Crampton

The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem.

There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity—jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month’s income.

Solving these problems isn’t simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we’re unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access.

We believe that it might actually be possible to build a ring of balloons, flying around the globe on the stratospheric winds, that provides Internet access to the earth below. It’s very early days, but we’ve built a system that uses balloons, carried by the wind at altitudes twice as high as commercial planes, to beam Internet access to the ground at speeds similar to today’s 3G networks or faster. As a result, we hope balloons could become an option for connecting rural, remote, and underserved areas, and for helping with communications after natural disasters. The idea may sound a bit crazy—and that’s part of the reason we’re calling it Project Loon—but there’s solid science behind it.

Balloons, with all their effortless elegance, present some challenges. Many projects have looked at high-altitude platforms to provide Internet access to fixed areas on the ground, but trying to stay in one place like this requires a system with major cost and complexity. So the idea we pursued was based on freeing the balloons and letting them sail freely on the winds. All we had to do was figure out how to control their path through the sky. We’ve now found a way to do that, using just wind and solar power: we can move the balloons up or down to catch the winds we want them to travel in. That solution then led us to a new problem: how to manage a fleet of balloons sailing around the world so that each balloon is in the area you want it right when you need it. We’re solving this with some complex algorithms and lots of computing power.

Now we need some help—this experiment is going to take way more than our team alone. This week we started a pilot program in the Canterbury area of New Zealand with 50 testers trying to connect to our balloons. This is the first time we’ve launched this many balloons (30 this week, in fact) and tried to connect to this many receivers on the ground, and we’re going to learn a lot that will help us improve our technology and balloon design.

Over time, we’d like to set up pilots in countries at the same latitude as New Zealand. We also want to find partners for the next phase of our project—we can’t wait to hear feedback and ideas from people who’ve been working for far longer than we have on this enormous problem of providing Internet access to rural and remote areas. We imagine someday you'll be able to use your cell phone with your existing service provider to connect to the balloons and get connectivity where there is none today.

This is still highly experimental technology and we have a long way to go—we’d love your support as we keep trying and keep flying! Follow our Google+ page to keep up with Project Loon’s progress.

Onward and upward.

Posted by Mike Cassidy, Project Lead

Joseph Pollini, another John Jay College professor, said that one possibility was that there were fewer police officers on patrol in some metropolitan areas that have cut spending sharply in recent years because of the recession.

“You’re dealing with depleted police resources,” he said of budget cuts that have caused a reduction in the size of nearly every urban police department.

So over at Unqualified Offerings Thoreau has a great blog post up.  You should go read it.

• Value in scarcity, broadly and narrowly construed

He considers philosophy majors (in the broader context of Whether Brick And Mortar Colleges Can Survive In The Face Of The Internet), and notes that philosophy majors make (relatively speaking) a shit-ton of money… because they’re smart.  I have no reason to doubt that he’s correct; the only philosophy majors I met in undergrad who were dumber than I was — I’ll note, perhaps unpleasantly, that I went on to get a doctorate — were in a bunch of required courses whose names started with “one-” and, maybe, “two-”.  So yeah, the PHIL majors in my sample tended to be pretty clever.

Thoreau, however, wonders whether “[t]here is value in training capable people to attain the level of intellectual sophistication that a good philosophy program instills.”

I submit that this conundrum is a catastrophic conflation of correlation with causation.  (I don’t even have an English Lit degree and I pulled off some pretty awesome polysyllabic alliteration there.  Govern yourselves accordingly.)

I’ve been reading a lot of The Last Psychiatrist lately, partly because he drinks more than I do but also because he’s put a fair bit of effort into unravelling why people send their kids to college at ruinous expense (mostly, but not always, to the kids) for absolutely no good goddamn reason at all.  In the first part of his epic Hipsters on Food Stamps rant — go ahead and click through, I’ll still be here in an hour when you’re done — he wonders:

I am not anti-liberal arts, I am all in on a classical education, I just don’t think there’s any possibility at all, zero, none, that you will get it at college, and anyway every single college course from MIT and Yale are on Youtube.  Is that any worse than paying $15k to cut the equivalent class at State?

Now, let me tell you a story a friend of mine loves to tell, from his perspective.  Text in brackets is mine.

The three of us — William [not his real name], me, and Matt, took Advanced Software Engineering last semester [or whenever].  It was basically User Interfaces In Java, although we saw the Design Patterns book for a few minutes in the second lecture.  William loved that shit, so he went to all the lectures, and he got a seven [out of nine].  I didn’t really care, so I skipped most of the lectures, and somehow I got an eight.  But Matt only attended the first lecture, the midterm, and the final, and he got a nine in that class.

(Yes, I’m the Matt in that story.)

I tell you that not to convince you that I’m amazing — the Ph.D. will have either done that already or convinced you irretrievably otherwise by now — but to convince you that that course was a waste of my fucking money.  Not my time, I spent all of maybe twenty hours on it that semester, and I can’t say it wasn’t a little bit educational.  I learned that I hate Java with the burning fire of a thousand suns, and also that 2000-vintage Swing was, while eminently hateable, better than anything else on the GUI-widget-set market at the time.  Also, in the first lecture one of the other guys in the class found out the hard way that he was colour-blind, so that was a thing.  I dunno what the fuck else I was supposed to have been educated upon in that course.  And they gave me the highest mark they could!

So if you’re an undergraduate programme committee member — and if you really are, I’m sorry — why would you put a course like that on the required list in the syllabus?  There are a lot of excellent cynical reasons, but the only pedagogical reason I can come up with is “so that every student we graduate must demonstrate, at the end of a semester of either skipping or attending class, that s/h/it knows how to make a calculator in Java.”  Actually I did that in high school, but thanks for taking four months to make me prove it to you.

This is not to say that I got no knowledge or skills of value from my undergrad.  If nothing else, the compilers course was worth the price of admission (and if you’re a CS student reading this blog, for fuck’s sake take a compilers course, it will change your life).  But I kind of doubt that I had to go to university to learn any of this stuff… maybe I had to go to university to be persuaded to study LL languages before attempting to write a compiler, but if you’re reading this sentence you don’t.  In any case compilers wasn’t a required course; I selected into it (as did both of my friends from the anecdote above).  And, of course, I got a B.Sc. and a GPA that convinced a grad school to admit me, whence I got a Ph.D. and a bunch of publications, whence I got a useful job.

And that last sentence is my point.

Hayek spent five weeks in Australia between 3 October and 6 November 1976. The visit was crowded with more than 60 appointments, seminars, informal meetings and formal presentations. He and his wife travelled from Cairns and the Barrier Reef to Melbourne Canberra and Adelaide with excursions to the country in Victoria and Queensland.

These notes come from the draft of a paper for a forthcoming collection of essays on various aspects of Hayek’s life and work, edited by Rob Leeson.

There are sections on the political situation at the Federal level and some aspects of the climate of ideas at the time before terms like deregulation, economic rationalism and the New Right were in common use. For many people now under the age of 50 that is practically ancient history but some of it is essential to appreciate the difficulty of getting any traction for Hayek’s ideas and for changing the direction of economic policy in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s.

The central issue in politics was the willingness and ability of the newly elected conservative Fraser administration to regain control of the economy after the big spending and other initiatives of the Whitlam era from 1972 to 1975. Inflation and unemployment were high and there were major issues to be resolved regarding monetary policy and the exchange rate. The political debate was soured by the resentment of ALP supporters following the Constitutional crisis in 1975 which the Governor General resolved by dismissing the Whitlam government on 11 November and calling upon Fraser as a caretaker pending a general election which the Liberal-Country Party coalition won in a landslide.

Many people had high hopes for Fraser and progressive circles were alarmed by a rumour that he was a reader of Ayn Rand. This was before it became apparent that Fraser was in fact the kind of conservative who Hayek had in mind when he wrote “Why I am not a conservative”, a man more concerned with holding political power than limiting it and more concerned to protect existing industries than to sweep away obstacles to free development. Hayek’s views were not music to the ears of the Prime Minister and the elders of the Coalition government, as indicated by the meeting of Hayek and Fraser.

In the mid-1970s interventionism had all the running in the formation and discussion of public policy. The strength of interventionist tendencies on the both sides of politics can be seen in the tenor of criticism of the so-called New Right a decade later when the Labor administration led by PM Hawke and Treasurer Keating became serious about deregulation. For many years the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) in Melbourne was the major source of informed economic commentary on the conservative side of politics. Formed in 1943 it pre-dated the Mont Pelerin Society.

The Regulation Nation took a great leap forward during the war when the federal public service doubled in size between 1939 and 1945. The Keynesian “Nugget” Coombs was the most influential advisor to Labor and Liberal governments over many years, driving the new order based on central control of the economy, using the insights of Keynes to deliver sustained economic growth with full employment and other social benefits. Not only ALP supporters who were impressed by Keynes, much the same conversion happened to the remarkable industrialist and organizer Herbert Gepp, who formed the Institute for Public Affairs and charged C. D. Kemp with the task of producing a program for it.

An academic James Walter wrote “By the late 1930s Gepp, like Coombs, had discovered Keynes, and begun to propound a version of neo-Keynesian economic planning. Unlike Coombs, however, he drew the line at anything that looked like collectivism”. The Keynesian synthesis of private ownership and state planning provided a framework of ideas that the social engineers and the business community could share, even while they disagreed on details. This framework included a highly interventionist function for the state, and neglected the microeconomic foundations of productivity. Much of the institutional framework had been put in place by the first Federal Government at the turn of the century with tariff protection for industry and central wage fixing for the workers (in reality for the most militant trade unions and their workers).

Classical liberalism and libertarianism had practically no profile in Australia through the 1950s and 1960s until in 1974 a new party appeared with a libertarian program and aroused a deal of disbelief but little electoral support. First called the Workers Party (heightening disbelief), later the Progress Party and currently the LDP it has yet to garner sufficient support to make an impact in State or Federal elections. In 1976 the pros and cons of economic rationalism or deregulation were not yet significant topics for public discussion, and there was still a serious battle to be fought on the conservative side of politics before the agenda of deregulation achieved full support in the Liberal Party round about 1990. The tour came before the network of academics, the new think tanks and the “backbench Dries” of the Liberal Party achieved some traction. The Centre for Independent Studies started operations in 1976 but was not up and running when Hayek toured, although people like myself, who were not paying attention, later thought that the Hayek tour might have been timed to promote it.

Impact and outcome of Hayek’s visit

The major public record of the tour is an Occasional Paper published by the Centre for Independent Studies containing the the text of his three major speeches. His address to the IPA appeared in the IPA Review in 1976), as did his paper on Socialism and Science. A version of the Whither Democracy paper was published as “Can Democracy be Saved?” in Quadrant, November 1976.

A survey of four daily newspapers, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the Financial Review revealed no mention of Hayek and the tour. The SMH (15 October) announced Friedman’s Nobel award on the front page (near the bottom of the page, under the lead story on the five point plan for economic recovery presented by Gough Whitlam, the Leader of the Opposition). That would have been a timely moment to mention that a recent prizewinner was in the country at the time. The Financial Review (5 October) ran a short story on Gunnar Myrdal, who shared the prize with Hayek, reporting that Myrdal still saw socialism as the hope of the future despite a recent setback to the Swedish Socialist Party in the polls.

The impact of the visit is impossible to assess. Later in the decade Hayek would have found many more interested listeners as the forces for reform became better organized and more articulate. There is no doubt that his ideas energised many of the people engaged in the push for reform but it took more than a decade and a change of government to achieve real, and possibly permanent, progress towards a more open and competitive economy.

The Economist just listed New Zealand as the best place in the world for working women. We somehow managed this while having very free labour markets and minimal obligations placed on employers around maternity leave. Maybe New Zealand's been on the right track by subsidising daycare rather than making it really expensive to hire women of childbearing age.

This article analyzes how body weight is associated with the existence of an intimate partner and with the sex ratio in the marriage market. The data rely on a representative sample of the 16–55 years old population in Germany, carried out in 2009 (Partner Market Survey 2009). In this data set, individuals’ mating opportunities for the first time are measured by their integration in a network of friends as well as in foci of activity as conceptualized by Scott Feld. Results confirm a weight increase after an intimate relationship has started (negative protection) and they also confirm a mating disadvantage corresponding to high weight (selection). Further results lead to the discovery that the weight difference between individuals with and without a partner varies according to the sex ratio in the marriage market: higher competition in the marriage market obviously corresponds to relatively lower weight of individuals without partner. Moreover, similar BMI of partners is not a result of adaption between partners over time but solely is a result of assortative mating. Consequently, mating patterns with respect to obesity have no effect on the individuals’ weight.

ON SUNDAY morning, Paul Krugman made more or less explicit the more or less supressed subtext of most of his columns and blog posts: "Maybe I actually am right, and maybe the other side actually does contain a remarkable number of knaves and fools." Maybe!

Of course Mr Krugman might be right! Of course "the other side" teems with knaves and fools, because knavery and foolishness are the human lot. But we know what he means: I am right. Those who disagree with me are vicious idiots. "The point is not that I have an uncanny ability to be right" Mr Krugman clarifies, "it’s that the other guys have an intense desire to be wrong. And they’ve achieved their goal." Not a model of collegiality, this. As a piqued Clive Crook put it, writing for Bloomberg View:

A line has been crossed when the principal spokesmen for contending opinions have no curiosity whatsoever about their opponents’ ideas and radiate cold, steady contempt for each other. That’s dangerous. Civil society depends on a minimum threshold of tolerance and mutual respect.

He's talking about Mr Krugman. So is David Brooks in his most recent column, though he does not mention his opinion-page counterpart by name. According to Mr Brooks, those of us who write about politics and policy all fall somewhere on a continuum from engagement to detachment. (Why not a continuum from engagement to disengagement or from attachment to detachment? Beats me.) Though engagement and detachment each has its characteristic hazards, it's clear that Mr Brooks aims to denounce the deranging engagement of those like Mr Krugman, whilst praising his own relatively Olympian mode of analysis. 

I don't think Mr Brooks's binary gets at the heart of the matter. "Too engaged" does not capture what's the matter with Mr Krugman. I agree that clear vision and good judgment are incompatible with intense partisan commitment. In this sense, as a "matter of mental hygiene", as Mr Brooks puts it, we should strive for "detachment" from tribal politics. Still, it's well within the power of even the worst sort of unyielding partisan to treat his or her interlocutors with a little respect. Mr Krugman can't seem to manage that. "Engagement" isn't the problem. An excess of engagement might make it hard to see the merit in others' arguments. However, those who hold wrong opinions are not therefore wicked or dim. Our attempts to persuade almost always fail, and the temptation to account for this failure in terms of the stupidity or immorality of others is with us always. A culture's ability consistently to resist this temptation is perhaps the first virtue of public deliberation. The inability to resist it indicates a failure of sympathy and imagination, which is its own sort of stupidity and immorality. Indeed, the tendency to think the worst of those with whom we disagree is a failure of engagement in a different sense. It is a failure to empathise, to try to feel what it's like from the inside of other minds, other histories, other lives. If Mr Krugman cannot imagine an honest and intelligent path to "the anti-Keynesian position" on fiscal policy, then the moral and intellectual failure is his. 

Fiscal policy! Yes, that's what this was about. Veronique de Rugy, an economist at the libertarian-leaning Mercatus Center, offers the most plausible diagnosis of the disagreement that so rankles Mr Krugman:

The debate between Keynesians and free-market economists has been going on for decades, if not longer. The main reason for the dispute’s longevity is that macroeconomics is far from simple. For one thing, for any one condition, there are multiple plausible causal factors and there are no controlled experiments. These limitations, sadly, are unlike to change anytime soon, and as such we should expect that the debate will be going on for many more years, in spite of Mr Krugman’s victory lap.  

Charity is hard. Macroeconomics is harder.

(Photo credit: AFP)

I am one of those people who thinks that we should not encourage people to enter the academic profession unless they are extremely committed to scholarship and they show exceptional promise. This advice often triggers a reaction that is summarized as: “You are evil! You want to exclude poor people/minorities/women/others from academia!”

My response: encouraging an expansion of graduate education does not address most aspects of inequality and might make it worse in many cases. For example, there is a large scale gap between whites and blacks in terms of education, income, and wealth. Sending people to graduate school will not address this gap. There are many reasons: lots of people don’t finish the degree; huge opportunity costs; low paid adjunct work after graduation; accumulation of burdensome of debt; and the tenure track pays modestly compared to other professionals with similar qualifications. These trends suppress mobility.

In contrast, there lots of other professions that are much more likely to lead to good income and mobility. If we want to genuinely shrink the income gap between people of color and whites, for example, we are much wiser to encourage engineering and health science careers. You’ll get the degree in a few years and almost immediately jump higher in the income distribution. Way, way, way easier than going for that anthropology  PhD and hoping for a tenure track job 12 years later.

If we want to address inequality within academia (ie., increasing representation on the faculty), we should reserve our efforts for getting people through the PhD pipeline and into jobs. We shouldn’t cram more graduate students into the pipeline. We should actually ask the logical question: What can we do to ensure that students acquire the right skills in academia? How can we make sure that they develop the right networks, that lead to publication in the “right” journals, and thus lead to the “right” jobs?

Sadly, very little effort goes into this side of things. It’s easier to count minorities and women and yell, “not fair! we need more!” It’s much harder to confront tenured faculty (like myself), and say: “Why haven’t you co-authored with women (or minorities) so that they may have a shot at a good tenure track job?” Let’s put the brakes on enrolling more students into doctoral programs and take up the less glamorous, but more important task, of making sure that the ones in the system will actually have the best careers possible.

Adverts: From Black Power/Grad Skool Rulz

On Twitter, Bryan Caplan asks me to clarify why zero marginal product workers do not clash with the notion of comparative advantage.  The point is simple: some workers destroy a lot of morale in the workplace and so the employer doesn’t want them around at any price.

Most of us buy into “morale costs” as a key reason behind sticky nominal wages.  If your wage is too low, your morale falls, you produce less and so the wage cut isn’t worth it.  Well, what else besides low wages makes people unhappy in their workplace?  Very often the quality of co-workers is a major source of unhappiness; just listen to people complain about their jobs and write down how many times they are mentioning co-workers and bosses.  (I do not exempt academics here.)  A “rotten apple” can make many people less productive, and you can think of that as a simple extension of sticky nominal wage theory, namely that installing or tolerating a “pain in the ass” is another way of cutting wages for the good workers, they don’t like it, it lowers their productivity, and thus it is not worth tolerating the rotten apple if said apple can be identified and dismissed.

There is no particular reason to think that ZMP workers are especially stupid or in some way “disabled.”  If anything it may require some special “skills” to get under people’s skins so much.  (Of course there are some individuals who, say for health reasons, cannot produce anything at all but they are not usually in or “near” the active labor force.)  To draw a simple analogy, the lowest-publishing members of academic departments are rarely those who make the most trouble.

To the extent production becomes more complex and more profitable, ZMP workers are more of a problem because there is more value they can destroy.  The relevance of these morale costs also varies cyclically, in standard fashion.  A company is more likely to tolerate a “pain” in boom times when the labor itself has a higher return.

Note also the “expected ZMP worker.”  Let’s say that some ZMPers destroy a lot of value (that makes them NMPers).  You pay 40k a year and you end up with a worker who destroys 80k a year, so the firm is out 120k net.  Bosses really want to avoid these employees.  Furthermore let’s say that a plague of these destructive workers hangs out in the pool of the long-term unemployed, but they constitute only 1/3 of that pool, though they cannot easily be distinguished at the interview stage.  1/3 a chance of getting a minus 120k return will scare a lot of employers away from the entire pool.  The employers are behaving rationally, yet it can be said that “there is nothing wrong with most of the long-term unemployed.”  And still they can’t get jobs and still nominally eroding the level of wages won’t help them.

In the perceived, statistical, expected value sense, the lot of these workers is that of ZMPers.

One policy implication is that it should become legally easier to offer a very negative recommendation for a former employee.  That makes it easier to break the pooling equilibrium.  There also are equilibria where it makes sense to “buy the NMPers out” of workforce participation altogether, pay them to emigrate, etc., although such policies may be difficult to implement.  Oddly, if work disincentives target just the right group of people — the NMPers — (again, hard to do, but worth considering the logic of the argument) those disincentives can raise the employment/population ratio, at least in theory.

Addendum: Garett Jones offers yet a differing option for understanding ZMP theories.

In the process of collecting addtional quotes for a new online venture of mine (@tweets_liberty) I stumbled upon an interesting passage from French liberal economist Yves Guyot’s (yes, a favourite of mine!) 1910 book Economic Prejudices (which, incidentally, I have blogged about previously).

The following passage, reproduced for those interested in the political economy of taxation, portrays a conversation between a socialist (M. Joseph Prudhomme) and a myth-busting political economist who seeks to mop up economic prejudices (M. Faubert). The passage appears under the chapter heading “Taxation must be of a moralising character:”

“M. Joseph Prudhomme – I am in favour of moralising taxation; I would tax alcohol and absinthe so heavily that no one would drink them.

M. Faubert – In that case, your taxation would merely encourage smuggling.

M. Joseph Prudhomme – Smugglers will be prosecuted.

M. Faubert – A premium on smuggling manufactures criminals; that would be a certain result of moralising taxation.

M. Joseph Prudhomme – But I should be doing something to check the curse of alcoholism.

M. Faubert – Not at all; you would only be adding one evil to another. You cannot prevent a man from drinking, if he wants to drink. The only thing is, you make him pay dearer for it, and the dearer you make him pay, the more you deprive him of the money needed for board and food and clothes, both for himself and his family.”

Striking how a book published a century ago can express fundamental wisdoms about the folly of lifestyle taxation, which continually escapes the thinking of paternalists such as Nicola Roxon and Tanya Plibersek! The passage also helpfully reminds the political classes that taxation is only meant to be imposed for the purposes of funding the necessarily strictly limited suite of public goods and services, and not for altering personal lifestyle choices on moralistic, “public health” or other grounds.

The Herald reports that an Eketahuna man has been convicted and fined for "offensive language" for subjecting a gay couple to homophobic abuse on the town's main street. The comments - calling the victims "a poofter" and alleging that they had Aids - are an appalling example of bigotry. But contrary to the judge, this is not sufficient to warrant a criminal conviction.

In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in Brooker v. Police [PDF] that the offence of disorderly behaviour was not about its insult to the values of "right-thinking" New Zealanders, but about whether it actually disrupted public order - that is, whether it seriously interferes with the "ordinary and customary use" of an area. In 2011 in Valerie Morse v. Police [PDF] they applied the same thinking to the charge of offensive behaviour, finding that it was not about giving offence, but about aggression and threat which (again) interfered with the use of public space. Together, these rulings raised the bar on the traditional public order offences, requiring that there basically be a real risk of starting a riot in order to justify interference with the BORA-affirmed right to freedom of expression.

While the Eketahuna bigot appears to have been charged under s4(1)(b) or (c) (relating to "threatening or insulting", "indecent or obscene", or just plain offensive words) rather than s4(1)(a) (relating to disorderly or offensive behaviour), the same principle surely applies. The law is not about protecting people from being offended in public, but about preventing breaches of the peace. Whether a breach of the peace is likely depends on exactly what is said: direct threats and intimidation are likely to be seen as disruptive, as they directly interfere with people's right to peaceably go about their business without fear of violence. But in a society which respects freedom of speech, mere insults are not enough. When insulted, "reasonable" New Zealanders are expected to respond with words or defamation lawyers, not violence (as the absence of any provocation defence for assault makes clear).

To be fair, the judge acknowledged this dependence on public order in their comments, but then flubbed it:

Judge Hastings said under the Bill of Rights, everyone has the right to freedom of expression but that was "not absolute" and was subject to reasonable limits. He said for the offence Strange was accused of committing to be upheld, it was necessary to establish that at the time, the place and in the manner of using the words, public order would have been disturbed.

That, the judge said, was "very clearly" the case.

"The words you used were offensive and homophobic and, as such, undermined the simple values New Zealand cherishes. They were used in the middle of the day in a public street and would have disturbed the public order of Eketahuna on that day."

But the issue isn't whether those insults offended against kiwi values of tolerance (they certainly do), but whether they were such that they would have driven the victims from the street or caused a riot. And that simply does not seem to be the case. The judge has misapplied the law, and entered a false conviction. It should be appealed and overturned.

Steven Landsburg’s post on psychic harm has created a firestorm of controversy. Many people don’t understand thought experiments and that is part of the problem but it was also a bad idea to combine hypotheticals with a real case involving a real victim. Nevertheless, Landsburg’s post raised important questions about how pure psychic harm (“I don’t like the thought of other people having gay sex.”) differs from a physical transgression without physical harm (rape of someone who is unconscious and which leaves no trace).  The point is not about rape but about whether and why (some?) psychic harms should count in the moral calculus. As David Friedman argues, how we answer this question has deep implications.

Moreover, Landsburg’s stark hypothetical is closer to a real policy question than many might imagine. Consider the issue of presumed consent for organ donation, the policy used by many European countries where someone who dies is presumed to have agreed to be an organ donor barring evidence that they opted out. There are good (not necessarily definitive) arguments for presumed consent, namely that it would save some lives  at low cost. After all, what harm can be said to occur from taking organs from a dead person? The latter point is obvious to me but it’s only obvious because I think the dead can’t be harmed. Other people, think differently  Many religions consider cadaveric organ donation to be a kind of desecration. In fact, some people liken presumed consent to rape of the unconscious. Professor Hugh V McLachlan for example writes:

if someone had sex with an unconscious woman and tried to justify his action by saying that, when she was conscious, she did not indicate that she did not want to have sex, we would not accept this as a reasonable argument. The notion of presumed consent to the use of our organs after our deaths is no more reasonable.

and another commentator on presumed consent in Britain says

The difference between voluntary consent and presumed consent is at least the difference between consensual sex and rape of a drunk person.

Evidently for some people being dead is similar to being unconscious. Thus in both cases physical harms without physical consequence can be wrong because they generate psychic harm, either in expectation or in the afterlife. Clearly, distinguishing which psychic harms are to be counted and which not quickly becomes a question of metaphysics.

My own view is that as far as possible psychic harms should not be counted at all. Instead I would let ethics dictate the assignment of property rights and economics dictate the allocation. In particular, I would assign body ownership to the individual on strong libertarian and autonomy grounds but I would let individuals sell a kidney (or sex).

One of the virtues of markets is that markets make people pay for their preferences, if only in terms of opportunity cost. My suspicion is that the psychic harm from the thought that after death one’s organs might be used by someone else would quickly dissipate once some cash was on the table. Indeed, it’s often the case that the least cost way to avoid a psychic harm is to change one’s mind and, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, it’s easier to get a man to change his mind when his salary depends upon him changing his mind.

Yet another gift to our public sphere from Jacob Weisberg and Michael Kinsley…

Cord Jefferson has the report:

Steven Landsburg… economics professor at the University of Rochester. Formerly a Slate columnist…. March 20… "Censorship, Environmentalism and Steubenville," the post attempts to compare and contrast potential "psychic harms" associated with pornography, environmentalism, and being raped while you are passed out. If one of those things, prima facie, doesn't sound like the others to you, well, Landsburg would like to understand "what is the key difference among them?"…

After describing a scenario in which a character named "Farnsworth McCrankypants" is mentally traumatized by knowing other people watch porn ("Question 1"), and another in which "Granola McMustardseed" is distressed by the idea of wilderness desecration ("Question 2"), Landsburg poses "Question 3," which references the recently closed Steubenville rape case:

Let's suppose that you, or I, or someone we love, or someone we care about from afar, is raped while unconscious in a way that causes no direct physical harm—no injury, no pregnancy, no disease transmission. (Note: The Steubenville rape victim, according to all the accounts I've read, was not even aware that she'd been sexually assaulted until she learned about it from the Internet some days later.)… Ought the law discourage such acts of rape? Should they be illegal?… I'm having trouble articulating any good reason why Question 3 is substantially different from Questions 1 and 2. As long as I'm safely unconsious and therefore shielded from the costs of an assault, why shouldn't the rest of the world (or more specifically my attackers) be allowed to reap the benefits?…

Every time someone on my street turns on a porch light, trillions of photons penetrate my body… if those… caused me deep psychic distress, the law would continue to ignore them… bodily penetration does not seem to be in some sort of special protected category…

A request for comment to Landsburg has thus far gone unanswered.

I have not mentioned it in a while, but new material is being added weekly to my course on America’s housing finance system. We will hold a chat on Thursday at noon. Feel free to stop by.

The course is something of a brain dump of what I learned in my years at Freddie Mac. The intended audience is regulatory staff and others who might be involved in the future of the housing finance system.

Last week the Christians tried to push their campaign to recriminalise prostitution by starting a moral panic about teenage prostitutes in South Auckland. Now it turns out that they were making it all up:

Police say they've seen no evidence to back up an NZ First MP's claims that girls as young as 13 are working as prostitutes in south Auckland.

[...]

That was news to police Area Commander for Counties-Manukau East, Inspector Chris de Wattignar.

"It's not something that police have seen ourselves. We also work with a number of agencies and community partners in the Otara town centre and that's certainly not the information we have."

He said police were spending a lot of time in parts of Otara where youth congregate, to try to prevent disorder and liquor ban breaches, and had seen no cases of underage prostitution.

"We've got the CCTV cameras over there and we're certainly not getting the same sort of information around prostitution there - in fact, any at all - as we get through the cameras at Papatoetoe."

Charitably, it seems some Christians are unable to distinguish between women and prostitutes. Less charitably, deceit and exaggeration seems to be a common tactic in their social crusades - witness the bullshit we've seen around marriage equality. Either way, it means we should treat their "moral" complaints with a bit more caution in the future.

The process starts today, as listed by the FT:

1 April – Spare room subsidy ends

1 April – Council tax benefit eligibility decided by local councils

8 April – New benefit rates come into effect. Most will be increased by a below-inflation 1 per cent

8 April – Personal Independence Payment replaces Disability Living Allowance in north England

15 April – Benefit cap, limiting sums a single household can receive to about £500 [TC: that is per week], begins in four London areas before national roll-out in July

29 April – Universal Credit pilot begins in one English town

Here is a CRS-like summary of the changes (pdf).  The Guardian breaks down some of the exact numbers.  If I understand their categories correctly, total benefit spending in nominal terms is going up by 1.9%, less than the rate of price inflation.  Supporters of reform argue that welfare benefits have been going up at a higher rate than have wages.  At the first link you will see that British public opinion was about 60% in favor of higher benefits in 1991 and was about 27% in favor of higher benefits as of 2011.

There is a concomitant movement afoot to cut benefits for immigrants.

I have been reading up on the Poor Law reforms of 1834 for a forthcoming MRU course, and the number of parallels to the current situation is striking.  (By the way, here is a good D.A. Baugh article (jstor) about welfare costs leading up to those reforms.)  For instance as British workers themselves struggled, support for toughening up the Poor Laws increased considerably.  The final 1834 changes, which restricted eligibility, limited grants, consolidated categories of aid, and emphasized “putting the poor back to work,” passed Parliament by a considerable margin.  There was also at that time, and now, a variety of popular overestimates for how much the benefits were squelching work effort (see Mark Blaug on the Poor Laws for instance).

This current reform is viewed by many critics as not being very generous.  It also can be said, however, that relative to current and recently lowered expectations of future wealth for the middle class, this is probably offering a higher percentage of redistribution than was the case a few years ago or for that matter during the pre-Thatcher British welfare state.

TO JEREMY BENTHAM

My dear Sir,

Mr. Walker is a very intimate friend of mine, who lives at No. 31 in Berkeley Square. I have engaged him, as he is soon coming here, first to go to your house, and get for me the 3.d and 4.th volumes of Hooke’s Roman history. But I am recapitulating the 1.st and 2.d volumes, having finished them all except a few pages of the 2.d. I will be glad if you will let him have the 3.d and 4.th volumes.

I am yours sincerely

John Stuart Mill.

Newington Green,
Tuesday 1812.

A rather ordinary letter until one considers the date. Mill you see was born in 1806, thus making him six at the time of writing. The editors of Mill’s letters note that his essay on Hooke’s Roman history has survived and includes a footnote correcting Hooke’s Greek.

"Culture" as an explanation also violates what Eric Crampton calls "the first rule of the microeconomists club": methodological individualism. A good economic explanation starts with the choices of individual rational actors. It begins with the ...

Nobel laureate, Princeton economics professor, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is a brilliant man. I am not so brilliant. So when Krugman makes strident claims about macroeconomics, a complex subject on which he has significantly more expertise than I do, should I just accept them? How should we evaluate the claims of people much smarter than ourselves?

A starting point for thinking about this question is the work of another Nobelist, Robert Aumann. In 1976, Aumann showed that under certain strong assumptions, disagreement on questions of fact is irrational. Suppose that Krugman and I have read all the same papers about macroeconomics, and we have access to all the same macroeconomic data. Suppose further that we agree that Krugman is smarter than I am. All it should take, according to Aumann, for our beliefs to converge is for us to exchange our views. If we have common “priors” and we are mutually aware of each others’ views, then if we do not agree ex post, at least one of us is being irrational.

It seems natural to conclude, given these facts, that if Krugman and I disagree, the fault lies with me. After all, he is much smarter than I am, so shouldn’t I converge much more to his view than he does to mine?

Not necessarily. One problem is that if I change my belief to match Krugman’s, I would still disagree with a lot of really smart people, including many people as smart as or possibly even smarter than Krugman. These people have read the same macroeconomics literature that Krugman and I have, and they have access to the same data. So the fact that they all disagree with each other on some margin suggests that very few of them behave according to the theory of disagreement. There must be some systematic problem with the beliefs of macroeconomists.

In their paper on disagreement, Tyler Cowen and Robin Hanson grapple with the problem of self-deception. Self-favoring priors, they note, can help to serve other functions besides arriving at the truth. People who “irrationally” believe in themselves are often more successful than those who do not. Because pursuit of the truth is often irrelevant in evolutionary competition, humans have an evolved tendency to hold self-favoring priors and self-deceive about the existence of these priors in ourselves, even though we frequently observe them in others.

Self-deception is in some ways a more serious problem than mere lack of intelligence. It is embarrassing to be caught in a logical contradiction, as a stupid person might be, because it is often impossible to deny. But when accused of disagreeing due to a self-favoring prior, such as having an inflated opinion of one’s own judgment, people can and do simply deny the accusation.

How can we best cope with the problem of self-deception? Cowen and Hanson argue that we should be on the lookout for people who are “meta-rational,” honest truth-seekers who choose opinions as if they understand the problem of disagreement and self-deception. According to the theory of disagreement, meta-rational people will not have disagreements among themselves caused by faith in their own superior knowledge or reasoning ability. The fact that disagreement remains widespread suggests that most people are not meta-rational, or—what seems less likely—that meta-rational people cannot distinguish one another.

We can try to identify meta-rational people through their cognitive and conversational styles. Someone who is really seeking the truth should be eager to collect new information through listening rather than speaking, construe opposing perspectives in their most favorable light, and offer information of which the other parties are not aware, instead of simply repeating arguments the other side has already heard.

Contemporary macroeconomic debates are a case where it is clear that a number of participants on both sides possess less than average levels of meta-rationality. It seems clear, for instance, that the “Internet Austrians” are not meta-rational. It seems equally obvious that Krugman is not meta-rational.

For example, when Jeff Sachs put forth a long, reasoned argument that Krugman’s crude Keynesianism was inadequate and dangerous, Krugman responded by saying that his model was not crude but sophisticated, pointing to published research that Sachs has no doubt already read. He did not respond to Sachs’s factual assertion, for instance, that profits are soaring, or to his claim that this conflicts with Krugman’s argument that our economic problems are purely demand-related.

Another recent example comes from Krugman’s hasty dismissal of Miles Kimball, who argued more narrowly that Krugman’s advice to Italy in particular to spend more was misguided. Krugman’s response, in full, was that the paper that Kimball cited, by Reinhart, Reinhart, and Rogoff, did not constitute conclusive proof that high debt levels were bad for growth. I happen to agree in general about that paper, but, as Noah Smith pointed out, Krugman himself had argued a mere three days earlier that Eurozone countries, because they do not control their own currencies, do need to be concerned about their levels of debt. In case you need reminding, Italy is a Eurozone country.

And to take a non-recent example, who can forget Krugman’s blanket dismissal of the “conservative” blogosphere: “I don’t know of any economics or politics sites on that side that regularly provide analysis or information I need to take seriously.” As if this were not already a caricature of self-deception, recall that Krugman frequently and irritatingly refers to libertarian economists as conservatives.

What does this mean for the rationality of disagreement with Krugman? To quote Cowen and Hanson (emphasis added):

For a truth-seeker, the key question must be how sure you can be that you, at the moment, are substantially more likely to have a truth-seeking, in-control, rational core than the people you now disagree with. This is because if either of you have some substantial degree of meta-rationality, then your relative intelligence and information are largely irrelevant except as they may indicate which of you is more likely to be self-deceived about being meta-rational.

Our intellects may be inferior to Krugman’s, but if we cultivate our own meta-rationality, we are more likely to be right than he is. Meta-rationality trumps intelligence. We would be fools to dismiss Krugman out-of-hand, because, after all, that would not be very meta-rational of us. But, having given due weight to his and other arguments, if we continue to disagree, we may do so with the strong suspicion that our disagreement is warranted.