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There was a story on NPR about a program in Texas to decentralize border patrol efforts. Texas sheriffs are webcasting their surveillance cameras to the website bluservo.net where private citizens can login, monitor the video stream and report any suspicious activity they see.
Putting aside the political dimension of this, I see it as an interesting case study in open-source security. In the realm of computer network security, there is a debate about openness vs “security by obscurity.” For example, we may debate whether an open-source operating system like Linux is more or less secure than closed-source Windows. On the one hand, the security measures are in plain view for all the black-hats to see and try to circumvent. On the other hand, the openness enables the enourmous community of white hats to fix whatever problems they find. Which effect dominates?
The Texas sheriffs apparently side with the open-source community on this one. They seem not to be worried that the black-hat coyotes will use these cameras to figure out where to cross the border without being seen.
The federal government owns preferred stock in many of the banks it has bailed out. According to the NYT, it is thinking about converting this preferred stock to common stock. The article also claims that this reduces the need for a further capital infusion and hence the need to go back to a feisty Congress for more money.
How could that be? Isn’t the re-labeling of stocks going to leave banks with exactly the same amount of capital and not change anything? This is just rearranging chairs on the Titanic.
The key sentence is the article is:
The administration said in January that it would alter its arrangement with Citigroup by converting up to $25 billion of preferred stock, which is like a loan, to common stock, which represents equity.
Preferred stock used to recapitalize banks does not come with voting rights but does come with a compulsory dividend. It is 5% now and rises to 9% after five years. In that sense, the preferred stock are more like debt that equity. There is a risk that a bank defaults on this in the same way it could default to other debt holders. Converting it to common stock implies the government gets voting rights but gives up the dividend. This reduces the payments the bank has to make on a regular basis and hence makes it more liquid. This appears to be the main idea. It is good for the banks as their debt obligations are reduced. It makes it more likely they survive.
What about taxpayers? They are taking on more risk as their stake is more junior than before. There are two countervailing effects. First, maybe the probability of bankruptcy goes down as a result of this so the risk goes down. Second, the initial decision to acquire preferred stock may have been politically expedient in which case it did not maximize shareholder/taxpayer value. There is the perception of a big political cost of being seen to nationalize banks. The initial plan reflected this political constraint. This plan is a move to pay this cost to avoid the new political constraint, the cost of going to Congress. So, maybe the Congress constraint is helping Obama to move to the economic optimum from the constrained political optimum as one political constraint cancels out the other.
“If [the spammers] are really able to write a programme to read distorted text, great – they have solved an AI problem,” says von Ahn. The criminal underworld has created a kind of X prize for OCR.
Reading the ubiquitous CAPTHCAs (those smeared words that are often impossible for even humans to read) is a big incentive to design new optical character recognition algorithms. I don’t understand the article’s connection to “Turing tests” but the economics are interesting. Spam is an inefficient way to provide incentives for research, it would be better to just use cash. But since they are going to try to spam us anyway (the cash just adds to the incentive), we might as well keep the cash and reward them with spam.
That’s the position of an editorialist writing in the Washington Post. The author is a tenured professor so this is not an attack from the outside. He argues that tenure continues to be an important safeguard of academic freedom but that
…the system has turned the academy into one of the most conservative and costly institutions in the country. Yes, conservative: Economists joke that their discipline advances one funeral at a time, but many fields must wait for wholesale generational turnover before new approaches take hold.
The system also hamstrings younger untenured professors, making them fearful of taking intellectual risks and causing them to write in jargon aimed only at those in their narrow subdiscipline: Thus in economics, people have “utility functions” instead of needs and wants.
Tenure is indeed important for academic freedom. I have seen a few cases in which tenure insulated from public pressure academics who expressed controversial views. However, in my opinion this is a small part of the benefit of the tenure system and in fact the editorial has it backward.
It is true that academia is conservative. But by merely observing that
- We have tenure
- We are conservative
it does not follow that 1 implies 2. Without tenure it would be even worse. Basic research occurs in universities because there is a missing market: it is too difficult to guage its benefits in the short-run. This is often true even for insiders within the field, let alone outsiders who would make hiring, firing, and promotion decisions based on published research. Without a good measure of successful research, these decisions would be based on litigatable bright-line criteria which would create greater distortions in research than tenure has. Witness that a professor of political economy would judge economists for using “utility functions.”
Indeed, the author makes exactly my point with the example of untenured professors. Only untenured professors face the prospect of having their research evaluated for promotion. They understand very well the incentives this creates. Unfortunately there must be one such evaluation period. Tenure ensures that there is at most one, and that it is as short as possible.
That’s a line from a crucial moment in the play Art by Yazmina Reza. I saw the play at the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago last week. This was one of the best plays I have seen there in my 10 years as a subscriber (putting aside August: Osage County which is in another category altogether.) Highly recommended.
But it is not for everybody. Sandeep wouldn’t like it for example (then again as documented previously on this blog Sandeep has bad taste.) I wanted to write a review to give a sense of who might like the play and I spent some time thinking about how to convey that, but a conventional review failed to materialize. After a while I realized that the right way to review it is in the form of a dialog between the characters in the play.
There are three characters: Serge, a dilettante who has created some buzz with a painting he just bought, Marc, a friend who is having a difficult time articulating his reaction to said painting, and Yvan who is helplessly caught in the middle. Hit the link below for the review.
Family conversation at restaurant:
Wife: …her husband is a political scientist at U of C.
Son (7 years old): What is a political scientist?
Wife: Your father can answer that question better.
Me: Well, scientists who are physicists study physics. Chemists study chemistry and political scientists study politics.
Son: Oh, so they’re not really scientists.
Wife and I fall about laughing.
Me to son: Why do you say that? What do they do?
Son: They study votes and stuff like pollsters. That’s not science.
Out of the mouths of children…..
(True story, I swear. Have yet to have a long conversation about economists.)
- Justice Stevens rules for the Earl of Oxford.
- What doesn’t taste good with bacon.
- In defense of puns.
The American Economic Association will begin awarding the Clark Medal every year rather than every other year as it has done since the prize was founded. Because the prize can be given only to an economist under 40, this raises the interesting question of who would have won in the off-years in the past had the prize always been annual. David Warsh comes up with a pretty good list.
Note that if it appears to you that the runners-up in recent years don’t match up to the heavyweight rejects from past years (Lucas, Tirole, etc.) keep in mind that the more time has passed the more hindsight plays a role. In 15 years time the true heavyweights of today will be revealed.
The Bad Plus is a unique piano trio that straddles jazz, rock, and classical and at their best combines all three. In their most recent album, For All I Care, they are joined by vocalist Wendy Lewis who sings on a number of rock covers. (Here was my review of the album.) Wendy Lewis is joining them on their current tour and Sandeep and I saw their Chicago show at the Old Town School of Folk Music on Friday 4/17 (the early show at 8PM.)
The show began with the trio alone playing some older tunes as well as the three classical pieces on For All I Care, Stravinsky’s Variation d’Appollon, Ligety’s Fem, and Semi-Simple Variations by Milton Babbitt. This was an enjoyable mini-set and worth the price of admission, although in my opinion the band was not in top form. The pianist Ethan Iverson was having somewhat of an off-night and failed to find the main groove on the improvised parts of “You Are” and “Dirty Blonde.” His trademark foundation-shifting flourishes lose their punch without a smooth and deliberate buildup from the point of departure. On the other hand, the classical pieces were all very tight and were the highlight of the show. There was one new tune, an Ethan Iverson composition entitled “Bill Hickman at Home.” This was a blues number with a very nice extended bass solo from Reid Anderson and some great playing from Iverson too.
Wendy Lewis joined halfway through the set and the band began with Lithium which also opens the album. She successfully navigated the tempo changes that add an additional slant to the Nirvana original and her usual flat delivery worked well in this tune as it did for Kurt Cobain. Up next was the Yes classic Long Distance Runaround, another very clever arrangement in which the jazzy instrumental part dissolves into a slow backdrop for Lewis’ powerful vocals. Unfortunately these were the last successful combinations until the fiery encore of Barracuda which was also the best tune on the album. The pretty chorus on Wilco’s Radio Cure could not recover from the dull, almost spoken-word delivery of the opening verses. (Fortunately, at the end of the song the trio left her behind with a searching group-improvisation that began with drummer Dave King mysteriously massaging his skins with his elbow, built up to Iverson’s hands flying all over the keyboard and finished with a very satisfied audience.)
The next tune, Blue Velvet (not on the album) was a puzzling choice. Wendy Lewis is a skillful vocalist and she can sing big on tunes like Barracuda, but her voice is not right for this song: too flat and emotionless. Finally, Comfortably Numb is one of the strong points of the album but on stage it was straightforward, uninspired rendition.
The Bad Plus are making some of the most innovative music in jazz today. They are to be commended for experimenting, however in my opinion this experiment did not pay off. I am looking forward to the next one.
The Soviet Union has collapsed. Karl Marx is read mainly in Comparative Literature Departments. You may think class war is no more.
You’d be wrong.
The Taliban are the new Bolsheviks, the new Lenins. Marx wanted communist revolutionaries to exploit class war. Persuade and provoke the proletariat to overthrow capitalists living off the surplus of labor. It is a strategy desgined for a capitalist society. Rural Pakistan has not reached that level of development and is largely a feudal society. The Taliban have simply taken Marxist strategy and applied it to this more primitive society. They are pitting the rural population against their landlords. The landlords are fleeing, their lives in peril. Their land is redistributed to their workers by the Taliban. In return, the Taliban impose Islamic Law and get a share of any profits. Not the outcome Marx envisaged. Power to the Taliban not Power to the People.
What does the future hold? The Taliban have taken control of Swat using this strategy. They might extend it into Punjab Province. And who kows where it goes from there. Pakistan, a nuclear state, is frightening. It’s hard to know what to do. Land reform for the peasants seem to be the least aggressive option. This would make them less amenable to joining the Taliban. Helping the Pakitani army fight the insurgents is a more aggressive policy. This could easily backfire amd draw more support for the insurgents.
The Navy Seals should be training to take over nuclear bunkers as well as shoot Somali pirates.
You may have seen in the news that Ashton Kutcher was trying to sign up 1,000,000 Twitter followers and in order to make that goal he offered the 1,000,000th follower a copy of the game Guitar Hero. This is not a very good mechanism because the optimal strategy it induces is not to sign up (until 999,999 others do, which will not happen because they are also waiting.) Here is a story about the Kutcher mechanism. (thanks to Joe Spanier and Toomas Hinnosaar for the pointer.)
A better mechanism is the following. Set a deadline, say midnight. If at midnight there are fewer than 1,000,000 followers then each of the existing followers wins a prize and the prize that the nth follower wins is decreasing in n. Thus, the 1st follower gets a larger prize than the 2nd which is larger than the 3rd, etc. On the other hand, if before midnight the number of followers reaches 1,000,000, then give only the 1,000,000th follower a prize. And it can be a very small prize.
In this mechanism, there is no incentive to wait to sign up and as a result the goal is guaranteed to be reached and the beautiful twist is that the only prize given out is the small prize to the 1,000,00th.
Coincidentally, just last week (before the Kutcher thing) I played this game with my intermediate microeconomics students where my goal was to sign up 150 followers in 2 days. I offered prizes ranging from $40 for the first follower down to $10 for the 149th follower and $1 to the 150th follower if I made my goal. If you look at the sidebar to this blog (scroll down on the left) and click through to my twitter page, you can see how I did.
Ever notice that food tastes better when your spouse cooked it (controlling for talent of course)? Why do leftovers often taste better than when the food was fresh? I believe the same phenomenon explains both of these.
A large part of tasting is actually smelling. You can verify this by, for example, eating an onion with your nose plugged. Our sense of smell tends to filter out persistent smells after being exposed to them for awhile so that we cannot smell them anymore. This means that when you are cooking in the kitchen, surrounded by the aromas of your food, you are quickly de-sensitised to them. Then when you sit down to eat, it is like tasting without smelling.
When your spouse has done the cooking you were likely in another room, isolated from the aromas. When you walk into the kitchen to eat, you get to smell and taste the food at the same time. That’s why it tastes better to you. The same idea applies to leftovers. It takes much less time to reheat leftovers than it took to prepare the food in the first place so you retain sensitivity to more of the aromas when it comes time to eat.
I believe that when recipes direct you to “allow the food to rest so that the flavors can combine” what is really happening is that you are induced to leave the kitchen and return with a renewed sensitivity. This also explains why dinners which you spent all day preparing are often disappointments. And it implies that when you have guests over for dinner you should entertain them outside of the kitchen so that they will enjoy the food more when it is ready.
I lost count.
Presumably the copyeditor at MSNBC is soon to be out of a job (via the Browser.)
There’s a serious answer to this question. Something to do with inheritance tax, going on leave abroad…but you’re not going to get that answer here!
When I first moved to the U.S, I arrived in Boston. Californians told me native Bostonians had a weird accent. I could hear a small difference but not large enough to really notice. Now, I think the accent is weird and exotic. It sounds British! I guess I’m a foreigner everywhere. Maybe it’s time to become a citizen?
Less elegant than its counterpart in Cambridge, the branch of the Elephant Walk in Boston did not disappoint. There was a Dilbert-worthy business hard sell going on at an adjacent table. We split water on our table. Despite all that, we enjoyed the excellent food. What’s in those wonderful deep fried spring rolls? My Mee Siem noodles were fantastic. We all had them so I can’t recommend any other dishes! Just go if you’re in the neighborhood.
It may be the biggest moment “for potty parity that we have seen, to have two big facilities open at the same time, and all these restrooms open at once,” said Kathryn Anthony, a professor of architecture at the University of Illinois and a board member of the American Restroom Association.
The new Yankee Stadium and Mets’ ballpark will adhere to new laws in place in New York City requiring two women’s toilets for every one men’s toilet. Read about it here in the New York Times (via The Browser.) Empirically, a woman’s visit to the stall lasts twice as long as a man’s on average so the ordinance is intended to equalize waiting times for men and women. A few thoughts come to mind (double-entendres noted in parentheses).
- This will actually overshoot (!). The waiting times will be equalized only at times of peak demand when queuing occurs. If women have more stalls than men, they will queue less often. As a result average waiting times will be lower for women than for men.
- We should not be equating waiting times anyway, we should equate the marginal cost of an additional fixture relative to the resulting reduction in average waiting times. Urinals are cheaper than stalls.
- There is a moral hazard problem coupled with an externality that is not being taken into account. When queuing is a possibility, the patron trades-off the instantaneous urgency versus the alternative of waiting for off-peak moments, for example avoiding the seventh-inning stretch. If prices could be charged, Ramsey pricing would dictate that prices would be positive only at times of peak-load (!). This is to encourage the less urgent to wait for the off-peak reducing the externality imposed on others. When prices cannot be charged, some level of congestion will be part of a second-best (number two !) incentive instrument.
- In queuing problems in general, it is efficient to first serve those whose needs require the shortest use of the facility because they impose the least externality on others. This principle points toward disparity in favor of men.
- I hope they have looked into this.
In Evanston, the location of your residence determines which school your kids attend. In Boston and Cambridge, there is a lottery system that determines where your kids end up. You list schools in order of preference. If your first choice is oversubscribed, you get to try for your second choice. But, at this point, people who listed your second choice as first are ahead of you. This gives you the incentive to lie and perhaps put your true second choice as your first. Because of these problems, Boston has changed its system to one that is resistant to such gaming (Al Roth, his students and co-authors have been at the forefront of this research and its application).
There is one other issue. An obvious response to this lottery is just to get out. Go to a suburb with better public schools where you are not subject to the random outcome of this strategic casino game. The price you pay is extra property tax. Or you might like living in cosmopolitan Boston or university-rich Cambridge. Welcome to suburbia, former bohemian. What impact does this have in the city you left behind? I guess richer people leave. Or people who do not get their first choice, presumably the best school in everyone’s ranking. The more concerned parents are about education, the greater will be their outflow.
I guess it actually requires a model to work out the equilibrium impact on the quality of students left in each locale. It would be surprising if it resulted in higher quality students in Casino School Districts.
Robert Akerlof, the son of Nobel Laureate economist George Akerlof, was on the economics PhD job market this year from Harvard. It raises the question of which academic disciplines are the most recurrent within families. I see two arguments about the heridity of economics.
On the positive side, economics is a language and framework for thinking about things that come up in everyday life. It will be more natural and common for an economist parent to explain economic concepts to their kids than it would be for parents in other disciplines, even other social sciences. On top of that, being an economist probably shapes one’s style of parenting more than being, say, a chemist does and so there is an additional, covert, channel of transmission.
On the negative side, I sometimes think that what inspires someone to go for a PhD in some discipline is when they discover that it allows them to organize and understand things in a new way. If a child is raised to think like an economist at an early age, they will never have this kind of revelatory moment and so may never feel drawn to economics as an academic discipline.
Finally, the question of heredity conditions on the child going to academia at all. It could be that having parents who are economists make you less likely to get any sort of advanced degree.
It would be interesting to see the data.
It is back. Production was legalized in the US in 2007 after being banned for nearly a century based on bogus claims of psychedelic properties. The marquee ingredient in absinthe is wormwood but it typically includes other herbs such as anise and fennel. Out of the bottle it is clear, but the spirit is prepared by dropping in a cube of sugar which then drives the herb particulates out of solution producing the famous green haze. It is usually then diluted with 3 to 5 parts water but it is also a key ingredient in some cocktails. The most famous is the Sazerac, a classic from New Orleans.
The last time I was in New Orleans, absinthe was not yet widely marketed and the Sazerac was still being made with the substitute spirit Herbsaint. Did you ever notice that Herbsaint is nearly an anagram for Absinthe? I don’t think its a coincidence. But I think they missed a big chance with Thesbian. Like Herbsaint, its not a word (clearly it should be) but its an exact anagram.
Here is a recipe for a sazerac from wikipedia:
One old fashioned glass is packed with ice. In a second old fashioned glass, a sugar cube and 3 dashes of Peychaud’s Bitters are muddled. The Rye Whiskey is then added to the sugar/Bitters mixture. The ice is emptied from the first old fashioned glass and the Absinthe is poured into the glass and swirled to coat the sides of the glass. Any excess Absinthe is discarded. The Rye-Sugar-Bitters mixture is then poured into the Absinthe coated glass and the glass is garnished with a lemon peel.
Here is Gary Vaynerchuck tasting and reviewing three absinthe brands.
It’s Sunday morning. You are reading the Week in Review section of the New York Times and realize piracy still exists in the twenty-first century. Who would have thought it? The Travel Section leaves you a bit wistful as you realize how many interesting places in the world you’ll never visit. Now you pack like a small army because you have two young children. You wish you had done the Inca Trail in 1987 when you went to Peru. That might have invited a kidnapping at the hands of the Sendero Luminoso, but maybe that’s better than grad school?
You hear the sound of Lego and see your kids building the John Hancock Building out of Lego. You smile, thinking, “The Inca Trail can never compare to the joy I just felt seeing the kids playing together so happily.” You turn to the crossword puzzle. Your reverie comes to a screaming end as a fight breaks out behind you. Who got one of diagonal bits that criss-cross the Hancock a bit wonky? You will never know but each kid blames the other.
What to do?
The situation reminds you of the famous Moral Hazard in Teams paper by Bengt Holmstrom. Someone clearly did not exert the cooperative effort level. But you cannot tell who it was as there is no kid-specific signal, just the aggregate signal of the building falling over and the fight. First, you think that you should be fair and punish a child if and only if the weight of evidence is high. You realize you’re screwed as you never have that level of evidence. You could ask the children what happened and cross-check what one did against the other. In fact, this would give an opportunity to apply your own research and you’re excited about that. It dawns on you that the 8 year old can always out-lie the 4 year old. And the volume of the four year old’s cries is measured on the Richter scale. Your research obviously did not take account of these practical matters.
Incentive theory gives the obvious answer: punish them both. This works very well if there is nothing random that can cause the building to fall over. Then, each child knows they get punished if they start fighting so no-one fights as long as the punishment is big enough. If a fight can start randomly – and we parents know this can happen – sometimes you’ll punish them even though nothing truly bad happened. This is unfair and inefficient but what can you do? This second-best solution is still better than no incentives at all.
Briefly, you think about the theory of repeated games which claims to get cooperation even when the game is quite noisy and there is lots of private information about who did what to whom. You remember that Jeff has made important contributions to this theory. You use your common sense and decide that using his research might take the application of game theory to family life a little bit too far. You get up, confiscate the Lego and send the kids to their room to get out of their pajamas and put clothes on. The ultimate punishment. The lovely mother of your lovely children has solved the crossword puzzle by the time you’re done. Bugger.
On Friday the 13th of February, the City of Chicago saw the first of a planned series of parking meter rate hikes which will eventually quadruple the hourly parking rate in the downtown area. This is happening because last year the City of Chicago sold the cash flow from parking fees for approximately $1 billion to a private investment fund. (No doubt soon to be securitized and tranched into Meter-Backed Securities. Quick: tell me how to price CDS protection against the event that Daley renegs once the billion is spent.)
The deal enables Chicago Parking LLC to raise fees according to a set schedule over the next ten years. After that, further rate increases must be approved by the City Council. The contract expires in 75 years.
Why would the City go for such a deal? Yes it is starved for cash and parking meters currently hard-wired at 50 cents an hour in most of the city are long overdue for an uptick. But this just argues for a fee increase, it doesnt explain why the meters should be privatized.
The economics of privatization are straightforward in this case. The city seeks bids for the parking meter cash flow. A bidder offers an upfront payment and a schedule for price increases. The upfront payment will be no less than the present value of the cash flow as determined by the new prices. Competition will ensure that the payment will be exactly this cash flow. This means that the high bidder will be the one who demands a price that maximizes the present value of cash flows. In other words, the monopoly price.
Remember from your textbook microeconomics that the monopoly price is associated with inefficiently low quantity. Zero marginal cost doesnt make this any less damaging, in fact it implies that on many streets there will be empty spaces all day long. Cozy, inviting parking spaces will be utilized by nobody.
Again the city could set the monopoly price on its own, so we still have the puzzle of why, if the City is willing to allow monopoly pricing it has to use a private entity as its agent. The answer is not because the City wants its cash up front. Apparently it does want its cash up front but it could always just borrow against the parking cash flows.
The only answer I can come up with is a commitment problem. The City could certainly borrow against the cash flows and set the monopoly price but then the City itself would be the target of the uproar that will soon occur when drivers in the city realize that their cars are now worthless. The political pressure would force the fees to be kept low and the City would then have to find another way to finance its parking debt. In fact, foreseeing this, no lender would be willing to lend the full present value of monopoly cash flows.
By contractually delegating the fee-setting to a private agent, the City effectively commits never to lower fees so that the monopoly cash flow is guaranteed and the City can extract it all in an upfront payment.
From Coffee Culture, Jerry Baldwin’s blog at The Atlantic:
A few specialty roasters in the US have begun to experiment with putting robusta into their espresso blends. The typical reasons are to make it more like Italian blends or make a thicker crema. I do understand the preference for the texture of a good crema, but I don’t understand sacrificing flavor to achieve it.
whoa, I thought I was a coffee snob but I never would have thought to ask the robusta question. Wikipedia says this about robusta:
[Robusta] is easier to care for than the other major species of coffee, Coffea arabica, and, because of this, is cheaper to produce. Since arabica beans are considered superior, robusta is usually limited to lower grade coffee blends as a filler. It is however often included in instant coffee, and in espresso blends to promote the formation of “crema“. Robusta has about twice as much caffeine as arabica.
back to the Coffee Culture article:
Why try to make espresso “more Italian” when specialty roasters in Italy are either abandoning robusta completely or have developed 100 percent arabica blends at the top of their product range? Torrefazione Mexico in Milan, Illycaffe in Trieste, and Caffe Kimbo in Naples are just a few of countless roasters who are 100 percent arabica or, “prefer the excellence of a 100 % arabica blend,” as Kimbo says on its website. Even Lavazza, the Folgers of Italy, has 100 percent arabica blends that are at the high end of their offerings.
Lavazza: the Folgers of Italy. (cap tap: The Browser.)
I collect examples of Kludges. Luis Rayo has sent me a very nice one.
In mammals, for instance, the recurrent laryngeal nerve does not go directly from the cranium to the larynx, the way any competent engineer would have arranged it. Instead, it extends down the neck to the chest, loops around a lung ligament and then runs back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe, that means a 20-foot length of nerve where 1 foot would have done. If this is evidence of design, it would seem to be of the unintelligent variety.
Apparently, some evolutionary biologists take this to be evidence of our fish ancestry.
“The circuitous path of the left recurrent laryngeal nerve in humans is evidence for their evolution from a fishlike ancestor… because the nerve remained behind this arch but still connected to a structure on the neck, it was forced to evolve a pathway that travels down to the chest, loops around the aorta and the remnants of the sixth aortic arch, and then travels back up to the larynx. The indirect path does not reflect intelligent design but can be understood only as the product of our evolution from ancestors having very different bodies.”
The latter quote is from “Why Evolution is True” by Jerry A. Coyne.
1001. One to change the lightbulb; the other 1000 to hold everything else constant.
(hat tip: tomas sjostrom)
Legalization of marijuana has gained some momentum recently in terms of conspicuous support in the press, expansion of medical marijuana freedoms, and relaxation of enforcement (see especially this article.) The argument is often made that the tremendous expense in terms of lives and money of the war on drugs does not justify whatever moral benefit there is of minimizing drug use.
But legalization would only make the drug war more costly. The reason is simple. Legalized pot does not reduce the incentive of government and its lobbyists to fight back the illegal market, in fact it only adds to that incentive.
The effort spent prosecuting the war on drugs is determined by a balance between the marginal cost of additional enforcement and the marginal benefit of reduced consumption. When pot is illegal, that marginal benefit comes from the (perceived by lobbyists) moral and cultural virtue. When pot is legal, the marginal cost of enforcement is the same but to the moral benefit would be added the financial stake in licensing legal producers and taxing consumption.
The government’s revenue from licensing and taxation of marijuana sales relies on foreclosing the black market which would not be subject to taxation and therefore would clear at a lower price. Government policy under legalized marijuana would be shaped by basic economics. The effort in fighting the black market imposes a cost on illicit producers which acts effectively as a tax. The level of that tax determines the market price in the black market and this is the maximum price that the legal market can sustain. If we start with the level of enforcement currently in place, this translates to a certain tax revenue that the government would earn were it to legalize pot and keep enforcement at its current level.
But raising the level of enforcement would allow the government to raise taxes on the legal trade. Since the marginal cost of enforcement was already equal to the marginal benefit based on moral considerations, the additional marginal benefit from increased taxes means that the government will increase enforcement.*
If you favor legalization of marijuana for libertarian reasons (or if you are just hoping for cheaper weed), you should instead push for a relaxation of enforcement without decriminalization (as the Obama administration is reportedly acquiescing to.) Decriminalization would give the create a vested interest in the drug war that would be hard to undo.
(*Theoretically, it is possible that, say, excise tax revenue would be increased by increasing consumption at the margin rather than decreasing. This would be true only if the current level of enforcement is already holding the black market price above the monopoly price. It is hard to believe that this is true today. )
I learned to juggle 3 balls when I was about 10. Its a great trick when you are 10 but it really comes in handy when you are a parent as endless entertainment for your kids. But now mine are getting bored and they are demanding 5 balls. Juggling 5 balls is pretty close to impossible. But with a little technology, learning to juggle 5 could be easy.
What I want is a ball that is sturdy enough for juggling but can be filled with helium in varying concentrations. Juggling a helium-filled ball would be something like juggling in low gravity. Which means the balls would fall slowly and 5 balls would be easy. With just the right concentration of helium, anyone could do it. Then, the helium concentration is gradually reduced. At each step, the difficulty increases just a little bit making it easier to master juggling the heavier and heavier balls. Finally, its all atmospheric air, and you are juggling 5 balls in no time.
Mario Batali’s Simple Italian Cooking is not that simple. It’s usually way more time-consuming than he suggests. This turned out to be true of the Crespelles al Formaggio. They were delicious nonetheless and we will make them again. They went very well with this salad (we skipped the pomegranate!) and remnants of yesterday’s Pinot Noir.
Normally, my palette is not good enough to distinguish between the regular Pinot Noir and the Méthode à L’Ancienne (MA). But the 2006 MA vintage is so good that pretty much anyone can tell them apart! There’s lots of cherry, a slight acidity at the end and then the cherry comes back again. I couldn’t taste the bacon or strawberry the description mentions. Maybe I will after a few years in the bottle. It’s worth the extra ten bucks to get the MA over the regular. Navarro is one of my favorite vineyards for whites too. Check it out.
This article doesn’t answer that question, but it does explain why scratching relieves the itch. Check it out (via MindHacks). Apparently scratching turns off activity in nerve cells, but somehow the nerve cells knew you were itchy because they do not shut off in response to a scratch when you are not itchy.
Did you know that just reading about itchiness can make you itchy? Did you scratch while reading this?
Can you resist an itch until it goes away? Try it! (Deep breathing seems to make it go away faster.)
Cheap Talk 