Acemoglu strikes again

MIT's Daron Acemoglu, the James Brown of economics has a new NBER working paper, "A Theory of Military Dictatorships". An ungated version is available here.

Here is the abstract:

We investigate how nondemocratic regimes use the military and how this can lead to the emergence of military dictatorships. Nondemocratic regimes need the use of force in order to remain in power, but this creates a political moral hazard problem; a strong military may not simply work as an agent of the elite but may turn against them in order to create a regime more in line with their own objectives. The political moral hazard problem increases the cost of using repression in nondemocratic regimes and in particular, necessitates high wages and policy concessions to the military. When these concessions are not sufficient, the military can take action against a nondemocratic regime in order to create its own dictatorship. A more important consequence of the presence of a strong military is that once transition to democracy takes place, the military poses a coup threat against the nascent democratic regime until it is reformed. The anticipation that the military will be reformed in the future acts as an additional motivation for the military to undertake coups against democratic governments. We show that greater inequality makes the use of the military in nondemocratic regimes more likely and also makes it more difficult for democracies to prevent military coups. In addition, greater inequality also makes it more likely that nondemocratic regimes are unable to solve the political moral hazard problem and thus creates another channel for the emergence of military dictatorships. We also show that greater natural resource rents make military coups against democracies more likely, but have ambiguous effects on the political equilibrium in nondemocracies (because with abundant natural resources, repression becomes more valuable to the elite, but also more expensive to maintain because of the more severe political moral hazard that natural resources induce). Finally, we discuss how the national defense role of the military interacts with its involvement in domestic politics

Justice: Yer doin' it Wrong

Ah Italy, where, "even traffic tickets can be appealed to the nation's highest court. Italy's courts are so clogged that the statute of limitations on most felonies expires before a final verdict can be reached. Claudio Urciuoli, a criminal defense lawyer in Rome, says he often reassures his clients: "Don't worry, you'll never go to prison.""

They are not content to rest on their laurels, though. Consider the following:

"Less than two years ago, Italy's prison system faced a crisis: Built to hold 43,000 inmates, it was straining to contain more than 60,000.

So the government crafted an emergency plan. It swung open the prison doors and let more than a third of the inmates go free.

Within months, bank robberies jumped by 20%. Kidnappings and fraud also rose, as did computer crime, arson and purse-snatchings. The prison population, however, fell so much that for awhile Italy had more prison guards than prisoners to guard.

In Italy, it sometimes seems that no bad deed goes unpardoned."

Don't you hate it when the article you are linking to gives a better punchline than you ever could? Kudos to you Gabriel Kahn, nicely done!

#4 with a bullet!

According to this morning's WSJ, Economics is the 4th most remunerative undergrad major (based on starting salaries), beating accounting, finance, and marketing.

Bad news for philosophy majors though: they come in dead last, behind even elementary ed majors.

Somewhere, Ludwig Wittgenstein must be smiling.

Hey Mungowitz: polysci isn't even on the list? Are there really no polysci majors left?

Marc Andreessen to the rescue

Over at pmarca, he has a nice list of possible follow-up stories to the NY Times' recent scare piece;

blogging = death.

Check them all, but my fave is: Hitler Probably Blogged!!




P.S. Hey maybe the Times's story explains where Mungowitz has got to!!

The best sentences I've read today

From TNR's J. Chait:

The persistent weakness of American liberalism is its fixation with rights and procedures at any cost to efficiency and common sense. Democrats' reluctance to push Clinton out of the race is the perfect expression of that delicate sensibility.

There is some point at which a candidate's chance of winning becomes so low that her right to continue is outweighed by the party's interest in preparing for the general election. Does Clinton have a chance to become president? Sure. So does Ralph Nader. Clinton's chances are far closer to Nader's than to either Obama's or John McCain's.

uh, Snap???

David Boaz defends our freedoms

In a case of crack investigative journalism, Cato's David Boaz gets to the bottom of Starbucks' outrageous policy of not allowing the phrase "laissez-faire" to be printed on their personalized gift cards.

Or rather doesn't get to the bottom of it. He claims it can't be because it's too political because he succeeded in getting a "people not profits" card (Boaz refers to that phrase as a "socialist slogan"). He claims it can't be because it's foreign because he got a "si se puede" card (Boaz refers to that phrase as "The Senator's (Obama) political campaign slogan").

Boaz and his assistant also made two phone calls to Starbucks but failed to get a satisfactory explanation for this outrage against liberty. Now that is exhaustive research my friends. No wonder this got published on the WSJ's editorial page

I'm guessing no one at Cato will use a si se puede or a people not profits gift card, so I am making a generous offer to buy these pariah cards from them at 50 cents on the dollar! Maybe that will ease the sting. Also perhaps Cato could set up a chain of coffee shops that sold laissez faire labeled gift cards and drive freedom-hating Starbucks out of business!

Our chief weapon is fear and a hedgehog?

In NZ, William Singalargh is being charge with assault with a weapon; viz a hedgehog!

Police allege that William Singalargh picked up the hedgehog and threw it several yards to hit a 15-year-old boy in the North Island east coast town of Whakatane on Feb. 9.

"It hit the victim in the leg, causing a large, red welt and several puncture marks," police Senior Sgt. Bruce Jenkins said Monday.

Jenkins said Singalargh, 27, was arrested shortly after the incident on a charge of assault with a weapon. He is expected to appear in court again on April 17.

His lawyer, Rebecca Plunket, said Singalargh intends to plead innocent. The maximum penalty for the charge is five years in prison

The Neverending Story

of Zimbabwe's presidential election has taken several even more bizarre turns. First and foremost, Mugabe's party, (ZANU-PF) has demanded a recount, even though no initial vote totals have been released!! Really.

The Movement for Democratic Change, which claims its leader Morgan Tsvangirai won the March 29 presidential ballot outright, said it would not accept a recount, did not want a runoff and pressed ahead with legal attempts to force publication of the results.

"How do you have a vote recount for a result that has not been announced? That is ridiculous," said opposition spokesman Nelson Chamisa.

He accused the ruling ZANU-PF party of vote fraud, saying that police have told opposition leaders that the ruling party has been tampering with ballots since early last week

Tsvangirai probably hasn't made things easier by publically telling Mugabe that he needn't fear for his safety in an MDC ruled Zimbabwe: "I want to say to President Robert Mugabe: 'Please rest your mind, the new Zimbabwe guarantees your safety,'" Tsvangirai told a news conference.

That to me is a bit like the general manager or owner giving a public vote of confidence to a coach days before firing him. I read that as saying, "don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out."

Finally Thebo Mbeki has taken this opportunity to show that he indeed lives on another planet. Remember that the vote was supposed to be announced a week ago and absolutely no information has been released to date while you savor this Mbeki gem:

A growing chorus that includes Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain and Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, has appealed for a speedy release of the vote count. But on Saturday, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, perhaps the most important international player in Zimbabwe’s electoral drama, counseled patience after meeting Mr. Brown in London, news agencies reported.

“I think there is time to wait,” said Mr. Mbeki, who was appointed by a regional bloc of nations to mediate in Zimbabwe but has been accused by Mr. Tsvangirai of favoring Mr. Mugabe. “Let’s see the outcome of the election results.”

Lol, sure thing Thabo, let's wait til your pal Bobby M fill out a few more "replacement ballots" and let the vote total come out maybe in June? How'd that be?

Hot Links!!

1. Vote for the NBAs LVP (least valuable player) here. Telling excerpt: Kidd has the opportunity to do something this season that no other great point guard has ever done: Cause two different teams to miss the playoffs.

2. So that's why me and Mrs. Angus are so happy; no kids!! Will Wilkinson has the scoop. A morsel: None of this is to say that people with kids are unhappy people. There are many things in a parent’s life that bring great joy. For example, spending time away from kids.

3. Stay in school kids. Mark Perry breaks down unemployment by educational achievement. Money quote: almost all of the .50% increase in the overall unemployment rate over the last 9 months from 4.6% in June 2007 to 5.1% in March 2008 was mostly from increases in unemployment for workers with less than a high school degree.

Basketball Zelig

Check out this photo of basketball royalty. No, not King James, but rather the other dude, William Wesley. The NY Times has a bizarre and fascinating story on this modern day Zelig.

He's friends with LeBron, MJ, Rick Mahorn, John Calipari, Coach K, and Denny Crum, even Derek Rose.

And it's not just basketball either. He's pals with Jimmy Johnson, Jay-Z, and Beyonce.

Here is a testimony to his Zeligness:

In one of the numerous “Where’s Waldo?” moments for Wesley, Mahorn said he saw Wesley on television on the sideline after a Cowboys Super Bowl victory. He was photographed breaking up the brawl between the Pistons and the Pacers in 2004. And he was on the floor in Houston last week, crying tears of joy when Memphis clinched its Final Four berth.

As another friend, Michael Irvin puts it:

“What Paris Hilton has done in Hollywood, Wes has done in the sports world,” said Michael Irvin, the former star receiver in the N.F.L. who now does a radio show for ESPN. “Whoever is winning a championship, Wes is there associated with them. He’s never played a down or shot a basket, but he’s a superstar anyway.”

A whole new meaning to the phrase: Sleep it off

From our French friends comes the news that,

"An extra hour between the sheets at night might be the key to shedding excess weight and fighting obesity, according to recent research"

Yeah, that's my kind of research! Maybe Eliot Spitzer was just trying to lose weight?

Sadly, that's not actually what they are talking about:

"More sleep could be the ideal way of stabilising weight or slimming," said neuro-scientist Karine Spiegel, of France's INSERM, a public organisation dedicated to biological, medical and public health research.

It's all about the hormones, people

Two key hormones produced at night which help regulate appetite were at play, she said.

Grehlin makes people hungry, slows metabolism and decreases the body's ability to burn body fat, and leptin, a protein hormone produced by fatty tissue, regulates fat storage.

"We have shown that less sleep (two four-hour nights) caused an 18 percent loss of appetite-cutting leptin and a 28 percent increase of appetite-causing grehlin," she said.

Such hormonal changes made people hungry for foods heavy in fats and sugars such as chips, biscuits, cakes and peanuts, she added.

INSERM?? Grehlin?

Hugo strikes again.

Yesterday, an apparently well-hydrated Hugo Chavez announced that Venezuela will be nationalizing the cement industry. The affected foreign companies are Mexican (Cemex), French, and Swiss.

He is making good on his vow made last year:

Prior to Thursday's announcement, Chavez had repeatedly expressed frustration with the high cost of construction materials and threatened to seize control of companies that fail to provide low-cost cement for the domestic market.

Last year, he said many of Venezuela's cement factories prefer to sell their product abroad at higher prices and warned: "If the cement factories do not (sell in Venezuela), we will occupy them."

Can cement companies price discriminate? Or is the price of cement held below the market price in Venezuela? Have any of you ever heard of a country nationalizing cement before, or is this another historic first for the Bolivarian Revolution?

Needed: An Ex-Dictator rest home

It looks like Mugabe has decided to fight. He's raiding opposition offices, arresting foreign journalists, and parading independence fighters through the streets. He is rumored to be planning a 90 day delay in the runoff election (it's supposed to be 21 days after the first vote). Incredibly, the electoral commission still has not released ANY presidential vote results. None!

One thing that may have weighed on Bobby M. is that ex-dictators don't tend to get cushy digs and aren't always safe from future prosecution. Thus they may tend to hang on til the bitter end.

Here are a few ex-dictators and their exile locations and durations. Please help me add to this list with other cases I've missed. Are there ones who have gotten a "good" (for them) deal?

Baby Doc-Haiti-France still alive 1986-present

Alfredo Stroessner-Paraguay-Brazil 1989-2006

Idi Amin -Uganda- Saudi Arabia 1981-2003

Mengistu-Ethiopia-Zimbabwe-1992-present

Charles Taylor-Liberia-Nigeria-2003-2006- now on trial in Sierra Leone

Hissène Habré-Chad-Senegal-1991-present.

Juan Peron-Argentina-Spain-1955-73-returned with new wife to be president again.

Snoop Dogg Attracted to Mormonism

FIrst a serious entry on the LDS. Now, less so.

Snoop Dogg...well, ATSRTWT.

(Nod to the Mayor, who is a BIG Snoop fan)

They Aren't Going to Get Jobs, Anyway, RIght?

Students do backflips, baksheesh, to get adWISE-ers.

BERLIN - A judge has sentenced a German law professor to three years in prison for accepting kickbacks from doctoral students.

The Hannover university professor, whose identity was not revealed, confessed to accepting euro 156,000 (US$240,000) to serve as a faculty adviser to 68 doctorate students between 1998 and 2005.

Court documents say an agency brokered kickback deals for him to serve as the students' adviser. Advisers can be difficult to find in German universities.

Judge Peter Peschka called it "a very severe case of corruption" on Wednesday.

The professor said he needed the money to renovate his Hamburg mansion.

Some observations:

1. Coase would say it doesn't matter, right?
2. Saying that the German academic system is corrupt is like
saying that trees are made out of wood. They aren't separate features. The whole "chair" thing is a state-run monopoly for the benefit of the mentally infirm. German students are good, some of them VERY good, but the system is horrible.
3. It's pronounced "adWISE-ers", as in "AdWISE-ers can be difficult to find in German universities."

(Nod to Anonyman, who never paid ME a darned thing)

Mommy, What is that woman doing?

TV tech suspended for broadcasting porn.

Reminds me of two other stories.

1. The finest WoW music video in history

2. This guy, who also neglected to check his video feed

Advice: Look up the word "volunteer"

What is it when the government requires payment of an in-kind tax, collected in the form of mandatory service hours?

In the state of Ohio, it's called "volunteering."

When I look up "voluntary," though, I find something like "of your own free will or design; not forced or compelled." Hmmmmmm......

A survey, from a tv station web site:

If House Bill 519 passes, would you volunteer at your child's school or pay the fine?
Choice____________Votes___________Percentage of 1632 Votes
Volunteer ________926_____________ 57%
Pay Fine _________706 _____________43%

They should have offered another choice: "Move to another state, where there are actually some jobs that pay higher than the implied wage of $100 / 13 hours = $7.70/hour"

I volunteer a lot at my kids' school. But requiring voluntary donations is nonsense. I predict that teachers will NOT enjoy policing petulant parents. I mean, can you imagine the teachers at 2T's school, trying to tell Angus how to "volunteer"?

(Update: Speedmaster posted on this first, and better)

Clubs, Groups, and Organization

Club Mormon: Free-Riders, Monitoring, and Exclusion in the LDS Church

Michael McBride
Rationality and Society, November 2007, Pages 395-424

Abstract:
The Mormon Church is best understood as a club, in the economics sense of
the term. It succeeds, in part, because it identifies and selectively
rewards high contributors, thereby limiting free-riding and producing large
religious benefits for its members. First, it offers a menu of club goods of
varying excludability, with the most valued goods excluded from
less-committed members. Second, to enforce this menu, it actively monitors
its members using a sophisticated administrative structure. The menu design
reflects to an extent the costs of excludability of various religious goods,
and the menu-monitoring approach implicitly allows some free-riding to
dynamically foster commitment. Because the menu-monitoring approach is best
understood as complementing other methods in achieving the Mormon Church's
religious goals, these findings yield insights into the activities of other
religious groups.

----------------------------

Conservatism, Institutionalism, and the Social Control of Intergroup
Conflict

Ryan King
American Journal of Sociology, March 2008, Pages 1351–1393

Abstract:
This research investigates the state social control of intergroup conflict by assessing the sociopolitical determinants of hate crime prosecutions. Consistent with insights from the political sociology of punishment, group-threat accounts of intergroup relations and the state, and neoinstitutional theory, the findings suggest that hate crime prosecutions are fewer where political conservatism, Christian fundamentalism, and black population size are higher, although this last effect is nonlinear. Linkages between district attorneys' offices and communities, on the other hand, increase hate crime prosecutions and the likelihood of offices' creating hate crime policies. Yet these policies are sometimes decoupled from actual enforcement, and such decoupling is more likely in politically conservative districts. The results indicate that common correlates of criminal punishment have very different effects on types of state social control that are protective of minority groups, and also suggest conditions under which policy and practice become decoupled in organizational settings.

This is a drill...This is ONLY a drill

APRIL FOOL'S MESSAGE FROM THE WINE AUTHORITY: BSAFD's ARE SCARCE!

BSAFD:


Sorry for the unusual email early in the week. We had to get the word out about new alcohol legislation that went into affect this morning at 12:01 AM.

March 31st was a historic day for the Wine Industry in North Carolina. In case you haven't heard, yesterday was the last day to sell higher alcohol wines. As of today no wine can legally be sold by wine retailers or restaurants over 10.78% abv. As strange as that seems, the neo-prohibitionists, especially the group PEAT, People for Ethyl Alcohol Tolerance, have made their voice heard and won their forty-six year on-going battle to have the alcohol volume lowered in wine. This new law goes into effect nationally December 1st, but the Sate of North Carolina volunteered to be the first test state eight months early.

What does this mean for us at the store? We'll a whole bunch of work at first, as well as a huge capital expense. To comply with the new law all retailers have to prove to an ALE agent that the bottles on display have been tested for alcohol level. Currently, the only way to do this c is to buy a machine called the Bufort/Stern Alcohol Flowvert Determiner, B.S.A.F.D. for short. As you might imagine these machines aren't easy to come by used on Ebay or Craig's List at the moment! A new machine runs about 15,000 Euros from Slovenia, or about $30,000! We wish there was an easier way, but this is the only device that can measure a liquid's alcohol level through glass, plastic, cardboard and aluminum without touching the liquid thus avoiding contamination. The only way a small business can afford such a contraption is to pass this cost on to the consumer. We are going to charge a Bufort/Stern tax of twenty-five cents per bottle until the machine is paid for. Sorry.

To comply, we had to pull the corks or open the screw tops on every bottle of wine in the store last night, use a turkey baster to suck out a few ounces, add distilled and purified water, measure the alcohol level with the BSAFD and then print a tag to show that bottle complies with the new standard. Similar to a mattress tag, this alcohol proving tag has to be affixed on the front label prominently, just like the ABC tags you see on liquor bottles on bar shelves at restaurants here in NC. Only this tag is about the size of an index card so it blocks the label entirely. You have to lift up the tag to see the name of the wine. Please pardon the appearance of our bottles on the shelves with their foils cut, giant ALE tags and the corks mostly pressed back into the bottles. We did the best we could to make the bottles look un-opened.
Furthermore, until this practice starts directly at the wineries we no longer recommend aging any wine for more than a week or two. Opening the bottles ahead of time and lowering the alcohol level certainly shortens its life!

Let's hope this new law is repealed quickly so we don't have to go through a short eternity of neo-prohibition.

(Nod to KL: You can breathe again)

I am not alone!

Hi, my name is Angus and I'm a grade-avoider. I give exams right before spring break so that I can have "all week to get them done" but generally I'm up late on Monday of the next week feverishly grading to get them done by when I've promised them back to the class. While other people look at the new academic calendars for vacation days, I look for the line saying, "final grades due by:" If anything will make me stop professoring, it will be grading.

Mrs. Angus on the other hand is a grading machine. She'll give exams in both her classes and have the first set graded by the time the second class finishes taking their test.

Well I learned this week that I am a member of a big club according to Insider Higher Ed. Late grades are apparently a chronic problem and some schools are taking extreme measures to deal with them. The article is worth a read and so are all the comments. The comments will give you non-academics a feeling for why faculty meetings generally take so long and accomplish so little.

If you think the proposed remedies for late grades seem extreme, at the school where Mrs. Angus and I taught in Mexico, professors were required to go to an office before each of their classes and sign a form certifying that they were actually holding their class that day! I am not making this up. It irritated me to no end, so I wouldn't do it and the bureaucrats decided they weren't going to pay me, so I told them that would cause me to stop teaching the course. This real life "Mexican standoff" was resolved by me agreeing to sign about 20 backdated certification forms.

I really enjoy teaching but I despise grading.

If Michael Mann made skating videos.....

They might look like this. Music by M83.

College Kids Easily Bored: Munger Campaigns at Pembroke

I drove down to UNC-Pembroke, and participated in the GOOB debate.

From the description, the crowd was not overwhelmed with the proceedings.

Nice picture, though.

Why not a golden parachute for the Mugabes of the world?

As the Zimbabwean electoral soap opera continues to unfurl, I am led more and more to wonder why "we" (Western governments and IFIs) don't simply buy out corrupt dictators? The World Bank has loaned a lot of money to Zimbabwe, all of it seemingly wasted judging by current conditions there. From the Bank's Zimbabwe page:

Between 1980, when Zimbabwe joined the Bretton Woods Institutions, and 2000 when the country fell behind in its payments on World Bank loans, the Bank funded a total of 33 projects worth US$1.6 billion. Bank support concentrated on infrastructure, agriculture, health support, and community and local government programs, financed from both International Development Association (IDA) Credits (42%) available to low-income countries, and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) loans (58%) available to middle-income countries. Zimbabwe’s arrears to the World Bank were estimated at US$521 million as of September 13, 2007. The arrears to the IMF stood at US$134 million at end-July 2007 and to the AfdB at US$359 million as of end-April 2007.

So why not "buy the rascals out"? Go to Mugabe in 2002 and offer him $500 million cash to go live in Canada. Is it that his expected profits from being in power are too large for us to afford the buyout? Is it because of moral hazard? Is it because of the moral outrage such a scheme would create?

Or is it because if the institutions of the country don't change, the new president will simply become the next Mugabe?

May you live in interesting times

Zimbabweans certainly are! After 28 years of Mugabeism, they seem tantalizingly close to getting a new president. However, the electoral commission still will not release any information about the presidential vote now 3 days after they were supposed to do so. The NY Times is running a story quoting a Zimbabwean newspaper saying that neither Mugabe nor his rival Tsvangirai have gotten 50% of the vote, meaning that there will be a runoff. Meanwhile the AP is quoting a spokesman for Tsvangirai's party as saying they have won a (bare) majority of 50.3%. These numbers are a far cry from what the opposition M.D.C. party was touting immediately after the election, i.e. that they had won a landslide with around 60% of the vote.

From my perspective, its very hard to imaging how in a country with 80% unemployment and virulent hyperinflation, the incumbent president could get anywhere close to 48-49% of the vote, but the opposition is not claiming any vote rigging in their claim of getting 50.3%.

The main theories behind the delays are (1) Mugabe is buying time to steal the vote. This theory now seems out of favor. Apparently the simple tactic of posting the results quickly at each polling station has made changing the results too costly. (2) Mugabe is buying time to negotiate a golden parachute. This seems plausible. (3) Mugabe considers having to endure a runoff "humiliating" and beneath him, but his advisers are pushing him to suck it up and accept the runoff. That sounds like something a crazy person would think, so I guess it is a plausible theory here too.

A-hole of the decade?

Tripp Isenhour is off the hook. KPC has found the a-hole of this year and the last several years as well in the form of Richard Davidson, a psychologist and medical researcher at the University of Wisconsin. Davidson is big on "compassion" and is pals with the Dalai Lama. He's been featured in Oprah's magazine and been named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Wikipedia sez that,

Dr. Davidson hopes to help get out the message that based on what we know about the plasticity of the brain, we can think of things like happiness and compassion as skills that are no different from learning to play a musical instrument or learning golf or tennis. Like any skill, it requires practice and time but because we know that the brain is built to change in response to experience, it is possible to train a mind to be happy.

Davidson has long maintained his own daily meditation practice, and continues to communicate regularly with the Dalai Lama.

A longtime friend of the Dalai Lama, some of his work involves research on the brain as it relates to meditation. Davidson is one of the most important scientists in the Dalai Lama's quest to validate Buddhism with science.

Well I am not a Buddhist, but I'd say Doc Davidson needs to teach himself a bit of compassion and that the Lama, Oprah and Time need to do some serious retracting.

Here are some tidbits from a paper published in 2007 by Davidson and others:

“Role of the primate orbitofrontal cortex in mediating anxious temperament.” (Kalin N. H., Shelton S. E., & Davidson R. J. Biological Psychiatry):

Experimental Subjects Twelve experimentally naïve adolescent colony-born rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) were the subjects. Animal housing and experimental procedures were in accordance with institutional guidelines. The animals were housed as pairs; each experimental animal lived with a control animal. At the beginning of the study, subjects were, on average, 34.4 months of age. Six randomly selected males underwent surgery at an average age of 35.6 months. Six nonoperated male control animals were used for comparison, since we previously demonstrated that the nonspecific effects of the surgery do not significantly affect the behavioral and physiological measures of interest.

Surgical Procedure Prior to surgery, atropine sulfate was given to depress salivary secretion, and dexamethasone was given to reduce potential brain swelling. Animals were pre anesthetized with ketamine hydrochloride, fitted with an endotracheal tube, and maintained on isoflurane anesthesia. An experienced surgeon made an opening in the frontal bone posterior to the brow ridge to expose the frontal cortex. Both hemispheres were lesioned in a single procedure by lifting the brain to expose its ventral surface. Using microscopic guidance, electro-cautery and suction were applied to the targeted brain area.

Oh my goodness people. He's a straight up animal torturer! And, lest you give me the "if it saves one human life" speech, let me tell you the experiment and the results. Davidson proceeds to show a snake to each of the monkeys and see whether or not the ones where he induced brain damage are less afraid. Really. I am not making this up. And the big scientific payoff for this horrific exercise?

The monkeys with the induced brain damage exhibited a less "fearful" response to snakes. Wow. I take it back. He's right at the doorstep of curing anxiety in humans!! Induce brain damage.

People, aren't monkeys SUPPOSED to be afraid of snakes? Is a monkey being afraid of a snake in any way similar to anxieties that people seek to overcome or get rid of? Isn't sticking snakes in front of a captive monkey cruel and heartless even when they haven't been surgically tortured?
Don't you think these brain damaged monkeys quite likely display less of a response to EVERYTHING and not just what the good Doctor stuck in front of them.

Shame on you sir and on the University of Wisconsin for condoning this crap. Shame on the Dalai Lama for lending his name to this creep.

Global Roundup

1. Ominous silence in Zimbabwe. The opposition still insists that it has won a clear majority, but no presidential vote tallies have been released by the electoral commission fueling speculation that Bobby M is going to claim victory.

2. Farmers are back to the blockades in Argentina. After initial negotiations with the government broke down, tax protesting farmers resumed their roadblocks and protests, though they are now delivering milk as some other products internally. The FT reports that the cost of the protests is approaching a billion dollars.

3. Chavez proposes to exhume Bolivar's body to test for poison and his poll numbers skyrocket!! Really!!

4. Cubans can now live the good life in Cuba. Sure, electronics, cell phones, even staying in hotels! Not sure where they are supposed to get the scratch to pay for all this bling, but hey!

It's not NICE....to thermal probe Mother Nature

They sink a probe into Mother Earth, and the town sinks.

A spokesman for Staufen council said: "The community was so proud of the environmentally-friendly geothermal energy project that it would be a painful irony if that was the cause for this incredible occurrence."

It's only an irony if you think that "green energy" is always cheaper, regardless of the cost. Otherwise, it is an "idiocy."

Look, we don't know much about what causes changes in the environment, or about how "alternative" energy sources work. That's why they are alternative.

Thinking that it's all easy, and the only reason we aren't all "green" is that greedy people are blocking the progress is...well, those people deserve a big old probe of their own. A red hot one.

Nod to Anonyman...

(Title credit, btw:
)

Great Questions in Poli Sci

Real stories from the front (and not from Duke, by the way):

American politics class. Students studying for exam. Two nights before the exam, prof receives following email:

"We were studying for the test, and came up with this question for you. Do we have to know the order in which the Federalist papers were written? And, if so, how can we find that out?"

My advice: If you get an email like this, go for a walk. Don't answer it right away.

Still no official results in the Zimbabwe Election

People, a presidential election occurred Saturday in Bobby Mugabe's Zimbabwe. The results were supposed to be reported this morning, but so far no complete results have been forthcoming. The main opposition party, the M.D.C. is claiming they've won a majority (there are three candidates, Mugabe, Tsvangirai of the M.D.C. and Simba Makoni). As of last night the NY Times was quoting an anonymous "independent observer" saying the tallies were Tsvangirai 58%, Mugabe 37%, and Makoni 5%.

However, the delay in announcing full results and the staging of the partial results are causing concern. The results announced so far show Mugabe's party and the M.D.C tied in the number of seats won for Parliment, and the fear is that Mugabe trying to steal the election and get a result announced of him winning 52% of the vote and his party holding a 1 seat majority in Congress.

Hmmm, I wonder what Ray Fair's economic model of the incumbent's share of the vote would predict when you plug in an unemployment rate of 80% and an inflation rate of 100,000%?

No country for old milkmen

Did you know that in 1947 the Indian state of Maharashtra "nationalized" its milk industry? It's true! This lasted until 2001. Can you guess what happened then?

Private carriers with higher quality milk swiftly won customers by delivering milk to doorsteps. The government milkmen have always been restricted to delivering mostly to curbside milk stalls so they could cover a greater area.

Customers swiftly deserted. Many switched to heat-treated milk in sealed packages that resist spoiling. Some ditched the government's former best sellers of sweet Pineapple milk and spicy Masala milk for Coca-Cola and Sprite as Indian tastes westernized. Others never found the milk stands appealing -- they can be dingy and the milk sometimes bad.

Sandra Melwani, a 42-year-old food writer who lives near the Worli Dairy, grew up on government milk but now buys sealed packs of Nestle skim milk from the new neighborhood grocery store. "Even as a kid I used to cringe when I looked at the government booths," she says.

Amazingly though, the WSJ asks us to feel sorry for, not the millions of Indian consumers to had to put up with crappy milk in nasty shops for 55 years, but rather for the government milkmen who are still being paid, but have no work to do because the "firm" has no business.

Once respected civil servants, Mr. Walkar and his 300-odd fellow drivers have been left in a strange limbo. Milk sales at their dairy have plummeted as the state government lost its monopoly on milk and consumer tastes changed. But because Indian work rules strictly protect government workers from layoffs, the delivery men show up for work each morning for eight-hour shifts, as they always did, then proceed to do nothing all day. They rarely, if ever, leave the plant.

All around the milkmen are reminders of their lost prestige. The Worli Dairy's entrance is adorned with a huge mosaic of milk bottling machines, a chandelier of milk bottles and plaques marking visits from top politicians.

In the good old days, the dairy threw big events with dancing, live bands, food, photographers and boxes full of sweets to take home. Now, there are only small gatherings to observe religious holidays and to congratulate another retiree. After a hiring freeze of two decades, the average age of employees is close to 50. The ceiling of the rest area where the drivers spend their days is covered with strings of frayed flags put up for a party long ago.

Hey Eric Bellman! Are you freakin' kidding me? The consumers of India got the shaft for 55 years and still are paying the wages of these guys. Not just them either, in Maharashtra alone there are over 25,000 such workers (employed and paid by state owned firms that now do little to no business now that Indian consumers have been given a choice). And your take is that the tragedy is how these guys have lost their "prestige" and have no future? Holy Crap, dude.

Alan Meltzer gets it right

...and of course by getting it right I mean "agrees with me". I've been posting (see here and here) that while I applaud the recent "lender of last resort" actions by the Fed, that driving short term real rates negative is bad monetary policy.

Here is Alan Meltzer this past week:

Monetary policy is too lax at present. The Fed has done too much to prevent a possible recession and too little to prevent another round of inflation. Its mistake comes from responding to pressure from Congress and the financial markets. The Fed has sacrificed its independence by yielding to that pressure. As a result, real short-term interest rates are negative. Borrowers are being paid to borrow. Negative real rates were a cause of the current problem; they are not a cure. The Fed must raise interest rates in order to prevent inflation.

On the other hand, the Fed’s credit policy has been good. It has been alert to problems in the payment and settlement system. Banks and financial institutions are uncertain about the solvency of other institutions, so they prefer to hold cash rather than to lend it. The traditional way to solve problems of this kind is to provide as much cash as the market wants. And indeed, the Fed has invented new ways of pumping reserves and liquid assets (Treasury bills) into the market. This has helped to prevent a genuine market crisis—at least so far. The Fed did not “bail out” Bear Stearns. It arranged a sale that wiped out the equity and replaced the management without closing the firm.

The Fed’s only mistake was to guarantee $30 billion of Bear’s portfolio. This action transferred potential losses from the market to the taxpayers. I do not believe the present system can remain if the bankers make the profits and the taxpayers share the losses.

Mungowitz: can I get a Amen?

There's no Debatin' these Socialist Calculations!!

Apparently Salvadore Allende didn't get the memo that Lange & Lerner lost the calculation debates. Allende's government (while it lasted) was attempting to implement a plan to "manage Chile’s economy using a clunky mainframe computer and a network of telex machines."

The project, called Cybersyn, was the brainchild of A. Stafford Beer...who employed his “cybernetic” concepts to help Mr. Allende find an alternative to the planned economies of Cuba and the Soviet Union.....

A Star Trek-like chair with controls in the armrests was a replica of those in a prototype operations room. Mr. Beer planned for the room to receive computer reports based on data flowing from telex machines connected to factories up and down this 2,700-mile-long country. Managers were to sit in seven of the contoured chairs and make critical decisions about the reports displayed on projection screens.

While the operations room never became fully operational, Cybersyn gained stature within the Allende government for helping to outmaneuver striking workers in October 1972. That helped planners realize — as the pioneers of the modern-day Internet did — that the communications network was more important than computing power, which Chile did not have much of, anyway. A single I.B.M. 360/50 mainframe, which had less storage capacity than most flash drives today, processed the factories’ data, with a Burroughs 3500 later filling in.

(the program was intended) to use the telex communications system — a network of teletypewriters — to gather data from factories on variables like daily output, energy use and labor “in real time,” and then use a computer to filter out the important pieces of economic information the government needed to make decisions.

Sweet! Here's more from Wikipedia:

There were 500 unused telex machines bought by the previous government, each was put into one factory. In the control center in Santiago, each day data coming from each factory (several numbers, such as raw material input, production output and number of absentees) were put into a computer, which made short-term predictions and necessary adjustments. There were four levels of control (firm, branch, sector, total), with algedonic feedback (if lower level of control didn't remedy a problem in a certain interval, the higher level was notified). The results were discussed in the operations room and the top-level plan was made. The software for Cybersyn was called Cyberstride, and it used Bayesian filtering and Bayesian control. It was written by Chilean engineers in consultation with a team of 12 British programmers.


Move over Von Mises! It looks like maybe it was Augustin Pinochet who actually won the calculation debate!

Hat tip to Mrs. Angus

Pangea 3000 presents the Beatles Block on WP3K

John, Paul, George and Ringo! All in the same band!! How is that even possible??

Gott in Himmel!

Oh, my. Mike Gravel decides he is a Libertarian. Check the new, spiffed-out web site.

A campaign video, from the Gravel campaign:



Yes, that is a campaign video. Don't blame me.

This one is even better.

if the 1s just hold their place the 0s make a smiley face

The NY Times has launched a new blog called "Measure for Measure", on songwriting and music! There are 4 bloggers, Andrew Bird, Roseanne Cash, Susanne Vega and some guy named Darrell Brown. The inaugural post by Bird is terrific, as is his music. If you are not yet a fan I highly recommend starting with "The Mysterious Production of Eggs" from which the title of this post is taken. I also really like Roseanne Cash. My alltime favorite song of hers is "Seven Year Ache"

Save Us From Wal-Mart

It irritates many rich people that poor people need to shop at Wal-Mart.

Chicago is taking action to end this irritation.

Earth to homeowners: time to move on

Last September I blogged that the house across the street from us had been for sale (well, had a for sale sign in the yard and a listing in the MLS) for 18 months. Well now it's the end of March and the sign is still there, so we are marking the 2 year anniversary of this neighborhood tomfoolery.

Coincidentally Dave Leonhart has a piece in the NY times on problems that homeowners have accepting reality. He cites an LA realtor claiming that "he has recently been saying no to almost half the sellers who have asked him to represent them. Their initial asking price is just too unrealistic."

Besides the obvious costs these folk are imposing on themselves, there is also an external cost here, isn't there? Aren't we waiting to see where housing ends up being priced so that we can resolve uncertainty and get back to the great business of America, getting in early on the next bubble with borrowed money?

So come on you would be sellers, suck it up and mark it down! Take one for the team; Team America!

You won't believe this. I don't believe it, but it's true

So, my son Kevin is applying to colleges.

He filled out this federal form for financial aid. We live in North Carolina, and said so on the form.

So....we just got this letter, from the state of "Rhode Island and Providence Plantations."



That's pretty small so let me summarize.

1. The state of RI & PP takes it upon itself to file EVERY application for federal aid as an application for aid in the state of RI.
2. Then, they send out letters to everyone NOT from RI, telling them that they were turned down for aid.
3. The reason is that....YOU DON'T LIVE IN RI & PP!

This was an actual letter, sent in an envelope, with a stamp. Rhode Island turned us down for aid we didn't apply for, based on a residence that we never claimed, for a set of colleges my son didn't even apply to.

Your government, at work.

Munger Girls

Munger girls.

Laugh About It, Talk About It, When You've Got to Choose

Video of the candidate forum.

Interesting contrasts.

And, major props to Bill Holman for playing this straight. I appreciate it.

Family values

In an audience with then World Bank president James Wolfenson in 1996, Indonesian president/dictator Suharto reportedly said "What you regard as corruption... we regard as family values", one of the greatest lines ever(reported by Sebastian Mallaby in his excellent book "The World's Banker", p. 179).

Now it appears that things might work the same way in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.

Hugo's dad is the governor of a state, his older brother is the federal education minister, and two of his younger brothers are accused (to be fair, by a political rival to his father) of buying a string of 17 ranches using fronts to hide their identity.

Excerpts from the article:

Venezuela's National Assembly opened an investigation Wednesday into a congressman's accusations that two of President Hugo Chavez's brothers acquired 17 ranches in recent years — if true a potential stain on the image of Chavez's socialist movement. Lawmaker Wilmer Azuaje detailed his allegations in a closed-door committee session, presenting documents that he says show how an assortment of ranch lands were obtained by Chavez's brothers Argenis and Narciso. Azuaje said afterward that he asked the congressional audit commission to visit the haciendas for an inspection and to summon those who sold the properties for questioning. Azuaje, of the president's socialist party, said the ranches are all located in Chavez's home state of Barinas, where the president's father is governor. Asked if the accusations are linked to his own campaign for governor in Barinas, Azuaje said Chavez and his party "demand that we denounce... acts of corruption (and) incapacity." There was no immediate reaction from Chavez's younger brothers or the president, who was traveling in Brazil. The lawmaker told the Venezuelan television channel Globovision on Tuesday that he has documents indicating Chavez's brothers acquired 17 ranches through front men who carried out the transactions on their behalf. Azuaje said he decided to call for the investigation because he feels the land acquisitions harm the image of Chavez's socialist movement. He said he also has asked prosecutors to open a separate investigation.

One step closer

David Stern was in town (OKC that is) this week with a sub-committee of the NBA owners' relocation committee. OU did its part by sending Bob Stoops to be part of the OKC welcoming delegation: Gov. Brad Henry, Oklahoma football coach Bob Stoops and numerous other representatives of the city, state and sports community came out to welcome Stern, New Jersey Nets owner Lewis Katz, Indiana Pacers owner Herb Simon and Los Angeles Lakers vice president Jeanie Buss as Oklahoma City brought out fancy cars and hard facts to woo its first major-league sports franchise (Wow Stoops is slipping. Second billing behind the Gov.? He needs to win him some bowl games).

After the presentation, Stern indicated that the sub-committee was going to recommend allowing the move: "It was a pretty full presentation and pretty much a tour de force on behalf of Oklahoma that I'd say impressed the members of the committee greatly," Stern said.

Stern also smacked down the late Seattle bid by Steve Balmer to buy the Sonics back from Clay Bennett and pay for half of renovating the Key Arena:

When asked about a group of Seattle businessmen who have offered to fund half of a $300 million renovation at KeyArena, the Sonics' current home, Stern rejected the option.

"The reason that this journey began was because KeyArena was not an adequate arena going forward and there were a lot of recommendations made for another arena ... but the tax revenues and the various contributions weren't forthcoming," Stern said.

Only one little hurdle left: Busdriver, BREAK THAT LEASE!!!

John McCain: Pure Evil

I must publicly break with my pal Angus, on the McCain question. From my Reason homeboy Matt Welch, in the NYT:

BEHIND any successful politician lies a usable contradiction, and John McCain’s is this: We love him (and occasionally hate him) for his stubborn individualism, yet his politics are best understood as a decade-long attack on the individual.

The presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party has seduced the press and the public with frank confessions of his failings, from his hard-living flyboy days to his adulterous first marriage to the Keating Five scandal. But in both legislation and rhetoric, Mr. McCain has consistently sought to restrict the very freedoms he once exercised, in the common national enterprise of “serving a cause greater than self-interest.”

Such sentiment can sound stirring coming from a lone citizen freely choosing public service. But from a potential president, Mr. McCain’s exaltation of sacrifice over the private pursuit of happiness — “I did it out of patriotism, not for profit,” he snarled to Mitt Romney during the final Republican presidential debate — reflects a worryingly militaristic view of citizenship.

More Reason: Be Afraid of President McCain

Have you heard about the new Argentine diet plan?

Recently elected Argentine President Christina Fernandez is facing the first big crisis of her administration over the government's inceased tax rates on some agricultural export crops, chiefly soybeans. Argentina has been growing rapidly since 2003 though with higher and higher inflation, now estimated to be between 20 and 30 percent, and higher and higher government spending. The government raised export tariff rates on March 11 and farmers went "on strike" with roadblocks, protests, and a cessation of delivering agricultural products either for export or for domestic consumption. Farmers vow to continue striking indefinitely and Fernandez vows not to give in to extortion.

From the FT story:

Agriculture is the backbone of the Argentine economy and high international prices for commodities, especially soya, have translated into booming exports.

The government’s new tariff regime replaces a 35 per cent levy on soya sales, with charges of up to 95 per cent if prices rise to $600 (€380, £300) a tonne.

Other crops are similarly affected, but soya is Argentina’s agricultural star commodity. Cattle farmers and other producers have been switching to the grain en masse, attracted by high profitability.

Under the new tariff scheme, farmers pay 44 per cent on exports at prices of about $465 a tonne. Added to income tax and provincial levies, this results in a total tax burden on farmers of 73 per cent, according to the Argentine Agrarian Federation, one of the four main producers’ associations.

The government argues that higher tariffs are needed to share out more fairly the windfall from exceptional commodities prices, and that the sliding scale benefits farmers more than a straight increase.

But the agriculture sector feels it is being squeezed to provide funds for a spendthrift government to fuel what critics say are unsustainable subsidies. Farmers say that the new tariff regime, coming just four months after the last increase in export tariffs on grains and cereals, was the last straw.

The government could close down meat exports in an effort to stave off shortages. It has requisitioned cattle owned by the armed forces for slaughter. But farmers say that is a drop in the ocean. Meanwhile, no trucks have entered the port of Rosario, Argentina’s grains export centre, for four days; eight ships have been diverted for lack of cargoes in Argentina and 15 are stuck in Rosario awaiting loading, according to the Agrarian Federation.

While I get a kick out of seeing farmers taxed instead of subsidized, them are some pretty steep tariffs. Note that when prices go up, tariff revenues rise with a constant tariff rate; what is going on here is that the tariff rate is also rising. I'm guessing the Argentine farm lobby screwed up and didn't put enough pesos into the Kircher-Fernandez political organization.

Mungers in Lugano?

Jason C, my homeslice from Austin, writes with this picture from his trip to Lugano, Switzerland:

Hi Mike,
Apparently, some of your relatives own a pasticceria in Lugano, Switzerland.

Is Brad DeLong right about China?

In one of the most curious defenses of free trade ever, DeLong argues that we should continue to trade freely with and embrace China so that their children will think fondly of us when they are our new overlords. Really! I am not making this up.

Some quotes:

if possible, the current superpower should embrace its possible successor. It should bind it as closely as possible with ties of blood, commerce, and culture--so that should the emerging superpower come to its full strength, it will to as great an extent possible share the world view of and regard itself as part of the same civilization as its predecessor: Romans to their Greeks.

There is a good chance that China is now on the same path to world preeminence that America walked 130 years ago. Come 2047 and again in 2071 and in the years after 2075, America is going to need China. There is nothing more dangerous for America's future national security, nothing more destructive to America's future prosperity, than for Chinese schoolchildren to be taught in 2047 and 2071 and in the years after 2075 that America tried to keep the Chinese as poor as possible for as long as possible.

I am just not so sure about this. First China is still a very poor country, and we recently found out it's even poorer than we thought. Second, though still very poor, China already has a very very serious pollution problem. Third, none of the east Asian miracle countries have caught up to the US (nor does it look like they will). Singapore and Hong Kong are indeed quite rich but they are cities, not countries. In per capita terms, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand all grew rapidly relative to the US for a while but plateaued well short of US income levels. Fourth, China has serious governance problems. I do not foresee a totalitarian government reaching US-EU levels of wealth, and I do not foresee a change of government in China that would be anything close to smooth.

So, free trade with China? Sure, I'm for free trade with everybody. Trying to please our new overlords in advance? If they turn out to be so, I don't think what we do now will matter much, but I also wouldn't hold my breath waiting for the takeover.

A Suggestion for a PLANK!

Dirty Davey suggests a platform plank, in an email:

A campaign suggestion--commit to a full-term moratorium on rhyming programs.

"Booze it and Lose it", "Click it or Ticket", "Learn and Earn"--we poor
citizens are a bit jaded by the poetry of the state.



So, I guess I'll throw out that stuff on "Never too late....to Masticate!" stuff I was working on. Free dentures for everyone over 110 years old.

Sitting on a sofa on a Tuesday afternoon: Going to the candidates' debate.....

Water issues today.

An actual debate. With me, Richard Moore, Bev Purdue, and Robert Orr.

Well attended. And fun.

I think they are going up put a link. I'll post it, if so.

Munger Goes for Reverend Wright Award

Okay, so maybe this was a little intemperate.

Excerpt:
Munger, who is the chairman of Duke’s political-science department, has never run for public office, and his ideology is difficult to pin down. He has been a Republican most of his life, and he said he expects to take votes away from the Republican candidate. But his support of same-sex marriage and a moratorium on the death penalty would appeal to many liberals.

“The Democrats in North Carolina are what the Republicans usually are, and the Republicans are the Taliban,” Munger said, with characteristic brashness. “They look to scripture to decide what their positions should be.”

Okay, that may have been unfortunate. The "Taliban" reference is a bit over the top. No point insulting people's religious beliefs.

One of the commenters on the article wondered if "Monger" was trying to one-up Rev. Wright.

RCHS Triumphant, for the Sixth Straight Year

Why does North Carolina continue to have a cap on charter schools? RCHS operates at 2/3 the cost per student of an average high school, and 1/4 the cost of NCSSM. Pharaoh, let my charters go!

QUIZ BOWLERS ARE STATE CHAMPS…AGAIN

The Raleigh Charter Quiz Bowl Team sent 16 students to the NCOAST (North Carolina Open Academic State Tournament) in Hickory Ridge on Saturday, March 15. This tournament serves as North Carolina's state championship. Congratulations to the varsity team of K. Munger (Captain), P. Schultz, J. Hanna, and J. Vandezande who won the tournament by defeating the team from North Carolina School of Science and Math (NCSSM). NCSSM had defeated our Varsity B team of B. Rubin, S. Stroud, K. Boyina, and C. Holgate in the semifinals. Both the A and B teams were undefeated after the preliminary matches

RCHS fielded two junior varsity teams as well. Our A team of D. Smith, O. Marschall, M. Lochbaum, and R. Austin won the JV section of the tournament, defeating our B team made up of S. Marivada, S. Challener, D. Rao, and C. Brown.

This is the sixth year in a row that RCHS has won both the Varsity and JV championships in this state tournament. Congratulations to both teams.

This tournament effectively ends the quiz bowl season, although we will still compete in the Knowledge Master Open (an international computer-based quiz) in April, and we have a berth at a national tournament in May. A special thanks goes out to all who helped in the training of our players and supported the team this year.

How not to retract something: Hillary edition

Regarding the difference between her verbal account and the film of her arriving in Bosnia, Hillary graciously said this morning:

"I went to 80 countries, you know. I gave contemporaneous accounts, I wrote about a lot of this in my book. You know, I think that, a minor blip, you know, if I said something that, you know, I say a lot of things — millions of words a day — so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement,"


By the way, if we assume she sleeps 6 hours a night, that leaves 18 hours, or 1080 minutes to talk. According to Wikipedia, "conversations are maintained at 200 words per minute". Lets recognize Hill's prodigious skills and allow 500 wpm for her. This gives us a figure of 540,000 words a day.

Sinbad??

and a side of Rice.....

I have a bad confession to make. I read the New Yorker every week. Pretty much cover to cover. Sorry.

Anyway, in last week's issue I found an intriguing idea: Condi Rice for the second spot on the Republican ticket.

an excerpt:

To deal first with the obvious: Rice may be “only” the second woman and the second African-American to be Secretary of State, but she is indisputably the highest-ranking black female official ever to have served in any branch of the United States government. Her nomination to a constitutional executive office would cost McCain the votes of his party’s hardened racists and incorrigible misogynists. They are surely fewer in number, though, than the people who would like to participate in breaking the glass ceiling of race or gender but, given the choice, would rather do so in a more timid way, and/or without abandoning their party. And with Rice on the ticket the Republicans could attack Clinton or Obama with far less restraint.

By choosing Rice, McCain would shackle himself anew to Bush’s Iraq war. But it’s hard to see how those chains could get much tighter than he has already made them. Rice would fit nicely into McCain’s view of the war as worth fighting but, until Donald Rumsfeld’s exit from the Pentagon, fought clumsily. And it would be fairly easy to establish a story line that would cast Rice as having been less Bush’s enabler than a loyal subordinate who nevertheless pushed gently from within for a more reasonable, more diplomatic approach.

Rice is already fourth in line for the Presidency, and getting bumped up three places would be a shorter leap than any of the three Presidential candidates propose to make. It’s true that her record in office has been one of failure, from downgrading terrorism as a priority before 9/11 to ignoring the Israel-Palestine problem until (almost certainly) too late. But this does not seem to have done much damage to her popularity. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll taken when opposition to the Iraq war was approaching its height, she enjoyed a “favorable-unfavorable” rating of nearly two to one. The conservative rank and file likes her.


Does anybody besides me think this is a great idea? Or are y'all hankering for flip-flop Mitt?

TV Story: In the News

A tv story, uncut, unfiltered, ripped from the headlines.

Well: a tv story, anyway.

My bracket is shot....

As El Zorno says...."In the spirit of the season."

My bracket is shot.

Subsidies: For You Podcastrians

For you podcastrians out there.....

Subsidies, Russ Roberts with very special guest me.

If not NOTA, then NOHA

The Libertarians want, as a matter of policy, to have "NOTA" as a choice on ballots.

NOTA, as in None Of The Above.

I will certainly be voting NOHA: "None of Hillary, Always!"

Check this:

"We need a president who is ready on day one to be commander in chief of our
economy." [Clinton, in speech today]

"...Mrs. Clinton's approach to [civil liberties] is that of a top-down
progressive. Her speeches about privacy suggest that she has boundless faith in the power of experts, judges and ultimately herself to strike the correct balance between privacy and security.

Moreover, the core constituency that cares intensely about civil liberties is a distinct minority — some polls estimate it as around 20 percent of the electorate. A polarizing president, who played primarily to the Democratic base and refused to reach out to conservative libertarians, would have no hope of striking a sensible balance between privacy and security." [Rosen, NYT op-ed]

WTF? Is she going to say, "Oil prices, down! Now! Housing prices, up, up sharply, restore equity! I am the commander in chief of the economy!"

And, on the civil liberties concern: That sounds just like...well....GW Bush. "No hope of striking a sensible balance between privacy and security." Been there, done that.

(Nod to KL)

They slipped up and said it out loud, Minnesota edition

For the original edition of this title see here.

From King at SCSU comes the tale of Minnesota State Senator Larry Pogemiller, who in his enlightened wisdom said:

"I think it's simplistic and naive to say people can spend their money better than the government."and he went on to include... "The notion that everybody can individually spend their money better than government I, I just think is trite, wrongheaded and anti-democratic."

I am loving this trend of our "leaders" coming out and finally saying what they really think. Getting all the cards on the table, so to speak.

King, I know what we'd do with such a fellow here in Oklahomie, but what will happen up north? Is he your next Governor?

Evo-nomics in Action

There is a very old joke about the businessperson to whom it was pointed out that their company was selling their product at less than cost and thus going to make a loss. The owner replied something like, "that's ok, we'll make it up on volume".

The above is a fairly accurate summary of energy policy in Evo's Bolivia. The price of oil there is set by government decree at $27.11 (the oil and gas industries were nationalized by Evo in 2006).

Amazingly this has caused two things (1) a lot of smuggling and (2) domestic demand now outstrips domestic supply by around 30%. This gap is made up by the government buying oil on international markets and then re-selling it to its citizens at the $27.11 price (making it up on volume, just like Walmart)!

From the linked article:

"The Bolivian state is turning into a protectionist one, fixing oil prices that do not match international market prices," said Carlos Toranzo, an economist at the Latin American Institute of Social Research in La Paz.

"Smuggling is a national habit, but we are going to suffer from it as long as we keep prices artificial," he said.

Frankly Dumb

[Robert Frank, Journal of Public Economics, forthcoming:]

"A positional externality occurs when new purchases alter the relevant context within which an existing positional good is evaluated. For example, if some job candidates begin wearing expensive custom-tailored suits, a side effect of their action is that other candidates become less likely to make favorable impressions on interviewers. From any individual job seeker's point of view, the best response might be to match the higher expenditures of others, lest her chances of landing the job fall. But this outcome may be inefficient, since when all spend more, each candidate's probability of success remains unchanged. All may agree that some form of collective restraint on expenditure would be useful. In such cases, however, it is often impractical to negotiate private solutions. Do positional externalities then become legitimate objects of public policy concern? In attempting to answer this question, I employ the classical libertarian criterion put forth by John Stuart Mill, who wrote the state may not legitimately constrain any citizen's freedom of action except to prevent harm to others. I argue that many positional externalities appear to meet Mill's test, causing not just negative feelings but also large and tangible economic costs to others who are ill-equipped to avoid them...Those conditions are precisely analogous to the ones that make military arms races between equally matched rival nations wasteful...No libertarian would think to object to a military arms control agreement on the grounds that it limited each side's freedom to spend as much as it pleased on arms. Since that was precisely the objective each sought by entering into the agreement, such an objection would be absurd on its face...I have argued elsewhere that a simpler, more promising, approach would be to abandon the current progressive income tax in favor of a more steeply progressive general consumption tax...Taxpayers would report their incomes to the tax authorities just as they do now. They would also report how much they had saved during the year, much as they do now in order to exempt money deposited in retirement accounts. People would then pay tax on their 'taxable consumption,' which is just the difference between their income and their annual savings, less a standard deduction. Rates at the margin would rise with taxable consumption. If the tax were revenue neutral, marginal rates at the top would be significantly higher than current marginal tax rates on income...Proposals to generate additional income tax revenue by raising top marginal rates invariably summon concern about possible negative effects on the incentive to save and invest. Under a progressive consumption tax, by contrast, people's incentives would be to save and invest more, even if top marginal tax rates on consumption were extremely high...it would lower the marginal costs of self-insuring against lost earning power and of leaving bequests...And given the apparent importance of context, the indirect effects of a progressive consumption tax promise to be considerably larger than the direct effects. Thus, for example, if people at the top save more and spend less on mansions, that will shift the frame of reference that influences the housing expenditures of those just below the top. So they, too, will spend less on housing, and so on all the way down the income ladder...Liberals and conservatives alike agree that our failure to save has had damaging macroeconomic consequences, that we would all be better off if we all spent less and saved and invested more. But no individual has the power to alter the aggregate savings rates...In the absence of detailed empirical evidence, a plausible conjecture is that the first expenditures that high-end consumers would reduce in response to a steeply progressive consumption tax are the same ones they have recently been increasing in response to their growing incomes. In the US, some of the most spectacular increases in high-end consumption in recent years have occurred in housing and the events families use to mark special occasions. By all accounts, such expenditures are hyper-positional."

Good lord. Robert Frank has "discovered" rent-seeking. Many of the signals that people give in interviews (arriving on time, dressing well, etc.) are not purely wasteful. They are signals of unobservable features correlated with likely performance.

But, if lazy folks could form a lobby, and lobby for the benefits inherent in BLOCKING smart, energetic people from being able to work hard to give good signals, how much would that be worth? A lot! So, even lazy people might work on that. Or pay somebody to work on it for them.

The problem is that EVERYTHING Frank points out as a cost is FAR less costly than the rent-seeking orgy he wants to start instead. Giving out the bennies he thinks are "good public policy" would cause a riot of rent-seekers. "Make smart people talk slower." "Yeah, and they don't get to wash their hair. I don't wash my hair, so people who DO wash their hair have an unfair advantage. Legislate that away!"

Rent-seeking is what people do to obtain favorable regulation. The competition for the kind of benefits Frank wants to give out would DWARF, in terms of costs, the tiny effects he claims to be worried about.

And he doesn't even realize that Tullock and Krueger pointed all this out 40 years ago. Yeesh.

As Kashdan and Klein say: "Assume the positional!" And give us taxpayers a little KY first.

(nod to KL, who likes to assume the positional, or so I hear)

All Sing

Thanks to Angus for the props.

Now, every body sing!



For most of you, the ones who can read, the words are written there in the video. For you folks from Michigan State, just hum.

Sinbad was right!

"I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."
--Hillary Clinton, speech at George Washington University, March 17, 2008.


Of course, the picture above is of Hill's landing in Bosnia. At least she does have her "head down".

My goodness people, I think she's a bigger and more shameless liar than Bill. Can it be??

Now Mungowitz can die happy

Duke is out and Davidson is in. Mungowitz must be completely delirious (as opposed to his usual level of partial delirium). Lil Davidson has their first postseason wins in over 30 years and has beaten Gonzaga (a 7 seed) and Georgetown (a 2 seed) to make the so called sweet 16.

For those who haven't yet read Mungowitz's autobiography "You can't touch this", Mungo went to Davidson and, because of his UNC roots (man crush on Dean Smith), hates his employer's main fundraising tool, Coach K's Blue Devils.

I say "so called" sweet 16 because from a quality of ball point of view, college basketball is an abomination. There are only maybe 10-20 college players that are any good at all, tops. NCAA hoops quality is at an all time low, though crazy stuff like this Davidson run and my ex-employer George Mason's run a couple years ago will keep the fanatics happy.

Congrats Mungowitz on the best Easter ever!