writes:
I noticed you occasionally post e-mails from loyal MR readers. That made me wonder:
– How do you know if readers are being loyal?
– What is required of me to be a loyal reader? Is it just that I frequently read the site? Must I forego reading other sites like Mankiw’s or McArdle’s blogs? Disavow other economists? (I’ve sworn off Krugman!)
– Is there an oath?
– Is there a loyalty program in which I could earn points for posts I read and redeem them for valuable economic insights?
Your devoted (and–I think–loyal) reader
Only a truly loyal MR reader would ask questions of this kind.