Results for “age of em” 15633 found
Cutting government spending in Colorado?
The stricter Colorado [spending] cap does three things: it imposes firm spending caps (which grow only to reflect population and inflation), returns any excess revenues to taxpayers and allows only voters, not legislators, to override the caps.
Both sides agree that the measure reined in the budget. The growth in per capita spending fell to 31 percent in the decade after the cap from 72 percent in the decade before..
But even as the Colorado measure galvanizes antispending groups elsewhere, it is dividing them at home, prompting a right-on-right fight that is luring outside combatants and drawing blood.
On one side is Gov. Bill Owens, the two-term Republican once promoted by National Review as a conservative of presidential timber. Arguing that the strict provision has forced a fiscal crisis, Mr. Owens is championing a ballot measure that would suspend the limit for five years, allowing the state to spend an additional $3.7 billion. Otherwise, he warns, the cap may be repealed.
On the other side are former allies who call the governor a tax-raising apostate discrediting the law he claims to protect. In addition to Mr. Norquist, they include the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal and the former House majority leader, Dick Armey, a leader of an antitax group called FreedomWorks.
Stay tuned…I would be surprised if this kind of initiative proved to be a long-run political equilibrium in many states. Voters could simply cut spending by voting for anti-spending politiicians, if they were truly convinced of the merits of that position. In part this is voters wanting to feel they want to cut spending, without actually having the desire to do so, a kind of expressive politics of the right. Here is the full story. Here is one account of failures at the federal level, courtesy of Cato and Reason.
Who are the smartest people?
When asked the above question, and given a list of 50 names, Americans responded with these rankings:
1 Albert Einstein
2 Bill Gates
3 Marie Curie
4 Stephen Hawking
5 Condoleezza Rice
6 Bill Clinton
7 Sandra Day O’Connor
8 Oprah Winfrey
9 Warren Buffett
10 Jane Goodall
I will object to Johnny Carson, Dr. Phil, and Ralph Lauren in the Top 50, but applaud Hayao Miyazaki, Susan Polgar, and Jackie Chan. Here is the full list. The only academics in the Top 50 are Einstein, Hawking, and Curie, not one person from the social sciences is represented, unless you count Condi Rice.
Addendum: Thanks to MacNeil, who directs me to further information about the survey. The wording of this post has been amended to reflect what appears to be an agenda-setting role for Marilyn vos Savant; she appears to have provided the initial list.
Against Intuition
Larry Temkin, the noted philosopher, was trying to convince Robin Hanson and I that some moral values should not be traded. He posed the following question:
Suppose that you had a million children and you could give each of them a better life but only if one of them had a very, very terrible life. Would you do it?
"Of course," I answered. "You would be crazy not to," said Robin. I could tell by the look on Larry’s face that this was not the answer that he had expected. "But, but," he stammered, "almost all philosophers would tell you that that is wrong." "So much the worse for almost all philosophers," I replied.
My response to Tyler’s post on animal welfare is similar. Tyler wants to find a theory that both rationalizes and is consistent with our intuitions. But that is a fool’s game. Our intuitions are inconsistent. Our moral intuitions are heuristics produced by blind evolution operating in a world totally different than our own. Why would we expect them to be consistent? Our intuitions provide no more guidance to sound ethics than our tastes provide guidance to sound nutrition. (Which is to say, they are not without function but don’t expect to be healthy on a yummy diet of sugar and fat.)
The reason to think deeply about ethical matters is the same reason we should think deeply about nutrition – so that we can overcome our intuitions. Tyler argues that we don’t have a good approach to animal welfare only because he is not willing to give up on intuition.
Tyler asks (I paraphrase) ‘Would you kill your good friend for the lives of a million cats? What about a billion cats?’ He answers, No, but says "Yet I still wish to count cats for something positive."
My answer is not only Yes it is that we do this routinely today. The introduction of "your good friend" (or "children" in Larry’s example) engages our primitive intuitions and feelings and that is why Tyler’s answer goes awry. But consider, last year Americans spent more than 34 billion dollars on their pets. That money could have saved human lives had it gone to starving Africans.
Similarly, contra Larry, we do make tradeoffs concerning our children and more generally we accept that some people, such as coal miners, risk a much worse life, i.e. death, in order to benefit everyone else just a little bit.
The dilemmas that Larry and Tyler raise tell us that our intuitions,
taken as a package, are not rationally derivable from a handful of
premises. But that is no reason to abandon reason instead we should
happily accept that some of intuitions lead us astray.
A sound mind and a sound body both require that we abandon our gut instincts.
The economics of droplifting
Droplifting occurs when small bands "anti-shoplift" their CDs onto the shelves
at music stores. They take shelf space without paying or asking, presumably to recruit future fans.
This is a Pareto improvement if you think there is slack in the system. The store has one more CD (book?), and no one is harmed. Alternatively, you might believe that CDs are "queuing" for shelf space and that something gets pushed out, if only probabilistically. The question is then whether your slotting is welfare-maximizing, relative to the retailer’s choice.
The retailer will care about expected profit from sales. If you are a band, you care about your own income and fame. This may or may not be closer to consumer surplus than is expected profit; on average I predict it is further away (e.g., The Beatles didn’t need to droplift).
If you are a listener discarding a previous purchase, odds are you didn’t like it much. For the typical listener/discarder, this loser CD will lower social welfare, since on average others share your tastes. But when it comes to books, what if you only give away your best reads…? Now we are getting somewhere…
Thanks to Mark Atwood for the pointer.
Self-Deception Explain Lying Ease?
A July 30 New Scientist article (sub. rec.) on lying reports:
A succession of studies using tests like this have shown that most of us are not very good at spotting if someone is lying. Even people whose job it is to detect deception – police officers, FBI agents, therapists, judges, customs officers, and so on – perform, on average, little better than if they had taken a guess. … But a few people seem to be the exceptions that prove the rule. … In a range of studies that totalled about 14,000 people, … The researchers identified 29 “wizards” of deception detection, who are now the subject of intensive study … One of the studies, published last year, investigated women’s skills at detecting men who were pretending to have appealing attributes … a man claiming he owned the Ferrari outside, rather than admitting he had borrowed it from a friend for the night. … single women seemed to be better at detecting men who were faking good than those who were in a committed relationship. “Women have a kind of radar for deception in men, which they switch on or off, depending on the context.”
So sometimes we are bad at detecting lies because that serves our interests. Tyler taught me the centrality of self-deception in human affairs, and so I wonder: could our need to be good at believing lies explain why we are surprisingly bad at detecting lies? Are those wizards of lie detection the vanguard of a future humanity, or do they pay a high price in their relationships, finding it hard to support the lies that fill daily life?
My ‘Misspent’ Youth
In Wired, Kevin Kelly describes the colorful web pioneer Ted Nelson:
Computing pioneer Vannevar Bush outlined the Web’s core idea –
hyperlinked pages – in 1945, but the first person to try to build out
the concept was a freethinker named Ted Nelson who envisioned his own
scheme in 1965. However, he had little success connecting digital bits
on a useful scale, and his efforts were known only to an isolated group
of disciples. Few of the hackers writing code for the emerging Web in
the 1990s knew about Nelson or his hyperlinked dream machine.
In 1984 I quit U. Chicago physics grad school to join the unpaid fringe of Nelson’s group. (Also to pursue A.I., but that’s another story.) I met Nelson a few times, but mostly spent untold hours talking with the brilliant crowd hanging around his Xanadu project.
During those years (through 1993) I learned that with some effort one can discern a substantially clearer outline of the future than is found in Sunday supplement punditry or even conservative academic commentary. And one can even have substantial influences on key changes. We were way ahead of the curve on the web, nanotech, and much more.
But I also learned why this is possible – such insight doesn’t produce much compensation or recognition. Those who made money and fame on the web were at very specific places and times with just the right skills and resources; foreseeing the general outlines of the web mean rather little. Let this be both an encouragement and a warning to those misspending their youth today. 🙂
Of course if we had enough prediction markets about such things, such insight might both be rewarded and better guide the actions of others.
Thanks to Chris. F. Masse for the pointer.
Accident compensation in New Zealand
Get this:
New Zealand has a comprehensive no-fault insurance scheme administered by the Accident Compensation Commission (ACC). The scheme applies to all injuries incurred in New Zealand regardless of the injured person’s country of residence. Under the ACC scheme it is generally not possible to sue for damages due to an accident. To pay for the ACC scheme, levies are payable by all New Zealand resident employers, employees and self-employed contractors.
In other words, instead of being able to sue another party, you get a piddly payment from the government. Here is material on the history of ACC. Here are more details, along with accident statistics. You can buy a law review issue on ACC. Here is one criticism of ACC, from a market-oriented point of view. It is, after all, government monopolization of the accident insurance market. On the other hand, it keeps down lawyers’ salaries.
Here is further information on the safety of bungee jumping.
Addendum: Libertarians who hold great faith in market mechanisms of reputation might favor this system over strict liability. Consumers could still patronize a high-reputation, high safety bungee-jumping firm, if they wished to, thereby replicating strict liability outcomes. But other consumers could opt for the "I don’t mind not being able to sue you, anyway I know you otherwise wouldn’t exist and I love risk" kind of ride. Of course this split will work better for contractual relations than for road accidents.
Hanged for Accuracy
Alex posted a few weeks ago about India prohibiting competing monsoon forecasts. I came across an even more dramatic example of such thinking in Dava Sobel’s Longitude (1995:11-12):
Returning home victorious from Gibraltar after skirmishes with the French … the English fleet … discovered to their horror that they had misgauged their longitude … the Scillies became the unmarked tombstones for two thousand of Sir Clowdisley’s troops. [Admiral Sir Clowdisley] had been approached by a sailor, … who claimed to have kept his own reckoning of the fleet’s location during the whole cloudy passage. Such subversive navigation by an inferior was forbidden in the Royal Navy, as the unnamed seaman well knew. However, the danger appeared so enormous, by his calculations, that he risked his neck to make his concerns known to the officers. Admiral Shovell had the man hanged for mutiny on the spot. … In literally hundreds of instances, a vessel’s ignorance of her longitude led swiftly to her destruction.
Even though shipmates had a strong common interest in knowing their longitude, other social incentives apparently prevented them from sharing their information. As a consultant on the use of prediction markets within organizations, I’ve also noticed that managers are often surprisingly uninterested in the prospect of more accurate forecasts and more informed decisions. Could these phenomena have similar explanations?
The quest for economies of scale
Is it disadvantageous to be a small country? Singapore seems to have done just fine. But if economies of scale matter for geographic (as opposed to legal) reasons, we might expect small countries to cluster their populations in one central location.
In the case of New Zealand, Auckland became the largest city in 1886. Since then it has grown in size relative to Christchurch, Wellington, and Dunedin. In 1951, Auckland was only 50 percent larger than Wellington. By 1996, Auckland was three times as big as either Wellington or Christchurch. The Auckland metropolitan area now accounts for about one third of the country, in either population or economic terms, and is likely to grow in relative terms. It is considered New Zealand’s major city.
The above facts are from James Belich’s Paradise Reforged: A History of New Zealanders from the 1880s to the Year 2000.
Critical Decline?
In perusing back issues of econ journals I’ve always enjoyed the critical commentary sections. Today, however, commentary is less frequent. Writing in the latest issue of Econ Journal Watch, Coelho, De Worken-Elly III, and MCClure present some hard data on the decline. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, for example, used to prints lots of short commentary pieces but now hardly prints any.
The authors decry the decline but don’t explain it.
One explanation is that the opportunity cost of space at the top journals has increased. One hundred years ago the top journals were (more or less) the AER, JPE, and QJE, all among the top journals today. One hundred years ago the journals published about the same amount of material as they do today. Yet the number of economists today is many times that of one hundred years ago. Since more articles are competing for the same number of printed pages it follows that on the intensive margin average article quality will increase and on the extensive margin types of articles with lower value will decline. Since comments are on average of less value than original contributions it’s not surprising that they have declined over time.
At the same time as commentary has declined in the top journals, the total number of journals has increased so it’s not obvious that total commentary has declined. Indeed, don’t we now have EJW?
Ten predictions about cars for 2025
The indispensable Chris F. Masse writes me:
Drive’s top 10 sure-fire predictions for 2025
1. Diesels will account for half of all new vehicles sold.
2. CVT transmissions will outnumber manuals and automatics combined.
3. Cars will be 30 per cent lighter and physically smaller on average.
4. Average fuel consumption will be down 50 per cent per vehicle.
5. Luxury cars will offer light-refracting, colour-changing paint.
6. Visual advertising will permeate the cabin and outer skin of cars.
7. Autopilot will still be 20 years off (thankfully).
8. We’ll still be complaining about congestion and fuel prices.
9. Road safety measures will be education-based and constructive, not
punitive.
10. Some car parts will be assembled atom by atom using nanotechnology.
The Melbourne paper The Age offers more and also lists the predictions. In my view, #8 is the sure thing.
My favorite things New Zealand
Having once spent a year living in Wellington, this one is easy:
1. Movie and movie director – Forget Peter Jackson and Lord of the Rings, I’ll opt for Vincent Ward’s The Navigator, where a group of medieval peasants suddenly emerges in late twentieth century Auckland. Ward’s Map of the Human Heart might count as Canadian, but I love its surrealistic treatment of love and memory. What Dreams May Come is sappy in parts but has Robin Williams doing a serious take on Bergman and Dante, doesn’t that sound strange? Note that this category is especially strong – for instance Andrew Niccol directed the underrated Gattaca.
2. Music – The Kiwis have many good indie bands but Split Enz is the peak, buy their greatest hits. Otherwise I’ll nominate the Jean-Paul Sartre Experience, if only for their name.
3. Fiction – Keri Hulme’s The Bone People or Janet Frame’s autobiography are both first-rate, catch the movie too.
4. Painter – Umm…things slow down a bit here. The obvious pick is Colin McCahon, here are some images. Here is my favorite, but I will admit some lameness in the category overall.
5. Food – Fish and chips is to New Zealand as barbecue is to Texas — tops in the world. The best places are owned by Greeks. New Zealand is also a first-rate locale for Malay, Cambodian, and Burmese cuisines.
6. City – Wellington is for me the single most beautiful city in the world, make sure you go to the lookout on Mount Victoria, here is alas only part of the panorama. Wellington is also full of lovely Victorian homes. I will Napier as an underrated second, here is some Art Deco, the city center was destroyed by an earthquake in the 1920s and rebuilt in that style.
The problem? I like New Zealanders so much, I wish there were many more of them. Here is a brief photo tour, if you haven’t already decided to go.
Is Firefly libertarian?
I am referring to the Jos Whedon science fiction show that went off the air after eight (?) episodes. I now have watched the available corpus of eleven episodes available on DVD. Many call it libertarian, I see the implicit politics as suggesting the following:
1. Don’t expect much from armed rebellion, the bad guys often win.
2. A galaxy devoid of the rule of law is not such a fun place.
3. Smuggler heroes are noble, but most smugglers are not heroes.
4. Economies of scale matter, and secession is a hard life.
In other words, it is actually Burkean conservative.
One of the heroines is a "companion", so I wonder if the series endorses legalized prostitution. We are told repeatedly that she is "registered" (legally, in the form of a cartel?), and she seems to look down on garden-variety you-know-whats, who presumably also engage in price shading.
Alina Stefanescu offers Firefly commentary; see Rod Long as well. Dan Drezner describes his conversion to the series, plus offers his usual excellent links. Jacqueline Passey is another avid fan.
What went wrong with red delicious apples?
I now find these apples inedible. Why? Falling prices led to overbreeding and lack of care:
Who’s to blame for the decline of Red Delicious? Everyone, it seems. Consumers were drawn to the eye candy of brilliantly red apples, so supermarket chains paid more for them. Thus, breeders and nurseries patented and propagated the most rubied mutations, or "sports," that they could find, and growers bought them by the millions, knowing that these thick-skinned wonders also would store for ages…
The Washington harvest begins in mid-August and runs to late October, and most apples sold through December are simply stored in refrigerated warehouses. Fruit shipped later in this cycle is kept in a more sophisticated environment called controlled-atmosphere storage — airtight rooms where the temperatures are chilly, the humidity high and the oxygen levels reduced to a bare minimum to arrest aging. Last year’s fruit will be sold through September, just as the new harvest is in full swing.
Storage apples must be picked before all their starches turn to sugar. Pick too late, and the apple turns mealy in the supermarket, but pick too soon, and the apple will never taste sweet. Growers test for optimum conditions, but today’s popular strains of Red Delicious turn color two to three weeks before harvest, making it difficult for pickers to distinguish an apple that is ready from one that isn’t…
The grower could deliver a better apple by harvesting a tree in two or three waves — the outside fruit ripens earlier than fruit in the center of the tree. This is done for Galas and other premium varieties, but the prices for Red Delicious are so depressed that farmers can’t afford that. "You would put yourself out of business," said Roger Pepperl, marketing director for Stemilt Growers Inc., a major grower in Wenatchee. In addition, the redder strains’ thicker skins, found to be rich in antioxidants, taste bitter to many palates.
The bottom line is that this practice has backfired. Consumers are no longer looking to buy artificial fruits simply for their color or durability. Here is the full story, and please support this trend by refusing to buy the standard red delicious apple.
The Australian housing bubble and the soft landing
[Australia] kept on raising [interest] rates the next year, and officials talked loudly about the threat of housing prices getting too high. The most populous Australian state even imposed a special tax on investment properties to discourage real-estate speculation. By 2004, the market peaked after more than two years of 14% or greater annual growth. The most recent data suggest Australia’s home prices have changed little over the past year, and have fallen slightly in the two biggest cities, Sydney and Melbourne.
…on the whole the nation’s economy is healthy. Unemployment is close to a 30-year low and incomes continue to rise. The Australian Stock Exchange hit a high in mid-June. Many economists and home buyers alike believe a reservoir of demand will help avoid a sudden crash in home prices.
That is from The Wall Street Journal, 14 July 2005. I have noticed that even a middling quality home, an hour outside of Sydney, can be listed at U.S. $600,000 or higher.