NCGA Does the Right Thing. Sort of.

A Senate bill (SB656), already passed by the NC Senate, is now out of committee in the NC House, and scheduled for a vote on Tuesday, June 26.  The "committee substitute" bill is here, if you want to look at it.....

What would this mean? NC has had some really restrictive ballot access laws, since 1983. In particular,
it now takes about 110,000 (individually validated) signatures to get on the ballot ("access") and 2% of the vote in either the Prez or Gov races to stay on the ballot once on ("retention").

The bill, if it passes, and it's expected to pass, would change those rules as follows:
Access: 10,000 signatures
Retention:  Either the 2% rule for Prez or Gov votes in NC in previous election OR have "a candidate" on the ballot in 80% of the states.

Now, the Libertarian Party has been on the ballot continuously since 2008, when (ahem) I got more the 2% of the vote for Gov.  In 2012, Barbara Howe did it, and in 2016 Lon Cecil did it.  A number of Republicans blame the LP for the Republican loss of the Gov race in 2008 (implausible) and in 2016 (extremely plausible).

But the point is that the LP is already on, again, for 2020. My man Gary Johnson actually got 2.74%, 130k votes, the first time an LP Prez candidate has EVER secured ballot access in NC.  Whoo-HOO!

Okay, so here's the thing. The Republicans don't have many chances to look like they are for ballot access, or expanding electoral freedoms (which include voting for the candidate of your choice). AND, they are likely tired of having to lose some votes, enough in close races to change the outcome, to the annoying "third party" Libertarians.

You can have a double win, if you are a Republican strategist, by cutting the restrictions on ballot access! You get credit for having a more sensible and less draconian set of rules, more in line with other states (NC regularly makes, on merit, those "Worst Laws in the US" lists, when it comes to ballot access).

And you get the Greens on the ballot, diverting votes from the Dems! Is there a downside?

I don't really see one. An interesting question is whether Gov. Cooper will sign it.  If a goofball like me can figure this out, I expect Mr. Cooper will not need to have the effects explained to him. But it will be difficult to veto the thing, because it really does just bring NC back into compliance with pretty normal rules for party access. This is hardly a radical bill, it just also "happens" to help the Republicans at the ballot box.  (Here is a story from the right-leaning Carolina Journal, which doesn't mention the political angle--adding Greens takes away Dem votes--or, oddly, the new 80% retention rule added in the committee version).

EDIT: The reason the 80% (40 states) is important is that Stein was on the ballot in 44 states in 2016.  That means that, depending on the way the law is interpreted retroactively (and it seems to be retroactive, since it says "previous election"), Greens would be on the ballot for the 2018 midterm elections in NC.

Taxation without Representation; or Adam Silver wants to lower the Black Youth employment rate

The NCAA and NBA are back at it again, with the NBA making noises about further tightening restrictions on who's allowed to work in their industry.

And of course, he's doing it for the kids!!

Silver said he's "rethinking" his position on the age limit. He called the process "half and done" for freshmen who turn pro after their first seasons on campus, suggesting the players in that pool fail to make academics a priority.

"I don't think it's fair to characterize them as going to one year of school," Silver said on Cowherd's show.

So some old white skeleton dude thinks young black kids shouldn't get paid. OMG, can we really still be doing this in 2017?

I was happy to see some college coaches quoted as approving kids going straight from High School to the Lig:


"I think they should be able to go right from high school if they want to," Iowa State coach Steve Prohm said. "I think it's working fine on our end. Just a part of the business. I would love to have a couple [one-and-dones]."


Seven Kansas players have turned pro in the one-and-done era under Self. Most contributed to his current streak of 13 consecutive Big 12 championships. Self says most also were ready to play in the NBA after high school.

"Andrew Wiggins, Josh Jackson ... I would say they were ready to be paid out of high school," he said. "They were certainly ready to be paid, without question."

Nice!

It's a small scale tragedy, but a tragedy nonetheless what happens to these kids. Can't go make money, so they play in college where the vast majority are not getting any realistic education, until Adam and the players' association say they can play in the NBA.

Books Cost Too Much! So I wrote a blogpost.

Academic textbooks are really expensive. The current version of Mankiw's principles text is $186 in hardcover.  I'll go out on a limb and conservatively guess that the marginal cost of producing another copy is no more than $25. Of course there are fixed costs (like N. Greg's reported $1,000,000 fee), but.........

Here's what I think is going on.

Textbooks are a type of network good. The more people use a given text, the more others will also want to use it. So the market approaches winner take all with just a few books selling well and making profits. This is probably true of all kinds of books.

Weirdly, the books that don't sell well (the losers) almost have to price high as they are trying to cover their fixed costs over a small sales volume.

The winners don't have to price high to break even, but given that demand is high and relatively inelastic, why shouldn't they? Indeed they do, and with gusto.

So the losers price high to try and stay in business and the winners price high because the network good nature of the market gives them a serious degree of market power. In a market like this, a loser cutting price is quite unlikely to receive much of an increase in market share

So how to fix the problem?

Doubly weird is the tried and true idea of "more competition" in form of a larger number of texts on the market probably isn't really going to help as will just create more losers struggling to stay alive. Competition here is "for the market" rather than "in the market" to use the terms of Cowen and Tabarrok's expensive text.

Another market solution is resale, which happens on a very large scale already. Amazingly, new text prices would likely be even higher without this form of competition, where old copies of the winning books compete against new ones. Naturally, publishers don't like resale and respond by pumping out new editions on an inefficiently fast schedule. But resale definitely is a check on new text prices already. If we want them lower, it's not a new tool to use. It's also true that resale doesn't only work to lower new prices. The fact that there is a resale market for a product likely would increase the demand and raise the price for that product. So, it's complicated.

If increased competition in terms of more textbooks is unlikely to help, and resale has already done what it can do, then what?

Well, Facebook is a network good and it's free to the end users, so maybe allow textbooks to contain paid ads? There's a free market solution for you folks!

There's another type of industry with high fixed costs and low marginal costs; natural monopolies like utility companies. We generally regulate them with the alleged aim of getting the outcome to be close to average cost pricing. Maybe the same should happen in the textbook market?

If we don't like a regulatory response, then it's going to take a big decline in demand to get prices down. There is some evidence that some schools, community colleges in particular are going to open source texts or even abandoning the use of textbooks at all. This kind of makes sense as their customers are the most price elastic ones.

Oh pity the poor publishers. If only they could price discriminate better!

So don't worry, Mankiw's days at the top are numbered (anybody remember Lotus 1-2-3?), but the new best seller probably won't be any cheaper.