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Swiss Industry

Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007

All trip long, the famous Swiss meticulousness did not disappoint.

Most chalets were of the traditional style, with shutters, overhanging roofs, and a prominent gable or two; flower gardens exploded autumn’s pretense with color.
I could set my watch by the trains, the buses, and the local shops’ opening hours.
By homes, small cow sheds, and stopping points along major trails, wood was invariably stacked, cross-hatched, covered with corrugated iron, awaiting its chance to warm a hearth.
Bergweg signposts, white-red-white, stood proudly along mountain trails, ready to remain visible in feet of snow to come.
As the train from Gstaad descends into Zweisimmen, it makes a hairpin turn in a tunnel. My wife thinks the engineers were drinking one day and challenged each other to pull off the u-ee. If so, such gambling is common: from Gstaad to Montreux we were treated to additional 180’s on buried tracks.

All this impressiveness noted, toward the end of our hike from Lenk to Lauenen, we passed a small old man in a stocking cap fighting to saw a 2×4 by hand. The place was no idyll for the poor, and a century had somehow passed him by.

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Fiction note #1

Sunday, September 16th, 2007

Kingsley Amis’s Roger Micheldene is a poor English cousin to Ignatius Reilly. Though both are supremely bloated on themselves, Roger is more self-aware (perhaps, older, owing to more time away from overprotective maternal influence), and unapologetically lacking in the consolation of philosophy. Some might appreciate One Fat Englishman for its charms, but for humor I’d say skip it in favor of rereads of Wodehouse, and for singular, hysterical experience John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces is supreme.

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Ending Continuing Disenfranchisement

Monday, August 27th, 2007

I support the fundamental principle of “one person, one vote,” and I interpret the common voting age of 18 in most democracies as contravention of this principle. To sustain the principle, the voting age must be zero: newborn babies (assuming they have citizenship) ought to emerge into the cares and wonders of the world with the right to a vote.

This proposal is far more radical than some recent discussion about incrementally reducing the voting age. It deliberately ignores questions of “competence” and “maturity” that are sometimes bandied when mulling criteria for franchisement.

Of course, we can’t have two-year olds bounding into voting booths alone and scribbling all over their ballots, just saying “no” to all the candidates. Rather, to make this work, the trick would be to assume that kids’ guardians will share in the exercise of this right to a vote initially; and to devise rules governing when and how kids could exercise it with additional levels of autonomy.

To my mind, having parents exercise the right on their kids’ behalf would be just fine: who better to look after the kids’ interests? Why shouldn’t those interests be looked after at the ballot box?

The rules would explain what assistance could be offered, how, and when, with the intent of preventing uncertainty or open conflict between child and guardian about whether to vote and who to vote for.

Note that many practical rules already exist regarding voting assistance for the elderly and disabled. I would favor modifying those rules, too, to ensure that their right to a vote is never rescinded, but see them as a possible source.

I’ve obviously set aside, for the purposes of this discussion, the question of whether people should bother to vote at all.

Posted in Opinion, Vision | Comments Closed

Blame Britain

Monday, August 20th, 2007

British territorial abdication following WWII caused disasters around the world. Two were particularly grievous.

First, the British failed to prevent partition of India and Pakistan or create conditions of safe passage for the religion-based mass migration that occurred. Hatred and fear during the exchange of 15 million people between the two new nations resulted in between 200,000 and 1 million deaths. The over-hasty British abdication on the subcontinent also caused a half-century of suspicion and war, now overhung with nuclear threat.

Second, the British let the Jews and Arabs fight it out in Palestine. The result was a tenuous state, surrounded by enemies, with millions of universally unwelcome refugees just across its borders.

Tired after WWII, and incapable of sustaining Empire, the British around the world just left. I do not quibble with their decision to depart; but for the tragedies their abdication of responsibility invited, we are more than fair to blame Britain.

Addendum: Pankaj Mishra’s excellent recent review of Indian Summer by Alex von Tunzelmann concludes, “The rival nationalisms and politicized religions the British Empire brought into being now clash in an enlarged geographical arena; and the human costs of imperial overreaching seem unlikely to attain a final tally for many more decades.”

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Iraqi Sweat

Sunday, August 19th, 2007

Current thinking in development policy is that recipients of aid– countries, communities, organizations, and individuals– should make direct contributions to the supported projects. One term for the idea is “participatory development” (c.f. the Participatory Development Forum), and there are many examples (among which the Kecamatan Development Program stands out for its early start, its size, and its success).

In Iraq, The Nation reports employment of 180,000 private contractors by the US, of whom 1/3 — fully 60,000 people — are not Iraqi. I find it incomprehensible that, given astronomical unemployment rates among Iraqis, any non-Iraqi contractors could be hired at all.

Posted in Economics, Opinion | Comments Closed

Civilizations have Libraries

Saturday, August 4th, 2007

People are people, and I love them all. But today and historically, some collections of people have been described as “civilizations,” and some time ago (okay, okay, while hiking through beautiful scenery from friendly but rough village to friendly but rough town, craving a hot, clean shower and a net connection) I began to ponder what this word meant.

I concluded that, for me, the defining features of a civilization are persistent traditions and bodies of knowledge, of exactly the sort that are maintained, preserved, and shared in recognizable libraries.

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Net Neutrality, Price Discrimination, and the Little Guys

Friday, July 27th, 2007

Suppose Senator A proposed that only a single kind of car could be sold in the United States. A government agency would write the specification for the car, and then manufacturers could produce it and set their prices for it. The Senator would be laughed out of office, right?

Suppose a wiser Senator B proposed requiring that lead paint not be used on children’s toys. Everyone would agree on this simple, prudent requirement.

Now suppose Senator C proposed standardizing the types of paper and ink that all newspapers had to use. Before (most likely) being shot down for infringing on First Amendment rights, Senator C might acquire some allies: small, hardscrabble publishers might believe that they’d be better off with the limitations on larger competitors’ flash and innovation such a proposal would engender. In addition, the growth in the market for the standard varieties of paper and ink might reduce the bargaining power advantage of the large players in negotiating discounts with paper and ink suppliers. The little guys might be better able to keep up with the standard in place.

As I see it, Senator C’s proposal shares important features with current proposals to preserve “Net Neutrality.”

According to the advocacy group Save the Internet.com, “Net Neutrality prevents Internet providers from speeding up or slowing down Web content based on its source, ownership or destination.” Traffic on the Net is made up of “packets,” and Net Neutrality requires that all packets be treated equally, implying most significantly that ISPs can’t impose charges that depend on either the content transmitted or the speed of its transmission. In practice, the likely effect of the end of Net Neutrality in the US would be ISPs offering multiple tiers of service, ie, charging more for faster packet delivery. In conventional economics lingo, without Net Neutrality ISPs might price discriminate.

Policy allows price discrimination in many settings. It’s unthinkable to insist, like daring Senator A, that all cars be of a single quality. Policy prohibits price discrimination in some settings, like where the lowest-quality goods would be outright dangerous, and only infinitesimally cheaper (consider iodized salt, in addition to Senator B’s justified cause cause against toys with lead paint).

In regard to the Net Neutrality example, (i) noone faces a health risk and (ii) in other media production, price discrimination is allowed (on the input side, as discussed above, and also on the distribution side). The (very limited) amount of economic research on Net Neutrality tends to argue that neutrality (like many other regulatory restraints) discourages innovation and decreases social welfare.

I think these analogies leave us with a question, the question on which the policy debate will and ought to turn: do we care disproportionately about the Internet analogues of Senator C’s small, hardscrabble boosters? We might, since not only do these people believe in a beautiful mythology of a free, collaborative Internet. They also contribute tremendous effort– writing and uploading free content, writing free software, volunteering time and spirit– to making the mythology true.

Posted in Economics, Opinion | Comments Closed

Marriages, Civil Unions, and Contracts

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

Somehow the debate about gay marriage seems to have quieted. Surely this state of affairs is temporary. When the debate resumes, what light can be shed in terms of the virtues of freedom and justice and the science of economics?

First, a note that it’s not clear or uncontroversial what “marriage” means. Dictionary.com has wholly ten definitions; Merriam-Webster has at least a couple that are relevant. Both refer once or more to a “legal and social institution.” I’ll take this to mean that (from a policy perspective) marriage is a form of contract.

This definition is fortunate, since economics hasn’t come up with much worthwhile to say about love, but has a whole lot of good insight into contracts. Economics (and the New Institutional Economics, specifically) teaches us that governments should enforce contracts but leave people with the freedom to devise contracts pretty much however they wish. To the extent a marriage results in a set of contractual rights and responsibilities, economic theory suggests that any individuals (ie, individuals of any sexual orientation, and any number of individuals) should be free to marry.

From this perspective, the right policy solution in relation to marriage is to have the state do what it ordinarily does: enforce contracts. Moreover, it should make no difference to the state whether those contracts are called marriages, civil unions, domestic partnership agreements, or something else. To minimize conflict (really!), I would favor the state ignoring “marriage” entirely, and recognizing only some contract labelled with a less inflammatory name like “civil union.”

Having reserved the state’s ordinary role to the state, it is fitting that we reserve the ordinary role of private community institutions to private community institutions. These institutions, including churches, mosques, and synagogues, define memes and respond with speed and grace to what their members wish. Giving their members the thrill and honor of marriage, however they define it, should be their right entirely, not the government’s.

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More on Immigration Reform

Thursday, July 5th, 2007

Aligned with this earlier post, and in much more detail, Lant Pritchett’s new book, Let Their People Come: Breaking the Gridlock on Global Labor Mobility, advocates huge expansion in the freedom for people to move across national borders to opportunities.

Posted in Economics, Opinion, Vision | Comments Closed

Incentives for Politicians, Incentives for the Poor

Thursday, December 14th, 2006

Since the Iraq Study Group released its report on December 6, 2006, many of its recommendations have come under fire from the Bush Administration. Prominently among the attacked recommendations, the report recommended revoking the blank check that’s been extended to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and replacing it with promises that continuing support will be contingent on measurable progress. Put differently, the Iraq Study Group (led by James Baker and Lee Hamilton) advocated creating incentives for the Iraqi political leadership to solve the problems they face. These incentives have been decried by the Bush Administration.
Economists and conservatives generally believe that people respond to incentives. Following this line in many other cases, the Bush Administration has advocated sharp reductions in social welfare programs and spending. For example, in simplified form, the main argument for Social Security privatization is that private accounts would increase incentives for private saving. Opposition to welfare also emerged from the logic that entitling the poor to perpetual government support problematically removed incentives for them to figure out how to make it on their own.
As I see it, we have here a question for economists and a potential opportunity for Democrats: Is there good reason to oppose tough incentives for Iraqi politcians while advocating incentives for America’s poor, or is the Bush Administration being hypocritical?

Posted in Economics, Opinion, Rhetoric | Comments Closed

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