Which of these is not a joke?

1 - Early last month the mayor of Topeka, Kansas stunned the world by announcing that his city was changing its name to Google. We’ve been wondering ever since how best to honor that moving gesture. Today we are pleased to announce that as of 1AM (Central Daylight Time) April 1st, Google has officially changed our name to Topeka. -- Topeka's Blog

2 - Harvard has decided to auction off 100 slots in next year's freshman class to the highest bidders. - Mankiw

3 - Blattman tells us to "Ask not what you can do for poor African children, but what poor African children can do for you."



4 - The Heritage Foundation is the originator of ObamaCare. - Sumner

5 - Let's turn the London subway into a super hadron collider. - The Independent

Defender of Utah Series

In our last installment here, we learned that Utahns are extraverted, agreeable, creative and intelligent, conscientious, and not at all nuerotic ... unlike New Yorkers, Connecti-cuties, and Californians. In today's installment, we'll compare Utah to the South and New England.

Someone out there created a chart comparing how 'religious' the people of a state are with a bunch of things the author thinks are bad. How is religion being measured? I don't know. But if you have a Southern drawl, your state is probably in the Top 13, and if you live in the Northeast or Northwest, you're probably ... not. The point of the chart is to show that, by and large, the more religious states have more bad stuff and the less religious states have less.

The difference in average IQ is not statistically significant, given that a standard deviation is 10 and the difference between Vermont and Mississippi is 10. So color code it however you like, that's not significant.

The 12 most religious states (plus New Mexico and Arizona) have the highest levels of poverty. They also have some unhealthy murder and theft rates. There's a real question of causation here - are some people more likely to turn to religion and others to violence when they are poorer? I think there's a good case to be made there. Health and contentment are also low in poorer states. Gee, I wonder why?

How is generosity measured? I don't know. But neither the least religious states nor the most religious states fare particularly well.

Religious states are also much more conservative. Now I call that a good thing, but whether you like it or not, there it is: another correlation.

What one state breaks most (but not all) of these patterns? Let's hear it for UTAH! The 14th most religious state, it is the SINGLE MOST generous and SINGLE MOST healthy and content of any state. It has the SECOND LOWEST murder rate, but average theft and divorce. Utah also has the THIRD LOWEST level of poverty and insignificantly above-average intelligence. And yes, Utah is highly conservative.

Breaking Utah Stereotypes since 2009.

A little philosophy: what is truth?

1 - Frederick Hayek's 1974 Nobel Prize (Econ) lecture: "I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false." Hayek was speaking about the great unknowns in economics and political science, pointing out the hubris in assuming away the things we cannot measure in order to come up with estimates to the third decimal point of the effects of, say, government spending on unemployment. It works equally well in discussing spiritual truth. It is the humility to say, "I know that [God] loveth his children; nevertheless, I do not know the meaning of all things" and avoiding the pride that says my model proves there is no God because He does not show up in my experiments.

2 - An economist who writes philosophy (Steve Landsburg) just started blogging, and he argued that 1) the evolutionist who says "Evolution proves there is no God" is missing the point. It's not explaining life that's challenging, but why is there anything? and that 2) since mathematics and other extremely complex things are eternal and self-existent, there is no need for a Creator to create them. I responded thusly:

Y'see, part of the problem both you and he are bringing up is what we mean by "create." There is stuck in Western thought since the councils that create must mean "ex nihilo." But there is no Biblical support for that. The better term for what Gensis speaks of is "organize" rather than "produce from nothing." That is, in fact, the sense we usually mean when we talk of creating anything: we take the parts that are already there, physical and mental, and combine them to form a new thing. "In the beginning ... the earth was without form" not "In the beginning there was no matter."

Joseph Smith, some one hundred years before Einstein said the same thing, claimed that matter "was not created or made, neither indeed can be" (Doctrine and Covenants 93:29). Mormon/LDS theology has long accepted the eternal, 'independent existence' of God, the universe with all its matter, mathematics, and all of us. It's still not proof there is no God. Its eternal, self-existent nature is in fact one more type and shadow of Him.

There is much of that I do not understand. ... That may be a good thing.

3 - On the lighter side, Chris Blattman links us to three questions: Truth is a number? Truth is art? Art is numbers? A Chinese firm that sells art around the world produces composite pictures of the most and least desired art in various countries to show us what we want. For Americans, it appears to be George Washington by a lake. Kenya has remarkably similar taste. One of the artists explained:

"In a way it was a traditional idea, because a faith in numbers is fundamental to people, starting with Plato’s idea of a world which is based on numbers. ... we believe in numbers, and numbers never lie. Numbers are innocent. It’s absolutely true data. ... That’s really the truth, as much as we can get to the truth. Truth is a number."

Oy, my head!

Let's not go there: avoiding markets in everything

Tyler Cowan, over at Marginal Revolution, was asked for some examples of successful government bureaucracies. He provided some thoughtful examples: "the NIH, the Manhattan Project, U.C. Berkeley, the University of Michigan, Fairfax County, the World Trade Organization, the urban planners of postwar Germany, some of the Victorian public works and public health commissions, most of what goes on in Singapore, anywhere that J.S. Bach worked."

One of the regular commentators objected to the Manhattan Project in this way: "Another thing, how is the Manhattan Project an example? Yes, they ended up creating an atomic weapon. But did they do it for less money than it would have taken a private company to do, if that had been legal and the company could reap the profits from selling A-bombs?"

EEEEEEEEEEEK!

Okay, now that my hair is back in a flat position, is there any way this could work?

a) Contract to the low bidder. At best, we have an airline result with our nuclear deterrent built with the cheapest materials possible. I'm rather worried about safety. In the mediocre case we get $10k hammers. Worse case (not worst, but worse) - Haliburton with H-bombs. We could name it the HALiburton-9000.

b) X-prize style. Get the best and brightest at dozens of private and public institutions working on it. It worked for space flight. Okay.... Security leaks are going to be killer... Undergrads at MIT working on nuclear warheads... Be afraid.

Just as an aside, I was watching Spiderman 2 for the first time last night while cleaning, so add to my list of fears Doc Ock with Einstein's head. Jurassic Park comes to mind as another example. Compared to the list of ways the entire project could have gone wrong, no matter who did it, I think it comes down as a success.

It might be instructive, though, to compare the Manhattan Project to other countries' efforts that also produced bombs: security, cost, time taken, etc.

Government as Santa

Robert Higgs, to whom I was sent by Marginal Revolution (link on the right), has an interesting discussion with a very interesting conclusion. The discussion is about the difference between diagnosis and prescription: it's one thing to say 'government is too big' and another to know how best to shrink it. In defending himself from those who say his diagnosis is no good because he doesn't have a prescription, he ends with these thoughts on why it is beyond the power of any one person or small group of people to stop the growth of government we've seen over the last 75 years:

"Yet, one thing we do know: Many Americans now believe many things about their government that are false, and they expect much from the government that the rulers cannot provide. ... Until more people come to a more realistic, fact-based understanding of the government and the economy, little hope exists of tearing them away from their quasi-religious attachment to a government they view with misplaced reverence and unrealistic hopes. Lacking a true religious faith yet craving one, many Americans have turned to the state as a substitute god, endowed with the divine omnipotence required to shower the public with something for nothing in every department – free health care, free retirement security, free protection from hazardous consumer products and workplace accidents, free protection from the Islamic maniacs the U.S. government stirs up with its misadventures in the Muslim world, and so forth. If you take the government to be Santa Claus, you naturally want every day to be Christmas; and the bigger the Santa, the bigger his sack of goodies."

I should note, despite my nice graphic, that many conservatives were quite happy to look at Bush II as Santa also. No one gets elected by saying they won't do anything, and only diehard Libertarians vote for someone because they expect that person to do nothing.

Economics Nobel Prize

From Greg Mankiw's blog, link on right
-----------------
First-Year Grad Student Wins Nobel Prize in Economics! From the Associated Press (with some light editing):

Pfuffnick's Nobel Economics Prize triumph hailed by many

LONDON — The surprise choice of first-year graduate student Quintus Pfuffnick for the Nobel Prize in Economics drew praise from much of the world Friday even as many pointed out the youthful economist has not yet published anything in scholarly journals.

The new PhD candidate was hailed for his willingness to tackle difficult problems, his commitment to improving the economic system, and his goal of bringing efficiency and equality into harmony.

Professor Paul Krugman of Princeton, who won the prize in 2008, said Pfuffnick's award shows great things are expected from him in the coming years.

"In a way, it's an award coming near the beginning of the first year in grad school of a relatively young economist that anticipates an even greater contribution towards making our economy a better place for all," he said. "It is an award that speaks to the promise of Mr Pfuffnick's message of hope."

He said the prize is a "wonderful recognition of Pfuffnick's essay in his grad school application."
---------------
I thought that was too appropriate and funny to pass up on in light of certain other committee choices. The actual Nobel in economics goes to two pioneers in the field of economic governance. Their problems and answers are related to political governance, but in a way show how to govern society when markets fail without resorting to government.

The first woman to win the Economics Nobel, Elinor Ostrom (Indiana University, Bloomington) found a solution to an old problem, the "Problem of the Commons." The problem is that when no one owns a thing (ie: common property), no one has the responsibility for its upkeep and proper management. This means common property natural resources tend to be overused to the detriment of all. It's not in anyone's individual interest to reduce their use, even though everyone would be better off if they could all agree to do so. The top two answers to that problem are privatization and nationalization (for two points, guess which political parties favor which policies). Ostram demonstrates, however, that real people often recognize and resolve the problem of the commons while develop social organizations that preserve the communal nature of the resources. "She observes that resource users frequently develop sophisticated mechanisms for decision-making and rule enforcement to handle conflicts of interest, and she characterizes the rules that promote successful outcomes." I have written about this in Per's and my food policy book.

Update: One example of this mentioned by Nobel laureate Vernon Smith, as posted on Marginal Revolution, from Switzerland: "One rule, still enforced, dating back to 1517 states that "no citizen could send more cows to the [common property] alp than he could feed during the winter." Wintering a cow is costly, and this rule rations access to the commons by tying it to private property rights."

Oliver Williamson (UC Berkley) asked which problems are better solved by market settings and which are best solved within a firm. "Competitive markets work relatively well because buyers and sellers can turn to other trading partners in case of dissent. But when market competition is limited, firms are better suited for conflict resolution than markets." Within-firm dispute resolution is also more likely to be chosen the more important establishing relationships of trust is.

Some fascinating links

To those who care, sorry I haven't posted last week. Work got very complicated and involved in a classified way and home life has been engrossingly fun with birthday celebrations (more later) and planning two major trips. But anyway, here are a few fascinating links from today I couldn't pass up sharing:

1) Why does time fly in only one direction? (Answer: it might go the other way, but we would never be aware of it. And for answers like this, you can get tenure!)

2) Top 100 political donors of the last 20 years. (#1 ... AT&T, donating 50/50 to Reps and Dems; All but 2 of the top 12 give heavily to the Dems, but most of those are unions; Most partisan Rep donor: Amway.)

3) Some creative athiests will watch your pet if you are taken up in the Rapture and the pet isn't during the next 10 years.

4) Phrase of the day: hapax legomenon (plural: legomena). It's a word or phrase that only appears once in an author's writings. This makes translation very difficult (we have no idea what gopher wood is, Gen 6:14). Someday I may have to sit down and determine all the HL in 'Weird Al' Yankovic's works. I found it as part of a challenge I won.

(Hat tips: Newmark's Door: 1&2. Marginal Revolution: 3)

This in from ... China: A Tale of Two Provinces

The inimitable Scott Sumner was preparing for a trip to China. In discussing just how big and diverse it is and how we rarely recognize that fact (because we focus on countries instead of on people, as a forthcoming article of mine discusses), he turns to a fascinating retelling of the Chinese miracle that has happened since 1978.

In the standard version, the Chinese government, led by the heroic Deng Xioaping [left], gave farmers some limited property rights and began letting price mechanisms decide some food production choices. The agrarian economy transformed and hundreds of millions of starving people could now be fed. This brought support for further reforms as the coastal (non-ag) areas received the blessings of the market system and grew much faster than the relatively neglected inland regions. Today the primary concern of developmentalists seems to be much more on the inequality between coastal/inland and urban/rural rather than on absolute living standards.

To VERY briefly summarize Prof. Sumner (a less brief version quoting parts of his blog is below), Jiangsu Province was the 3rd richest agrarian province in 1978 and Zhejiang 7th. They are marked in red on the map. Both are next door to Shanghai, China's New York City, both were relatively open to trade, and after 1978 were required to grant foreigners the same levels of property protection for foreigners. Domestic protection levels varied, however, with Zhejiang being more market-friendly to natives.

Today Zhejiang is not only the richest province (Jiangsu still 3rd), despite Jiangsu getting more foreign direct investment (FDI), but the average income of the people there is roughly equivalent to its production while Jiangsu's inhabitants own only a third of their production (the rest goes back to foreigners). Zhejiang also scores very highly in terms of human development (health and education). So the inequality problem may be too little free market rather than the oft-supposed too much (alternatively, too little equality under the law). The rest of the post is worth a read if you have a minute:
------
To give you a sense of how complicated China is, ... [Prof. Huang of MIT] observed that both [provinces] had similar histories of being relatively prosperous and open to trade. ... In the 1980s, however, the provincial leaders in Zhejiang province were much more encouraging of private business. Although we think of the economic reforms starting in 1978, a huge ocean liner turns very slowly. The government of China does not just wave a magic wand and order changes, rather change often bubbles up from the bottom. So the leaders of Zhejiang province, and even more so the early entrepreneurial pioneers in business, were risking their lives. Just imagine if China had decided to abandon the economic reforms and go back to the Cultural Revolution.

BTW, a brief digression that libertarian readers might find inspiring. The rural reforms began in late 1978 in a single village in Anhui province [some members of which are pictured right]. Each family in the commune was assigned their own plot of land. This decision was incredibly risky, so everyone took a blood oath to secrecy. Gradually other villages started to copy them. When the government saw that the reforms were successful, they eventually gave them their blessing. But it was not the sort of top-down change that is often portrayed in the West. It was the Chinese people that took the lead, and the leaders followed. In an earlier post I called this agricultural reform the single best thing that has ever happened in world history. [I'd put it top 10 non-religious.]

Yasheng Huang points out that the 1980s have been widely misunderstood. The industrial revolution occurred mainly in the countryside, where free enterprise was encouraged. ... These reforms actually led to a reduction in income inequality in the 1980s, not the increase many Westerners assume occurred. Why? Because the growth was fastest in rural areas that had been much poorer than the cities. Of course since 1990 the cities have grown faster, and income inequality has indeed worsened. Huang argues that that is because government policy favored the cities after 1990.

Back to Zhejiang [pictured right. Jiangsu is pictured left]. After the party leaders adopted a business-friendly policy, economic development in Zhejiang province took off. Since 1978 Zhejiang has gone from 7th to 1st in per capita provincial GDP, while Jiangsu, which has also grown fast, stayed at 3rd. But the most interesting part of Huang’s argument concerned foreign investment. Which province do you think attracted the most foreign investment? Surprisingly it was Jiangsu, the slower growing province. The reason was that after the economic reforms began the central government provided secure property rights for foreign investors in all of China’s provinces. In contrast, property rights for local business was much more iffy. ... [Huang then uses a clever comparative advantage argument that this really isn't surprising at all: If both provinces are equally accommodating to foreigners, but one does a better job attracting domestic talent, the domestics will tend to work in one province and the foreigners in the other.]

... We found that the difference between Jiangsu and Zhejiang was even more dramatic if you looked at personal income, rather than GDP per capita. In relatively market-oriented cities in Zhejiang province, such as Wenzhou [right], the firms are mostly owned by locals, and GDP per person is only slightly higher than the personal income per person. In contrast, in a Jiangsu city like Suzhou, much of the industry is foreign-owned and GDP per person is roughly 3 times higher than personal income per person. The people in Suzhou produce a lot of output, but much of the income flows out of the country to the owners of the foreign enterprises. So even in two seemingly similar coastal provinces, there are vast differences in the economic structure. ...

Professor Huang argues that many of the Chinese problems that are blamed on free market reforms are actually caused by a lack of free markets. ... In my view the social indicators in China would look better, not worse, if market reforms had occurred at a faster pace. And once again I think Zhejiang province is the best example. Not only did their incomes grow much faster than in neighboring Jiangsu, despite all the foreign investment flowing into Jiangsu, but their Human Development Index score is now highest among all non-urban Chinese provinces. If market reforms were really the cause of China’s social problems, you wouldn’t expect the social indicators in Zhejiang to be so good. ... [Zhejiang Normal University pictured right, another Jiangsu shot on the left]

I often think about the little village in poor Anhui that started it all. Wouldn’t the secret pact of Mr. Hongchang and the other 12 families of Xiaogang village make an inspiring Hollywood story? Don’t hold your breath, there’s still more films to be made glorifying Che Guevara. Of course Che would have preferred China’s pre-reform agricultural policy. The one that led to mass famine. The one that the brave peasants of Anhui rebelled against.

DC - A Policy Guy Wanders

"Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek." -- POTUS

As interesting as the economic landmarks were, I was much more interested in making a tour of the Presidents. I have no idea if Pres. Obama was 'at home' when I came calling, but it was very interesting to imagine him or one of the kids pulling back the curtains to look out at the small crowd of photographers, families, and protesters (below) standing vigil. I wondered how long it takes before the novelty of omnipresent amateur paparazzi wears off. Imagine looking out your windows every day and seeing a throng of people. Then I wondered what it would be like if the White House lawn was armed as well as the X-Mansion and decided I wasn't dignified enough to be sticking my camera through the bars and moved on.

"Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition. It asks too little of yourself. Because it's only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential." -- POTUS

Washington and the Distinctive Unit Insignia of the The Big Red One from near the FDIC and Red Cross HQ. Being a Cornellian, I'm rather fascinated by that nickname for the First Infantry Division, the oldest division of our army.

I marched across the green between the White House up to the Washington Monument and was amazed at the number of baseball games going on. Game after game of coed softball all over the parks! I paused once in a while to cheer on a batter or applaud a good outfield catch.

From Washington, you can see the Capitol Building (Congress, pictured right), the Jefferson Memorial, Lincoln and the WWII Memorial, and the White House. It is a fitting layout in tribute to our first president. There are so few people who have been put into such high office with so much humility, so much willingness to put it all down to return to a simpler life, and so many excellent first examples. John Adams, our second president, had apparently wanted to make the President serve a life term. Yet as Washington peacefully laid down the mantle, so Adams also turned them over in one of the world's first peaceful exchanges of power between political parties.
I gazed up from the foot of the monument. Yes, he stands that tall today. This is what he said:

• Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.
• Be courteous to all, but intimate with few, and let those few be well tried before you give them your confidence.
• Friendship is a plant of slow growth and must undergo and withstand the shocks of adversity before it is entitled to the appellation.
• Few men have virtue to withstand the highest bidder.
• Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
  
• Happiness and moral duty are inseparably connected.
• If the freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.
  

Of similar bold assertions was our third President, Thomas Jefferson:

• A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.
• Errors of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.
• Every generation needs a new revolution.

• Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves are its only safe depositories.
• Experience hath shown, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.
• He who knows best knows how little he knows.
  

Sauntering around Jefferson, I visited a remarkably flat memorial, that of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, President during the only economic crisis of the last 100 years worse than this one. I walked it backwards and spent much of it wondering where a statue of the man himself was. The walk consists of his more famous sayings carved into stone, with occasional reflecting pools and waterfalls or statues of Depression-era bread lines.
His dear wife, Eleanor, gets a statue of her own as our first delegate to the UN. Since she is rather less often quoted, here are some of hers:

• Do what you feel in your heart to be right- for you'll be criticized anyway.
• Freedom makes a huge requirement of every human being. With freedom comes responsibility.
• Happiness is not a goal; it is a by-product.
• In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility.

And so finally, after more than two hours of walking I came round to the lanky Illinoisan himself, whom I trust you will read with as deep a voice as you can manage:

• The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep's for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as his liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty. Plainly, the sheep and the wolf are not agreed upon a definition of liberty.
• My great concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are content with your failure.
• How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn't make it a leg.
• I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.
• Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another, but let him work diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built.
• No man is good enough to govern another man without that other's consent.

What a debt of gratitude we owe to these men and their wives.

Two interesting reads

With a hat tip to Marginal Revolution, some new research on how choice of majors impacts religious devotion. Bottom line: religious people are more likely to go to college. Once there, business and education majors get more religious, humanities and particularly (oh the shame!) social scientists get less religious, and bio and physical sciences have no effect. One commenter noted that there are some serious measurement problems with determining how 'devoted' one is after controlling for attendance.

The second is a diverting piece by Scott Sumner, whose usual beat is monetary policy. Today, though, he's posting a thought experiment on modern federalism called The American Union: or how a right-winger learned to stop worrying and love the EU. Now paging Dr. Strangesumner. (I also highly recommend his discussion of the monetary side of the current financial crisis: quite unorthodox and rather long-winded but decidedly convincing.)

This in from ... Africa: Less Conflict than Advertised

The entry for today's correction of African stereotypes comes from Easterly's excellent and relatively new blog, Aid Watch where you can find the entire...
-----------------------
reaction to President Obama’s speech in Ghana by guest blogger Leonard Wantchekon, NYU Professor of Politics

Overall, I like the theme of the President Obama’s speech in Ghana. Africans must own their future by strengthening democratic institutions and the rule of law in their countries, and by becoming less reliant on assistance. I also like the idea of a real partnership between Africa and other developed countries based on trade. It is very much in line with what most of us would think. He said:

"America can also do more to promote trade and investment. Wealthy nations must open our doors to goods and services from Africa in a meaningful way. ..."

What I find a bit questionable is this:

"Africa is not the crude caricature of a continent at perpetual war. But if we are honest, for far too many Africans, conflict is a part of life, as constant as the sun ... These conflicts are a millstone around Africa's neck."

My sense is that in saying this he has helped to perpetuate, perhaps unwittingly, the very caricature that he questions. Conflict is NOT as constant as the sun in Africa. While this may have been the reality of the 1970s and the 1980s, it is certainly no longer the case. He forgot to add that many of these conflicts were proxy wars between the US and the former Soviet Union (such as that in Angola), or were manufactured by France (such as that in Congo Brazzaville).

The average African country is at peace. Moreover, it is a democracy, albeit one with relatively weak state capacity, such as Liberia, and Mali. Zimbabwe is the exception, not the rule. And even in Zimbabwe, where there is 90% unemployment, incredible hardships and repression, most people want democracy, not another war.

Freedom, especially freedom of the press, has also drastically improved in the majority of African countries, to the point where Reporters Without Borders have ranked several African nations above developed countries such as Italy and Japan.

... In terms of the strongman syndrome, things have changed for the better. All across Africa courts and unions have tried (most of the time successfully) to block and prevent constitutional changes that would allow the sitting president to run for an additional term (African presidents have therefore been less successful than the Mayor of New York City in this regard!). Afrobarometer surveys suggest that 75% of Africans reject military rule, 73% reject a one-party system, and 79% reject strongman rule. ...

[People responded to the initial blog post, and this comes from his response.]

How many countries that can be considered to be at war, in Africa? The two clear cut cases are Somalia, and Sudan. But you can add Chad and to some extent Congo. That is 4 out of 54 countries in Africa. That is 7 percent of Africa. You can throw in Nigeria or Kenya because of electoral violence. But would we call India a country at war? ...

[If] we want to promote investment and tourism in Africa, it is really counter-productive to exaggerate the security situation. We also need to report progress, which has been significant in the past 10 years.

------------

The map on the right comes from the US State Dept. Humanitarian Information Unit. I see only 4 countries where there is widespread conflict (as opposed to hot spots), but a number of other countries do have hot spots than acknowledged above. Even so, the percent of Africa in conflict is quite low compared to historical averages and stereotypes alike. I found a similar 1999 map from the BBC and it shows a similar, albeit less-detailed, picture.

D.C. - An Economist Wanders

The Institute of Medicine, the Gates Foundation, the Kaiser Family Foundation, and who knows how many others, brought together a wide array of speakers on the topic of "Mitigating the Nutritional Impacts of the World Food Crisis" last week. Per Pinstrup-Andersen - my boss - was on the planning committee and was the first speaker, and he knew that the conference would be both interesting and relevant for our project next year, so he invited me along. Rather than abandon my family for four days, by dropping them off with the Green M&Ms, we were only separated 2.5 days.

The conference ended each day at 5pm, after most of the interesting sites had closed, so I wasn't really able to go see much. Tuesday was the All-Star game (so close! We almost finally won.). But Wednesday night was open and available, so I went walking. I wandered for 3 hours altogether, from the hotel down to the mall, circling the Presidents in a grand, 10+ mile loop. Rather than try to present all of that at one large post, I'll make a handful of small posts with pictures by topic.

First stop of interest along my route: the US Treasury, with Albert Gallatin (Wiki: a Swiss-American ethnologist, linguist, politician, diplomat, Congressman, and the longest-serving United States Secretary of the Treasury. He was also a founder of New York University). I haven't heard much out of Treasury in the last two years that I could cheer, but their recent announcement that they will be auctioning off the shares they currently own in other banks is a very welcome event (more info: here, courtesy Donald Marron).


Circling the Treasury and White House (forthcoming), you come to a much talked about institution of late: the FDIC. They're the ones who promise that your deposits are safe even if a bank goes under. In that unhappy event, the FDIC takes possession of the bank (aka nationalizes it) to unwind its debts and make sure you get your money back. So we've had a program of bank nationalization for over 70 years, and it's worked pretty well.



I was surprised to look to my side Thursday on my way to work and realize I was passing by the Inter-American Development Bank. The IADB is unique among the development banks because the developing countries are its majority shareholders - that is, they have a big role in calling the shots. This has on average tended to increase accountability and legitimacy, both in the bank and in the countries getting loans.

A word about debt

In 1860, the federal debt was $65 million (in today's money). The Civil War took it to over $2.7 billion, or $2700 million: a forty-fold increase. World War II only brought it up 5x, from $51 billion to $260 billion. Nixon and Carter brought us up to shake hands with a trillion dollar deficit ($900 bill). Reagan&Bush brought us up to a trillion (3 of them actually), Clinton nearly doubled it ($5.7 tril), Bush II added another 3 tril ($9 tril), and Obama has pledged to double it by 2014. Add to it consumer debt of $2 trillion in 2003.

For at least the last 30 years, a favorite game has been to remind people just how much these numbers mean. Let's have another round!

How big is the debt....

as a Pyramid scheme?
1
10
100
1000
10000
100000
1000000
10000000
100000000
1000000000
10000000000
100000000000
1000000000000
10,000,000,000,000 --- We got our 13th zero some time this year.

as a pile of $1 bills?
It would stretch from earth to the moon three times over.

in seconds?
320,000 years.

as a Road Trip?


per person?
$30,400 is your share as of Feb 2008. Put it at about $33,000 now.



(Hat tip Donald Marron, former CBO head)
From Oct2007-June2008 we had a $286 billion dollar deficit. It's grown to $1 trillion this year already as tax revenues fell 18% and the TARP, bailout, and stimulus funds kick in.

That's what we've already added to the debt this year so far. 11% growth in 3/4 of a year with a pledge to spend 500 billion more.






The debt increases by a trillion dollars as far as the eye can see.

And that's before Medicare, Social Security, National Health Care, and other entitlements ratchet up when the boomers retire.





J. Reuben Clark - "Once in debt, interest is your companion every minute of the day and night; you cannot shun it or slip away from it; you cannot dismiss it; it yields neither to entreties, demands, or orders; and whenever you get in its way or cross its course or fail to meet its demands, it crushes you."

Self-evident

My last blog post got me thinking. Consider the following statement:

"I hold my political views to be self-evident, and that all men who disagree with them must be either incredibly stupid - for failing to perceive what is self-evident - or incredibly dishonest and evil - for perceiving what is self-evident and rejecting it."

To paraphrase C. S. Lewis, "not many people, I admit, would formulate a [political ideology] in precisely those terms; but [I suspect] a conception not very different lurks at the back of many minds."

Perhaps a third quote would close the thought: Benjamin Franklin, on encouraging his fellow delegates to sign a Constitution he said he did not approve, said "having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged, by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that, the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment of others. ... On the whole, sir, I can not help expressing a wish that every member of the convention who may still have objections to it, would, with me, on this occasion, doubt a little of his own infallibility, and, to make manifest our unanimity, put his name to this instrument."

Would that it were easier to doubt our infallibility!

Something Fishy

To celebrate my sister the marinophile's birthday tomorrow, I am proud to present a set of interesting and entertaining fish stories. Here's to the Monkeyfish! Long may she and my brother swim!

The Economics of Why Lobster is suddenly so cheap: a great job at conservation, a poor job at cooperative marketing (aka collusion, but we'll let that pass), and an economic recession.

A fish who can look through its own head. It looks up through a transparent head to see the outline of fish above it closer to the sun. Scientists are now delighted to learn it can in fact turn its eyes when it turns vertical to make its move on a smaller fish above it.

The Law of Unintended Consequences similarly swims up and bites environmentalists' swimming trunks again: Dolphin-safe tuna disaster. "If you work out the math on this (and you don’t have to, because the environmental justice foundation did), you find that 1 dolphin saved costs 382 mahi-mahi, 188 wahoo, 82 yellowtail and other large fish, 27 sharks, and almost 1,200 small fish."

And, only tangentially related because of the Fish McSandwich, How McDonald's conquered France, its #2 most profitable area. "... McDonald's was a blight on the American landscape, ... and in a contest between Roquefort and Chicken McNuggets, I knew which side I was on. But implicit in this attitude was a belief that McDonald's had somehow been foisted on the French; that slick American marketing had lured them away from the bistro and into the arms of Ronald McDonald. However, that just wasn't true. The French came to McDonald's and la malbouffe (or fast-food) willingly, and in vast and steadily rising numbers. Indeed, the quarter-pounded conquest of France was not the result of some fiendish American plot to subvert French food culture. It was an inside job, and not merely in the sense that the French public was lovin' it—the architects of McDonald's strategy in France were French."

A Prop 8 Conversation

Last year I had intended to post something regarding California's Prop 8, which defined marriage as between a man and a woman in the state constitution. I had gone door to door with my father back when it was Prop 22 that was making it a law, only to see that law enacted by the will of the people overturned by certain judges. I intended to write several, but somehow never got to it. I was rather disappointed when it was over.

But it seems that it isn't over and there is continued and ongoing debate about it. I voiced my opinion on a Facebook poll, and that started a lengthy and interesting conversation with a friend of mine that I wanted to quote here as a belated contribution. The debate is mostly about what government can and should do and about the relationship between agency, liberty, and law than about the rightness or wrongness of homosexual marraige per se or whether it is a civil rights issue. In order to distinguish between his comments and mine, I will stick a small pic of me next to my contributions. I should note that I don't necessarily agree with everything he says we agree on, and let a lot of debatable points go for the sake of brevity and staying on message.
-----------------------------------
In stating the reason I was voting No to reverse Prop 8, I wrote:


If marriage were a purely social institution, I would have no problem with extending it to everyone. It is not, however. Marriage between a man and a woman was ordained of God, and we do not have the right to change its definition. I also worry about how freedom of speech and of religion will be curtailed as any preaching that something is morally wrong will be labeled "hate speech."



He responded: take government out of the marriage issue and the problem goes away. Would a government ordained by God be in the business of restricting free agency?


Of course not. The question yours begs, though, is if the establishment and enforcement of law curtails free agency. The answer is that it does not. God sets forth laws, laws He not only enforces, but is also bound by, and that without restricting agency. In fact, laws are ESSENTIAL in order to HAVE agency in the first place because without them there is no choice.
Commandments do not restrict agency. We are free to disobey and reap the consequences. The eternal laws are already there and we can't change them. Legal immorality is still immoral.

Man's law is enforced through coercion and duress, removing agency.
HE offers a reward for obedience, and a choice.
So, it seems we agree that the US gov. isn't ordained by God. I suggest it is even in opposition to God's will and an obstacle to building the Kingdom for HIM; where agency lets men suceed or fail. We can help others make good choices without threats, violence, and cages. I do not need a law to decide to love my neighbor.

Except for one thing: in this case, that coercive power is not being used on anyone. If homosexual marriage became legalized, the coercive power of the state would be used in our schools and against churches and religious people to force them to accept as normal and permissible something they regard as sin. Right now, no one is using the force of the state to prevent people from marrying. They just say, "oh, you had a ceremony. That's nice. It doesn't count." In countries where it has been legalized, pastors have been threatened with jail for preaching against it. In this case, protecting agency against coercion means keeping the law and constitution we just passed in place.

Again, the problem is government enforcement of law. If there's no coercion, why did WE need a license to marry? I got one, under duress. Did you?
I think you'll agree that permission from the Church is more important than that from the state. Seems to me, we should be deleting marriage law, not adding more. I'd rather tell the state what they can't do, instead of my neighbor.

1) There was no duress. I wanted the benefits the law provides and happily provided evidence that Joy and I would be, and then were, properly married by someone having authority.
2) The Church itself uses the phrase "legally and lawfully" married, not "married under Church authority."
3) Yes, I would also rather tell the state what it can and cannot do rather than my neighbor. But when my neighbor rises up and wants to use the state's coercive powers against what I hold most dear, I am happy to tell the state it has the authority to say, no, you can't. The early saints tried to get the state government to protect them against their neighbors, and then the federal government against the state government. Joseph Smith lamented that he felt the Constitution was not yet perfect, in part because there was no protection for them.
This is about protecting freedoms we have. At least to me.

Y'know, let me try a different tack.

You say the problem is whether the state or US government should or should not have the authority to decide who can and cannot get married. Unfortunately, that isn't the question Prop 8 or Nullify Prop 8 asks. Whether we keep the CA Constitution as it now stands or make another ammendment to it, the state is going to decide who can and cannot get married. The world where the government does not have that authority doesn't exist in this timeline.
It is possible for a hypothetical best to stand in the way of a feasible good. I can understand trying to hold out for it, but in doing so, we prevent the good that can be done today. Next fight we can try to bring it further. But this is today's fight and today's question.

Fun links and excerpts

From my usual suspects.

Star Trek Office signs - For the terminally red shirted.

Klingon opera- Coming soon to a local theater!

Extreme Green living - Too much of a good thing?

Another Reason to Just Say No
The data, collected by the Forensic Science Service, reveals how drug gangs are using increasing amounts of chemicals - so-called cutting agents - to dilute cocaine powder sold on the streets of Britain. They include the cancer-causing drug phenacetin, cockroach insecticide and pet worming powder.


Best line: The three most dangerous words in the English language are: "Macroeconomists agree that ..."



Breaking News from the Onion [excerpt]:
Ugandan Ambassador Seizes Control of the UN and Declares himself Secretary-General for life
Reporter: It’s extremely tense, Brandon, there’s no telling what a madman like Mtambe will do! As Secretary-General he has the ability to do anything, from outline the UN’s year long goals, to propose agenda items for consideration by the Security Council!
Anchor: I can’t imagine what it must be like for those ambassadors inside, having no idea what this maniac will decide to place on the preliminary list of matters to be included in the provisional dockets.
Reporter: It’s terrifying!

Zombie economics and politics - be sure to read the first two comments about Obama's (serious) attempts to stimulate the undead.

TARP in pictures

This is one person's (brilliant) idea of what the government bailout looks like.

The TARP, in Pictures

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Humor Creative Writing tarp

One interesting character commented that it's a shame no one understands sunk costs... Hit tip Russell Roberts.

Moses making a comeback

Remarkably enough, two leading political figures are starring in comics today as Moses: Rushmo and Obamoses! Rush is also depicted today as the Buddha, which is of a piece with the regular depictions of the Obamessiah. The question is if the satire is a better depiction of these men's egos or of their devotees' fervor. "Lo, here! Lo, there!" indeed.

Derrill of Arabia 3

(Note for readers: The first paragraph by each picture is a description of the pic. The second will be part of an ongoing description of the conference topics and some thoughts about possible future research topics. So if you don't care about the economics, just read the first paragraphs.)

Oh, yes, not only did I sleep and eat, I did attend an actual important conference. They occasionally put video of the participants on the large screen, and I happened to notice a familiar looking goateed person or two in the picture. One of them surreptitiously (I can't believe I spelled that right on the first attempt) snapped a picture of them. This is a zoom in on yours truly.

The topic of the Global Development Network conference this year was natural resource management. Per and I took this to mean the interaction of agriculture and the environment. The vast majority of the conference, though, was focused on what to do with extractable natural resources like ... let's see, we're in Kuwait, so it must be ... OIL. Copper and minerals got some honorable mentions, but the real discussion was on how oil revenues affect development and political economy.



As you walk in the door to the Arab Organization building where we met, they had this beautiful mosaic waterfall and reflection pool on the left.


One effect of oil revenues is clearly the ability to build amazingly plush, opulent meeting rooms. I mentioned to Per that it might be interesting to study the effect of 5-star hotels on development. Is it positive because they create jobs and encourage development people to come hold seminars there so they study the problems of your country, or is it negative because the money could be used elsewhere to better effect? What difference does private vs. public ownership make? Per chucklingly surmised that I would enjoy the field research.....


Mosaics and carved wood ceilings everywhere. This was a side room where we discussed African development.






An Arabian version of the Tree of Life, also in the entryway.


One of the speakers proposed a political economy model with fascinating results, but which relied on the assumption that people are willing to trade off safety/security (military, economic, etc) for political freedom (voice and democracy in government). The discussant for that round correctly pointed out that the notion that these are substitute goods (I'm willing to give up safety for freedom or vice versa) is by no means certain. They could be complementary (the more economically secure I am, the more political freedom I demand) or completely unrelated.

It reminded me strongly of Ben Franklin's quote "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." At other times, he added, "and will lose both."


On the floor with the lunch buffet. In addition to furniture and paintings, they had several small birdcages. The decorative holes in that wall look down into the conference room.





Another view from the lunch room, this one straight up. All the sides of the large atrium are filled with potted plants of many different varieties, not to mention fountains and works of art.


One of the more entertaining moments was when a woman came forward to remind all of us that she and the more poli-sci oriented folks had been discussing these questions since the 1980s and she was delighted that economists were finally getting on board. We had been following our own models at the time and she referred to a number of the advances that had been made since that time in the other literatures. I had a fairly long conversation with her later.



This picture deserves to be clicked on to see it up close. Delicately carved gold decorations.







Another side room. I should mention that they had attendants EVERYwhere. Not only the two guys who opened the front door for us and the security people everywhere, they had bathroom attendants who mopped the floor every time it emptied!





The main conference room before things begin.


Given the chapter I wrote on good governance, her comments got me thinking about an interesting idea. One of the complaints about aid and various natural resources is that they reduce government accountability to taxpayers. The question is: what about governance in the US? Alaska, Texas, Nevada and maybe a few other state governments receive most of their funds from the sale of natural resources or a mild tax on only one industry. How does this affect governance? Do they have worse governance (participation, accountability, transparency, lack of corruption, etc.) than California or NY with their perpetual budget battles or Illinois? She was vehemently in the affirmative. Question is, does anyone have governance measures within the states?


Another side meeting room upstairs. The wood carvings throughout the room were most impressive.







Tapestry in the main conference room.


The other research type question the conference made me ponder had to do with government expectations. The old Keynesian model believed people have "adaptive" expectations -- they look to the past and make a guess about today based on the past. This allows policy makers to trick them with unexpectedly high inflation, producing perpetually low unemployment. The 1970s critique introduce "rational" expectations and the notion that people look forward so that the government might be able to trick people once, but people would anticipate further tricks and so neutralize the government.

The research presented at the conference indicated, though, that some of the governments were behaving AS IF they had very perverse expectations, as if they confused long-term trends and short-term trends. That is, they spent money as if it will always be there and ignore long-term trends in lower prices as if they were here today and gone tomorrow. Both adaptive and rational expectations people would have done better at investing the money than government did.

I fooled around with a a handful of explanations and talked to the presenters. They all seemed to settle on a lobbying answer in one form or another: the oil/mineral/whatzit industry gains political influence when its price is high and turns this into long-term political favors. If this is a semi-permanent feature of the political landscape, it is poorly understood and it ought to be possible to devise a set of institutions (to be determined since I haven't done the research yet and it'll be several years before I could get to it) to anticipate this and work around it.