Kinds of Collusion

4/1/2004 | link

So, there's probably a blindingly obvious answer to this question, but I was kicking it around with a couple of fairly sharp folks at the Guatemala conference earlier this month and, while we came up with a few possible answers, none seemed obviously right. I'd forgotten about it soon after, but it just came up again because of a news report I read. The question is this: As a matter of longstanding common law tradition, collusive contracts (price fixing, etc.) aren't enforceable, quite apart from any affirmative penalties governments might establish for behavior "in restraint of trade." Mergers, on the other hand, are sometimes subject to antitrust scrutiny, but are generally allowed. But it seems like you could tailor a merger in a way that preserved most of the division of benefits you'd get from a collusive contract. Or put it another way: if you imagine a range of variously comprehensive collusive contracts, it seems like mergers are just an extreme case at one end of the spectrum. So why the differential treatment? We had a bunch of ideas, but I want to see if others come up with different ones.

 

Bleh

3/31/2004 | link

You can now listen to the Kojo Nnamdi debate here (Real Player). I'm actually fairly unhappy with that performance now that I listen to it. There's a whole lot of stuff I'd intended to say—some of it more important than what I did get out—that I didn't get around to, which is just bad time management. I think I let the debate be framed a bit too much by the other side, and I was clearly in "conversation mode" rather than "debate mode," which (when I get myself properly into it) tends to cut those obnoxious "umms" out of my speech. Well, lessons for the future, I guess.

 

Kurtz and Cameron (A Dialogue)

3/31/2004 | link

The Agitator offers a hypothetical exchange between two gay marriage supporters who know that only legal disapproval of homosexuality prevents us all from surrendering to our inner need for hot man love.

 

Breaking out the Kojo Mojo

3/30/2004 | link

I'll be on the Kojo Nnamdi show from 12 to 1 Wednesday afternoon talking about Ban the Ban and the evil proposed ballot initiative to outlaw smoking in bars.

 

Bobos in the Hood

3/30/2004 | link

Roommate Chuck informed me today that the new Starbucks on the corner of 13th and U—the presence of which I'll confess I greeted with some glee, since I can now get good coffee beans without trucking over to Whole Foods—is owned by Magic Johnson, part of his practice of investing to "give back to the community." I was a little incredulous: "He's giving the community a Starbucks?"

But on reflection, it makes some sense. Apparently, the Logan Circle neighborhood "tipped" after being relatively sketchy for a long time soon after that Whole Foods at 15th and P was built. There's something of a chicken-and-egg problem there (was it built because developers projected it was about to "tip" anyway?) but one might at least speculate that the incursion of a few of these bobo-friendly establishments—Starbucks, Whole Foods, Anthropologie, whatever—can start a kind of gentrifying cascade, a kind of reverse broken windows effect. That is, assuming the neighborhood is at least pretty close to some already gentrified areas, it both starts to draw in Bobo money from neighboring areas, draws in other similar businesses (a cluster effect: if Bobos are going to Whole Foods, have some other Bobo-friendly businesses near by on the still-cheap real estate), and sends a signal about what kind of neighborhood one is in.

As a test, I'll check to see if, post-Starbucks, there's any decline in the weekly streams of broken car windows running along the side of 13th...

 

Money and Your Life

3/29/2004 | link

Interesting New York Times Magazine piece this week on how the government assigns monetary values to "statistical lives" saved by various policies, a subject I've written on for Reason.

Some of the author's suggestions seem not particularly useful. For instance:

To say that a human life is ''priceless'' does not necessarily mean that it is worth more than any amount of money. It may just mean that money is the wrong yardstick to use when our decisions involve the loss of life.

Sounds pretty, but the problem is that money is the yardstick used when we're considering the burden imposed by various regulations. Keeping our air purer or a particular place safer is costly. We don't, and shouldn't, ignore that when deciding how much safety we want. So at the end of the day, we are asking a question about dollar values: How much are we willing to spend on that marginal life saved?

Still, it does seem like a straight cost-benefit analysis elides some important distinctions. Consider highway safety vs. air purity. Everyone has to breathe air, whether they want to or not. People presumably knowingly assume some level of risk when they get in their cars—it seems appropriate to weigh this in, to be willing to bear a greater cost to spare those who have no choice about whether to subject themselves to risks.

Some other interesting points: We have a "discount rate" on future lives, analogous to that of money. But the discounting of money is an individual cognitive bias; it's not at all clear that it's appropriate to discount future lives in the same way, except to the extent that consequences far in the future are always less certain and therefore a somewhat less sound basis for forming current policy. Perhaps most interesting, though, is the closing sentence:

Even the most ardent cost-benefit analyst would spend more money to rescue a single actual child than to save 10 ''statistical lives.''

As a psychological observation, that seems plausible on face, although I wonder: Monetary values for a human life range from about $3-6 million. Do we spend $6 million to treat mortal but curable illnesses? Do countries with socialized healthcare do this? But let's assume it's true. Is it rational? Those ten "statistical lives" are usually projections, but imagine in a particular case that you're all but certain some regulation would save about that many—maybe 8 or 9, maybe 11 or 12, but about that—does it really make sense to say you should spend more than your upper bar for that regulation to save a known person? Emotionally, it seems more urgent when you've got a specific person in front of you, but it's not clear why that's particularly rational or moral. Imagine you're choosing between two societies, each of which will tax you the same amount for public safety purposes. The former seeks to maximize statistical lives saved per dollar, the latter focuses on saving particular, known victims. Is there any reason you'd rather live in the second, from the perspective of maximizing your benefit in a quasi-Veil of Ignorance sense? It's hard to see one. Prospectively, they're all "statistical lives". And ex-ante, it's always particular individuals who live or die.

 

Pointless Yet Hilarious Time-Wasting Link

3/27/2004 | link

Jesse Walker just passed this bottom-ten-worst-album-covers list along, and all I can say is, don't click through at work... I just spent about 10 minute howling like a loon; I assume my housemates think I've lost it.

 

It's Official

3/26/2004 | link

My New Jersey driver's licence was about to expire, and so today I finally got myself a Washington, DC, license. An amusing testament to the psychic power of state documentation, even for a libertarian, is that despite having lived here for almost two years now, despite having a lease on a house in the district until at least the end of 2004, it was this that finally left me feeling as though I was a DC-person. (Even though, some months ago, I caught myself referring to the subway in Manhattan as the "metro"—already a tourist again!)

Two side benifits are that my name on this license now reads "Miguel F. Julian Sanchez" (the previous one read only Miguel F. Sanchez, leading occasionally to problems since all my other stuff, including credit cards, says Julian) and that the picture no longer shows me with hair down to my shoulders and a goatee, which was different enough from how I currently look to elicit the occasional suspicious look from bouncers and barkeeps.

 

If It Quacks Like a Duck...

3/26/2004 | link

So there's an Orkut community called Outsourcing Backlash [Orkut account required] that describes itself as:

A community for those who believe unmitigated outsourcing and unbalanced international trade is bad for America, and for those who object to being labeled as "isolationist" and "protectionist" for those beliefs.

Ok, I'll buy that with respect to "isolationist" (a term I seldom hear bandied about vis a vis economics anyway, probably because nobody is...) but according to Merriam Webster, a protectionist is:

an advocate of government economic protection for domestic producers through restrictions on foreign competitors

and protection here means:

the freeing of the producers of a country from foreign competition in their home market by restrictions (as high duties) on foreign competitive goods

So there are two possibilities here. One is that they're saying they don't like outsourcing, but that this dislike has no public policy implications. That seems unlikely. The other is that they just don't understand what a "protectionist" is, and that they're it. Still, as I've noted before, nice to see that protectionist has come close enough being seen as a synonym for mouth breathing troglodyte that even folks who aren't sure what it means don't want to be branded one.

 

Law and Aesthetics

3/26/2004 | link

Will notes a creative writing contest centering on the (fictional) discipline of Law and Aesthetics. But it occurs to me that, actually, the major theories advanced to offer an account of "what art is" (at least as I've understood them from Will, who's teaching aesthetics at Howard U. this semester) parallel reasonably closely the major theories of jurisprudence. Various candidates make the sine qua non of art the public meaning of or reaction to a piece, others focus on authorial intent, others place great weight on whether an object exhibits "significant form", still others on the situation of a piece relative to various "artworld" institutions. This is a fairly superficial intuition, but it'd be interesting to see if the objections to and motivations behind each of the various theories in law and aesthetics show a deeper parallel structure.

 

Serfdom's Receding Horizon

3/25/2004 | link

Y'know, this TCS piece gets at something I've been thinking throughout the Road to Serfdom 60th-aniversary hoopla. (In D.C. libertarian circles, anyway, there's hoopla.) Because everyone seems to want to say that the book is just as relevant, or even more relevant, than when it was published. And it clearly just isn't. Look, I love me some Hayek. And a lot of the insights in RTS, about the impossibility of economic planning and the dynamics of economic regulation more generally, are still vital and useful. But the central thesis—that "mixed economy" style regulation leads inexorably to full-blown despotism, is by this point pretty clearly false. What actually seems to happen is that policy gets dumber and dumber, then eventually someone like Hayek comes along, and we roll it back to a slightly-less-dumb point. Now, there's an observed "ratchet effect" here, where the rollback never brings you quite to the previous level. Does that mean we eventually get to tyranny? I wouldn't rule it out a priori, but it seems like there's a healthy enough feedback dynamic that it's not, so to speak, a historical inevitability.

 

Something Fell

3/25/2004 | link

Seems everyone, most recently colleague Brian Doherty in The American Spectator, is offering muted congratulations to Dave Sim on the publication of the final, 300th issue of Cerebus, completing a comic book story that began some two years before I was born. Many of the comments are in the same vein as those of (the very talented) Warren Ellis:

A testament to utter determination and vision. I mean, it pretty clearly drove the guy insane, but it's an astonishing achievement.

And there's the rub. Looking at the final years of Cerebus, longtime fans must feel a bit like the audience at the Homer Simpson/Mel Gibson remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, in which the ending is changed to a standard Hollywood action flick bloodbath. The early story arcs—High Society, Church and State I and II, Jaka's Story—are some of the best comic book storytelling you'll ever find on paper; alternately poignant and hilariously satirical. The Mothers and Daughters arc (split over four smaller compilation books) is still astonishingly good, though in retrospect it marks the beginning of the book's transformation into a soapbox for the ham-handed exposition of Sim's religious and political views—perhaps ironic when one considers that the previous arc, Melmoth, was a fictionalized retelling of Oscar Wilde's final days. Most people seem to object to this turn on the grounds that Sim's views are regarded as misogynistic. And they are, but the real problem is that they made the book increasingly uninteresting. Instead of a triumphant climax to a long and brilliant run, the last couple of years of Cerebus provided something akin to the unseemly spectacle of an aging rocker squeezing himself into leather pants that had long since ceased to fit. In issue 300, which I've not yet read (I suppose, mostly out of nostalgia, I will), Cerebus finally dies. It's sad to think that, at this point, it's a mercy killing.

 

Efficient Critiques

3/22/2004 | link

I'm as apalled as anyone by Noam Chomsky's apologies for people like Pol Pot, but I think Pejman Yousefzadeh is off base in this TechCentralStation piece, which takes the linguist-cum-radical-pundit to task for focusing on perceived U.S. wrongdoing when there are so many indisputably heinous abusers of human rights out there. I don't want to defend Chomsky per se, but the idea that it's not morally odious for, let's say, an American writer to focus on abuses of his own government rather than the worst regimes out there.

Chomsky's two part defense of this behavior is that, first, as a citizen of the U.S. he feels a special responsibility to comment on his own government and, second, that there is little benefit to attacking one's country's "official enemies"—Kim Jong Il or Osama bin Laden, say—when, after all, everyone already believes that they're odious.

Pejman argues that this implies a double standard, since folks on Chomsky's side aren't about to criticize Arundhati Roy for writing about the U.S., though she's an Indian citizen. But, of course, Chomsky's claim wasn't that non citizens shouldn't write about the U.S.—he brought up citizenship as part of the reason that he does. The notion that there's a double standard present requires misreading an "If P, then Q" as "If not P, then not Q," which, as any good logician will tell you, are not equivalent.

Anyway, it's the two reasons together that Chomsky's citing as grounds for his focus, and unless I've missed something, the U.S. is not one of the "official enemies" of India. The real test is what Chomsky & co. would say about, say, an intellectual in some despotic regime in the Arab world criticizing the U.S. (already widely enough despised), even if accurately, rather than focusing on domestic iniquity.

One last point worth mentioning, and one I've made before, is that it's rational enough to spend your intellectual energy where you think it might do some good. Western democracies much less likely than genuine tyrannies to commit really egregious violations of rights, but they're also far more likely to feel pressed to respond when the media or intellectuals are appalled by something they've done. Let's say Kim Jong Il is the worst bastard on the planet: Is it a good use of a writer's time to rail agianst his latest crime? Well, probably it's good that someone do it, as a reminder... but everyone already thinks KJI is the worst bastard on the planet, and KJI seems notably unconcerned.

 

Serious Spandex

3/22/2004 | link

Jim Henley has written a great piece on the status of the superhero story in American letters.

 

RFC

3/19/2004 | link

Constructive critiques from anyone who attended the Hipublicans panel this week are appreciated.

 

Fun with Hair Splitting

3/19/2004 | link

Matt Yglesias has a post where he says that slippery slope arguments are often "logically" false but "empirically" correct. This gives me an opportunity to highlight a minor argumentative pet peeve of mine: the conflation of reductio arguments and slippery slope arguments, which are related but distinct—and I think it's a distinction worth preserving.

The reductio ad absurdum is related to a familiar form of proof in logic: You make an assumption and then derive from it a contradiction or a known falsehood by a series of valid inferences. The assumption is then disproved. A typical reductio shows that the principle according to which one would support, say, policy X is also an equally compelling reason to support policy Y, where policy Y is taken to be self-evidently misguided or horrible. So, for instance, pro-lifers will often argue that if you support late term abortion, that because there's almost no functional difference between an 8 month fetus and a newborn, you must also support infanticide, which is clearly awful. (I offer this argument as an example; I don't mean to endorse it.) The argument being advanced is not (usually) that we will one day be killing newborns if we accept late abortion, merely that there would be no consistent reason to oppose the latter and not the former. Usually, though, these arguments serve mostly as starting points or intuition pumps to get us to see what's wrong with the underlying principle, since if policy Y really is so awful and logically equivalent to X, then it should be at least possible to condemn X on its own terms.

The slippery slope argument, as Matt notes, is not a logical but a sociological claim. We can recognize that one can perfectly consistently support, say, a form of national ID with various forms of privacy protection built in without also supporting various more intrusive measures. Probably almost nobody would regard such a position as incoherent on its own terms. But civil libertarians might nonetheless say that a national ID (or any number of other such measures) create an institutional structure that's rife for abuse, or cause people to be psychologically acclimated to being tracked that opens the door to more objectionable measures.

I waste this much space on a simple distinction only because I feel as though I occasionally see people talking past each other because it's not clear which form of argument is being advanced. It might be useful, for the sake of clarity, for people to briefly state, when deploying either form of argument, which they intend. (They may intend both, of course.)

 

Law and Demonomics

3/19/2004 | link

Jon Rowe notes a decision in an intellectual property case [PDF] that pitts comics legends Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane against each other. In addition to whatever legal interest the case may offer, you also get to read Judge Richard Posner explicate—quite accurately—the origin story of Spawn. So now, in addition to law and economics, he's added fandom to his stable of expertises? I'm impressed...

 

New at Reason

3/17/2004 | link

Appease this.

 

Let Me Count the Ways—#1,276

3/17/2004 | link

Birthday present from the Sexy Economist™: This framed poster of "The Prisoner," signed by Patrick McGoohan! And she made an indescribably tasty kiwi-strawberry cheesecake. I think this must explain my affinity for theories of justice that don't put too much emphasis on desert... (err, moral desert, not the cheescake kind).

/archives

Comments by YACCS