Trying

My friend Jon and I got into a debate about what "trying" means. Another friend commented that he and his wife were not being careful about getting pregnant, but that they "weren't trying". Jon commented that if you're not actively preventing it, and you know what the consequences are, then you are, in fact, trying. The crux of Jon's argument is that there's an action that happens (sex) which has a probability of a consequence (baby). These actions and consequences are exactly the same when you're trying and when you're not actively preventing. Hence trying and not preventing are the same thing.

I disagreed, but I couldn't seem to dissuade Jon from this point of view. I argued that he was talking about responsibility, and that intent and responsibility were not linked. If two couples are both not actively preventing pregnancy, and one is trying while the other is not trying, both couples will be equally responsible if they produce a baby. If we're talking about responsibility, I completely agree with Jon. But I thought we were talking about "trying", which I don't think is the same thing.

Unfortunately, as is often the case, I came up with a much better response after the discussion was long over. When someone says "trying" they usually mean that they have a goal they wish to achieve. So if someone is "trying" to do something (including get pregnant) they are sad if they fail. When someone is "not trying" they're not sad if they fail. Imagine two couples:

Couple	Intentions	Results	Are they sad about this?
Tom & Sue	Trying	Get pregnant	No
Joe & Amy	Not trying	Get pregnant	Yes
Tom & Sue	Trying	Did not get pregnant	Yes
Joe & Amy	Not trying	Did not get pregnant	No

Look at the couples who are trying. They're satisfaction with the result is exactly the opposite of those who are not trying. So, there are differences in the results. The actions and the consequences are not exactly the same. And I think this is what our friend was trying to say. When he said, "we're not trying" I think he meant that if they don't get pregnant, they won't be sad.(*)

I understand why Jon, as a highschool teacher, makes this argument. It's meant to shock teenagers from some stupid excuse. It's meant to say that if they're not actively preventing pregnancy, they might as well be trying to get pregnant. I understand that stance. Its useful as a tool to dissuade teens who might become sexually active, or worse, become sexually active without any attempts to prevent a baby -- for which they will struggle to provide care. But I don't think that "trying" is the same thing as "not preventing". I think that's a redefinition of what most people mean when they say "trying".

(*) Ironically, when our friend asked his wife if they were "trying", she pretty much said yes. But I think my point stands despite the specific circumstances of our friends' lives.

Update:
I've added a new entry with a much better set of tables that explains what I was thinking.

Monogomous wives?

Steve Landsburg has published a book called "More Sex is Safe Sex". I found out about this from econlog. Back in January 2005, I read the article that Landsburg wrote with the same title. That article no longer appears to be available. In any case, I had some questions for him, so I sent him this email:

I just your article titled "MORE SEX IS SAFER SEX". This has produced a series of questions that I have been unable to resolve on my own, and was wondering if you could provide some insite.

In your "monogamous wives" parable you mention that all the men demand two sexual partners and all the women demand one. As a consequence, prostitution starts up, and the prostitutes end up being the source of HIV for most of the men. Basically, if any one person in this country is infected, the prostitutes turn into the transmission point to ensure that everyone in the country becomes infected.

You argue that if the women were to take another partner, then prostitution will die, and most everyone will not be infected.

1. Question 1: Doesn't this assume that the prostitutes are the source of the disease?
   

   
   As example, I offer the following image, where men are represented by letters and women are represented by numbers. A & 1 are married, B & 2 are married, etc. A line indicates that they're having sex.
   

   
   A B C D E F G H
   | | | | | | | |
   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
   

   
   If we assume that each woman's additional partner will be the husband of her neighbor to the right, then we end up with this:
   

   
   A B C D E F G H A
   |/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/
   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
   

   
   Now as soon as any one of them gets infected, all of them will get infected. There's two ways that this isn't true. The first is if one of the infected people dies before they can propagate the infection. With the effectiveness of drugs at prolonging life with HIV, that seems like a bad assumption. The second way this isn't true is if the prostitutes are the original source of the infection. At which point everyone's demands are being met and there's no impetous for an external source of infection.


2. Question 2: What if the prostitutes aren't the source of the disease?
   

   
   Using my notation above, and assuming that the prostitutes aren't the source of the disease, I can construct a similar graph which optimally limits the spread of the disease and meets the assumption of 2 partners per person:
   

   
   A B C D E F G H
   |x| |x| |x| |x|
   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
   

   
   This additionally assumes that there's an even number of couples. In this case, the best solution is a fixed "wife-swapping" scenario. Now if any one of them gets infected, the infection will spread to only 3 other people (4 total)


3. Question 3: But if that's good, then why isn't monogamy even better?
   

   
   A B C D E F G H
   | | | | | | | |
   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
   

   
   If any one of the people get infected, then the spread is limited to only one other person. Yes, in order for this to work, men need to be monogamous, which violates the assumption that all men demand at least 2 partners. But doesn't this demonstrate that such a demand is part of the problem, and that monogamy is more effective at limiting the spread of the disease?


4. Question 4: What about other complications, like having children?
   

   
   Looking at my graph from Question 1 we get:
   

   
   A B C D E F G H A
   |/|/|/|/|/|/|/|/
   1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
   

   
   Assume 16 children. The bigamist scenario is on the left and the monogamous scenario is on the right.
   

   
   A1 => boy(A1)   A1 => boy(A1)
   B1 => girl(B1)  A1 => girl(A1)
   B2 => boy(B2)   B2 => boy(B2)
   C2 => girl      B2 => girl(B2)
   C3 => boy       C3 => boy(C3)
   D3 => girl      C3 => girl(C3)
   D4 => boy       D4 => boy(D4)
   E4 => girl      D4 => girl(D4)
   E5 => boy       E5 => boy(E5)
   F5 => girl      E5 => girl(E5)
   F6 => boy       F6 => boy(F6)
   G6 => girl      F6 => girl(F6)
   G7 => boy       G7 => boy(G7)
   H7 => girl      G7 => girl(G7)
   H8 => boy       H8 => boy(H8)
   A8 => girl      H8 => girl(H8)
   

   
   Unfortunately, this bigamist scenariol creates a problem becuase the next generation has genetically close ties to more people than would be if each monogamous couple had two children, increasing the risk of birth defects in the 3rd generation. In the monogamous situation, a girl would avoid genetic problems if she avoided bearing the child of one person: her brother. But in this bigamist scenario, girl(B1) has boy(A1) as a half brother whom she has to avoid, and boy(B2) as a half brother whom she also has to avoid. Bigamy has doubled the riskiness factor for birth defects for the next generation.


5. Question 5: If we follow this through successive generations, don't we end up with a population of people who only have one safe mate in order to produce offspring? In other words, don't we end up right back at monogamy?


6. Question 6: Have I missed something fundamental that is keeping me from understanding what you're paper is saying?

I appreciate any clarity you'd be willing to provide.

Thanks,
mjh

He wrote back. He said:

Unlike some of the other arguments in the essay, the "monogamous wives" example is not meant to be terribly realistic but just to indicate, in the context of a very simple model, that certain things are logically possible.

In your question 1, the disease dies as soon as one person fails to pass it on, either through death or by missing an assignation. With the prostitutes, that's not true. And with the prostitutes, it doesn't matter where the disease starts; it still gets passed on to everyone pretty quickly.

The only point you've missed was that this particular example can yield a great variety of conclusions depending on your auxiliary assumptions (as you've shown), but the only point I was making with it was that certain conclusions are *possible*, not that they're *necessary*.

Of course other parts of the essay do make points that should hold in any model; in particular, when there are positive externalities to sexual activity, there can't be enough sexual activity without subsidies.

Perhaps I didn't understand his response, but I found it to be unsatisfactory. It seems to me that his model is unrealistic. Who cares if something is possible in a given model? If that model doesn't match reality then there's little value to the recommendations that come as a result of that model? What are the set of assumptions that are realistic? If my assumptions are closer to reality, then doesn't the recommendation that "More Sex is Safer Sex" actually hold false?

Abolish Highschool

I read an article in Education Week calling for changes to how teenagers are treated in society.

although it’s efficient to cram all apparently essential knowledge into the first two decades of life, the main thing we teach most students with this approach is to hate school. In today’s fast-paced world, education needs to be spread out over a lifetime, and the main thing we need to teach our young people is to love the process of learning.

...Are young people really inherently incompetent and irresponsible? The research I conducted with my colleague Diane Dumas suggests that teenagers are as competent as adults across a wide range of adult abilities, and other research has long shown that they are actually superior to adults on tests of memory, intelligence, and perception. The assertion that teenagers have an “immature” brain that necessarily causes turmoil is completely invalidated when we look at anthropological research from around the world. Anthropologists have identified more than 100 contemporary societies in which teenage turmoil is completely absent; most of these societies don’t even have terms for adolescence. Even more compelling, long-term anthropological studies initiated at Harvard in the 1980s show that teenage turmoil begins to appear in societies within a few years after those societies adopt Western schooling practices and are exposed to Western media. Finally, a wealth of data shows that when young people are given meaningful responsibility and meaningful contact with adults, they quickly rise to the challenge, and their “inner adult” emerges.

...We produce such turmoil by infantilizing our young and isolating them from adults. Modern schooling and restrictions on youth labor are remnants of the Industrial Revolution that are no longer appropriate for today’s world; the exploitative factories are long gone, and we have the ability now to provide mass education on an individual basis.

Teenagers are inherently highly capable young adults; to undo the damage we have done, we need to establish competency-based systems that give these young people opportunities and incentives to join the adult world as rapidly as possible.

Making the assumption that the research is true, I have two reactions to this.

1. This is appealing because
1. It's a pretty strong case for homeschooling, or in the worst case, ensuring that the schooling that your teen receives is introducing them to adulthood instead of confining them in childhood.
2. It seems to agree with Love & Logic which suggests that parental control needs to steadily decrease throughout the entire child's life and be replaced with an expectation of adult behavior.  Most people do it exactly the opposite, too little control for infants and toddlers and increasing control as the desire for independance grows.
3. It appeals to my distrust of government provided education and of government provision in general.
   
2. But it's also unappealing because I don't want to introduce my children to adult issues before it's time.  This author is arguing that the time is earlier than we think.  My immediate reaction is that we already push our kids into adulthood too early as it is, although I don't really have any supporting data that comes to mind for why I think this.
   

I think I'm going to purchase the book and read it.  I don't have a teenager but it's only a few years away.  This is the kind of thing that I want to mull over for a while before I decide whether or not I want to try and integrate it into my parenting.

Penn & Teller

Showtime has a program that I very much enjoy. It's the magician team of Penn & Teller running around debunking things that they view as wrong. It's called "Penn & Teller: Bullsh*t". I really enjoy it. It's not for the faint of heart, though. Penn Jillette is a connoisseur of profanity. Don't watch it with the kids around.

But I'm in a quandary. In 2004, they did an episode on the Bible. They presented testimony of inconsistencies and historical inaccuracies. And for the most part I can just interpret away the problems that they came up with. By this, I mean that they took a rather narrow interpretation and poked holes in it. A broader interpretation is harder to poke holes in. For example, the two creation stories in Genesis. I don't happen to believe in creationism. I happen to fall on the side of evolution as the mechanism of creation. Theistic evolution does a really good job of explaining my position. So the "conflicting" views in Genesis 1 & 2 are not that big of a problem. The main message of Genesis is that God did it. I don't seriously take the Genesis accounts as a reliable physical description of what happened.

And then there's the horror that Penn expresses when he retells the story of God killing all the first born sons in Egypt. Of course, that's a horrific event if you're convinced that this life is the only thing. It's also horrific if you think that the children are victims. But it's not so horrific if you believe that God loves those children more than their parents do. It's also not so horrific if you believe that God can call home any human at any time he pleases and that in doing so, God will treat them justly, fairly, and compassionately. Death is only the worst possible thing in the world if this is the only world there is.

I'm also reminded of Rob Bell's description of how to interpret the Bible, and what a "yoke" is. And of how we're to constantly re-evaluate the meaning of the Bible. We're to constantly say, "Hey, maybe I had that interpretation wrong." Especially when we're confronted with new truths that are blatant. All truth is God's truth. So if we see truth in the world that apparently conflicts with the Bible, it might just be that we didn't correctly interpret the Bible. It might also be that we didn't correctly evaluate the truth in the world. Nevertheless, it's freeing to realize that we're not forced to stick with Biblical interpretations that don't make sense. This is a somewhat controversial position amongst some Christians, but it really resonates with me. As a result, many of the inconsistencies presented by Penn & Teller fall under the umbrella of "You've heard it said, but I tell you..." new yoke interpretation.

Unfortunately, it gets harder to interpret away the heart of Christianity: the death and resurrection of Jesus. If that one didn't happen, then Christians everywhere can cry in their beers and go home. If Christ didn't rise, then how can we say that God defeated death? If God didn't defeat death, then how can Jesus be a savior who can take on for himself the wages of sin? How is he anything more than just a man? How can I be any better believing in his salvation for my life? In fact, if he's just a man, then I'm remarkably worse off believing this. I'll act like my eternal position is resolved when it's not.

The show does not do very much to debunk the resurrection. It simply says, that it's hard to prove. It doesn't provide any counter evidence to suggest that it's demonstrably false. But it does tell an analogous story about how, less than 3 decades after the death of Elvis, there are people insisting that they've seen him alive. And if the gospels in the Bible are all written 60-70 years after the death of Christ, it's pretty easy to see how this might just be part of the human condition that afflicts devotees of a hero.

On the other hand, I don't see any Elvis followers sticking with their stories so much so that they're willing to be executed instead of recanting, whereas most of the most influential early Christians did just that when it came to Jesus' resurrection. I also don't see anyone demanding the execution of the "Elvis lives" crowd. In any case, the Elvis analogy can only go so far.

Before I watched the episode, I whipped off a quick prayer: "Lord protect me from what might be coming. I want to watch this because I believe that all truth is your truth. Keep me focused on the truth and give me answers to Satan's intellectual temptations that I will almost certainly experience." I think He's done a pretty good job of answering that prayer. Most of this blog reports the answers that I got. But I'm still a little shaken by the experience. I find myself resonating with the comment Penn made that it's really not fair to pick and choose what you want to believe from the Bible. I wonder if all of my "interpretations" above are just fancy ways of doing that.

Still, the thought of returning to atheism holds only a minor pull with me. That pull being this: maybe it's true. The pull is slightly stronger now than it was before. But it's not nearly as strong as the pull of the community in which I now reside. It's not as strong as the realization of how much better my life is as a Christ follower than not. And that truth seems much more real to me than the possibility that atheism is true.

Witness

I had a discussion with a friend recently. I was trying to make the point that, depending on your point of view, some things that seem irrational might make sense. I don't recall the context, but the example that I came up with was the fact that I was fairly concerned about his not being a Christian.

"If you really believed in Hell, that would almost certainly motivate your behavior towards those friends of yours who you think might be headed there. Which reminds me, that I'm pretty concerned about you."

"It doesn't concern me. It doesn't match my world view."

"Which is what?"

"That there's insufficient evidence to conclude that there's god or hell or anything after you die."

"Ok. But you believe lots of things that don't rely on proof, don't you?"

"Like what?"

"Imagine this scenario: you're in New York, and you look out your hotel window and witness a murder. This particular murderer is very thorough and manages to very effectively conceal what had happened. But nevertheless you are completely convinced that what you saw was a murder... but you can't prove it. You're sure it's true, but the murderer was so thorough that you can find no trace. Moreover, you didn't get a good enough look at the victim or the suspect to really identify them. In this scenario, would you attest that what you saw was true, even if you couldn't prove it?"

My friend changed the subject, "Eye witness accounts are incredibly inaccurate. This has been thoroughly documented and tested."

"That's not the point. The point is that there are things you believe but can't prove."

He conceded the point and we went on to discuss other things. But I've been thinking about his response. I don't think it's a very good one. Ok. Sure, eye witness accounts are incredibly inaccurate. But they're not so inaccurate as to cause us to not trust anything we witness. For example, I hand someone a fork and they take it. Their intial reaction is not to distrust the fact that there's a fork there. We act like the things we see are real. We act like it all day long and react accordingly. Our reactions tell us what we really need to know about our beliefs about the validity of witness.

Does that make eye witness testimony entirely thorough? No, of course not. Do I trust entirely my experience of God? Could I be wrong? Yep. There it is. I could be wrong. But I don't think I am. I could be wrong that I'm typing into a computer right now. I could be imagining it. But I don't think I am. I act like it's real. Similarly, even though I could be wrong about God, I don't think I am.

There is some part of me that feels a pull to doubt God's existence. I've decided to actively ignore that pull. My friend hasn't. I remember being on his side of that decision. I'm sure he's convinced that I'm deluding myself. Which is ironic, because I would now say that he's deluding himself into ignoring the obvious. We're both in reciprical situations. He's unwilling to experiment with Christianity. He's convinced it's not worth anything. I'm also unwilling to experiment with non-Chrsitianity for the same reason. I would say that I've already run that experiment and it failed. Of course, he'd say the exact same thing.

I don't have a whole lot of hope that he's going to change his mind. The good news for me is that it's not entirely my responsibility to change it.

Ranting Waiter

I've been really enjoying waiterrant.net. The author is a fantastic writer. I find myself needing to rethink how I'm going to contribute to this blog as a result.

Ain't irony great?

I can't help but laugh at this from the AP (HT: Cafe Hayek):

A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite.

Of course, Russ Roberts does a much better job of fisking the entire article than I could, so I'll let well enough alone. I just think it's hilarious.

UPDATE: Updated link to working link.

Exposed!

I shared the fact that I have a blog with some friends last night. One of the reactions was to the name of my blog: dullgeek. It got me thinking about why I called my blog that.

Of course, the first reason is that I don't really think I'm all that particularly interesting. Amongst this group of friends, I'm viewed as the nerdy one with an obsession for "The Lord of the Rings". I enjoy this reputation, even though it's entirely unfounded. I did make one reference to LoTR (notice the ubergeeky acronym?) but that single reference was it. And if you use this blog as a guide to what I'm thinking about, I think that this entry is the first time in the couple of years that I've had this blog where I even mentioned LoTR. It's hard to see an obsession with that data.

Of course, I find the things that I write about to be terribly interesting. I have no such illusions, however, that anyone else will be interested. Hence the dull portion was prescient. The interest level (as demonstrated by the comments) is tragically low. I know of at least two other people who have read it. And I think it's fair to say that in this case, it's also "at most" two other people who've read it. I'm not offended by this lack of interest, nor are my feelings hurt. In fact, I'm more likely to be proud of the fact that I made an accurate prediction.

But another reason that I chose that label is that I know that I'm not as sharp as some of the authors of blogs that I read regularly. See my links section. I hope to sharpen myself through this endeavor. But I will always be relatively dull compared to others. I'm ok with that, too.

Those Nasty Credit Card Users!

This article drives me a little batty. 

In most instances today, it would be silly to pay an annual fee for a credit card simply because most cards don't have them anymore. But in a Senate Banking Committee hearing examining credit card practices this week, one consumer advocate suggested those who pay their balances in full every month (about half of all cardholders) should pay a small annual fee to credit card companies.

Why? To pay their fair share.

To pay my fair share?  Three questions:

1. If I'm agreeing with the terms of my credit card statement, how am I not already upholding my end of the bargain?  Most products are more expensive because they include the cost of the transaction fee that the credit card companies receive on every transaction I make.
   
2. If someone else is NOT paying their full balance off, and as a consequence is paying exhorbitant interest fees, how should that be my problem?
3. Why, oh why is it necessary for some third party to interfere in my agreemeent with the credit card company?
   

The credit card companies will hate this legislation.  What will happen is that they will lose the transaction fees of all "deadbeats".  The incentive that I have to use a credit card is the rewards programs and the free 30 day loan they give me every month.  But if all of that is offset by mandatory annual fees, I'll just switch to a debit card which does not have such fees.

So I doubt very much that this will happen.  But why is it necessary to even propose such meddling?  Why is it necessary for the goverment to have its finger on absolutely everything that I do?

Dumbest moments...

CNNMoney is running an article titled: "100 Dumbest Moments in Business". Here's #9:

A computer glitch in the tax rolls of Porter County, Ind., causes the valuation of a house in the city of Valparaiso to shoot up from $122,000 to $400 million - boosting its annual property taxes from $1,500 to $8 million. Though the county's IT director spots the mistake and alerts the auditor's office, the wrong number nonetheless ends up being used in budget calculations, resulting in a $900,000 shortfall for the city and a $200,000 gap for its schools.

How is this a dumb moment in business? This isn't business stupidity (for which there are plenty of examples in the article) this is government stupididty. Let's call a spade a spade.

Anti-semitism

Steve Browne has an interesting article about anti-semitism. In it, he concludes:

for a believing Christian, the very existence of believing Jews is going to be a threat to their core beliefs, since he can't get around the fact that the basic scriptures of his faith are Jewish and the Jews stubbornly refuse to be convinced that their prophecies have been fulfilled.

This conclusion is based on the following premise:

For a Christian, his whole faith is wrapped around the idea that the life of Jesus Christ was the fulfillment of the ancient Hebrew prophecies of the messiah.

(Shockingly) I disagree with this premise. I do not pretend to be as knowledgable about the Jewish scriptures as Mr Browne appears to be. However, as a Christian, I can attest that the core of my faith is that Christ, through his crucifixion, wiped me clean, and that I desperately needed it. That Jesus fulfills an ancient Hebrew prophecy is merely evidence that he is what he says he is.

This implies the highest possible stakes, his belief in eternal life as a reward for believing this and acting accordingly.

Personally, I wouldn't describe it that way. It implies there's some reward for an action that we take. I would describe it Christianity claiming that God desperately wants to bring us back to Himself. He made us to long for Him. We chose something else thinking it could replace God. This created a huge gap between us and God. So we needed a way to bridge the gap. Christ was that bridge. Eternal life is only a tiny part of what happens when we cross that bridge. Reunion with God is the real prize. But the important part is that the prize is not something we earn. It's something given to us (if we accept it)(1) because God so desperately loves us.(2) Other things he said:

there is not a single messianic tradition but several (3 to 5 depending on who you're listening to), which scholars have been arguing about for a long time.

It matters little to me that Judaism has multiple prophecies. Science produces multiple predictions. The ones that come true are the ones we tend to believe. That there are multiple predictions doesn't invalidate science. But we do tend to disagree with those who hold onto the predictions that didn't come true.

But the most important reason [that Christ is not the fulfillment of the ancient Hebrew prophecies] lies at the heart of Christian symbolism - crucifixion. In the Hebrew scriptures, an accursed death which renders the body unclean and destroys the chance for resurrection.

Let's suppose that this is true. If this is the product of this kind of death, then it would certainly require divinity to be resurrected from it. In other words, it's this kind of death, the worst kind of death, that a God who's intention is to cleanse the sins of the world would choose.

But it seems odd to me that there's this kind of execution. I presume that the execution of people is not done by their choosing. Which means that, per the Hebrew scripture, I can condemn another person not by the quality of their character, nor by their behavior, nor by any choice that the other person makes. But rather my choices can impose eternal penalty upon another. This does not jibe with what I think of when I think of God and His sense of justice. Moreover, I'm reminded of two characters from Joshua: Rahab and Achan. In which we see that Rahab, a foreigner, is welcomed as one of the Isrealites, while Achan, an Israelite is sent to his death. What distinguishes these two characters is their behavior. They are not held responsible for the sins of someone else. They are responsible only for their own choices. And those choices supercede their heritage. It's difficult for me to resolve the picture of God that I see in Joshua with this description of the revulsion of the crucifixion.

One of the last things he says about this is:

(Ask any violence professional the quickest way to get assaulted: challenge core beliefs.)

The context of this is that he's answering someone who asked him to define anti-semitism. And he came up with the conclusion at the very top of this post. Then he says this. Is he really trying to say that being Christian is the definition of anti-semitism? Obviously, I don't agree with this. I certainly don't believe in the tenets of Judaism, but I don't think that means I hate Jews! This is a conclusion that seems really broken to me.

1. Within Christianity there are two schools of thought w.r.t. our acceptance of this gift. In the one school (Calvinism) even the act of accepting God is something that God does for us. On our own, we are unable to even accept his Gift. I find this to be a difficult position in that it destroys free will. The other school (Arminianism) says that God did in fact do it all, including giving every one of us free will to accept/reject his Gift. I'm better able to understand Arminianism than Calvinism.
2. It's not the only thing He loves. He also appears to love free will. Which is why he allows us to deny Him. CS Lewis describes it this way: "In the end we will say to God, 'Thy will be done' or He will say to us, 'Thy will be done'." He let's us choose. He also appears to love purity. Which is why we need to be cleansed of our inpurities in the first place. Which is the purpose of Christ.

The Big 3

The goals of the free-market agenda should be:

1. Increase the proportion of children who are schooled outside of the public school system.
2. Increase the proportion of health care spending that is paid for directly by consumers.
3. Limit the fraction of people's lives where they collect Social Security.

If the Republicans want to win my enthusiasm, they need to convince me that they will make a difference on these indicators. (For those readers on the Left, I should hasten to add that I am all in favor of education, good health, and retirement security for all Americans. I believe that those goals would be better served by market-oriented policies than by government expansion.)

This is a wonderful article. I recently moved and, as a consequence, needed to re-register to vote. I used to register republican, but I have switched to unaffiliated because of the recent behavior of the republicans. This is my favorite part of the article:

My personal message to Republicans is that I care more about what happens on the Big Three than about whether you hold power.

Me, too.

Decertifying Skeptics...

The Weather Channel’s most prominent climatologist is advocating that broadcast meteorologists be stripped of their scientific certification if they express skepticism about predictions of manmade catastrophic global warming.

My initial reaction to this was shock and revulsion at the attempt to silence skepticism. I'm not a professional scientist, so certainly my understanding of the scientific method is limited. But I think I'm right when I say that skepticism is a builtin part of the deal. So to hear someone deeply involved in climate science attempt to deny skepticism, it strikes me that someone might be asking for a method to the truth other than the scientific method.

I think that's a reasonable conclusion to make and I find it highly ironic that this is being done by a professional scientist. But it doesn't address the core problem: should this person's recommendation be applied? And I'm surprised that my answer is, "I hope so".

First, this recommendation really ignores how I think many people will react to this. What I think will eventually happen is that the value of the AMS certification will be diminished. When people consume weather forcasts, they look for accuracy. There seems to be little relationship between the accuracy of:

• Local, short term weather predictions
• Global, long term climate change

A stance on the latter is unlikely to influence the accuracy of the former. And consumers of weather forcasts will prefer those from anyone who can provide them, whether they've got an AMS certification or not.

So the impact is to increase the supply of accurate weather predictors who don't have AMS certification. In addition, by increasing the scarcity of AMS certifications, they increase the wages of AMS certified meteorogists. Which creates incentives for those who hire meteorologists to ignore the certification - accurate weather predictions are not related to whether someone is AMS certified or not. This can't be good for the certification. So, I suspect that the AMS will plainly ignore the recommendation.

However, I hope they don't. I hope that they're foolish. I've become convinced that the US health care system is where it's at, in part, because of licensure. Only those who are licensed are allowed to practice medicine. This sets a floor on the minimum quality of medical provision. Which, in turn, sets a floor on the cost of that provision. Why is this bad? Some states require certain procedures to be performed by opthamologists, while other states allow optometrists to perform those same procedures. Clearly, there is a set of procedures that can be performed by both, yet in some cases, licensure prevents it. Licensure ensures that only the higher cost provider does the job. The end result is that licensure in US health care, results in higher wages for health care providers at the expense of health care consumers. Licensure becomes a form of rent seeking.

I'd like to see the AMS certification devalued in order to put the idea in people's minds that perhaps certifications and licensures are subject to being questioned. I'd like to see licensure not be legally required. And if that happens, then a more open market for provision of those services can develop.

How I hope *NOT* to write

Through a maze of links (God bless the Web) I ended up at this article. I watched the game in question, and I agree with the conclusions of the author. It was easily the best game that I watched this football season. It's possibly that it's the best college football game ever. (I'm not willing to commit on that last part.)

But what bugs me about this article is the writing. My general plan for writing something persuasive is to open with my premise, present the data, and close by re-emphasizing the premise. It's my general hope that the data will speak for itself. Unfortunately, this guy does not follow that pattern. In his article, he hand holds the reader down the path he wants them to go. He keeps interrupting the data to affirm his premise. Examples:

• But after 25 minutes of entertaining and unpredictable football, the fun was just starting.
• But as the night's events would show, the Broncos still had a lot of greatness left to achieve.
• This instance of role reversal created an even more compelling Fiesta Bowl narrative.
• It was at this moment that the 2007 Fiesta Bowl began to assume mythical proportions as a game that would break all the rules and defy all the odds.
• Once again, it seemed as though Goliath was finally beginning to wear down David, only in a more dramatic way with the clock ticking down.
• The dramatic tension inside the domed stadium grew exponentially....And then things got reallyinteresting.
• It only added to the drama that was unfolding in the Desert.
• The narratives just kept getting more poignant and powerful as the proceedings continued to the amazement of all.

He hadn't stopped describing the game, but this is where I couldn't take it anymore. I found the constant commentary in the middle of the data to be really annoying. When I'm writing, I hope to elicit a different reaction. "Yes, I agree" or "No way" are fine reactions. Obviously I prefer the former. But "get on with it" is something that I'd like to avoid, and it's the reaction I had reading this article.

Of course, don't forget that the criticisms from someone like me, whose major writing accomplishment to date is an unread blog, should probably not be taken very seriously by someone who's actually managed to convince people to pay him money for his writing. Still, this is the blogosphere. We don't need no steenkin rules!

Perhaps there are some things to learn from this article:

1. He's getting paid. I'm not. Maybe his strategy is more effective than mine.
   
2. Annoying people like me is probably not a hindrance to being a paid writer.

Nevertheless, one purpose I have for this blog is to improve my ability to write. I really would like to avoid annoying my readers the way this guy's article annoyed me.

(I'd ask, "What do you think?", but as the only reader of this blog, I already know the answer!)

Brilliant!

I love this post which I will quote in it's entirety here:

Sure, if the FCC isn't toothless, then it has the power to do much good for us. No argument there, but I think the old maxim still applies with regard to government authority: "Only relinquish power to your friends that you would not fear in the hands of your enemies."

Put another way, give the FCC as much power as you'd let a Sony exectutive have in setting technology mandates, because one day the Sony executive will be pulling the strings of the FCC's processes.

I like it because:

1. It's concise
   
2. It's easy to understand
   
3. It's correct
   
4. It's a nice refutation to statists
   
5. It's something the statists will tend to agree with
   

Great post. Wish I had mod points.

Surprising application of discount rates

The blog over at the Economist has a surprising entry. The basic idea behind this blog entry is that there's a large portion of the liberal left who thinks that it is our moral obligation to save the lives of future generations of people who will be killed by our collective apathy towards the environment. The idea is that the future value of those people's lives is worth protecting.

The surprising part is this: if the left believes that we have this moral obligation, then why do they disagree with the moral obligation to protect a fetus? The author of the article does a much better job of pointing out this discontinuity than I can. I recommend the article.

As for myself, I am opposed to abortion. I think the prima facia case is that the fetus is a proto-human being, and I need proof that it's not a human being before I think that killing it is ok. Absent any proof, stealing another person's right to live is wrong. It doesn't matter if that person is dependant on another for survival.

But the author of that article forces me to question my consistency. I don't know what to think about the global warming. On the one hand, there seems to be a lot of evidence that it's happening and that we play some part in causing it. However, I'm generally skeptical of the claim that we must limit economic growth in order to stop it. The above article forces me to ask myself this: if I'm concerned about the rights of an unborn fetus, shouldn't I also be concerned about the rights of future (as of yet unborn) Bangladeshis? If I think that a financial crisis does not justify the restriction of rights to life imposed in an abortion, shouldn't I also think that a financial crisis shouldn't justify the restrictions of rights to life imposed in global warming?

I have to ponder this a bit. My instinct is to recognize what Arnold Kling says about the issue, "I think that people in Bangladesh... are at least as threatened by economic and political backwardness as they are by coastal flooding." This doesn't fully resolve the issue, though. One could make the same argument of a baby: The life of that baby is threatened by finacial crisis of the mother as it is by abortion. This would justify abortion on demand for the destitute. I find that discomforting, but feel compelled to examine my consistency.

God Loves Porn?

Freelance Genious thinks that God loves porn:

http://freelancegenius.blogspot.com/2006/12/god-loves-porn.html

I think that FG is mostly making a joke. I don't think he(?) would
try hard to defend the logic of this conclusion. But still, the joke
would be more funny(1) without the logic flaw. Here's his propositions:

1. God created humanity.
2. God loves humanity.
3. God loves humanity's actions.

Whoa.. stop there. God loves freedom. God gave man freedom.
He loves freedom more than he demands compliance with his will(2).
Humans are free to reeject God. He doesn't love that. Therefore God
does not necessarily love humanity's actions.

On the other hand, rejection of God works out really bad for humans,
and He keeps trying to tell us that, but he lets us do it anyway.

This is pretty much a show stopper for the rest of this (admittadly
tongue in cheek) argument. But still..

4. Humanity created the internets.
5. The internets is the greatest creation in the history of humanity until the next big one.
6. The internets is the Library of Alexandria.
7. The internets is full of pornography.
8. The Library of Alexandria is full of pornography.

I'm not sure I understand the significance of including three of
these propositions. There seems to be an assumption here that God
loved the Library of Alexandria. In any case, can't you just skip
5,6&8 and go straight to...

9. God loves pornography.

For that matter, can't you just say:

3. God loves humanity's actions.
4. Humanity created pornography.
5. God loves pornography.

This entire argument follows only if proposition 3 is true. I don't
think it is.

(1) Yes, it is the abosolute pinnacle of geekiness to be critisizing someone else's jokes with logic. But there it is. Whatcha gonna do?
(2) Why? How the heck should I know? Ask Him. I'm just reporting what I observe.

Saddam Hussein execution

Jane Galt asks who's watching the Saddam Hussein execution video.

Jane mentions:

Okay, so I'm against the death penalty...

The commentary is very interesting. One comment asks:

If he had been given life in prison, what would have happened if a group of Baathists had held a school bus full of kids hostage and demanded his release?

Another comment asks:

What would you do with Saddam -- that is morally proper, given his
proven crimes?

Finally, another commenter asks:

I am neither Jane nor a death penalty opponent, but I can
understand why one would oppose it in the criminal justice
system. What I can't understand is any kind of ethics,
except for an absolute belief that taking life under any
circumstances is unjustified, that says that there is no
imaginable crime that justifies death in retribution.

As someone who opposes the death penalty, here is my answer to the
questions in reverse order.

To the 3rd question, the death penalty is (by it's very name)
limited to the criminal justice system. You don't exercise the death
penalty in war. It is a penalty that is only exercised as part of
a system of justice for crimes. Being opposed to the death penalty
can only be applied to the criminal justice system
as that is the ONLY place that it's exercised.

But to the issue of the ethics of not taking life under any
circumstances, I would say that I do not believe that. I certainly
stand by the idea that taking another's life in self defense is
acceptable. Additionally, I think that the individiual participants
in a war are acting in self defense in that there is an enemy out
there who is attempting to kill them. It gets somewhat less clear
cut the higher up you go, e.g. up to the person ordering the war.
The higher up you go, the more the circumstances come into play.
Was this a response to a attack from someone else? Even, from the
point of the attacker, was it a response of last resort?

I don't have clear cut answers for anything other than self-defence.
But, in general, I think a case can be made for justifyably taking
another's life outside the boundaries of the criminal justice system.

My problem with the death penalty inside the criminal justice system
is this. The criminal justice system has mechanisms for undoing
mistakes that it makes in the exercise of its role... except for the
death penalty. The death penalty assumes that the criminal justice
system is infallable in its judgement, something that the system
itself does not assume. So that once you've executed a person,
there's no way to say "oops" after it's done. One could argue that
the same can be said of someone who's been wrongfully imprisoned,
but with the death penaly there's no way that you can even attempt
to make up to the wrongly accused. They are no longer around to
recieve your apology.

With respect to the 2nd question, my instinct is to answer that he
be given life in prison, in an undisclosed location. Of course,
that doesn't answer the problem proposed in the first question,
for which, I do not have an "off the top of my head" answer.

But thinking about it, bad people will be bad people with or without
Saddam Hussein being alive. He is a convenient reason to hold that
schoolbus hostage. With him dead, they will find some other reason
to hold the schoolbus hostage. His being alive or dead does not
change the probability that some group of bad people will hold
a schoolbus full of children hostage. Executing Hussein seems
unlikely to prevent future bad things from happening. What seems
more likely to me is that executing Hussein will prevent using him
as an excuse for for future bad things.

Can't do it.

I recently saw the following article
(This came by way of http://www.thehealthcareblog.com/)

In this article, it asks:

Almost all the problems with the American health care system boil down to two questions. How do we create a system that ensures that all citizens, and perhaps residents, have access to health insurance? And how do wecontain the huge cost increases?

I don't know what you call this rhetorical trick. I suspect it has a clever name, but I don't know it. In any case the author is laying out two questions and expecting a favorable answer to both. But these questions can't both be favorably answered. A favorable answer to one, is the negative question to the other. The author might as well ask these two questions: How do we create a road trip that ensures we end up south of our current position. And how do we simultaneously ensure that we end up north of our current position?

The problem is that the author doesn't understand the concept of insurance. Arnold Kling correctly points out here that what we have in our country isn't insurance, it's insulation. And as such giving insulation to everyone is equivalent to ever increasing costs. If you want to contain or decrease costs, you have to *STOP* giving insulation to everyone.

The author even has a section titled "reforming insurance" that, ironically doesn't talk about reforming insurance. Instead it talks about the need to regulate insurance as it currently is without the need to change actual health insurance.

I find myself in agreeing with Kling, and not with ABC News. Until we are able to unleash the entire population all demanding that their costs be contained, costs will not be contained. The *ONLY* way to get the entire population demanding this is if each member of society is individually motivated to contain those costs. As long as we're insulated from the actual costs of health insurance, that motivation will not be sustained.

I'm hopeful (possibly naively hopeful) that the system will fix itself through a gradual collapse. This year I switched insurance plans to a program that required that my family bear more of the day-to-day costs of healthcare. But that still provided coverage for catastrophic health events. I did this because my employer is continuing to pass the costs of health insurance to me. And when investigating the alternatives, I found one that had a much lower premium while still providing coverage in the event of a catastrophy. Along with that lower premium came more day to day responsibility from me. I'm betting that the amount of money I save in premium costs will more than make up for the increased day to day costs I'll encur for the next year.

I'd like to think that the increasing costs of health insurance will create incentive for people to look for other solutions. And that over time, the currently broken system will incentivize itself out of existence. The counter argument is that what will actually happen is that most people, instead of searching out lower cost alternatives, will simply drop health insurance altogether. They will then become a part of the pool of people looking for the government to subsidize their health costs.

I don't know which way it's going to go. I fear universal health care. The Canadians aren't doing so well with it. I loath the idea of governmental tampering. But I'd rather a little tampering now (to reform health insurance) instead of being forced into enormous and permanant tampering later (i.e. universal health care).

Immigration

It's been a while since I've written anything here. This particular topic has been bothering me long enough that I really ought to write down what I think about it. Frankly, it should be a much lower standard than that to get me to write things. But there it is.

I don't know how to label myself on the political spectrum. In almost everything I'm on the conservative side of the fence. But there are a few things that I just don't care that much about. Gay marriage, for example. On the one hand, I'm aware that marriage is an important underpinning of our society. And I'm persuaded by Jane's discussion of the topic. On the other hand, I have a fairly close relationship with a gay man. And it seems to me that part of the problem that he experiences in his life is associated with non-committed relationships. It might be of value to him to make a marriage committment that is harder to get out of than just saying, "See ya!"

But then there are things that I just find myself in stark opposition from the rest of the conservatives out there. And immigration tops that list. I simply don't understand what all of the hubub is about. And I can't figure out what rational stance there is in support of limiting immigration. The best I can come up with is that they take our jobs, and that they spend our money without contributing back.

Here's my opinion in a nutshell: I believe that we live in a country of endowed rights, not government granted rights. Which means that the government can neither give nor take away rights. Our rights have been endowed to us by our creator. One of those endowed rights is the right to free association and to assemble peacably. Which means that Mexicans have it whether they're here or not. So do Chinese, Afghanis, Germans and Iraqis. The difference is that some other governments don't protect those rights, and in some cases, wrongly repress those rights. The US government is constituted on a promise to protect those rights within the boundaries of this country. So that when someone from Mexico or China or Afghanistan or Germany or Iraq sets foot in this country, our government is required to protect their rights to freely associate with any of us who are already here. Immigration laws are based on the premise that you only have those rights if you're a US citizen. In other words, the US Government grants them to you. I believe that's incorrect. I believe laws restricting immigration are counter to the concept of rights described by the constitution. I believe that all such laws should be overturned.

Let me address the conservative positions on immigration.

First, they take our jobs. Ok. So? I don't believe that one of the constitutionally protected rights is the right to a job. I certainly don't have the right to my job. I do it as long as it is mutually beneficial to both me and my employer. If someone comes along with a better job, I'm going to take it. If someone comes along who can do my job less expensively, my employer will almost certainly hire them and fire me. That's the way a market works. And I wouldn't want it to work any other way. Because if I try create some right to employment, then I'm shooting myself in the foot. The right to employment is only one half of the picture. The other half is the right to freely choose who I employ. Which means that if I can guarantee that my employer can't fire me, on what ground would I be standing if I tried to switch from cable TV to satellite? I would be firing the cable company and hiring Dish (for example). If I have a right to my job, don't they also have that right? What about a person being from Mexico or Afghanistan changes this picture? By what justification is ok for someone to tell me how I am forced to spend my money? If I want to hire a Mexican or German to mow my lawn, then what business is it of yours. If you can't compete, find something that you're better at.

Second, they spend our money without contributing back. One of the many complaints that I hear from conservatives is how much we have to pay for "illegals" to come here. For example, they use healthcare without paying the taxes that support medicade, etc. That's true. But, in my opinion, that's a problem of the systems of health provision that we have in this country. Whenever you have a federally funded program, over-consumption and excessive costs are the consequence. Don't you think that just maybe the reason that so many people want to come here is that we offer them free stuff through social welfare programs? Certainly one way to react to this is to restrict immigration. But it's not the only way. The other way is to fix the social welfare programs. The impact of strong immigration laws is to insulate the voting American public from the negative unintended consequences of social welfare programs. I believe that if the American voters felt the full brunt of those unintended consequences, that we would make changes to the detrimental effects of those policies. But as long as those effects are hidden, there's less motivation to change the policies.

Immigration laws hurt us: they undermine our core values, and they insulate us from the effects of bad policies. I think we would be better off without them.

Full Disclusure:
1) I have three cousins who have immigrated to this country. I believe one of them is here illegally, and can't go home because he's afraid that he won't be able to get back. My opinion above is certainly influenced by his situation. However, I don't think my opinion would change were his situation different or non-existant.
2) I've been heavily influenced by this article.

The First Rule of Double Standards

One of my favorite self-reflective statements is: The first rule of double standards is that I get to have one and you don't. I like it because in one sentence, it demonstrates the problem of a double standard: some person or entity holds two conflicting standards and applies them to his, her, or their advantage. But if two different people or organizations hold a different standard, that is not a double standard. Sure, it's two standards, but it's not got the same logical inconsistencies as a single person trying to hold two conflicting standards at the same time.

I think the author of this article is frustrated. But when he says "double standard", I'm forced to disagree with him. Last year, Brett Favre played for the Green Bay Packers while Steve McNair played for the Tennessee Titans. That they have been treated differently during this off season simply means that the general managers for each respective team had different priorities. If one entity, had treated each of them differently, then the author could argue that there was a double standard. But the Green Bay Packers are not the same entity as the Tennessee Titans.

One could argue that the NFL is the unifying entity since both of them play in that league. But the NFL isn't the entity that is making the contract decisions for the Packers or the Titans. Each of them is doing that independently of each other and the NFL.

The author does argue that there is a unifying entity (the media and the fans) who are treating each player differently. And that's got a little more teeth to it. The problem is that there is no organization that is either "the media" or "the fans". Those are convenient terms that we use to describe a group of independent people who have similar characteristics. As a result, the media and the fans will almost always hold more than one standard: there's more than one of them deciding what standard to hold.

The author might want to make the point that the double standard is actually prevalent among NFL fans. If so, he'd need to find out how many people simultaneously support Favre returning to the Packers and reject McNair returning to the Titans. You can't simply say that one group of fans supporting Favre, and another group of fans rejecting McNair indicates that there's a double standard. They're different groups of people.

You could also find real double standards in the media: just find any author who has written in support of Favre and in opposition of McNair. Unfortunately, in that case, you're really only criticizing the specific authors who hold those conflicting views. It's got much better rhetorical value to say "the media holds a double standard". It makes for a much taller soap box.

There may very well be a double standard. It's possible that many NFL fans are individually holding two conflicting viewpoints with respect to McNair and Favre. Maybe there are lots of individuals in the media who are praising Favre while rejecting McNair. Maybe there's some mastermind in the league offices pushing a pro-Favre and anti-McNair agenda. But nothing in this article lends any credence to any real claims of a double standard. What the author does call a double standard isn't one. And calling it that only serves to dilute the meaning of those words. It makes them less useful when a real double standard comes along.

FULL DISCLOSURE: I am a lifelong fan of the Green Bay Packers. I'm glad that Favre is back. I have no opinion on whether or not Steve McNair plays for the Titans.

FAITH based initiatives

The American Muslim has scheduled news conference. This is an interesting announcement. It would appear that they find Wachovia's closing of the account to be problematic and worthy of some sort of political response. Presumably, this response would then force Wachovia to re-open the account. Perhaps, their ultimate goal is to force all banks to not discriminate based on the religious preferences of their account holders.

I don't know the ultimate goal of this. But as a person who holds religious beliefs, I find this to be rather wrong headed. Let's suppose, for example, that I were a customer of, say, Bank of America. And Bank of America decided that it was going to close all the accounts of all people of German descent who are also Christians. Would I be annoyed with this? Yes, of course. My great grandparents moved here in the early 1900's from Germany and I am a Christian. I'd be excluded.

But, unfortunately, a free market demands that each participant in the market be free to decide their trading partners. I am free to exclude Bank of America as a trading partner - I can choose not to be their customer. They should have that exact same freedom - to choose not to do business with me. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter what the reasons are. If you force trade between two parties where one of them doesn't want it, that party is being robbed. Thaey are having their assets taken from them without their permission and given to someone else. It doesn't matter that they receive some compensation for those assets. What matters is that the robbed entity didn't think that compensation sufficient for the trade. As a result, they're getting something less than what they're being forced to give up. I see no distinction between that and robbery.

And it makes no difference if this is between a Muslim group or a Christian group or a German group or whatever group. If Wachovia doesn't want to do business with them, that is their prerogative. If, it turns out that none of the existing major banks want to do business with this group, that simply creates a market oppurtunity for someone else. Let's suppose that I'm being discriminated against by Bank of America. I could give you my money in return for a promise that you

1. Have sufficient loss insurance
   
2. Will give it back to me when demanded
   
3. Will pay me an agreed upon interest rate
   

You are then given the freedom to invest that money however you want, so long as you meet the above criteria. You might even open an account at Bank of America, and the agreed upon intersest rate is 0.5% less than Bank of America's published rate.

But maybe I don't trust you. Ok. If Bank of America is discriminating against me alone, then Citi probably won't discriminate against me alone. They want my profits. So I'll go there. Or, if Bank of America is discriminating against me as a class (German Christians) then I can still go to Citi. But maybe all of the existing banks are discriminating against German Christians. Now the risk of trusting you might look better. Or maybe there's someone else who's interested in my 0.5% profit and is more trustworthy than you.

Given time, the market will produce someone who's willing to get my profits. The beauty of free association is that this is what happens. The cost of free association is the ability of one entity to refuse to associate with another. If you keep free association, over time, we all get what we want. If you start forcing associations, over time, none of us get anything we want.

Don't kill free association.

Emergent

Tonight, within the last 2 hours, I discovered a new concept that I didn't know about before. I love that. The concept is "emergent churches". My interest in it turns out to have come almost accidentally. I read a book... well, I listened to an unabridged audio version of it. I really enjoyed this book. It's Rob Bell's Velvet Elvis. As much as I enjoyed it, I also feel somewhat cautious about some of the things that it suggests. So I asked one of the pastors at my church about it. He hadn't read it, but he mentioned the words "emergent churches". So I went googling.

It turns out that Rob Bell is part of a movement of churches that are trying to change the church. That movement calls itself "emergent". And, WOW, a LOT of people really dislike emergent churches. I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised, I went out looking for criticisms of velvet elvis, and I found 'em. For instance, take this blog entry and it's comments.

Even though the comments end amicably, the middle part is too contentious for me. What I think that the commenters have missed is the value of failure. I don't know where I stand with respect to whether Rob Bell is right or wrong. But there is value in the discussion, even if he's wrong. There's value in taking a chance and presenting a viewpoint, even if that viewpoint eventually turns out to be provably false. The value is that we've learned something about finding false viewpoints. I wish very much that the commenters on that site could sit back and have the discussion and appreciate the other point of view, without having to agree with it. And, more importantly, without having to belittle their opposition. I'm especially frustrated by the posts that seem to suggest that these questions not even be asked. E.g.:

Goodness. Not only am I in shock by some of these posts, but that those who carry the banner for Christ would ‘excuse’ or grant grace, to anyone who wants to water down truth.

I wish it were completely obvious which things (including Biblical interpretations) were truth. But, more often than not, clear cut truth is evasive. Clear cut truth almost never requires discussion. No one argues that 2+2=4. There are no blog entries with multiple comments going back and forth on that one. Doesn't the existence of the discussion suggest that the truth being discussed is not obvious?

Does that put me on the side of Rob Bell? Even if I'm skeptical of some of the things he suggests? Does that make me a post-modern Christian? I really hope not, because I simply don't agree with post-modernism. I don't agree that *anything* goes. I don't agree that perspective can change right and wrong. I think there IS objective truth. I just don't trust my human ability to accurately discern it on my own.

I agree with the economists who describe markets as a discovery process. I want to welcome all ideas to the discussion. Even the ones that I think will ultimately be rejected. There's value in experimentation. There's a lot of value in failed experiments.

So disagree with Rob Bell if you like, but it might be wise to consider humility. Be willing be wrong. I'm not God, and as such, I'm always prone to misunderstanding Him and His truth. I don't think I'm the only one who has that problem.

Am I wrong?

Parent-onomics

Bryan Caplan links to a great post on parenting and economics. It reminds me of one of my previous posts on the topic. In any case, Bryan then asks:

The only problem: Most of Cox's advice is aimed at parents of young kids, but most of the anguished parents I know have teen-agers! In particular, I know a number of parents who have 18-year-olds who refuse to go to school or get a job. What's a parent of a teen-age bum to do?

As the father of four boys (all under the age of 10) I practice a parenting technique called "Love and Logic". It's described in a book called "Parenting with Love and Logic" and it's quite similar to what Dr. Cox prescribes.

In any case, what to do with the teenage bum? I would hope that my pre-teen children would see something like this coming from a mile away since they've been dealing with me and my devious wife since they were born. But if I just started practicing this parenting style on them as a teenager, I'd first sit them down when we're all in a good mood. Maybe after a good movie on TV, or going out to they're favorite dinner or something like that.

Then I'd casually say something to my wife. Of course, we'd have rehearsed this many many times so that we knew what our plan was. Maybe we'd do it on the way home in the car.

Me: You know, honey. John's been living at home for a while now. He's not in school and he's not got a job.

Wife: Yeah, I know what you mean. It doesn't seem like he's got any plan for anything, really. I'm not sure what to do about this, do you have any ideas?

Me: Well, I've decided that we need to start treating John much more like an adult. We've been doing a really bad job at that lately. We're acting like he's 4 years old and it's just not working.

John (interrupting): Yeah, that's right.

Me: I'm sorry, John, I'm speaking with your mother right now. Just a minute. Anyway, I think we should start treating him much more like an adult. Do you think we can do that?

Wife: Oh yes, I know exactly how adults are treated. I don't think that will be a problem at all.

Me: Ok. Then we're agreed. Sorry, John, you were saying?

John: I was just agreeing with you.

Me: Oh, good. So this sounds like a good plan to you?

John: Sure. Whatever.

Me: Oh good. I'm so releaved. I thought you might hate this plan.

John: Why would I hate it?

Me: Well, let's not think about that for now. I'm sure that it will all work out just fine.

And then I'd just end the conversation.

The next day, I'd put a bill on his bedroom door for rent. The rent statement would read: "Can be paid monthly in cash or by semester in college grades of C or better." Rent or a college acceptance letter is due on the 1st of the month. I wouldn't say a single thing other than that. The monetary amount would not be ridiculous, but it'd certainly be more than he could afford without getting a job, maybe $100 per month.

I suspect that the kid would not do a single thing, and the 1st of the month would roll around without a payment or an enrollment letter. At which point, I'd go into his room, remove his stereo (or some other valued possession) and sell it. In it's place, I'd leave a note saying something like, "repossesed for non-payment of rent".

Now the trick to this would be when the kid came home and discovered his missing stereo, to be empathetic. To say something like, "Man that really stinks! I know *exactly* how you feel. I would hate it if I lost my house because I didn't pay the mortgage! What are you going to do?"

Now if the kid's smart, he'll do something immediately. If he's particularly stubborn it will take a couple of months of losing his things before he starts to realize that he's being treated like an adult and it's going to require and adult response: get a job, go to school, or move out.

You might prefer to start with something smaller: maybe stop buying his favorite food. Then escalate to bigger things like his stereo.

This seems harsh. But it's all in the delivery. It's all in how much empathy and compassion for the kid's problem you have. If you make life difficult enough for the kid, but deliver that difficulty with empathy, the kid will choose to leave. He might be very unhappy, but that's when you innundate him with your catch phrase: "I love you too much not to treat you like the adult that you are. Good luck!" The kid may not like you very much when you do this, but it will serve him well in the future. When a payment of a bill (or some other adult responsibility) starts to get close, he'll have the memory of this (relatively) small pain to help him avoid a much more painful situation that's not delivered by his parents.

And that's how a parent gets through this kind of thing. If you *could* lay both painful situations side by side and choose which one your child was forced to experience, you'd almost certainly choose the least painful one. When you do something like this, you have to remember about the larger pain in the future that you're sentancing your child to if you avoid the small pain today.

Of course, if you want a much better set of examples, I recommend this.

Bounced Email

I tried to send an email to the author of this article, but email to him bounced. Here's what I tried to send him:

Mr Colvin:

I read your article on the possible reverse of income inequality. In it you state:

"Rising income inequality has settled comfortably into America's big economic picture as a reliable--and much lamented--megatrend... The college graduate's income started beating the high school graduate's income by a wider margin every year--and income inequality began to swell. That explanation makes sense, and the data support it."

My question is: why only think about this trend since the 1960's? The trend of ever increasing knowledge started long before that. Probably it started in earnest with the development of the printing press. That's when it became relatively easy to disseminate information. With that easy dissemination of information came the
growth of those who used it to their advantage. Those who didn't bother to gather that information were left behind.

But that is nothing compared to the demands that the industrial revolution has made on increasing knowledge and skills. Someone with a high school level education in 1900 (with little or no exposure to the internal combustion engine) would have a VERY difficult time getting a high school graduate's job in 1960. Someone with a high
school education in 1965 (and little or no exposure to computers) would have a difficult time working at McDonald's today - a job for pre-high school graduates.

The increasing demand of knowledge is not a trend to be lamented. It is, rather, a trend to be celebrated because it's a mark of our progress. It's the natural result of innovation.

As far as the trend changing, I think it's more of a blip than a trend. I think it's much more akin to what Schumpeter called "creative destruction". A great description is available in a paper called "The Churn".

Sincerely,
mjh

This can't be right...

It's been a long time since I've written anything here. Too long. I don't know if I'll sustain anything, but here goes...

Last night at church, we celebrated communion. And as is usually the case, I was struck by how big what Christ did for me. But this time, there was something more. This time, I couldn't seem to feel happy about it. I mean, I am happy about it, but...

Think of it this way. Imagine that you've just started writing a book. You finish the first page, and the next day you come back and the entire book is written. Maybe you know who wrote it, maybe you don't. But you read it. And it turns out to be good. It turns out to be exactly what you'd have wanted to write, if only you'd done it. It's so good, that even though you didn't write much of it, you feel its necessary to publish it, because this thing can't be kept secret. So you publish it. Next thing you know, everyone is giving you accolades. You're appearing on the today show. You're getting recommendations from Oprah. You win the Pulitzer. You try to convince everyone that you didn't really write it, but they don't believe you.

In the end, you know that you didn't deserve this. The real author of the book deserves the accolades. The real author of the book deserves the prizes. All of this is a sham.

That's how I felt last night. I can't possibly deserve this. I am far too wretched for the cross to apply to me. Yet God says it does. And somehow that just doesn't seem right. In exactly the same way that I couldn't accept the Pulitzer, it just seems wrong to accept the cross. Thank you Jesus for what you did, but it seems too much.

I don't know where I'm going with this thought. I am ineffably glad that Jesus did what he did. It is my *only* hope.

Russ is wrong on rights

I don't know squat about economics. Especially not in comparison to someone like Russ Roberts, who's an econ professor at GMU. But I think he got this wrong in his latest entry on gouging:

By what right (asks the critic) can a gas station owner or the oil company charge so much more?

Right has nothing to do with it.

Whoops. I think right has everything to do with it. Property rights are what permit the gas station owner, or the oil company to charge whatever price that they want. Imagine I had a cherished family heirloom. I'm not willing to sell it except for ridiculous sums of money. Am I gouging? No, I'm exercising my property rights. So are the gas stations and oil companies.

Until you pay a mutually agreed price, it's not your gas. You have no right to it.

Missed an option....

I think this guy doesn't understand logic as much as he thinks. I can come up with at least a couple of different options that he left out:

• God does not always use natural or man-made catastrophes to punish people for moral failings. I don't know if Katrina was the wrath of God. But it's clear that God does not punish every moral failing with a natural disaster. Every human being on the face of the planet has experienced moral failing, yet the vast majority of us survived Katrina. Indeed, most of us survive any natural disaster. It seems pretty evident to me that it's a bad assumption that God always uses natural disasters to punish moral failings.
  
  
• Maybe God did use a natural disaster to destroy Bourbon St. Despite being relatively unscathed Bourbon St. is still in significant trouble. How many customers has it served in the last several days? How long do you think it will be before any of it's services are reopened? Even if this isn't physical destruction, the effects are the same.

The Social Institution of Marriage

This is a compelling argument. It definately moves me off of my "on the fence" stance w.r.t. what marriage means in a society.

The editors of the Nation, for instance, support gay marriage but do not usually defend the sanctity of contracts. This apparent paradox evaporates when we realize that the dissolution of marriage breaks the family into successively smaller units that are less able to sustain themselves without state assistance.

The basic idea here is that by dissolving marriage, it puts a greater dependancy on the state. Or put another way, if you want to create and support a large central government, one way to accomplish that is to dissolve any meaning behind marriage. The resulting society will be much more dependant on the state for resolution of even trivial disputes. Disputes that are less intrusively resolved in an organic marriage.

The modern claim that there need not be and should not be any social or legal preference among sexual or childrearing contexts is, by definition, the abolition of marriage as an institution. This will be a disaster for the cause of limited government. Disputes that could be settled by custom will have to be settled in court. Support that could be provided by a stable family must be provided by taxpayers. Standards of good conduct that could be enforced informally must be enforced by law.

This is a very interesting premise that the author (Jennifer Roback Morse) does a good job of explaining. I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

My vote for the most insiteful comment:

An appreciation of voluntary cooperation between men and women, young and old, weak and strong, so natural to libertarians and economists, is completely absent from this statist worldview.

This is why it is no accident that the advocates of sexual laissez-faire are the most vociferous opponents of economic laissez-faire.

Ideal Parents?

Jane Galt has an article on gay adoption. One of the comments made is this:

This is not in any way to say that gay adoption is a bad idea; the gay couples I know who have adopted are all ideal parents.

I'm so on the fence on this issue of gay marriage and gay adoption. On the one hand I don't undertand any reason why it ought to be wrong. But it still strikes me that it is. And, as a Christian, I believe in the veracity of a bible that says it is.

But ignoring the moral platitudes, how can gay parents be ideal parents? I've commentted on this before. How can two gay men be ideal parents for (e.g.) a heterosexual girl? Where is the role model that the child has in her life? Or where is the appropriate role model for the heterosexual son of a lesbian couple?

That being said, I'm sure that the exercise of effective parenting skills is not endemic to heterosexual parents. But I think it's a far stretch to say that a gay couple can be an "ideal" parent. Ideally, children have role models in their lives and it strikes me that gay couples are very likely to be less than ideal.

Economics and Parenting Cross Paths

Marginal Revolution has an entry about tantrums. The basic idea is that the tantrum is a status symbol. If you are able to have a tantrum, it means that you are in a higher social status than the rest of us.

CEOs throw more tantrums than mailboys. Similarly movie stars, sports stars, and politicians throw more tantrums than ordinary people in those industries. Also famous for their tantrums: spoiled young wives, bigshot patriarchs, elite travelers, and toddlers.

The last entrant may seem surprising, but...

Parents mostly serve toddlers, not the other way around.

What does this mean? It means that Foster Cline and Jim Fay are right. But it also means that they're more than just astute parents; they're astute economists. If you want to change the behavior of the toddlers, change the incentive structure.

Hammers

I've written in other places on the stupidity of municipal broadband. Russ Roberts has taken his shot. My favorite part:

If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Spending money is the hammer of politics.

Repeal the "Death" Tax? Phooey!

I'm not a big fan of political correctness. I don't like the idea of simply changing the name of something in order to give it a better spin. The problem with people who suffer from an ailment isn't in the name of the thing they suffer. It's the ailment itself. Telling someone that they're handicapped instead of crippled is not going to change their ailment. All that's going to happen is that the negative connotations of the old name will eventually transfer to the new name. Hence we now have "handicapable". I don't know what the next iteration will be, but I'm sure that it's coming.

So it's with a bit of trepidation that I criticize the name of something. But I personally can't stand the name "Death Tax". The people who make the argument that you're taxing death are as wrong headed as can be, and they've chosen a name that tries to convey something that isn't real. It's no more respectful to the dead to take their money than it is to leave it alone. The dead don't care anymore about their money: they're dead. The estate tax does NOT tax the dead. It taxes the living who inherit the estates.

But, unlike other taxes, it's acutely destructive. Other taxes, while being destructive, are much slower. A person who gives up 20% of their annual income loses a lot of money over their lifetime. But that destruction takes place only a little bit at a time. The estate tax, however, happens all at once: when a person dies. This has the impact of destroying, in one fell swoop, the thing that a lifetime had built up.

The effect of this destruction is most evident when you talk about how the estate tax impacts farmers. Farmers are small business owners. This particular small business requires an enormous amount of capital be effective. Land, machinery, storage facilities, processing facilities, etc. As a consequence, most of the wealth built into a farm is not in the form of liquid assets. When a farmer dies, the inheritors of that farm are suddenly subject to a huge tax burden. Most of the time, the inheritors do not have the cash assets to pay the tax. The only mechanism available is usually to change the non-liquid assets into cash by liquidating the assets. One person buys the land, someone else buys the equipment, etc. The resulting cash is then used to pay the tax. Even if the inheritors wanted to keep the business running, they usually can't.

The result of the tax is that a farm, which had been built up over a lifetime, is destroyed by tax policy. The estate tax is the easiest example of how tax policy destroys private property. If the government just took a bulldozer and razed 45% of the farm, we'd all be rightfully enraged with the government. We'd be calling for reforms and restrictions on the power of the government. Estate taxes do the exact same thing as bulldozering 45% of a farm, and we should be equally outraged and calling for restrictions on the power of the government, and an abolishment of such a destructive policy.

Unfortunately, farms are not the only private property destroyed by tax policy. And the estate tax is not the only tax policy that destroys private property. All taxation destroys private property. It's just that with the estate tax it's much easier to see the destruction. And lest you get too cozy with the destruction of private property, much rides on strong private property rights.

Does it pay to be a flirt?

According to CNN the answer is no. Unfortunately, that article doesn't give enough information to identify whether it's true or not. The only data cited in the article is this:

The respondents who said they never engaged in such activity earned an average of three promotions, versus two for the group that had employed sexuality. Those who said they never used sexuality were, on average, in the $75,000-$100,000 income range; the other group fell, on average, into the next range, $50,000 to $75,000.

That's way less than enough information to come up to this conclusion:

Women who cross their legs provocatively, wear short skirts or massage a man's shoulders at work get fewer pay raises and promotions

The appropropiate comparison isn't between women who flirt and women who don't flirt. You need to know how well the women who flirted would do if they didn't flirt. And you need to know how well the women who didn't flirt would do if they did. In other words, they haven't controlled for a variable. The explanation of the data may very well be that the women who didn't flirt didn't need to in order to advance their careers and the women who did flirt needed to.

Of course, I don't think that this type of behavior is appropriate at the office, but from the data presented, I don't think the conclusion can be drawn that it's ineffective. My problem is with the methodology of this study. I think they missed something. Or (hopefully) it was misreported.

My personal opinion is that it's likely that the conclusion of the story is true. If I'm a male manager concerned about profits, then I would think that a woman who feels the need to use sexual behavior is signaling her incompetance. In other words, if she uses this type of behavior it means she thinks its the only way to advance herself. In other words, she believes that her skills alone are insufficient to advance her careeer. On the other hand, she may be so convinced of sexism in the workplace. She may very well believe that her skills are sufficient, but that there's a glass ceiling for women and the only way to break it is to use sex. Personally, I don't know.

What I'm convinced of is that the article really sucks. There's not nearly enough information in it to even suggest the conclusion much less conclude it.

Update: The original article in USA Today is not much better. But it does have an interesting quote:

"Our story is really a feminist story, because we argue that there are negative consequences for women who use sexuality in the workplace," Brief says.

This strikes me as research with an agenda, but I'd like to read the entire paper before I decided that was true.

Income vs Expenses and Imports vs Exports

Russel Roberts of Cafe Hayek comments on CAFTA. In his comments, he mentions:

they falsely argue that the benefits of the agreement and the increase in exports to Central America and all the jobs that will be created. In this Alice-In-Wonderland world of pseudo-economics, exports are good and imports are bad... Presidents will find it hard to make the case for opening our borders unilaterally to foreign products—the educational well has been poisoned by all the previous mercantilist rhetoric that has argued that exports are good and imports are bad.

This reminded me of a commercial on the radio that I'd heard on the way to work this morning. In it, a state republican congressman was arguing for lower taxes (with which I agree) on the grounds that it would bring more business to our state resulting in more jobs. His argument basically was that a higher tax rate in this state, relative to the tax rates of neighboring states, encourages jobs to be created in those states. I must be starting to think like an economist because I was immediately puzzled by why I should care about whether or not a business comes to North or South Carolina. If I really want to work for the business in South Carolina, it's not hard. I just get a job and then move there. That's how I moved to North Carolina in the first place. Why should I care where that business locates itself. All I should care about is whether or not I want to work there for the salary that they offer me.

Which brings me to Professor Roberts comments about imports and exports. Imports are stuff that we as a nation buy. Exports are stuff that we as a nation sell. As an individual I also buy and sell stuff. Does the assumption that imports=bad and exports=good also apply to me as an indvidual? If so, then I should avoid imports, and try and increase exports. And in certain cases, I do avoid imports. For example, I don't import lawn mowing service. I do that myself. I earn roughly $25/week doing this by not having to pay someone else to do it. But I can't buy everything from myself and it's pointless to even try. The result is that I have trade defecits all over the place. I have an unbelievable trade defecit with the grocery store. I import all of their stuff and never export anything to them. Similarly my employer imports my services from me and I spend a tiny fraction of my salary on their products. This is an incredibly lopsided trade deficit for them in exactly the same way that I have a lopsided trade defecit with the grocery store.

Is this any cause for concern? Heck no! By buying my groceries I receive more benefit than just getting the groceries: I don't have to produce them. As I'm not very good at growing things (for example: my lawn), I get to take advantage of someone else's prodigious green thumb. Similarly, my employer doesn't have to learn certain technology skills; they simply hire me with my skills.

Imports aren't bad. Imports are good. Imports allow us to focus on the things that we do well, and let someone else who's figured out a better way to do things do them so that we can free up our labor efforts to focus on something that we do well. Exports aren't bad. Exports are good. They force us to create value for others when we work.

Neither imports nor exports are bad. Trade is good. Trade restrictions are bad.

Capital Freedom

This is a very good blog. Concise, intuitive, logical, and surprising (she comes up with conclusions that I didn't expect). I wish I could write like that. I wish I could think like that.