"Expert" politicians

These days, every politician assumes that because he has a driver's license and an ATM card, he must have all the necessary skills to run an automaker and operate a bank.

Barack Obama has exacerbated the problems

Barack Obama didn’t cause the problems he now faces, but he’s exacerbated them. What Obama and his administration should have done—and perhaps still can—is set aside other plans and focus almost myopically on the economy. Fix this, and Obama’s political capital will be nearly limitless. But fix it, and fix it now.

Doing more with less

On NPR, Chana Joffe-Walt cites Ben Zimmer, a lexicographer with the Visual Thesaurus, whom she says "loves phrases like 'do more with less'," and thinks "the phrase is useful in many ways because it's strategically vague". He says Benjamin Franklin "said that by diligence shall we do more with less perplexity. Well, there he was talking about how we should work hard and achieve greater results. But he actually specified less perplexity."

Joffe-Walt says that Franklin is "talking about making work simpler by just being focused and industrious. Zimmer says 100 years later, French economist Frederic Bastiat picked up on that same idea," and Zimmer cites Bastiat saying that "man is so constituted, that his constant concern is to lessen the ratio of effort to result, to substitute the action of nature for his own action. In a word: to do more with less."

Joffe-Walt then claims, "Bastiat is not talking about working harder. He's talking about putting your feet up." No, she's wrong. Look at the context. In Harmonies économiques, translated here, Bastiat wrote:

Man is so constituted that his constant concern is to lessen the ratio of effort to result, to substitute the action of Nature for his own action—in a word, to do more with less. His skill, his intelligence, his industry are always directed toward this end.

And if he "discovers a process whereby he can complete his task with half the labor it previously took...he will turn it to his own exclusive advantage. Either he will rest half the day, or else he will work twice as hard."

And what is his conclusion?

This, I may briefly remark, is what is always lost sight of in discussions concerning the question of machinery, free trade, and progress in general. We observe that labor is laid off by more efficient techniques, and we become alarmed. We fail to note that a corresponding proportion of the cost is likewise placed at our disposal at the same time.

And indeed, it's from the chapter entitled "Producer and Consumer". It's about how efficiency is good for the consumer. So one of the few times NPR cites Bastiat, it gets him wrong. Doing more with less brains, maybe.

high speed rail?

Obama, who wants to make the construction of a national high-speed rail network his “signature issue,” no doubt sees this as a model. It was a poor choice.

Aside from the simple factual issue that most of the first transcontinental railroad was built after, not during, the war, most of Obama’s audience would have forgotten that its construction caused for one of the first and biggest financial swindles of the nineteenth century. That scandal was the result of a simple fact: such a railroad made no economic sense in the late 1860s....

So now Obama wants to build a new rail empire. Like the Union Pacific, this one will require huge subsidies. Like Crédit Mobilier, contractors will make huge contributions to Congressional campaigns to keep the money flowing. The rail lines will never cover their operating costs, much less capital costs, and so will either go bankrupt or be forever subsidized by taxpayers. And just as the economic benefits of the Union Pacific were invisible for several decades, the environmental benefits of high-speed rail will be negligible or negative.

an idle and repining despair

....since the aerial routes and the well-organized road routes had appropriated three-quarters of the passengers who used to make their journeys by train, the remaining railway companies had fallen into a settled melancholy; an idle and repining despair invaded their literature, and its influence was noticeable even in their time-tables."

I laughed out loud the first time I read this.

havoc wreaked by legal drugs such as alcohol and tobacco

This is a worldwide problem. We need a rational debate about the true damage caused by illegal drugs - which pales into insignificance compared with the havoc wreaked by legal drugs such as alcohol and tobacco. Until then, we have no chance of developing a rational drug policy.

Why did the cops shoot Bush?

So much for democracy

Forty-five percent (45%) of Americans oppose the federal government subsidizing mortgage payments for financially troubled homeowners, according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey.

Thirty-eight percent (38%) think government subsidies are a good idea, and 18% are not sure which course is best to follow.

A missed opportunity

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood suggested yesterday that the Obama administration might embrace a new and controversial way to pay for highway and transit projects: charging motorists a tax for every mile they drive.

But no sooner was the idea being batted around by cable commentators and commuters than spokesmen for the White House and LaHood's own department shot it down -- hard.

Hello neighbor!

Liberal politicians’ pious devotion to the science of global warming never translates into action, unless the costs of action can be safely transferred onto non-voters. And environmental groups are just as cowardly. I sure didn’t notice the Sierra Club or the NRDC protesting when presidential candidate Hillary Clinton called for a suspension of the federal gas tax last year.

I live in a small liberal college town and walk to work; few of my neighbors walk anywhere.

Government intervention turned a thriving industry into a basket case

From television specials to newspaper editorials, the media are pushing the idea that current economic problems were caused by the market and that only the government can rescue us.

What was lacking in the housing market, they say, was government regulation of the market's "greed." That makes great moral melodrama, but it turns the facts upside down.

It was precisely government intervention which turned a thriving industry into a basket case.

Who's next?

Unintended consequences

If Congress wants to deal with the rising number of foreclosures, it should not create a new mess by converting the mortgage crisis into a bankruptcy crisis. Doing so will open the door to a host of unintended consequences that will further freeze credit markets, raise interest rates for new home buyers, and spread the mortgage contagion to other types of consumer credit.

Do politicians really not understand this?

Money for us!

What do you get when you combine impeached former Illinois Democratic governor Rod Blagojevich, legendary K Street lobbying firm Cassidy & Associates, Senate appropriator Dick Durbin, D-IL, President Barack Obama, former Democratic House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri, and the largest spending bill in the history of the planet?

You get the costliest earmark Washington has ever seen.

Obama proclaims his stimulus bill is earmark-free, but that claim is a bit Clintonian. Turns out, it depends on what the meaning of the word earmark is. What if a provision in the bill doesn’t name one specific project, but is written so narrowly that only one project is eligible?

That’s what Republican critics charge in the case of clean-coal funding in downstate Illinois. The Senate bill included a section dedicating $4.6 billion to “fossil energy research and development,” with a $2 billion line-item “for one or more near zero emissions powerplant(s).”

Sure, that doesn’t name one powerplant, and it leaves open the idea of funding multiple powerplants, but there’s plenty of evidence that this line was intended as—and will function as—an earmark for the FutureGen coal gasification powerplant in Mattoon, Illinois.

It's not pork when we get it.

Not so different

When it comes to bailout/stimulus/econ, there is no significant break in policy between George W. Bush and Barack Obama, no matter how much it benefits enthusiasts and detractors from pretending there's a sharp break between the two. The biggest economic political* event last fall was not the election, it was the bipartisan, unpopular, panic-driven bailout. So yeah, Obamanomics from the outset precludes much of any warm embrace between liberals and libertarians. Much like Bushonomics did throughout his term. Hmmmm, what do the two presidents (and the congressional majorities that enabled them) have in common? Could it be that they're...politicians?

The paradox of spending?

There's a lot of talk about the "paradox of thrift", but I'm wondering about the inverse. Don't forget that it was that big spender John Maynard Keynes who thought up the term. Morover, the lack of a clever label for too much spending suggests to me that we don't think of too much spending as a bad thing. On the other hand, just because there's not a word for it doesn't mean the concept doesn't exist.

Stay dirty

“Children should be allowed to go barefoot in the dirt, play in the dirt, and not have to wash their hands when they come in to eat,” [Dr. Joel V. Weinstock, the director of gastroenterology and hepatology at Tufts Medical Center in Boston] said. He and [Dr. David Elliott, a gastroenterologist and immunologist at the University of Iowa] pointed out that children who grow up on farms and are frequently exposed to worms and other organisms from farm animals are much less likely to develop allergies and autoimmune diseases.

The pursuit of taste encourages competition and conformity

Keith Thomas writes

In modern times, there is nothing which more exactly defines social differences than personal taste, whether in food or music or wallpaper or the choice of children’s names. The choices that people make in these areas of life may seem spontaneous and genuine, but, without any apparent pressure or coercion, they usually conform to class lines. The possessions which we place in our living spaces and the way we decorate those spaces instantly reveal our sensibilities, our preoccupations, and our social milieux. That is why they will evoke the admiration of some observers and the disdain of others. This state of affairs was already in evidence in the early modern period.

...

Possessions were symbols of refinement and politeness. They helped to define individual identity. They even shaped their owners’ physical deportment and behaviour, for knives and forks, cups and teapots, fragile porcelain and increasingly delicate furniture imposed a distinctively mannered way of eating, drinking, moving and sitting. In this way the consumption of goods created social differences as well as expressing them.


The competition...shifted away from the conspicuous display of opulence to a more restrained demonstration of elegance, refinement and fastidious discrimination. ...The purchasing power of the middling and lower classes might rise, but the elite could hold on to its monopoly of cultural capital by asserting that wealth was not enough.

Meanwhile, the consumption of new goods was unleashing a torrent of contemporary criticism. From the 16th century onwards, there were denunciations of ‘immoderate purchasings’, ‘unlawful spending and consuming’, and what one Protestant divine called ‘the inordinate and unsatiable desire of having’. Moralists pointed to the waste of resources which could have been better employed in relieving the poor; to the adverse consequences for the balance of trade of the import of foreign commodities; and to the ruinous effects of self-indulgence upon an individual’s health and finances.

They attacked ‘wasters’ and ‘spenders’ and were contemptuous of what they called ‘superfluities’, ‘needless toys’, ‘vain trifles’, ‘fantasies’, ‘new fangles’ and ‘trumpery trash’. Adam Smith was in this tradition when he said that it was the desire of great lords for ‘frivolous and useless’ objects which brought down the feudal system: they bartered their authority ‘for the gratification of the most childish, the meanest and the most sordid of all vanities’. Luxuries were ‘contemptible and trifling’, ‘trinkets and baubles, fitter to be the play-things of children than the serious pursuits of men’.

Distaste for frivolities was reinforced by the classical notion that luxury weakened the state, undermined civic virtue and led eventually to despotism. The ‘civic humanist’ belief was that comfortable living had an enervating effect, sapping the martial spirit and reducing military effectiveness; the very word ‘luxury’ had connotations of excessive fleshly indulgence. Republican virtue required frugality, whereas abundance produced ‘effeminacy’; and the lure of private comforts distracted citizens from a commitment to public service.

Throughout the early modern period, commentators repeatedly harked back to ‘the plainness and hardness of the people of old’, contrasting the military vigour of ‘our plain forefathers’ with the soft and luxurious habits of their descendants. The exact location of this age of primitive simplicity was variously put at any point between the Old Testament patriarchs and the reign of Queen Anne, but its virile austerity remained constant. It was asserted that effeminacy was generated by the new objects of expenditure, from coaches, which robbed men of their riding skills, to tea, which emasculated them as they sat sipping in female company. This objection to ‘foreign, effeminate and superfluous commodities’ was not just a classical theme: it reflected the central role of women in the purchase of objects for domestic consumption and the association of the new goods with domesticity and an unmilitary style of life.

...

In fact, of course, it was not only the female sex who engaged in this competitive shopping. Well-to-do men spent heavily on horses, carriages, clothes, paintings, watches, plate, wigs, books and other luxury objects without incurring the same odium. Besides, much female expenditure was of a vicarious kind, designed to bolster the husband’s position: as a Jacobean moralist remarked, ‘there cometh credit and praise to the man by the comely apparel of his wife’.

Nevertheless, women spent more time in shops because they were usually responsible for provisioning the household; and middle-class housewives were coming to think of houses as places in which goods were displayed. The wives of better-off farmers were notoriously house-proud, keeping their floors spotless, and polishing and scouring their pewter dishes until they shone. More goods meant more cooking, more washing up and more housework. In 18th-century London, even modest rented rooms had copper kettles, walnut-framed looking-glasses, curtains, and white cotton counterpanes.

...In the absence of probate inventories for the poor, it is hard to generalise, but it is clear that furnishings were sparse and over half of the domestic budget went on food. The emphasis was more on immediate consumption than on enduring possessions; though, by the later 18th century, cotton and linen, pewter, pottery, tea sets, and decorative household items would reach even labourers’ cottages. Carpets and curtains arrived rather later. ‘Best’ clothes had always been important.

An early 18th-century observer thought that ‘the poorest labourer’s wife in the parish’ would half-starve herself and her husband in order to buy a second-hand gown and petticoat, rather than ‘a strong wholesome frieze’, because it was more ‘genteel’. Even when undernourished and poorly housed, the lower classes were prepared to devote some of their limited resources to goods which boosted their self-esteem and helped them to create social relationships with others.

For the consumption of goods was, as it remains, as much conformist in spirit as competitive. Most people bought commodities out of a desire to keep in line with the accepted standards of their own peer group rather than to emulate those of the one above: similarity in living styles was an important source of social cohesion; and anxiety to do the right thing was more common than the urge to stand out. As Josiah Wedgwood remarked: ‘Few ladies, you know, dare venture at anything out of the common style ’till authoris’d by their betters – by the ladies of superior spirit who set the ton.’

...as Lord Halifax sardonically observed, ‘we call all ‘‘necessary’’ that we have a mind to’. So-called ‘artificial’ wants soon came to seem natural. Adam Smith would rule that necessities were not just those goods which were indispensable for the support of life, but ‘whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without’. By relating the dividing line to prevailing conceptions of decency, he accepted that it was a shifting boundary.

For standards constantly changed; and, as Mandeville had observed, one could not tell what words like ‘decency’ and ‘conveniency’ meant until one knew the quality of the person using them; what the poor saw as intolerable luxury was regarded by the gentry merely as ‘decency’. In this way the values of civility, respectability, refinement and politeness were invoked to legitimise the unceasing acquisition of goods.
...

What we see during the 17th and 18th centuries is the gradual emergence of a new ideology, accepting the pursuit of consumer goods as a valid object of human endeavour and recognising that no limit could, or should, be put to it. Consumption was justified in terms of the opportunities it brought for human fulfilment. The growth of a consumer market, unrestricted by the requirements of social hierarchy, offered increasing possibilities for comfort, enjoyment and self-realisation. Poverty was no longer to be regarded as a holy state; and there was no need to feel guilt about envying the rich; one should try to emulate them. Or so the advocates of laissez-faire commerce would argue. Goods were prized, for themselves, for the esteem they brought with them, for the social relationships they made possible. To interfere with the process of acquisition by sumptuary laws was what Adam Smith would call ‘the highest impertinence and presumption’; it threatened liberty and personal happiness. The labourer had the right ‘to spend his own money himself and lay out the produce of his labour his own way’. The sovereignty of consumer choice triumphed over the notion that consumption should be regulated to fit social status; and the distribution of goods was left to the working of the market. No one yet foresaw that monopolistic capitalism might one day do as much to restrict choice as to enlarge it.
...

...independent spirits asserted their individuality by perversely not consuming, rather like a modern middle-class family extolling the virtues of ‘good plain cooking’ or boasting that it does not possess a television set. Social competition can take many different forms.

Great article, with the exception of the emphasized sentence.

Not all drivers take responsibility for their actions

A counterintuitive traffic design strategy known as shared streets

encourages driver anarchy by removing traffic lights, street markings, and boundaries between the street and sidewalk. Studies conducted in northern Europe, where shared streets are common, point to improved safety and traffic flow.

The idea is that the absence of traffic regulation forces drivers to take more responsibility for their actions. “The more uncomfortable the driver feels, the more he is forced to make eye contact on the street with pedestrians, other drivers and to intuitively go slower,” explains Chris Conway, a city engineer with Montgomery, Ala. Last April the city converted a signalized downtown intersection into a European-style cobblestone plaza shared by cars, bikes and pedestrians—one of a handful of such projects that are springing up around the country.

This wouldn't work in China or most places in Taiwan, where drivers regularly ignore traffic lights, street markings, and boundaries between the street and sidewalk.

Generalizing this to the libertarian love of freedom, it suggests to me that for freedom to work, people need to be educated into believing in the rights of others. So will I have to concede that we need a minimum amount of moral brainwashing? Ugh.

Rationality

According to Keith E. Stanovich, author of What Intelligence Tests Miss: The Psychology of Rational Thought, IQ tests

would be far more effective if they took into account not only mental "brightness" but also rationality — including such abilities as "judicious decision making, efficient behavioral regulation, sensible goal prioritization ... [and] the proper calibration of evidence."

But there's such a thing as too much rationality.

Assume that a tiger is there

Magical thinking can be plotted on a spectrum, with skeptics at one end and schizophrenics at the other. People who endorse magical ideation, ranging from the innocuous (occasional fear of stepping on sidewalk cracks) to the outlandish (TV broadcasters know when you're watching), are more likely to have psychosis or develop it later in their lives. People who suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder also exhibit elevated levels of paranoia, perceptual disturbances, and magical thinking, particularly "thought-action fusion," the belief that your negative thoughts can cause harm. These people are compelled to carry out repetitive tasks to counteract their intrusive thoughts about unlocked doors or loved ones getting cancer. But more magical thinking does not necessarily mean more emotional problems—what counts is whether such thinking interferes with everyday functioning.

You wouldn't want to be at the skeptic end of the spectrum anyway. "To be totally 'unmagical' is very unhealthy," says Peter Brugger, head of neuropsychology at University Hospital Zurich. He has data, for example, strongly linking lack of magical ideation to anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure. "Students who are 'not magical' don't typically enjoy going to parties and so on," he says. He's also found that there's a key chemical involved in magical thinking. Dopamine, a neurotransmitter that the brain uses to tag experiences as meaningful, floods the brains of schizophrenics, who see significance in everything, but merely trickles in many depressives, who struggle to find value in everyday life. In one experiment, paranormal believers (who are high in dopamine) were more prone than nonbelievers to spot nonexistent faces when looking at jumbled images and also were less likely to miss the faces when they really were there. Everyone spotted more faces when given dopamine-boosting drugs. Brugger argues that the ability to see patterns and make loose associations enhances creativity and also serves a practical function: "If you're on the grassland, it's always better to assume that a tiger is there."

Yeah, I'm not magical.