Results for “ostrom”
66 found

Assorted links

1. What were the top TV words this last year?

2. What a fig is.

3. How the WSJ and NYT really work, in the eyes of the Chinese (video).

4. Camille Paglia on Lady Gaga (negative).

5. The culture that is Australia, part I, and here parts II and III.

6. Against the R&D tax credit.

7. Video of Manne, Sen, Ostrom, and Buchanan at George Mason; at 90 years old Buchanan still stole the show.

Thomas Pynchon

One of the recent reader requests is to give my opinion of him.  It's pretty simple.  The first half or so of Gravity's Rainbow is extraordinary.  V is a superb novel, his most consistent work, and it is best read by not trying to make much sense of it.  The Crying of Lot 49 feels like an excellent novella but over time it slips away from you and is probably a minor work.  The rest of it I cannot finish — or even get far in — and my best guess is that it is wheel-spinning and it will not last.  I haven't tried the latest book and it is not high on my list.  He's certainly an important figure and worth reading and indeed rereading.  But I view him as belonging to the somewhat distant past.

Here is the Twitter stream on Thomas Pynchon, as good a place to start as any.

The request by the way comes from this blog.  Here is a post on Vincent Ostrom, husband of Elinor, and an oddly neglected figure in recent times.

Assorted links

1. Bailouts worsen state-level finances in Germany, by Thomas Stratmann and Alexander Fink.

2. The same thought had occurred to me.  Here is Paul Romer on Elinor Ostrom; a perceptive appreciation.  Here is David Henderson on the prize and also Williamson's theory of mergers.

3. Perfect boiled eggs.

4. Galen Strawson on "No Ownership of the Future," courtesy of The Browser.

5. Podcast with Andrew Hazlett on Create Your Own Economy and also aesthetics.

What this Nobel prize means

It's a nod in the direction of social science, rather than economics per se.  It's another homage to the New Institutional Economics and also to Law and Economics.  It's rewarding larger rather than smaller ideas, practical economics rather than abstract theory.  It's a prize somewhat outside of the mainstream.  As you probably know by now, Ostrom is a political scientist and she has spent much of her career at Indiana University.

I was delighted to hear of Ostrom winning (which I had not expected) but frankly it makes the omission of Gordon Tullock all the more glaring.

Here are interviews with Elinor Ostrom (recommended).  On Elinor Ostrom, here is Peter Boettke and on Williamson and Ostrom here is Lynne Kiesling.  Here are varied reactions.  Here is an excellent list of long links on Ostrom.  Here is Henry on Elinor Ostrom.

Check out Ostrom's cites on Google Scholar.

Oliver Williamson and asset specificity

That's his greatest contribution (see Alex on this same point, and Jeff Ely).  Let's say you privatize a water system in Africa and write a 30-year contract with a private French company to run the thing.  As the contract nears its end, and if renewal is not obvious, the company has an incentive to "asset strip," or at the very least not maintain the value of the pipes.  Alternatively, the government might signal, in advance, that it has every intention of renewing the contract.  The company then has the incentive to lower quality to consumers, since it expects renewal a and faces weaker competitive constraints.

In other words, franchise bidding, or "ex ante" competition for the market doesn't always resolve monopoly issues  The key problem is the existence of a fixed investment in the pipes and that the value of the pipes depends on investments from both the government and the company.  It can be hard to write a contract for a good solution, since any allocation of the residual rights creates some distortion or another.  This has in fact been a very real problem with privatization around the world in many settings.  Oliver Williamson outlined these arguments in his debate with Harold Demsetz over privatizing cable TV.  Much of the literature on "mechanism design," such as David Baron's pieces, picks up on this problem and extends Williamson's work.

Williamson is a truly important economist.  If you read him, especially in his later work, he also has lots of taxonomy and verbiage.  The key is to cut through to the substance, which is plentiful.

Here is John Nye on the Prize

Bold claims about time asymmetry

…given self-indication we should expect to be in a
finite-probability universe with nearly the max possible number of
observer-moment slots.  Such universes seem large enough to have at
least one inflation origin, which then implies at least one (and
perhaps infinitely many) large regions of time-asymmetry like what we
see around us.  And if, as it seems, most observer-moments in such universes are in
such regions, then we have explained why we see what we see.

That’s from Robin Hanson, one of the least evil people I have met.  I do not have the background to judge this claim but it makes sense to me.  The question is whether you are willing to bite the bullet when you realize the other implications of what Robin is postulating, namely that you start dealing with expected values of infinity, most of all in ethics

By the way, via Andrew Sullivan, here is new evidence for dark energy.

What I Haven’t Been Reading

1. Red State Blue State: Why Americans Vote the Way They Do, by the consistently impressive Andrew Gelman.

2. Global Catastrophic Risks, edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic; so many smart, virile young men, all writing about destruction.

3. Prosperity Unbound: Building Property Markets with Trust, by Elena Panaritis.  An update on the debates on Hernando de Soto and the associated land and property issues.

4. The Mirrored Heavens, by David J. Williams.  A science fiction story for people who take the idea of space elevators for granted.

5. The Household: Informal Order Around the Hearth, by the noted law and economics scholar Robert C. Ellickson.

If I’m not reading them, it’s because I’ve been spending my time with Dreiser’s Sister Carrie and Norris’s McTeague, both for my Liberty Fund conference in Cleveland.

The Fermi paradox revisited

I am still thinking about Nick Bostrom’s stimulating essay (and Robin Hanson’s precursor essay).  Nick of course is worried about finding signs of alien life, which would suggest that life has arisen many times, leading to the question "where are they?" and the fear that life dies out pretty easily.  For Nick it is cheerier, from our point of view at least, to think it is very hard for life to get underway in the first place.

In pondering the Fermi question, I often wonder if I am not simply missing the party, so to speak.  Most people already *do* think they see signs of an alien presence of some kind, of course defining that concept broadly to include The Gods.  So how can we say we don’t see "them"?  Maybe I, the agnotheist, don’t see "them" (Him?) but surely most other people think they do.

Doesn’t that make the Fermi paradox go away in a snap?  No one cites Blind Boy Blake and screams "He doesn’t see them!".

Another way of putting it is to say we don’t take David Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion seriously enough.  We really have just one data point, so who can say what "they" look like, or what kind of "display" they would have made for us?

Alternatively, I am struck by the tension between the Fermi paradox with the "We are probably living in a simulation" claim.  Both are popular with the same group of people because they are nerdy ways of making you believe something weird; in reality the two conundrums don’t fit together.  If you take the simulation option seriously, you again see the creators all around you, albeit in disguised or cloaked form.  Of course you had to use Bayesian inferential reasoning to see them, but what’s wrong with that?  Better than a telescope, some would say.  And since most people believe in God, the creators might even consider their artwork to be already "signed."  (I’ll note rapidly in passing that the arguments against the simulation hypothesis also strike at the Fermi worries, but establishing that would take lots of work.)

Either way, it seems we see "them," or ought to think we see them, even if that turns out to be a visual mistake of sorts.

Addendum: I liked Michael Goodfellow’s point:

After that first species gets control, it makes all the rules.  If it shells over all the stars, no other life can even develop, since all the planets are frozen solid.  If it wants to let biological evolution continue, it can do that, by avoiding stars with fertile planets.  It can prevent any other technology from arising (by monitoring all the planets where life is evolving.)  It can guide or change any life that it does find.

This may seem horrible to you — little robots putting all the stars out!  Spreading like a weed and killing or preventing any new life from developing.  But you’re looking at it the wrong way…The first species out there gets to decide the future, for every species that follows.  For lack of any other evidence, let’s hope it’s us.

Splendid, but I part company at the last sentence.  There is some other evidence (of the Bayesian sort) and I think the most logical assumption is — whether you believe in God or space aliens — to think of ourselves as their product, one way or another.

Or to put it yet another way, what’s the principle of individuation here?  Isn’t "seeing us" and "seeing them" more or less the same thing?

Hail David Hume!

Robin Hanson is blogging

Sort of, check out Overcomingbias.com, an on-line forum with posts on how to enhance our orientation toward truth-seeking.  Contributors include Robin and also Nick Bostrom, my favorite young philosopher.

This is a noble endeavor.  Virtually everyone thinks that the thought processes of others are laden with fallacies and bias.  Yet most of us — once you get past the obligatory lip service to self-doubt — believe that our epistemic procedures are relatively immune from such problems.  That can’t be right.

That said, I do not go as far as Robin in my desire to preach truth-seeking.  With all due respect to the truth, I find something Quixotic in such a quest.  I view Robin as believing in a kind of Archimedean point, from which we could be objective truth-seekers if only we had the will.  My view is closer to that of Pascal.  Yes we should seek self-improvement, but we are weak and in the dark no matter what.  An excessive attachment to "truth-seeking," might even divert us from the pragmatic, skeptical pluralism — laden with a healthy dose of ego to get the work done — most likely to lead society closer to truth.

Markets in deaf embryos

What do you think of this?  Consumer sovereignty anyone?

Several U.S. fertility clinics admit they’ve helped couples deliberately select defective embryos.  According to a new survey report, "Some prospective parents have sought [preimplantation genetic diagnosis] to select an embryo for the presence of a particular disease or disability, such as deafness, in order that the child would share that characteristic with the parents.  Three percent of IVF-PGD clinics report having provided PGD to couples who seek to use PGD in this manner."  Since 1) the United States has more than 400 fertility clinics, 2) more than two-thirds that answered the survey offer PGD, and 3) some clinics that have done it may not have admitted it, the best guess is that at least eight U.S. clinics have done it.  Old fear: designer babies.  New fear: deformer babies.

Of course Nick Bostrom will push us one step further and ask why the status quo bias?  Aren’t we all "deformed" compared to the Uebermensch of the future?

Philosophical implications of inflationary cosmology

Recent developments in cosmology indicate that every history having a nonzero probability is realized in infinitely many distinct regions of spacetime. Thus, it appears that the universe contains infinitely many civilizations exactly like our own, as well as infinitely many civilizations that differ from our own in any way permitted by physical laws. We explore the implications of this conclusion for ethical theory and for the doomsday argument. In the infinite universe, we find that the doomsday argument applies only to effects which change the average lifetime of all civilizations, and not those which affect our civilization alone.

Got that?  Here is the paper.  Here is brief background.

It seems if you count all possible universes (or call them parts of our multiverse, whatever) as normatively relevant, none of your actions matter in consequentialist terms. 

As to how our world, and our decisions, matter at the margin, we delve into the murky waters of infinite expected values.  With an infinity of alternatives out there, our little add-on doesn’t seem to make any difference for the grand total.  Why should even you raise the average outcome across universes?  (TC yesterday: "No, Bryan, we are not leaping up Cantorian levels of infinity, it is just one version of you getting another Klondike bar.")

One option is that only our universe, or some other "in-group," matters.  The other universes cannot count for less, rather they must count for nothing.  I recoil at such a thought, but it does avoid the mess of infinities.  Alternatively, we might embrace some version of Buddhism. 

On the bright side, philosophic talk about modality is no longer so problematic but rather refers to facts about other existing universes.  Since that problem threatened to bring morality to its knees anyway ("what do you mean, you "could" have done something different?  You did what you had to do."), maybe I don’t feel so bad after all.  And who should care if I do feel bad?  The other me feels fine.  Infinity has its benefits, and there are many worse problems.

You should lower your probability that God exists, since the Anthropic Argument will dispense with the Argument from Design.  Only the ordered pockets of the multiverse can wonder about why we are here and why things seem to run so smoothly.

That’s a lot to swallow in one day, but it seems the probability of all those propositions just went up.

Addendum: Have I mentioned that inflationary cosmology and its implications fit my crude, pathetic intuitions?  Since we have a universe, I feel it must somehow be a kind of cosmic "free lunch."  And once you open the door for free lunches, why stop at just one?  There is no good reason to rely on our locally-evolved common sense intuitions when doing philosophic cosmology.