My friend in Georgia (the country) asked me to buy a notebook pc for him here in U.S. and bring it to him. He said they are about $600-800 more for comparable models in his country than in the U.S. So we checked out the options and settled on a nice machine and he agreed to pay me back when I got there. (He did repay me and all is well on that front.)

The only problem is that the price included a $150 mail-in rebate so I cut the price to him accordingly and now I await the rebate check. Given my co-bloggers' previous posts on rebates here, here, and here, I admit to being worried that I was going to get stuck on some technicality. Imagine my relief when I received this e-mail today. I'll be even happier if the check actually arrives!

Hello ROBERT LAWSON,

We are happy to inform you that your rebate submission for Circuit City $150 Notebook Computer Reba has been received and is currently being processed. Please allow 8 weeks from the postmark date of your submission for processing your rebate. You should receive your rebate at the address below:

XXXXX
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If this is not the correct address or if you have any additional questions, please contact the Circuit City Rebate Center at (888) 213-9761 or visit us online at www.circuitcityrebates.com. Your rebate order number is XXXXXX, Please reference this number during your call.

Thank you for shopping at Circuit City.

A story at New Scientist reports on psychobiologist Qazi Rahman’s findings about the differences in map-reading strategies between men and women, gays and straights. (Hat tip: Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution.)

The stereotype that women are relatively poor map readers is borne out by a reasonable bulk of scientific literature, notes Rahman. […]The new study might help researchers understand how cognitive differences and sexual orientation develop in the womb, he says.

Two thoughts:

(1) Please, nobody show this story to MIT biologist Nancy Hopkins. She might faint or throw up.

(2) Since the UNLV administration professes to be interested in what the peer-reviewed academic literature has to say about possible gay-straight differences with respect to time-preference, perhaps they’ll commission Rahman to apply his research methods to that question?

The Moores divorced after 25 years of marriage. Mr. Moore was ordered to pay his ex-wife spousal support that would terminate if she remarried or cohabitated with another male. After the divorce, the ex-Mrs. Moore had a sex change operation and began cohabitating with a female.

In Moore v. Moore, Mr. Moore petitioned for an end to the spousal support payments. This was clearly something that was not contemplated at the time of the initial award. The ex-Mrs. Moore was no longer a female and he was cohabitating with someone of the opposite sex. The court rejected the petition for an end to the spousal payments because the ex-wife’s financial circumstances had not changed.

This case certainty makes us rethink the basis for spousal support. Is it to correct gender inequities in our society or is it to reinforce investment in a marriage contract? If the purpose is to correct gender inequities then we certainly can argue that since he is no longer a she that spousal support should end? However, if the purpose of spousal support is the repayment of investment in a contract that was broken by the other partner, then gender or switching gender should be irrelevant. It also should be irrelevant whether the party receiving the support has remarried or is cohabitating, since the lost past investment is the same regardless of future living arrangements. The payments should also be independent of the ex-wife’s financial circumstance; otherwise, they create a disincentive for future investment in human capital.

Doctor: Mr. Lawson, what seems to be the problem?
Me: I have a sinus infection.
Doctor: A lot of pressure?
Me: Yes.
Doctor: Are you producing yucky stuff?
Me: Yes.
[Doctor looks in my ears and mouth.]
Doctor: I agree you have a sinus infection. I'll write you a prescription for antibiotics. [He scribbles on Rx pad.] Here you go. Hope you feel better.

This 90 second experience cost me a $15 copay and about 1 hour. I imagine my insurance company will get hit for $40-60 for the visit too.

Why oh why won't they let me go straight to the pharmacist for this?

Professor Bainbridge has graciously responded to my attempt to de-mystify for him the so-called “transition costs” of moving from Social Security to personal accounts. I made the point that there is no additional fiscal burden when those who opt-out of paying the payroll tax today also opt-out of receiving enough future benefits. “Enough” here means “enough to completely repay the Treasury debt that replaces their payroll taxes with accumulated compound interest.” The transition then requires no additional taxes (or benefit cuts) and consumes no potential tax cut.

Another way to put the point, as I noted on Saturday, is to recognize that the Treasury’s borrowing does not represent new debt, but merely a debt swap. The future dollars that would have been paid to the retirees who opted-out are now to be paid to the holders of the replacement Treasury debt. (The obligation to make a future Social Security benefit payment is a debt in the relevant economic sense, whether or not the accounting rules require the government to record it as such.)

In response to this point, the good professor offers a “quibble”. Let me take it piece by piece.

Read More »

Allergy season is upon me and I was awake in the wee hours of the last two nights as a side-effect of an allergy medication. (This is a perfect example of Thomas Sowell's admonition in "The Vision of the Anointed" that there are not solutions to problems, just trade-offs. Tonight I plan to choose sleep over medication.) So while surfing the veggie-vision about 3 am Sunday morning, I found myself reading the Fox News crawl line. In a blurb about how the Pope had led Sunday prayers over the past 26 years, the ticker added even "4 days after being shit in 1981." Not surprisingly, it was changed to "shot" about 10 minutes after I first saw it. Somewhere there's an intern who's got some explaining to do ...

ADDENDUM: My Sunday-Monday overnight viewing consisted of the frightening PBS/HBO film "Dirty Bomb" and about half of "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," a film capable of inducing some scary memories among those of us in high school in the early 80s.

Apparently the animal rights folks have no sense of humor. Story here; hat tip Mini-me (glad to hear from you, it's been awhile).

The Seattle Times clues us to a creative new piece of social engineering:

Paul O'Neill, President Bush's first treasury secretary and a former chief executive officer of aluminum giant Alcoa, proposes having the government stake every American baby at birth to an investment savings account. […]

• Upon each child's birth, the government opens an investment savings account in his or her name and puts $2,000 into it. The government puts another $2,000 into the account every year until the child turns 18. The money then would be left to grow at a compounded rate until the individual reaches the retirement age of 65.

• Assuming a 6 percent continuously compounding rate of return over 65 years, money in the account would exceed $1 million. The money would be put into a 20-year annuity paying about $82,000 a year.

• Assuming 4 million births annually, O'Neill estimates it would cost about $144 billion to fund accounts for each year's babies for 18 years.

I like the idea of tax-free retirement savings accounts, and I like the idea of replacing the current system of using payroll taxes to make transfer payments to retirees. I have only two small amendments to offer to O’Neill’s plan. Instead of having strangers fund the account through taxes, let’s have the child’s parents (or other relatives or friends) fund it. And let’s let them choose the amount they put in.

Seducing Dr. Lewis is a French Canadian (English subtitles) film about a small decaying town's attempt to lure a doctor to their community. A factory promises to locate there if they can get a doctor to sign on. The lengths they go to seduce the big city doctor to their sleepy village are quite hilarious. As comedies go, I'd give it a solid A-.

While nowhere near as libertarian as the 2003 Best Foreign Film Oscar winner, The Barbarian Invasions [previous post], this one had a couple "libertarian moments" including a couple scenes where the characters extol the virtues of work and decry the welfare trap that they are in. And of course, the entire movie is an example of the law of supply at work.

In Friday's Wall Street Journal was an econometric analysis of the upcoming Oscars. article here (reg. required).

The upshot of the article is the probit analysis by Andrew Bernard at Dartmouth, he of winter Olympics medal predictions. His analysis suggests that the best picture award is more likely to go a movie that is not a comedy, has more nominations, and has more Golden Globe awards. Other fields had a significantly insignificant impact on the odds of a film winning the top award.

The journal explained the probit analysis as such:

The science behind the Weekend Journal formula is, well, science. Math geeks, read on.

We started by collecting some two dozen fields of data on the 100 Best Picture nominees for the past 20 years, expressing each as a number (Oscar nominations, length of each film in minutes) or, in the case of plot elements, as a binomial (movies in which a main character rode a horse were designated a 1; others were given zeros in the category). We turned our data over to Andrew Bernard, an economics professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, who used a form of regression analysis, which is a way to examine how well a variable or combination of variables predicts an outcome.

More precisely, Prof. Bernard used a "binary probit" statistical model, which seeks to find a correlation between a group of explanatory factors and a given outcome. It's binary because the outcome is expressed as one of two variables -- a 1 for a movie that wins Best Picture, and a 0 for one that is nominated but does not win. He expressed that as an equation, above, which produces the probability that a given movie will win. All the probabilities were between one and zero -- a one representing a guaranteed win, and a zero representing a guaranteed loss.

His final formula used three variables: a film's total number of Oscar nominations, its number of Golden Globe wins, and whether or not the film was a comedy. Each of the three variables includes a coefficient (beta, gamma, delta) that essentially provides a weighting. The formula also includes a constant (it balances out the equation, and is the same year after year). The final term, mu, represents factors we haven't identified but also affect a film's probability of winning. Because no comedy has won a Best Picture Oscar in the past 20 years, those films, such as this year's "Sideways," were statistical zeros in our model.

When he ran the model, each Oscar nomination increased a film's probability of winning Best Picture by an average of 4.5 percentage points. And for the typical film, each additional Golden Globe increased the probability of winning by about 10.2 percentage points.

Pretty decent explanation of the probit approach. Econometrics might become more "maintstream" thanks to Dr. Bernard.

I’ve been making the point that letting people opt out of Social Security is “self-financing” if done right. Letting Ms. Smith move $100 of her payroll taxes into her own savings plan is a break-even proposition for the federal government if she also signs away just enough future benefits to retire the debt that the government incurs replacing her $100. (Because Ms. Smith’s payroll taxes are used to pay current retirees, the government needs replacement cash to continue paying current retirees). Namely, Smith signs away her claim to future payment of $100 plus interest, with the real interest rate she "pays" set equal to the Treasury’s real borrowing rate. The transitional debt then requires for no additional taxes or benefit cuts. Opponents of Social Security reform who cite “trillions of dollars of borrowing costs” as a fiscal irreponsibility are being frightened by a phantom: there is no additional cost to taxpayers.

Here’s another way to make the same point, courtesy of 2004 Nobel laureate Ed Prescott. The debt incurred to replace Ms. Smith’s payroll taxes, because it matches the cut in the government’s obligation to pay her future benefits, does not even represent new debt. It merely swaps one debt for another. Instead of owing Ms. Smith $100 plus interest, the government owes a bondholder exactly the same amount.

"There are no transition costs," Prescott said at the Cato Institute Feb, 9. "Re-labeling debt is not a cost."

Prescott added that the federal government is being less than honest when it calls the money it has borrowed from current FICA taxpayers to pay retired workers’ benefits an asset rather than a liability.

"Firms are required to list pension fund liabilities," Prescott stressed. "I think the federal government should as well."

Hat tip to Sean Hackbarth at The American Mind.

Now, to be precise, it is not necessarily a mere “re-labeling” to substitute full-faith-and-credit Treasury debt for legally-non-binding Social Security obligations. The Treasury debt is legally more secure (as would be Ms. Smith’s personal retirement account balance), not subject to arbitrary reduction via Congressional changes in the payment schedule. But you will be hard-pressed to find an advocate of the Social Security status quo who will call it a virtue of the current system that it cleverly gives Congress the option to cut future payments. For those who regard the currently promised level of benefits to future retirees as a sacrosanct obligation, just like the Treasury’s obligation to repay its bonds, the transition-to-choice debt swap really is a mere re-labeling.

The residents of just 20 streets on the east side of Central Park donated more money to the 2004 presidential campaigns than all but five American states.*

*"The Town of the Talk," The Economist, 19 February 2005.

"You almost began to want to put the wall back up."

- Robert Bork in the December 31st Washington Times, reacting to the spread of American popular culture in Eastern Europe.*

* "Quotes," Reason, April 2005, p. 13.

Update: Don Boudreaux has thoughts.

From last week's Ft. Worth Star-Telegram is this article about the Cowboys trying to ink a naming rights deal for their new stadium in Arlington. Rumored to be betweeen $10m and $15m per year? That is considerably more than recently signed deals and therefore I doubt that the number is true. In the range of $4m to $6m I could buy into, but we will see.

Along with the naming rights announcement, the team announced that HKS has been selected to build the stadium. This is an interesting choice because every stadium they have built has been ever more expensive. They built the Ballpark in Arlington for $195m in 1994, then built Miller Field in Milwaukee for $400, then American Airlines Arena in Dallas for $450m and now the new football stadium for $650m. I'd like to get a piece of that action.

The best part of the story, however, was the picture of Jerry Jones handing our good mayor, Robert Cluck, a Dallas Cowboys Jersey with Cluck's name on the back.

Linked here to avoid copyright infringement.

Yep, the old principle-agent problem is revealed again. When do I get a Dallas Cowboys jersey with MY name on the back? Suppose I shouldn't hold my breath.

Risk and Business Cycles by Tyler Cowen. Judging by Cowen's post at Marginal Revolution, it might provide several answers to questions I have about Austrian Business Cycle theory in light of modern macroeconomics. As someone who is sympathetic to ABC theory, my first semester of graduate macroeconomics was an eye-opener because it made me see why ABC theory is so easily dismissed. Had I taken graduate macro before hearing of ABC theory (especially classical ABC theory) I probably would have done the same thing (which would have been a shame).

Michelle Malkin has found another work of Churchill’s art that may have dubious origins.

How about a scavenger hunt?

Churchill's lithograph entitled Cheyennes is contained in a publication of museum card from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Can you find the original?

I picked up a film recommendation from the folks in Georgia/Armenia. They all raved about the 1977 Soviet comedy Mimino. A DVD with English subtitles is availalbe, but unfortunately Netflix doesn't have it in its stock. I'll post on it if I can find a copy.

Also, I spent a very interesting part of an evening touring the Sergei Parajanov Museum in Yerevan, Armenia. Parajanov was a famous Armenian Georgian filmmaker in the Soviet Union who was arrested and jailed on several occasions. He was also an accomplished folk artist and the musuem had hundreds of interesting pieces on exhibit: pic, pic, pic, pic, pic, pic, pic, pic, pic, pic, pic, pic, pic.

From today's Chronicle of Higher Education (sorry, reg required):

A GEOGRAPHY PROFESSOR at Oklahoma State University at Stillwater who plagiarized numerous times over his long career will no longer be allowed to teach after a university investigation confirmed allegations that were first revealed in The Chronicle. The professor, George O. Carney, has 15 days to appeal the university's decision.

Folks, in today's world it doesn't pay to cheat in academic research. Woe to those who cheated in the past before the computers, searchable databases, and the explosion of people actually doing research. I have a feeling that we will continue to see people "outed" as plagiarizers and fabricators.

For the youngsters out there, my advice is to keep your nose clean.

Story here--amazingly this is not the first time grandma has been found in a drug raid:

"The great grandmother had been roused from another drug house on NE Shaver one year ago."

In one simple cartoon, Mike Lester of the Rome News-Tribune sums up the importance of the Supreme Court's finding for the homeowners in Kelo v. New London.

The Rocky Mountain News reports that Weird Churchill may have plagiarized a work of art by Thomas E. Mails. You can judge for yourself.

Does art plagiarism count for academic misconduct if you are not in the art department? Is plagiarism an expression of free speech? If my speech is free so is yours.

Maybe we shouldn’t be too hard on Churchill. Is it right for us to apply our European ethnocentric concepts of academic integrity and private property? As the noble savage that Churchill is, he has a right to the common property resources that were given to us all by the Great Creator. Is it Churchill’s fault that God first put the idea for this painting in someone else’s head? Churchill knows that private property is only a tool used by technocrats to suppress the disadvantaged of the world. Only when property is free will we all be free. By appropriating someone else’s work without attribution, Churchill strikes a blow against the evils of capitalism. Is it not the ultimate culmination of capitalist thought to take artistic expression and turn it into a piece of property to be sold in the market like a banana? And isn’t ethnicity just an expression of racial oppression? Why can’t we freely appropriate each others ethnicity? What better way to do away with stereotypes than to permit us all to be whatever we want to be. If Churchill wants to be an Indian instead of a cowboy, then he should be an Indian. But, why can’t we all be Indians?

No doubt, as an additional strike against the capitalist pigs, Churchill will now place the copyrights for all of his own works (the non-plagiarized ones) in the public domain so that they can be distributed at a price that reflects their true worth to society.

Pirateballerina, thanks again for the pointer.

Evidently the spate of movies based on bad TV shows (Beverly Hillbillies, Starsky & Hutch, etc.) hasn’t completely run its course yet.

Gurinder Chadha, director of the charming Bend it Like Beckham and the recently opened (to mixed reviews) Bride and Predjudice, spills the dirt on her next project:

Q: What's next?

A: No more Bollywood. Now I'm working on I Dream of Jeannie. It's great because it's different from the television show. Ours is a prequel. It's about how she becomes a genie, and it's set in ancient Persia and is an action-adventure film with lots of magic.

Gee, why am I not looking forward excitedly?

The Pakistani news service Online reports that Pakistan’s government has heavily fined a Pakistani actress, Meera, for kissing on screen (!) in an Indian film. What's the crime? The news service (which declares itself completely independent of the Pakistan government) explains matter-of-factly that the Ministry of Culture views any Pakistani actor working abroad as an ambassador, and “no actor or actress is allowed to spread vulgarity as we live in an Islamic state.”

The Institute for the Secularization of Islamic Society obviously has its work cut out for it in regard to Pakistan. By the way, in case you were wondering, the name “Pakistan” means “Land of the Pure”.

Southwest Missouri State University -- if you've never heard of it, you are forgiven, assuming you live outside Missouri -- is lobbying hard for the Missouri legislature to change its name to simply Missouri State University, a name that remarkably has gone unexploited to date. At present Missouri's set of tax-funded universities has a top tier consisting of the four research-oriented campuses of the University of Missouri system (Columbia, aka Mizzou; St. Louis, my campus; Kansas City; and the engineering school at Rolla), a second tier consisting of four large teaching-oriented schools with bidirectional names (Southwest Missouri State, aka SMS; Northwest Missouri State, which wants to convert itself into a fifth UM campus; Southeast Missouri State, aka SEMO; and Truman State, nee Northeast), and a third tier of smaller schools I know little about.

Southwest wants the new name in order to escape the image of a “regional” or “compass” institution, and therby to attract better students. According to the campus president SMS, with close to 20,000 students, is the largest institution in the United States with a “multidirectional” name. I guess he thinks a bidirectional name bespeaks third-tier status, and I'd grant that there's some truth to that. But the new non-directional name bespeaks first-tier status, like that of Ohio State, which for SMS is over-reaching a bit.

He says the name change isn’t about funding:

Keiser said SMS has asked for more state funding in the past and will continue to do so regardless of whether the name is changed.

The bill to change de-directionalize SMS also inflates the names of four other schools:

• Central Missouri State University would become University of Central Missouri.

• Missouri Western State College would become Missouri Western State University.

• Harris-Stowe State College would become Harris-Stowe State University.

• Missouri Southern State University-Joplin would become Missouri Southern State University.

For all these schools, including SMS, the objective is name inflation. Well, why not? If students get inflated grades, why shouldn't campuses get inflated names?

I wish that my own campus could change its name from UMSL, which the locals pronounce “Umm-sull”. If we reversed the first two words to make it Missouri University – St. Louis, or MUSL, we could pronounce the resulting acronym “muscle”. Think of clever advertising possibilities! But I suppose my proposal won’t fly – the Kansas City campus wouldn’t want to be known as “muck”.

A court makes progress in defining the property rights over sperm:

"She asserts that when plaintiff 'delivered' his sperm, it was a gift -- an absolute and irrevocable transfer of title to property from a donor to a donee," the decision said. "There was no agreement that the original deposit would be returned upon request."

Story here; hat tip Drudge.

After the Soviet's left Georgia, the Georgians rushed to privatize the private housing stock as quickly as possible. Most people in the cities live in those awful square Soviet-style apartment buildings so the question was how to private these units. In the end, the tenants were given property rights to their individual flats but the buildings themselves have never been privatized and are basically common property.

The result is predictable and sad. The heat doesn't work, roofs leave, landscaping is nil and the building exteriors are crumbling. Meanwhile, the individual flats are quite nice on the inside--but how long before the buildings fall apart?

Here's a pic of the typical building.

Weird Churchill admits he is not an indian. I am crushed. I guess he was just as confused as Columbus.

Thanks again to Pirateballerina.

Hold the presses!! I may have been too quick to the post. He may not have denied being an indian. We have to get to the bottom of this. Doesn't the truth of his historical analysis depend on whether he is really an indian? Faux indian speak with forked tongue.

I'm back from Georgia and Armenia. It was a busy and productive trip. Here's a few quick notes on the trip. I'll have a few detailed follow-ups later.

1. While no one laments the end of Soviet rule, there have been big problems since Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan became independent nations. Chiefly among them is the fact that travel and trade between the countries is now difficult if not impossible. The border between Armenia and Azerbaijan is completely closed to people and goods in fact as a result of a border war between the states. Also the language differences (and historically religious differences) are important barriers too. It is as if Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland had three different languages and religions. Though Russian is still a common language it is becoming less common now as time goes by. The speeches and seminars were held in Russian (I had a translator) but everyone complained that their Russian is rusty from years of relative disuse. Some younger folks aren't learning Russian at all.

2. There is basically no central heat in T'bilisi, Georgia except in western-style hotels. This includes government buildings! Everyone uses portable electric space heaters--and the electric power is unreliable. The lecture I gave at T'bilis State University was in a room that was about 60 degrees F.

3. On upside, Georgia's central government building has a small bookstore on the ground floor selling copies of Ludwig von Mises' Human Action and Socialism (in Russian).

4. The Armenian Central Bank is directly across the street from a strip bar. Cool. Talk about your network economies!

5. Georgia had had a problem with their "road police" shaking down drivers in the country side. Solution? They fired the entire lot and abolished the road police completely. They then hired several thousand new regular police and increased their pay dramatically. Result? No more shakedowns and it's possible to drive through the country without getting stopped.

More later....

From today's Chronicle of Higher Education: "Israeli Physician Quits Faculty Posts Amid Accusations of Research Misconduct" (sorry, reg required).

Here's the upshot of the story:

A professor at Tel Aviv University's medical school has resigned from his faculty and hospital positions after being accused of falsifying research data and forging the signatures of eight colleagues.

To avoid things like this. A German anthropologist has systematically lied about the age of certain artifacts. How many dissertations were written using this guy's bogus "dates" as facts?

Needless to say, it wasn't a good strategy for the professor:

Yesterday his university in Frankfurt announced the professor had been forced to retire because of numerous "falsehoods and manipulations". According to experts, his deceptions may mean an entire tranche of the history of man's development will have to be rewritten.

"Anthropology is going to have to completely revise its picture of modern man between 40,000 and 10,000 years ago," said Thomas Terberger, the archaeologist who discovered the hoax. "Prof Protsch's work appeared to prove that anatomically modern humans and Neanderthals had co-existed, and perhaps even had children together. This now appears to be rubbish."

Well, at least the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica?

Items without entries that quickly came to my mind: movie, television, and computer. I am sure there are others.

One of the more interesting reads was the entry on Taxation.

At least that’s one interpretation of what he was ranting about in yesterday’s news conference:

You want to go back to the 19th century and 18th century, rehash the past and open up a lot of things. We'll crush a lot of things in sports if that's what you want. We can go back to the 1800s and basically asterisk a lot of things. If that's going to make you happy, go ahead.

Barry’s endorsement will no doubt cheer co-bloggers and vintage base ball enthusiasts Bob and Josh.

A recent news item:

"The U.S. Senate on Thursday unanimously approved legislation to bar health insurers and employers from discriminating against people with a genetic predisposition to disease."

Since there is no feasible way to ban consumers from getting genetic tests, this legislation might create a "lemons market" for insurance as my former student Mike Rupert and I explain in this "Freeman" article. Ironically, the bill is not likely to help the people with the greatest genetic predisposition for illness but it will make it difficult for people with good genes to buy insurance at favorable rates.

The fact that the bill passed the Senate with no opposition reminds me of Steve Landsburg's chapter in "The Armchair Economist" calling for the end of bipartisanship. Virtually anything that can get those 100 gasbags' approval isn't worth having--of course, most of what passes along partisan lines also isn't worth having.

Earlier I posted on freedom of association in the workplace. Here's an example that I bet won't last long--a NJ casino has set limits on the weight that wait staff (known as Borgata Babes) can gain. Even though the casino applies its policy to both male and female employees, I bet the policy is untenable.

The quote in Ralph's post gives one hope that the Supremes might come down in favor of property rights, but Don Boudreaux has a more pessimistic read.

By the way, the pro-takings/economic development crowd likes to crow that people who lose their property are paid a fair price. If the price is so @#$! fair then why the need to confiscate it rather than acquire it via voluntary exchange? Boudreaux is spot on when he calls takings "thievery."

Our merry band of bloggers found lots to like in yesterday's WSJ. Ralph posted on the review of a book on Galbraith (I liked Samuelson's quip that Galbraith was the noneconomists' favorite economist--some of that Samuelsonian charm is evident in his nephew Larry Summers); the p.A2 article on the labor market for star economists caught my eye. Some excepts are here; I especially liked the bit about 15% of Harvard undergrads majoring in econ (there's hope for the place yet) and the discussion of Harvard economist Caroline Hoxby. She's done some fabulous work and she was very generous when a student of mine contacted her about his honors thesis on school competition.

Kelo v. City of New London has just been argued before the Supreme Court. The case involves the use of emminent domain for private profit.

"The plight of Connecticut homeowners whose homes may be condemned to make way for commercial development pulled at the heartstrings of Supreme Court justices on Tuesday."

I wonder how we might reconcile the actual behavior of Africa’s last pure monarch (reported by Craig below) with the prediction Hans-Hermann Hoppe has made (at p. 95 of the linked article) about the behavior of a pure monarch, aka “private government owner”, by contrast to a democratically elected official, aka “government caretaker”:

A private government owner will tend to have a systematically longer planning horizon, i.e., his degree of time preference will be lower, and accordingly, his degree of economic exploitation will tend to be less than that of a government caretaker;

The deductive logic of Hoppe’s prediction is straightforward enough (his conflation of planning horizon, measured in years, with degree of time preference, measured in percent per year, is unimportant here). The problem lies with its practical applicability. The reason the King of Swaziland seems to be grabbing and consuming all he can, while he can, may be that the King suspects that his ownership is unlikely to endure very long. If this kind of insecurity is a common problem for real-world monarchs (and shouldn’t we expect it to be, given the logic of rent-seeking and the history of coups and inter-monarch warfare?), then there is little to no real-world relevance to Hoppe’s prediction of lower time preference (which assumes secure monarchical ownership). There is accordingly little to his associated conclusion that pure monarchy is better for the public than democracy.

Question for political historians: what percentage of monarchs have held ownership of the government to a ripe old age and successfully passed it on to their heirs?

A couple of weeks ago, I pointed out some of the antics of Africa's last pure monarchy in Swaziland - the post discussed virgins and cows.

Evidently the good king is at it again.:

Swaziland's King Mswati has barred photographers from taking pictures of his growing fleet of royal limousines amid criticism that the luxury car purchases are an embarrassment to one of Africa's poorest countries.

Mswati stirred up a storm in December when he bought a new $500,000 (264,000 pounds) DaimlerChrysler Maybach 62 -- one of the most expensive cars in the world -- and recently hit the headlines again when he splashed out for new BMWs for each of his 10 wives.

Good grief.

Literally, when Greenpeace protesters trespass on their workplace to disrupt trading. (Hat tip to David at De Gustibus.)

Brings a warm feeling to my heart, seeing people willing to stand up to eco-bullies, defend private property, and fight for capitalism like that. Greenpeace made themselves look foolish in more ways than one.

UPDATE: Further reading shows that most press coverage of the incident has been remarkably kind to Greenpeace. A BBC account quotes a Greenpeace spokesman at three-sentence length regarding the issue of climate change, but carries no mention of the traders forcibly repelling the protestors!

The Forbes account has this amusing juxtaposition:

A trader who spoke on condition of anonymity said the activists ran around the floor, blowing whistles to disrupt trading.

Greenpeace executive director Steven Tindale said traders tried to force several of the protesters out of the trading pit.

"We were nonviolent and peaceful and we made it clear that's what we were there for, but there were quite a few blows raining down on our heads," Tindale said.

Invading someone’s workplace, deliberately getting in their way, trying to create a deafening noise by blowing whistles (Forbes also mentions the use of foghorns; another account adds rape alarms), in order to disrupt their work, is “nonviolent and peaceful”?!

Dan Seligman has a nice book review of a new biography on John Kenneth Galbraith in today's Wall Street Journal. (February 22, 2005; Page D10).

This blog seems to continually return to the question of rebates. Why do firms utilize rebates? The four principal reasons given in posts are related to:

1. Promotional efforts.
2. Price discrimination
3. Financing
4. Scams

I have no problem with the first three reasons. The last, however, I find troubling. If consumers dislike rebates and if a substantial amount of fraud is associated with rebates, why haven’t these concerns been addressed in the private market? Frank mentions the Easy Rebate program at Staples as a market oriented attempt to reduce uncertainty surrounding the rebate process. This seems, however, a minimal and belated response to a problem in asymmetrical information. Why isn’t there a Housekeeping Seal of Approval of a United Labs for rebates? Certification would enhance the returns to the first three behaviors and reduce the return to the last. What say you?

Actress Sandra Dee, title star of the pathbreaking 1959 beach-culture film Gidget, died yesterday of complications from kidney disease.

As the perky blonde pint-sized teenager nicknamed Gidget (from the combination of "girl" with "midget"), Dee hung out at the beach with the local surf bums (Moondoggie played by James Darrin; the Big Kahoona [sic] played by Cliff Robertson; not to mention Hot Shot, Stinky, Lover Boy, Lord Byron, and Waikiki) and learned to surf herself. (The shots of the stars surfing in the movie were filmed using the cheesiest rear-projection special effects.) The screenplay was adapted from the book Gidget by Frederick Kohner, based on the real-life story of his daughter Kathy.

Without the popularity of Gidget, there would have likely been fewer Frankie-and-Annette beach party movies, and much less prominence for surf music (of either the vocal Beach Boys variety or of my personal favorite, the instrumental Dick Dale variety). Audiences would have been thinner for the immortal surfing documentary The Endless Summer.

P. S. Deborah Walley replaced Dee in 1961's Gidget Goes Hawaiian. Cindy Carol played the role in 1963's Gidget Goes to Rome. (James Darrin reprised his role as Moondoggie in both films.) Sally Field played the title character in the TV series Gidget.

Last week, Professor Bainbridge raised several “questions for my fellow conservatives who support private [Social Security] accounts”. Here’s his key question:

2. If we can achieve significant savings and ensure the health of the system [by re-indexing benefits and by raising the retirement age] is there a non-ideological reason for introducing private accounts?

The next day he reported:

Curiously, even though I was explicitly seeking non-political explanations for Bush's reform proposals, most of the comments I've seen have involved concepts like freedom of choice rather than efficiency. Which worries me.

Let me see if I can clarify for him the benefits of Social Security choice. (Btw, I wouldn’t call myself a “fellow conservative,” but the label I would prefer isn't so important given that we're trying to be non-ideological here.) There are basically two major benefits:

1. The option to open a personal account (in place of payroll taxes and SS benefits) would give wider choice to the individual, enabling him to earn better returns on his retirement savings and to tailor his savings plan to his specific life-cycle situation and risk preferences. While Professor Bainbridge would be right to call this greater “freedom of choice,” it also means greater efficiency. We normally achieve greater efficiency (some gain, nobody loses; technically economists call it a “Pareto-improvement”) when we remove political restrictions on trade that keep an individual away from his preferred position. And we would do so here. There isn’t a conflict here between the two goals of more freedom and more efficiency.

Imagine a proposal to levy a new payroll tax to fund something (housing, clothing, medical care) that workers had previously bought for themselves. Imagine that almost all workers get less benefit per dollar than they had been getting, and that the one-size-fits-all nature of the program suits some workers particularly badly. The loss in efficiency is clear. Social security choice is an effort to undo, at least partially, a program of that sort.

2. Switching from an unfunded (pay-as-you-go or “Ponzi”) defined-benefit system to a funded defined-contribution system would dramatically increase real capital formation in the economy. By “real capital formation” I mean, retirement income would come from securities ultimately backed by machines and factories (corporate stocks and bonds) rather than from IOUs backed by nothing but claims on future taxpayers. (Martin Feldstein has made the point for years that Social Security has crowded out private savings and capital formation; he summarized it here.) Private accounts, were they widely adopted, would allow Americans in general to enjoy a higher standard of living. Perhaps this is the kind of efficiency gain Professor B. seeks?

Professor Bainbridge adds:

Even proponents of private accounts concede that the transition costs will require trillions of dollars of government borrowing. Do we conservatives really want revenge on FDR and the New Deal at that price? Personally, speaking as a small government fiscal conservative kind of guy, I'd give up personal accounts if any money thereby saved was spent on deficit reduction or, better yet, an income tax rate cut.

The good professor is simply confused about the "price" of personal accounts here. As even opponents of private accounts concede, the proposed move to personal accounts, with workers who opt-in paying an appropriate price in reduced benefits, is self-financing. It will require borrowing, yes, but it will not require additional taxes or benefit cuts to repay the transitional debt. The debt will be repaid with the cash freed up by the voluntary benefit reductions for those who opt in. Conversely, giving up the Bush proposal for personal accounts will not make a single dollar available for deficit reduction or an income tax rate cut.

The good folks concerned about global warming imply that all of us driving down to the Blockbuster are contributing to the death of the planet. It seems that their reasoning is: if it is so easy to destroy the planet, then it must be easy to save the planet.

What if it isn't so easy to destroy the planet?

In December, you may recall, £26.5 million in currency was stolen from the Northern Bank in Belfast, two-thirds of it in the Bank’s own banknotes. (Northern Ireland – mirabile dictu – has four private banks issuing their own note liabilities, denominated in pounds sterling.) Police in the Republic of Ireland have now seized some £60k worth of Northern Bank notes at the home of one George Hegarty in Douglas, County Cork. Mr Hegarty is “said to be a member of Sinn Féin,” the political party affiliated with the terrorist Irish Republican Army. (Sinn Féin and the IRA operate on both sides of the border.)

Because the Republic of Ireland uses the euro, and not the pound sterling, Northern Bank notes cannot be spent there. It is hard to imagine a large sum of Northern Bank notes finding its way to County Cork for any reason other than to let hot money cool off.

Meanwhile, “Gardaí [police] in Cork city yesterday released without charge a 47-year-old man they had arrested in Passage West on Friday afternoon after receiving a report that burnt Northern Ireland bank notes were found near his home in the south Cork town. Gardaí believe he was asked to mind the money by a senior figure in the Provisional IRA in Cork after police began trying to recover money which the paramilitary group was trying to launder.”

It is hard to imagine deliberately burning banknotes for any reason other than to destroy evidence of a crime.

Sinn Féin spokesman Gerry Adams of course denies any Sinn Féin involvement.

Why would the IRA resort to bank robbery? Perhaps because, in the world after 9/11/2001, it has been harder for the terrorist army to gather donations in New York and Boston, which used to be among their chief fund-raising sites.

A quick prefatory remark: I favor drastically reducing if not eliminating Social Security. I assume, however, that such a change is not likely and make my comments below accordingly.

1. It's been reported that President Bush "has not ruled out" hiking the $90,000 taxable wage base as part of a Social Security reform package. Instead of raising taxes on high wage workers, why not cut their benefits a bit? After all, many are in households with incomes well above $90,000 and, more importantly I think, these are the folks for whom all the gloom-and-doom privatization scenarios are least likely to occur. Many, probably most, already have private retirement/investment accounts so they would be fairly informed about the nature of such accounts, would have little additional cost for setting up new accounts, etc.

2. A few weeks ago I came across an idea that struck me as pretty clever. (Unfortunately, I can't recall the source so I am unable to give credit to whomever came up with it or to provide a link with a more complete explanation.) An alternative plan for Social Security would be to hike the retirement age; perhaps 67 for the onset of benefits and 70 for normal/full benefits. Such a move would more than solve the solvency problem; the excess taxes of 3-4 percentage points per worker would then become forced savings and go into an "early retirement account." If the account performs well over time, people could tap the accounts beginning at age 60 or 62, if not they keep working until eligible for Social Security benefits. People could also choose to leave the accounts as bequests instead of drawing them down. Such a plan reduces much of the work disincentives inherent in the current structure of SS (I assume most folks would retire by 70 regardless of the SS program but many are now induced to retire at 62 or 65) while socializing the risk/burden of income for folks who, in many cases, could not return to the work force if they exhausted their savings by, say, age 75. (No, I have not gotten squishy--reread the comment at the top of the post.)

In an earlier post, Michael commented on the price discrimination scheme/scam of rebates. (He was following up on an Arnold Kling posting at EconLog and has a link to Kling's post.)

In late December, I bought a shredder and one of the scanner/copier/printer combos for my home office from Staples. (Note the timing of the purchase--since I had some consulting income last year, Uncle Sam kindly picked up about 45% of the tab.) The two items came with combined rebates of $30. Staples has a web set-up called "Easy Rebates" where one can enter a couple of long numbers from the purchase receipt instead of clipping UPCs, mailing receipts, etc. About 4 weeks later I had my rebates.

One happy rebate recipient--so what? But wait, as they say in the bamboo steamer commercials, there's more. Last night, while watching Michael's Blue Devils defeat Wake Forest (hard to take ACC hoops out of this NC native), on came a Staples commercial. What was Staples pitching? Its "Easy Rebate" program. Evidently the capitalist pigs at Staples have figured out that it is good business to provide and advertise a consumer-friendly rebate program. And this is just what the folks using rebates as scams need--some good old fashioned competition. As Dickie V. might have said had he been calling the game--Wow, can you believe it?

ADDENDUM: There's a certain health insurance company that I'd happily direct Michael's wrath and attorney wife toward. A few years back I filed a claim (I didn't have my card when I went for treatment so I put the bill on my credit card). After several months of no response, I called the company and was told it never received the claim. Though I'm no great fan of the postal service, I think this is unlikely (my mortgage company, two credit card companies, etc. have always received my mail). So I sent a new claim, return receipt. The bastards' response this time came promptly--the (12 month?) deadline for filing a claim had elapsed.

Gale Brewer a member of the New York City Council has proposed a bill that would require movie theaters to advertise the actual start time of a movie, rather than the time the previews are supposed to begin.

According to the New York Sun.

---She decided to introduce legislation, Ms. Brewer said, after receiving more than a dozen complaints from her constituents about having to sit through previews and commercials for 15 minutes or more every time they go to the movies.

A news release that her office circulated yesterday put her view more bluntly, saying theaters deliberately mislead patrons to ensure a "captive audience for unrelated advertising material and previews."---

Here is another proposed law in Connecticut."We're being robbed of our freedom of choice because we're not told when the actual movie will begin," said State Rep. Fleischmann, a Democrat.

If anyone has a pointer to unabridged copies of these proposed regulations, I would appreciate the link. Thanks.

Does the proposed law increase or decrease efficiency? What's your view?

Evidently the United States is not the only society that insists on warning its population about every possible danger that lurks in the shadows. Japan also has a proclivity for warning signs, including one about monkeys?

A New York restaurant in now clothing optional. Ever mindful of selection bias, let's just hope it's not a buffet.

(Found on Drudge. He also links to this story about some idiot protester throwing a shoe at Richard Perle. Are leftists so infantile that they have throw shoes insteading of articulating a sensible argument against Perle?)

Interesting article by Arnold Kling about the ongoing fight between the producers and the politicians. He draws the battle lines between Prodiguous Accumulators of Wealth and Power Intoxicated Washington. He includes an interesting table:

Trend	PAW Response	PIW Response
Longer lifespan, more opportunity for leisure	Save a higher proportion of income and finance your own retirement	Extend the period of dependency on government and raise taxes to pay for it
Improved Health Care Technology	Save for future health care needs; obtain catastrophic coverage	Share health care costs communally, ration health care services
Conditions that require long-term care	Saving, insurance	Medicaid reimbursement for nursing homes
Importance of education	Private schools	Government schools
Importance of college	Save for childrens' college	Means-tested financial aid
Dynamic economy	Save for contingencies; self-educate; lifelong learning	Government programs to insure income, provide job re-training

I can't help but think that these dichotomies carry over into the political arena - perhaps the PAWs outnumber the PIWs at the moment (and hopefully into the future). As the Democrats try to "recast" themselves, perhaps they would do well to consider Kling's hypothesis.

I assumed Ward Churchill had a doctorate. I was evidently wrong.

From today's Chronicle of Higher Education (sorry, reg required):

Newly released documents show that a vice chancellor at Boulder urged other administrators to hire Mr. Churchill in 1990, even though he did not have a doctorate. He earned tenure the next year, bypassing the usual six-year review. The documents were released by the university to Dan Caplis, a talk-show host on a Denver radio station, who shared them with the Rocky Mountain News.

Here's the Rocky Mountain News article about his odd tenure decision.

About his Native American heritage there are some questions. However, his wife and spokesman dismisses claims that there is no evidence that he is Native American:

She said Mr. Churchill had verified his heritage numerous times. More important, she said, the federal government has used criteria other than bloodlines to recognize people as American Indians, including "self-identification and recognition by the community" of Indians.

Oh, I see.

The Churchill case is a rock that many people in academia don't want to look under. It is definitely easier to castigate Larry Summers for his comments than to question the quality, intentions, and qualifications of the ethinc studies department. Perhaps all the hubbub about Ward Churchill is fabricated and drummed up by the right wing conspiracy, but to have a department head without a doctorate in what he is supposedly teaching, researching, and administering?

While reading the NY Times on the reaction at Harvard to Summers's remarks, Ben Franklin's description of Harvard came to mind.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Now I bethought my self in my Sleep, that it was Time to be at Home, and as I fancy'd I was travelling back thither, I reflected in my Mind on the extream Folly of those Parents, who, blind to their Childrens Dulness, and insensible of the Solidity of their Skulls, because they think their Purses can afford it, will needs send them to the Temple of Learning, where, for want of a suitable Genius, they learn little more than how to carry themselves handsomely, and enter a Room genteely, (which might as well be acquir'd at a Dancing-School,) and from whence they return, after Abundance of Trouble and Charge, as great Blockheads as ever, only more proud and self-conceited.

While I was in the midst of these unpleasant Reflections, Clericus (who with a Book in his Hand was walking under the Trees) accidentally awak'd me; to him I related my Dream with all its Particulars, and he, without much Study, presently interpreted it, assuring me, That it was a lively Representation of HARVARD COLLEGE, Etcetera.

I remain, Sir,
Your Humble Servant,
SILENCE DOGOOD.

The New-England Courant, May 14, 1722

Harvard's Office of the President has made Larry Summers's comments available in transcript form.

Dr. Summers also wrote a letter to the faculty in which he says:

At the request of Professors Grosz, Hammonds, Skocpol, and others, I am making available a transcript of my remarks at the January 14 conference as well as the questions and answers that followed. Although I had intended them as informal and speculative, and was reluctant to reopen wounds, I want to be responsive to the concern expressed on Tuesday that our new task forces be in a position to move past the discussion of my remarks and move on with their important work. Links to the transcripts of my NBER remarks and my opening remarks at Tuesday's Faculty meeting are attached at the bottom of this message.

From what would have been the first minute or so of his speech:

The other prefatory comment that I would make is that I am going to, until most of the way through, attempt to adopt an entirely positive, rather than normative approach, and just try to think about and offer some hypotheses as to why we observe what we observe without seeing this through the kind of judgmental tendency that inevitably is connected with all our common goals of equality.

Nice try, Dr. Summers. Those who don't want to consider positive hypotheses just aren't going to cooperate, just like Dems won't cooperate with Pres. Bush so they can claim he is a "divider not a uniter."

It seems that those who are knee-jerk against what Summers discusses in his comments have only one form of analysis: the normative. Perhaps these folks think the positive went out of style after Newton. Perhaps the positive simply doesn't jive with what they want to be true and therefore the easy thing to do is ignore the positive (what is) and immediately debate the normative (what could/should be).

In printed form, the speech is 12 pages long. Can we expect everybody at Harvard (and Stanford, Princeton, MIT, and Columbia) to take a few minutes and actually read what Dr. Summers said? Unfortunately, I doubt many will read it.

To many of the good folks in Cambridge, Dr. Summers has already committed the ultimate sin. As Ralph posted below, Ward Churchill might keep his job longer than Dr. Summers. After all, the only thing Dr. Churchill might have done is lie on his vitae (I have seen no real proof, only rumor).

I didn't know about this group, but others might. Here's a list of student complaints sorted by university name. Some of the complaints are pretty humurous, others are absolutely terrifying.

Ward Churchill only mentioned once (Feb. 3, 2005).

CBS New - Taser Gun Death In Texas
MSNBC - Groups Call For Moratorium On Stun Gun Use
ABC News - Taser Guns Come Under Fire

The latest hype is that taser’s are dangerous to your health. This is only really news if you thought that a zillion volts surging through your body and flopping around on the floor like a fish was a healthy whole life experience. The taser controversy is the latest attempt by the media to manufacture another crisis.

The media creates the news as much as it reports it. This crass promotionalism blatantly appears in the promos for the evening news. “Shooting at the mall! Tune in at 6 for full story.” When you tune in, you find out the mall is not the local town mall, but some place a thousand miles away. Moreover, the full story could have easily been reported in the same amount of time the promo took to hype it. The news media show the maximum disregard for their audience when they announce, “Hurricanes, tornadoes and the black plague on the way. Watch the evening news with Dan Blather for details.” Thanks, but I might be dead by then.

Aren’t they just responding to market forces? Sure, but if that is the case then caveat emptor. It would be refreshing if they just admitted to want they were doing. But no, they claim they are news professionals. That assumes a professional-client relationship. It assumes that they know what is best for the client and that they have a responsibility for the client’s welfare. We can quibble over whether the current list of talking heads is more knowledgeable than their audience. In most cases, however, it is clear that the hype comes before the truth.

I don’t doubt that tasers can be harmful, but what’s the alternative, a bullet through the heart or a baton up side the head? When we focus on the alternatives, the crisis losses its urgency and the news losses its impact. We then have to engage in a boring analysis of benefits and costs. It should be obvious by now that there is an unhealthy alliance of plaintiff attorneys and news media. For them this is a win-win situation. Taser deaths and court cases make good stories and bring big damages. And if they do succeed in getting tasers banned, then it’s guns and batons all the time. That means more deaths, more news and more damages.

Think again.

From this report

My wife subscribes to several parenting magazines. While many of them have useful recipies and information on new products and places to visit, every other month there is an article lobbying for more government involvement "to help out working moms." These articles are targeted to their readers so the articles are not about government helping low-income single mothers. Rather, they are about "society" (e.g. government) helping middle-class mothers deal with the stress of being a mother and working full-time.

As usual, James Likels sums up my feelings on these articles perfectly:

The day I expect "society" to take care of my child in a meaningful way is the day I give society the right to take her away and do a better job if I don't schedule daily flash-card phonics sessions. I suspect that we are talking about two different groups - those mothers who genuinely need help because they made some horrible decisions and find themselves with many children and no fathers, and those who can't quite strike the perfect balance between Corporate Warrior Princess and UberSuperPerfectRoleModelLove-GusherMom, and hence get, well, excessive and control-freakish. I think the former group needs our help, and the second group needs a big frosty glass of chill-the-hell-out with a kicky pastel umbrella.

ATSRTWT.

Never thought I would see the day that anyone was too far left for Antioch.

Ward Churchill Not Wanted at Antioch Commencement.

(Hat tip to Pirateballerina.com)

Who is more likely to be fired, Weird Churchill or Larry Summers? My money is on Summers. He did the unforgivable. He suggested researchers might look into a testable hypothesis on the innate differences between men and women. Like Galileo, he has recanted his errors. But, as a warning to others who might suggest politically incorrect inquiries, he must be punished. Who knows where unfettered research might lead. Is not liberal thought at the center of the universe?

Churchill, on the other hand, simply made an assertion that three thousand technocrats deserved to die. He never suggested any areas of fruitful inquiry, nor did he raise a testable hypothesis. He was simply providing us his insights and feelings, which take on added importance because there is a possibility he could be part of an oppressed minority. Academe obviously feels that Churchill’s right to express his feelings is more cherished than Summer’s right to raise testable hypotheses. As Ann Coulter points out, Churchill is more likely to be fired for his smoking than for his lack of scholarship.

My bet is that Summers in on the next train to the gulag while Churchill sings Rocky Mountain High.

See:

Clashes with Churchill found

Harvard president faces rise in anger among faculties

In this column that recently appeared in my local paper, Bob Barr takes on the Michigan company that plans to begin testing employees for tobacco use. An excerpt:

"Federal laws strictly regulate the extent corporations may use polygraphs in hiring and firing decisions, for example. And there are strict legal limits on how companies may deal with employees found using mind-altering drugs. But companies apparently are free to arbitrarily test employees for tobacco use and terminate them summarily for so doing. Obviously, off-duty smoking by its employees is more important to Weyco corporate leaders than employee theft or cocaine use.

How far this nonsense will be allowed to go is uncertain. Smokers are held in such low regard by government and the law these days, it is hard to imagine anyone in authority defending former Weyco employees.

But if companies are allowed to do what this company is doing, it is easy to imagine other "undesirable" employee activities to which the corporate watchdogs will turn their attention in their never-ending search for the perfect, Stepford employee."

Barr seems to be suggesting that some sort of law against companies performing tobacco use tests would be desirable. (An alternative reading would be that he thinks workers shouldn't allow the firm to get away with testing; presumably this would involve workers changing to employers that do not test.) I disagree. Although the testing does strike me as overbearing, I think government should stay out of the matter. If firms want to have Stepford employees then they should be able to try to do so. I say try to do so because if the firm is too intrusive then workers will demand a pay premium to work there or they will choose to work for less overbearing firms.

Here's another example of an employer exercising its freedom of association: Drinking a Bud costs Miller employee his job.

Of course, I can't understand why anyone would drink either Miller or Bud. Evidently I'm not alone.

Lance Armstrong will be riding in this year's Tour de Georgia, with two stages in my fair city.

Well, it seems I was a bit premature in blogging that the Chattanooga mayoral race featuring "the other Ann Coulter" wouldn't be interesting. Au contraire--a kerfuffle has arisen about her alleged atheism and a group, whose name I used as the title of this post, has sprung up in opposition to her candidacy.

The NHL cancels its season. Yawn.

From today's New York Times is the latest about the crisis at Harvard over Larry Summers. Yesterday a faculty meeting was held to discuss Summers's leadership at Harvard:

"Many of your faculty are dismayed and alienated and demoralized," Dr. Arthur Kleinman, chairman of anthropology in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, said at the meeting, referring to a "crisis concerning your style of leadership and governance."

Please. "Alienated" and "demoralized"? Over what? How do these folks ever weather the storms of academic publishing? Idiotic referee and editorial decisions are made all the time which require a thick skin. Perhaps the good folks at Harvard never receive rejection letters and are therefore supersensitive to the "storm of controversy" that Larry Summers has unleashed.

But the fragile flowers haven't had their full say yet:

The 90-minute meeting ended with a unanimous vote to hold an emergency meeting of the faculty next Tuesday so professors could continue to discuss their lack of confidence in Dr. Summers's leadership.

Great. A whole week of lunches, wine spritzers, and "tsk tsk"ing about how Larry Summers has set women back fifty years or some such nonsense. What a shame.

The folks who are so outraged about the statement of a hypothesis are supposed to be the best of our best. This, in my opinion, is the bigger scandal of the Larry Summers speech - the best scientists and academics in the world have been revealed to be nothing more than scared and small.

However, there were two voices of reason at the meeting. One was an Larry Katz, an economist. No surprise there. The other? A professor of Yiddish literature? Good on 'ya!!

One of two professors who spoke in support of Dr. Summers was Ruth R. Wisse, the Peretz professor of Yiddish literature, who said her colleagues were allowing sexual politics to silence the open discussion Dr. Summers intended when he spoke about women at a conference last month, The Crimson reported.

How quickly the left turn against their own - kinda like it was in another country about eighty years ago.

A gem from Krugman's latest column, guaranteed to bring a smile to those of us who teach economic history for a living:

In fact, by taking on Social Security, Mr. Bush gave the Democrats a chance to remember what they stand for, and why. Here's my favorite version, from another fighting moderate, Eliot Spitzer: "As President Bush embraces the ownership society and tries to claim that he is the one that is making it possible for the middle class to succeed and save and invest - well, I say to myself, no, that's not right; it is the Democratic Party historically that created the middle class."

I guess Krugman has learned the first rule of advocacy journalism: there’s no need to make an indefensible claim yourself when you can quote someone else doing it for you.

I would have thought it was the Industrial Revolution that created the middle class, seeing as how countries without industrialization did not develop a middle class, no matter what kind of democratic politics prevailed. Do Krugman and Spitzer really believe that the US lacked a middle class before Franklin Roosevelt's tax-and-transfer policies?

CNN reports:

Two "Dogs Playing Poker" paintings cleaned house at Doyle New York's annual Dogs in Art Auction, fetching a staggering $590,400, the auction house said.

I remember those paintings. There were copies hanging on the walls of that house my friend rented one summer at the Jersey shore – walls done in sea-green fake-wood paneling. The floors were done in orange shag carpeting.

They have an annual Dogs in Art auction?!

Sports columnist Bryan Burwell of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, addressing the NHL hockey players (who have finally agreed in principle to a salary cap but are holding out for a more generous one):

Dear players, ESPN replaced the programming of your games with a bunch of fat guys in sunglasses, chomping on cigars and playing poker, and the TV ratings for that time slot improved!!!!

Call me crazy, but I don't think you have any leverage.

The ACLU is upset that Ohio has approved "Choose Life" license plates. I’m a bit surprised that some courts have ruled such plates unconstitutional. I wouldn’t think the government has a duty to be content neutral in this regard. The government takes stands on all sort of issues (don’t smoke, abstinence, etc.) and we don’t expect the government to give equal time to pro-smokers or promiscuity advocates. This looks to me to be another example of the “abortion exception”.

But I’m no lawyer…

According to Price Fishback, the answer was no.

Economic theory and empirical evidence offer several reasons to doubt the monopoly view of company stores. First, company stores faced competition not only from local stores but also from other mines to the extent that mine employers hired in a competive labor market. In nonunion areas like West Virginia, company store prices were part of an employment package, including wages and housing, offered to mobile miners in a labor market with hundreds of mines.

...

Prices apparently were higher at isolated mines, in part due to higher transport costs, but scattered evidence suggests that higher prices were offset partially by higher wages. Finally, miners were typically not in debt to the stores nor paid entirely in scrip. Scrip was offered as an advance on payday, when miners, on average, received 30 to 80 percent of their earnings in cash after deduction for rent, fuel, doctors, and store purchases between paydays.*

* Price V. Fishback, "Did Miners 'Owe Their Souls to the Company Store'? Theory and Evidence from the Early 1900s," Journal of Economic History, 46 (December 1986): 1011-1029.

Commenting on the cryogenics debate over at Marginal Revolution, William Butterfield at Corner Solution comments:

Maybe human life was naturally set to maximize the ... benefit of time alive [net of] its marginal cost, in terms of day to day human strife and problems.

Problem is, what is the "naturally set" lifespan? The lifespan of a Stone Age hunter-gatherer? Thanks to capitalism, human life expectancy is much longer now than it used to be, and we don't need to send the superannuated out to die in the snow.

Personally, I doubt that paying more than a few bucks to have my dead head kept on ice would be a wise bet, given the implausibility of being successfully re-animated. It seems to me more plausible -- but still in the realm of science fiction -- that before I die I can be cloned and my clone loaded with my memories, a la Dr. Ninestein on the cult tv show Terrahawks. (Wow, my second Terrahawks reference this week!)

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch on Feb. 5 published a long letter I had sent them that was essentially the same as my blog entry you already read here on "Pareto-Improving Social Security Privatization". On Saturday they published a letter in response that raised the following questions:

But if it's so simple for Ms. Smith to earn 5 percent on her $100 investment, why would anybody buy the Treasury note that pays only 3 percent? Could it be that Ms. Smith's investment promises a higher rate of interest because it is riskier than the old, boring Treasury not? Isn't it the case that while her investment might return 5 percent, she also might lose part or all of her money instead?

The author, Andy Ayers, humbly identified himself as "merely an interested citizen, unstudied in economics".

Here's my reply:

Read More »

I'm off to a weeklong series of meetings, seminars and speeches in Georgia and Armenia. These are sponsored by the Friedrich Naumann Foundation and the New Economic School-Georgia.

Unless internet access is unexpectedly good, I'll probably not blog until late next week. I'll bring back a full report.

Everybody seems obligated to pipe off about economics, especially if they have no training in the area. Exhibit A: What if we doubled the minimum wage? by Michael Brain (who founded How Stuff Works).

From his working example, which requires cutting executive pay in half and to double the pay of the lowly workers:

Could the executives manage to survive on $2 million rather than $4 million? Yes, they could. They could also survive on $1 million a year, or $500,000. Their pay is completely arbitrary. It has risen by a factor on 10 in the last 20 years -- In 1980, these same executives would have been making $400,000 instead of $4 million.

AAAARRRRRGGGGGHHHHH!!!!

So, Michael Jackson is rushed to the hospital and and now lawyers in Vienna are filing suit in New York for the tsunami of 2004 that occurred, literally, on the other side of the planet. What's the cause for the suit?

A group of Austrian and German victims of the Asian tsunami disaster are to file a lawsuit demanding that Thailand, French hotel chain Accor and US forecasters prove they reacted adequately to the disaster, their lawyers said.

How does a forecaster in Hawaii or San Diego prove that they responded adequately?

(Story seen at Drudge)

How much are we willing to spend to close the racial academic achievement gap? From the introduction to the current issue of "Future of Children" comes this open-ended proposition:

For the present, however, we believe that by far the most promising strategy is to increase access to high-quality center-based early childhood education programs for all low-income three- and four-year-olds. Such a step would measurably boost the achievement of black and Hispanic children and go far toward narrowing the school readiness gap. So what should these programs look like? First and foremost, the education component of these programs must be of high quality. This means having small classes with a high teacher-pupil ratio, teachers with bachelor degrees and training in early c