Results for “tyrone”
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Three Words – Any Place

Here’s an amazing new tool. what3words has identified every one of the 57 trillion 3mx3m squares on the entire planet with just three, easy to remember, words. My office, for example, not my building but my office, is token.oyster.whispering. Tyler’s office just down the hall is barons.huts.sneaky. (Especially easy to remember if you recall this is Tyrone’s office as well.)

Every location on the earth now has a fixed, easily-accessible and memorable address. Unpopulated places have addresses for the first time ever, of course, but now so do heavily populated places like favelas in Brazil where there are no roads or numbered houses. In principle, addressing could be done with latitude and longitude but that’s like trying to direct people to web sites with IP addresses–not good for humans.

Algorithms have assigned words to avoid homophones (sale & sail) and to place similar combos far from one another to aid in error detection. Simpler, more common words are used to address more populated areas and longer words are used in unpopulated areas.

Moreover the three word addresses are available not just in English but in French, Spanish, Portuguese, Swahili, Russian, German, Turkish and Swedish with more languages on the way. The addresses in other languages are not translations but unique 3 word addresses in those languages.

All of this is available in a small app so that it can be used even offline on a simple smartphone. Find your address here.

Hat tip: The Browser.

Most Popular MR Posts of 2013

Here is my annual round-up of the most popular MR posts of 2013 as measured, somewhat eclectically, using the number of links, tweets, shares, comments and so forth. Sadly, the post that was most linked to this year was by neither Tyler nor myself but by… Tyrone.

Look people, I have explained this before. Tyrone is a bad man. Do Not Encourage Tyrone. Fortunately for us Tyrone doesn’t like it when people like him. 

Second most highly linked was my post No One Is Innocent. I was also pleased that a related post, Did Obama Spy on Mitt Romney?, was also highly linked although I think that the question raised in this post about the potential for NSA tools to be abused for political purposes hasn’t been truly addressed in the main stream media. Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic in The Surveillance State Puts U.S. Elections at Risk of Manipulation was one of the few people to pick up on this important question.

Also highly linked were my post The Great Canadian Sperm Shortage and a few less substantive items drawn mostly from elsewhere such as Equal Population US States and What is the Most Intellectual Joke You Know.

If you followed Tyler’s timely advice in another highly linked post, China, and the soaring price of Bitcoin, you would have saved yourself from a big loss (albeit you would have made an even bigger profit by ignoring Tyler’s earlier advice).

The most shared post was Tyler’s Stereotyping in Europe with over seven thousand shares, followed by Nobody dislikes inflation more than strippers. I was pleased that a bunch of my substantive posts were highly shared including:

Another highly shared and commented upon post was Our DNA, Our Selves on the FDA and 23andMe. Mark my words, when this or similar case goes to court the FDA will eventually lose on free speech grounds.

Gun posts get lots of comments including The Culture of Guns, The Culture of AlcoholGuns, Suicide and Natural ExperimentsFirearms and Suicides and How Japan Does Gun Control.

Question posts such as Who is the Worst Philosopher? and Who is the most influential public intellectual of the last twenty-five years? get lots of comments as did Who is Juan Galt?

There is overlap between most linked, shared, and commented so some of the above would fit in several categories but it’s surprisingly weak. Posts with a lot of comments, for example, often do not draw lots of links.

What were your favorite posts of 2013? And what requests do you have for 2014?

I am sorry, but this is absurd

Charles Manski, a well-known professor of economics at Northwestern, writes:

The anti-tax rhetoric evident in much lay discussion of public policy draws considerable support from the prevalent negative language of professional economic discourse. Economists regularly write about the ‘inefficiency’, ‘deadweight loss’, and ‘distortion’ of income taxation.

In fact he wishes to abolish those concepts for their anti-governmental implications and work only with social welfare functions directly.

That’s one easy way to limit deadweight loss from policies, namely take it out of your analytical framework.  The reality is that it is still the simplest and best way to explain why very high rates of taxation — as noted say by George Harrison or Bjorn Borg — are not such a good idea.

Manski also ignores that a belief in deadweight loss is fully compatible with the view that government spending may bring economic benefits.  In fact you often cannot understand the benefits of (some) government spending without first grasping the deadweight loss concept.

And even if you think Arrow’s theorem is overrated in its importance, as I do, working with social welfare functions isn’t exactly a recipe for wringing normative preconceptions out of your economics.  And any plausible social welfare function is going to pick up some concept of deadweight loss and stick it back into the calculations.  How about a social welfare function which says “minimize deadweight loss”, which is what you often find in Mirrlees?

It’s called microeconomics.  Yet Manski complains that “…prominent applied public economists continue to take the theory quite seriously.”  You’ll even find the notion of deadweight loss in some Principles books, believe it or not.  Must we derive a new social welfare function every time we wish to do partial equilibrium analysis, say of a tax on a single (small) commodity?

And get this example of mood affiliation:

The Feldstein article and similar research on deadweight loss appear predestined to make income taxation look bad. The research aims to measure the social cost of the income tax relative to the utterly implausible alternative of a lump-sum tax. It focuses attention entirely on the social cost of financing government spending, with no regard to the potential social benefits.

Contra Manski, I say it is fine to study the tax side of the equation while leaving the benefits (and costs) of expenditures to other researchers.  (By the way, Manski’s supposed culprit, Martin Feldstein, first made his name studying how to measure the benefits of public expenditure.)  All his point really boils down to is to note that in a second best comparison, optimum deadweight loss generally will be positive, as noted by Lipsey and Lancaster long ago in their 1955-56 ReStud piece, not to mention Frank Ramsey.

Manski wishes to cite the work of James Mirrlees for inspiration, but in fact Mirrlees has been a firm believer in the deadweight loss of taxation concept, and in comparing economies to hypothetical first best situations, as illustrated by for instance by these pieces.

I can thank Manski for reminding me that Tyrone, my evil twin, has been begging me for a chance to blog again at Marginal Revolution…

Interfluidity has a dream

A few nights ago, a gentleman accosted me in a dream and declared himself to be “Tyrone”, Tyler Cowen’s evil twin. Tyrone told me that his brother had “as usual” got it all backwards.  In fact, he told me, we’ve been in the Great Stagnation for a century as a result of, rather than for the lack of, technological progress. The median household is experiencing wealth stagnation caused by technological change. Households are feeling the pain now more than in the past, even despite a relatively modest pace of change, because over the past few decades we have managed to avoid employing the sort of durable and effective countermeasures to stagnation that have succeeded in the past.

Here is much more, interesting throughout.  Here is another excellent sentence:

I worry that specialization in the information asymmetry industry could be an antidevelopment strategy for developed countries.

More bits on whether we need a Fed

In Alex's response there are various criticisms of me, but you can read both of his posts and you don't find a reason why free banking would offer an advantage over post WWII central banking (combined with FDIC and paper money).  That's long been the weak spot of the anti-Fed case.

Ask yourself: do we want a countercyclical money supply, and is central banking or free banking more likely to provide that?  Once you take income effects, credit quality, and bank runs into account, the answer is obvious.  It takes a good deal of imagination to believe that the Fed's periodic overreaches outweigh the benefits it provides through countercyclicality, even if, as Scott Sumner suggests, they don't always go far enough.  The short rates of 2001-2004 weren't the root cause of Armageddon, even if they were one factor of many feeding into what was essentially a private sector bubble.

To whatever extent we can do without a Fed, it's because there are so many Treasury securities, which should be a sobering thought to a market-oriented perspective.  If the Fed were shut down, over time the new base money would not be gold, "Hayeks," or a commodity bundle.  It would be T-Bills.  We would have achieved the full integration of the monetary and fiscal authority but to what useful end?  (Better not balance the budget!)  The real question is whether the Treasury should be the Fed or whether the Fed should be the Fed, but you won't often see it framed that way.

Alex wants to include the early years of the Fed in the Fed vs. no Fed comparison, but other than "pass the nam tok, Tyrone" there is no argument why these early years should be much relevant for a 2010 choice.  Judge what you're likely to be getting, on a forward-looking basis and that's not the Fed of 1929.    

Many of the Fed's most serious mistakes are sins of omission, not commission, including of course 1929-1932, not to mention the lead-up to the recent crisis.  Fed critics sometimes use sleight of hand to turn these sins into a case against the Fed; in other words, they wish to permanently lock in such sins of omission and somehow claim this as a gain.

Alex makes more of an argument when he notes that a non-Fed alternative would have improved over time, just as the Fed has.  Still, recent experience with the shadow banking system, unregulated mortgage brokers, AIG, runs on money market funds, auction-rate securities, and other practices and events raises strong questions as to whether we can expect a general evolution toward stability.  You can — in hypothetical terms — blame all those problems on the Fed and moral hazard (in my view moral hazard was one factor but hardly the whole story) and abolish what was essentially the saviour institution, on the hope that it won't all happen again.  That is what a lot of the case against the Fed boils down to.

One contrarian argument against the Fed is that it would force the Chinese to play lender of last resort and a) they would be less likely to favor Goldman Sachs, and b) they might insist on more fiscal rectitude, as the EU powers are trying with Ireland.  Still, this is not a feasible political equilibrium. 

There is also no practical transition out of dollars, but that is a topic for another day.  In the meantime, that means abolishing the Fed implies freezing the monetary base — forever.  Is Alex willing to advocate that policy?  In this game, transition paths and lock-ins are essential, not a second-order consideration.

In his discussion of foreign policy, Alex admits we're going to have a Fed, like it or not.  And there is no attempt to dispute that the alternative to the Fed is Congress running the bailouts, not real market-based accountability for financial mistakes.

The key question is how to make the Fed as good as possible — there is plenty that can be done – and trying to tear it down won't make that liberty-enhancing end more likely.  Alex dismisses that observation as "sociology," but if so it is true sociology, also known as public choice economics. 

Addendum: Robert Teitelbaum at HP comments on the earlier debate.

Response to Tyler on the Fed

Tyler's Case for the Fed (see below) has solidified my judgment that the case for the Fed is surprisingly weak.  I will draw out some of Tyler's comments.

I view 1929-1932 as a better illustration of "a world without a Fed" than "a world with a Fed," even though of course we had a Fed then.

I have learnt that the best response to this kind of reasoning is to say "please pass the nam tok, Tyrone" and move on. Be forewarned.

The Fed made the recent crisis much better than it otherwise would have been.  Without a Fed, we would have experienced something more like the Great Depression, including a frozen payments system.

It's wrong to evaluate a big institution like the Fed by assuming a world in which everything else is exactly the same, except for the Fed's absence. Tyler does a lot of this in his post but I am not enamored of this style of reasoning. This is why we need pre and post-Fed history.  Pre and post-comparisons are one of the few methods we have for understanding how entirely different institutional structures perform in equilibrium (looking at countries without a central bank is another possibility). Pre and post-comparisons have all kinds of problems, since other things are changing, but the facts do at least put some constraints on imagination.

By the way, as the Miron paper I linked to shows, comparing just the 25 years before and after the Fed (even if you exclude GD) also suggests that the Fed reduced stability.

Tyler says the Fed has been getting better. Ok, but that also illustrates the weakness of Tyler's approach. After 100 years we would have expected alternative institutions to have also gotten better.

In the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s, and 1990s, I see the Fed as bringing improvements, of unknown magnitude.

Tyler gives us his informed opinion but it's long on opinion and short on information. Would it be possible to be more vague?  "Improvements"? Compared to what? Compared to the Fed in the 1970s?  Unknown magnitude? As I said, Tyler's case for the Fed leaves me more solidified in my judgment that the case is weak. I will let the Straussians ponder that more.

Historically central banks have been essential in helping nations fight major wars.  The world's preeminent military power simply will have a Fed, for the same reason that it has lots of nuclear weapons.

I agree with this entirely.  Governments want central banks because they help to fuel war. Historically, this is why central banks were created. 

More generally, both Fed and Treasury are usually, in relative terms, voices of economic reason within government, even if they're not everything you wish them to be.  It is arguably counterproductive to lower their status.  Currently, the relevant alternative is a totally politicized Fed, not no Fed at all;

Like the points Tyler makes in the beginning of his post about who does or does not support deposit insurance this is sociology, irrelevant to the fundamental question of evaluation.

Moreover, as I pointed out earlier the case for "independent" central banks is also weak; central banks are always politicized, only the interest groups change.

Trolley Problem Biases

In one variant of the trolley problem a trolley is rapidly bearing down on the Trolley-problem-1 innocent five who can be saved but only by pushing a single fat man onto the tracks.  Do you push the fat man or not?  The question throws into stark relief the moral theories of consequentialism and deontology.

Now suppose the fat man is named Tyrone.  Does that change your answer?  What if the fat man is named Chip?

In The Motivated Use of Moral Principles (pdf) the authors show that self-identified liberals are more reluctant to sacrifice Tyrone than Chip despite prior agreement that race is irrelevant to moral questions of this kind.  Even more interesting when first presented with the Tyrone story liberals subsequently become less consequentialist even regarding Chip.  But when first presented with the Chip story they maintain consequentialism for Tyrone.  

On different questions, such as how consequentialist to be in military situations, self-identified conservatives swing back and forth in similar ways depending on whether Americans are attacking or being attacked.

Unfortunately, the authors don't present their statistical results in as clear a form as I would have liked (percentage changes would have been nice) so it's a little unclear how large the effect is.  Nevertheless, although the conclusion isn't surprising it's interesting to see these results even in as clean a context as one could ever hope for:

Rather than being moral rationalists who reason from general principle to specific judgment, it appears as if people have a “moral toolbox” available to them where they selectively draw upon arguments that help them build support for their moral intuitions. While the present studies do not imply that general principles never play a direct, a priori role in moral judgment, they do suggest that moral judgments can be influenced by social desires or motivations, and that moral principles can be rationalizations for other causes of the judgment. 

Hat tip Psychology Today.

MR vocabulary guide

1. “Self-recommending”: the very nature of the authors and project suggest it will be good or very good.  This also often (but not always) means I haven’t read it yet.  I am reluctant to recommend *anything* I haven’t read, but I am signaling it is very likely recommendation-worthy and I wish to let you know about it sooner rather than later.

2. An “Assorted link” that ends with a question mark: Worth thinking about, but I wish to distance myself from the conclusion and the methods of the study, without being contrary per se.

3. Hansonian: of, or relating to Robin Hanson.

4. The Jacksonian mode of discourse.  I am opposed to this.  Political and economic pamphlets in the Jacksonian era were excessively polemical and sometimes the Jacksonian mode is still used today, in 2009, believe it or not.

5. Wunderkind: Take the average age of that person’s relevant peers.  If said person is either under twenty or less than half that average, that person may qualify for “Wunderkind” status.

6. Markets in everything: Some of these are celebratory but many of these are sad or tragic.  Usually I am trying to get you to think about — as a philosophical question — why the market exists at all and not whether it should be legal.

7. Tyrone is my brother and alter-ego who believes the opposite of what Tyler believes.  Trudie offers personal advice.  Neither has good time management skills and thus they don’t write very much these days.

8. “Shout it from the rooftops”: What to do with wordy, obscure truths which the world badly needs to learn.

What have I left out?

In case you were wondering: free review copies

The regulators have spoken and they require disclosure.  I would guess that about one fifth of the books reviewed here are advance review copies which I did not pay for.  They were sent to me for free, by demons who wish to addict me.  If am reviewing a book before its publication date, it is almost certainly an advance review copy, sent to me for free.

If I am reviewing a book past its release date, it is only rarely a free review copy. Very often I visit the free public library and walk away with ten or twelve books in my arms.  Just this week I ordered two new books for $40 a piece and I would not have bought them otherwise, but for my desire to please MR readers with my timely reviews (which are forthcoming). 

I hardly ever receive works of fiction.  I am never sent toys or given free trips to Disneyland.

It is reported:

For bloggers, the FTC stopped short of specifying how they must
disclose conflicts of interest. Rich Cleland, assistant director of the
FTC's advertising practices division, said the disclosure must be
''clear and conspicuous,'' no matter what form it will take.

Beware!  You have been warned in a clear and conspicuous manner that the demons control me and I do not in turn control the demons.

Addendum: You might wish to read Tyrone on free will.  The real scandal is that we (possibly) live in a frozen four-dimensional space-time block and that the content of my reviews has been fully determined by the initial conditions of the universe. 

Conniptions from me on urban economics

Matt Yglesias, picking up from Ryan Avent, writes:

…some libertarian economists at George Mason University go so far as to
laud America’s large houses and plentiful parking specifically as
evidence of the superiority of America’s free market economic policy,
blissfully unaware that in the United States pervasive regulation
requires the construction of bigger houses and more parking spaces than
the market would provide.

Matt refers to:

…the kind of libertarians who one would expect to go into conniptions if
Fairfax County, Virginia were to propose a stringent rent control law seem surprisingly blasé
about the vast array of land use restrictions that infringe economic
liberty in that county and most other American jurisdictions.

Just for the record, I'd like to add my conniptions on the issue:

1. I would not have brought the U.S. down the path of water subsidies, many of which are pro-suburban.  (Admitted they are not always easy to repeal.)

2. I think pollution externalities should be priced in Pigouvian fashion; this would penalize many suburban developments.

3. I oppose the widening of Route 7 at Tysons Corner and I expect a disaster from the current plans.

4. I favor school choice and charter schools, which would make many U.S. cities livable again for couples with children.

5. I would price many roads for congestion, although as Bryan points out this could either help or hurt cars as a mode of transport.

6. I would allow U.S. cities to become much taller, thereby accommodating more residents.  I would weaken many urban building codes in the interests of a greener America.

7. I much preferred the time when I lived near a gas station and a 7-11.

Maybe Matt and Ryan are picking on Bryan Caplan rather than me but I suspect Bryan would agree with most of this list, maybe all of it.

If I don't throw conniptions on these issues more often, it is because I regard them as unlikely or in some cases they are simply not issues I follow closely.  Fairfax County zoning has such strong political support, most of all from the wealthy Democrats who supported Obama but from Republicans too.  If you find anyone in Fairfax screaming about the horrors of zoning, that person is likely to be a libertarian and not a blase one.  Or maybe they are a Best Buy shareholder.

But today is the day of conniptions.  I truly wish that Fairfax County were more like central Arlington or for that matter Falls Church City and I curse those who have made it otherwise.

Here is a picture of The Conniptions.  Don't forget them.  They are mine!  My conniptions.

Fairfax, by the way, did have rent control before 1973.  Oddly, my main post on rent control is a chat with Tyrone, who of course favors the idea.

A Boy Named Sue

“Researchers have studied men with cross-gender names like Leslie,” Dr.
Evans explained. “They haven’t found anything negative – no
psychological or social problems – or any correlations with either
masculinity or effeminacy. But they have found one major positive
factor: a better sense of self-control. It’s not that you fight more,
but that you learn how to let stuff roll off your back.”

Here is much more, interesting throughout.  I liked this part:

“In the past, there was more of a sense of humor, probably because
fathers had more say in the names.” He said the waning influence of
fathers might explain why there are no longer so many names like Nice
Deal, Butcher Baker, Lotta Beers and Good Bye, although some dads still
try.

As I’ve told you before, my dad had wanted to name me Tyrone.  It could have been worse:

…why would any parent christen an infant Ogre? Mr. Sherrod found several
of them, along with children named Ghoul, Gorgon, Medusa, Hades,
Lucifer and every deadly sin except Gluttony (his favorite was Wrath
Gordon).

Last night’s debate on happiness

It was Jeffrey Sachs and Betsey Stevenson against myself and Will Wilkinson on the topic of whether America is failing in the pursuit of happiness.  The Economist magazine was the sponsor and it was held in Gotham Hall in New York, which yes could have been out of a Batman movie.

As I had expected, Will proved to be the world’s best debating partner, or at least in the top two (my previous debate partner was Randall Kroszner, for a year in high school).

The initial tally of sentiment was about 67-33 in favor of the Sachs-Stevenson position that America is indeed failing at the pursuit of happiness.  By the end of the debate there was a slight margin in favor of the Cowen-Wilkinson position.  The crowd turned, I believe, in part because Sachs pursued attacks on the current administration rather than focusing on the defined topic at hand.  He was rendered shrill by the unholy madness of something or other, as Brad DeLong would put it.  Will and I don’t like current policy either, but we looked happy.  We were happy.  We are happy.  We also had a long array of facts and citations from the happiness literature and some pointed rebuttals to the so-called Easterlin paradox.

Many loyal MR readers were there, so of course your impressions are invited, even if you don’t usually leave comments.  Who else is to tell this story if not you?  Expect to see reports on Will’s blog and by Felix Salmon as well.

Addendum: Here is Will, Tyrone may weigh in soon.