I’m in a social group called “Thinkers and Drinkers”, who meet every two weeks to debate. I submitted a question yesterday that I thought would be pretty controversial. I was surprised when it wasn’t, and I’d be very interested in thoughts from our readers.
It’s a two part question, with a hypothetical to set up the actual question. Here’s the hypothetical part:
There are a number of books with titles like “The Hitman’s Handbook”, which ostensibly tell you how to kill someone and get away with it. Let’s say that someone reads one of these books, takes its advice, and kills someone. That person is caught, convicted, and sent to jail. Then the family of the victim sues the publisher in a civil suit. The ACLU is defending the publisher on First Amendment grounds.
No one would doubt that the murderer, and the publisher, are morally in the wrong. The question is, given that there’s a world full of hurt out there, is it wrong for the ACLU to offer its time and money in support of the publisher?
The discussion group, which is largely made up of center/ center-left, religious, young female professionals, uniformly came down in defense of the ACLU. There was widespread agreement that publishers can’t be held responsible for the actions taken by people who read their books, and that a victory would set a dangerous precedent. We refused to see a distinction between fiction that could inspire people to commit crime and explicit how-to books. It would be easy to lightly mask a how-to book with a fictional veneer, and we didn’t want courts trying to interpret that distinction. We all agreed that this book doesn’t make anyone commit murder- that only the murderer, and people who actively aid him, could be held responsible.
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by John Q on March 5, 2004
Brad DeLong has had a string of posts referring to the possibility that some or all of the US Social Security fund should be invested in stocks rather than, as at present, in US Treasury bonds, of which the most pertinent is this one. This idea first came up in a major way in Clinton’s 1999 State of the Union speech, and has since had some play on the Republican side, especially now that privatization individual accounts seem to be off the agenda.
The key fact that makes the idea attractive is the equity premium, the fact that, historically the rate of return to investment in stocks has been well above that in bonds. This used to be explained by the fact that stocks were riskier than bonds. But ever since the work of Mehra and Prescott in the 1980s it’s been known that no simple and plausible model of the social cost of risk that would be generated by efficient capital markets can explain more than a small fraction of the observed premium. The immediate response, that of finding more complicated, but still plausible models hasn’t gone very far. The alternative explanation is that capital markets don’t do a very good job of spreading risk. For example it’s very hard to get insurance against recession-induced unemployment or business failure, even though standard models imply that this should be available.
Simon Grant and I have done a fair bit of work on this, with some specific attention to the Social Security issue. In this paper (large PDF file), published in the American Economic Review, we argued that substantial gains could be realized by investing Social Security funds in the stock market. We didn’t put a number on it, but I don’t find Brad’s half-embraced suggestion of $2.4 trillion in present value implausible.
An important point, though, is that investing in stocks will generally not be the best way to go, at least if the amount invested is large. A government agency holding, say 20 per cent of the shares in Ford and General Motors, would seem to have big problems. Leaving aside the specific institutional issues of the US Social Security fund, the obvious implication of the equity premium is that, unless there are large differences in operating efficiency between private and public enterprises, government ownership of large capital-intensive enterprises like utilities will be socially beneficial. The case is strengthened if monopoly or other problems mean that the enterprises have to be tightly regulated in any case. Again, Simon Grant and I have written this up, this time in Economica (PDF version available here)
by Daniel on March 5, 2004
With the pressure increasing on Robert Mugabe’s extremely unpleasant government, I thought I’d repost an old comment of mine from D2D on the subject of how things got this way. There is an unfortunate tendency on the left to lose their nerve in the face of human rights disasters in left-wing regimes and take their eye off the ball – to commit the fundamental attribution error of assuming that the problems they see aer the result of particular moral corruption in the regime in question, rather than maintaining more plausible structural assumptions. As I say below, there is no exonerating Mugabe; there is always the option of not being a bastard and he didn’t take it. But it is very hard to see how any good outcome could have come out of the situation created by the British.
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by John Q on March 5, 2004
My view of the US is probably overly influenced by Hollywood, but I had the impression that the right to marry your high school sweetheart was a crucially important instance of the inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness set out in the Declaration of Independence. If so, it seems as if there’s a contradiction between this and this.
by Henry Farrell on March 4, 2004
“Juan non-Volokh”:http://volokh.com/2004_02_29_volokh_archive.html#107834026231790507 and “David Bernstein”:http://volokh.com/2004_02_29_volokh_archive.html#107820064555793050 suggest that the recent brouhaha over the Bush administration politicization of science is only to be expected; whenever the government funds scientific research, it’s liable to get politicized. Their proposed alternative – a “separation of science and state.” This proposal rests on an implicit claim that is, to put it kindly, contestable: that scientific research on politically topical issues is liable to be less politicized when it’s funded by the private sector. Judging by the sober and disinterested contributions to the public scientific debate coming from junkscience.com, Tech Central Station, and, in an earlier era, the good old “Council on Tobacco Research”:http://www.prwatch.org/improp/ctr.html, I reckon that Bernstein and non-Volokh have their argument cut out for them.
by Eszter Hargittai on March 4, 2004
It seems “googling” is now used by many as a synonym for online searches just like kleenex is used to refer to a tissue or xeroxing to using a copier. I have yet to see empirical evidence that suggests Google is used by the majority of Internet users, yet many people talk about it as though it was the only existing search engine. References to Google as the be-all and end-all of search engines abound at least among journalists and academics, and perhaps it is not surprising that such people know about and use Google. But not everybody does although you’d be hard-pressed to know that judging from the rhetoric.
I have a small piece in this month’s First Monday in which I discuss this issue and why it is problematic to assume everyone uses a certain service when that is not necessarily the case.
Actually, I only mention one concern in that piece. Another that I do not bring up there but have alluded to elsewhere is that it is problematic to have so much riding on a proprietary service. We do not know where it is headed and since the details of its algorithm for displaying results are not transparent to the public we should not depend on it to guarantee equal access to all types of information indefinitely.
by Kieran Healy on March 4, 2004
Divorce was declared illegal in Ireland by the “Constitution of 1937”:http://www.ucc.ie/law/irishlaw/constitution/. A referendum to repeal the ban was proposed in 1986 and soundly defeated. Almost two-thirds of the electorate voted against it. In November 1995 a second divorce referendum was put to the country. That one passed, by a margin of “just over nine thousand votes”:http://www.adnet.ie/divorce.html in a total valid poll of 1.62 million. I had just started graduate school at “Princeton”:http://sociology.princeton.edu that Autumn and remember the slightly frozen expressions of fellow grad students when I told them about the constitutional debate raging at home. Most of them were under the impression that Ireland was an advanced capitalist democracy located in Europe, fabled continent of liberal attitudes toward sex and generous social provisions for all. I decided not to upset them further with stories of my “college years”:http://www.rte.ie/tv/reelingintheyears/1991.html, which coincided with the time of the “Great Condom Wars”:http://www.ifpa.ie/about/hist.html in Ireland.[1]
The rhetoric of the Irish divorce debate is strikingly similar to what we’re hearing today about gay marriage in the United States.
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by Chris Bertram on March 4, 2004
“John Holbo and Belle Waring”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/ have now finished their week of guest blogging with us, so I think it appropriate to say how much fun it was to have them around. With reflections on Sesame Street, the English murder-mystery, Chinese-Italian (or should that be Italian-Chinese) cuisine from Belle and on the changing experience of blogging, the FMA and conservatives in academia from John — we at CT have certainly done well from having them on board. (You can check out those posts again by clicking on the little squiggly thing next to “Guest Bloggers” on the LH sidebar.) I hope we’ll be seeing them again some time soon, but in the meantime be sure to visit their blog regularly.
by Chris Bertram on March 4, 2004
bq. “The launch of his Kulturkampf has been a blitzkrieg.”
“Sidney Blumenthal”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1161399,00.html trips over the “fascist octopus”:http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/patee.html in a polemic against G.W. Bush.
by Chris Bertram on March 4, 2004
I’m off to see “Das Rheingold”:http://www.metopera.org/synopses/rheingold.html on Saturday (or, rather, since the production is by “English National Opera”:http://www.eno.org/home/index.php , “The Rhinegold”:http://www.eno.org/whatson/full.php?performancekey=18 ). The anticipation of this set me off googling for a hilarious passage from a Jerry Fodor review of Steven Pinker. I’d have liked to have found the whole thing, but the money quote is there in this “review”:http://www.yorku.ca/christo/papers/Fodor-review.htm of a Fodor’s “In Critical Condition”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/026256128X/junius-20 :
bq. The literature of psychological Darwinism is full of what appear to be fallacies of rationalization: arguments where the evidence offered that an interest in Y is the motive for a creature’s behavior is primarily that an interest in Y would rationalize the behavior if it were the creature’s motive. Pinker’s book provides so many examples that one hardly knows where to start.… [H]ere’s Pinker on why we like fiction: “Fictional narratives supply us with a mental catalogue of the fatal conundrums we might face someday and the outcomes of strategies we could deploy in them. What are the options if I were to suspect that my uncle killed my father, took his position, and married my mother?” Good question. Or what if it turns out that, having just used the ring that I got by kidnapping a dwarf to pay off the giants who built me my new castle, I should discover that it is the very ring that I need in order to continue to be immortal and rule the world? It’s important to think out the options betimes, because a thing like that could happen to anyone and you can never have too much insurance. (p. 212)
UPDATE: Thanks to commenter C.P. Shaw. The whole Fodor article, which I’d failed to find using Google is “available on the LRB website”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n02/fodo01_.html .
by John Q on March 3, 2004
My post a week or so ago considering (and ultimately rejecting) the hypothesis that the 2004 election might be a good one for the Democrats to lose raised plenty of eyebrows, but the ensuing debate helped to sharpen up my thinking on the underlying issue, that of the unsustainability of current US fiscal policy and the appropriate Democrat response.
In the original post drew the conclusion that the only campaign strategy that would give a Democrat, once elected, any real chance of prevailing over a Republican congress, was that (supported by Dean, Gephardt, Kucinich and Sharpton) of repealing the entire Bush tax cut and starting from scratch. To the extent that primary voters considered this issue, they didn’t see it this way. With the possible exception of Lieberman, Kerry was the candidate most supportive of the tax cuts.
Like Bush, Kerry promises to cut the deficit in half over four years. He proposes to scrap the cuts for those earning more than $200 000, but to expand them for ‘middle-class families’, a group normally taken to include about 95 per cent of the population[1]. When other spending proposals are taken into account, the Tax Policy Center (a joint venture of the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution) estimates that Kerry’s proposals will yield a net increase in the deficit of $165 billion over four years , or $40 billion a year. (Of course, Bush will almost certainly spend more once the unbudgeted costs of higher defense spending and even more tax cuts are factored in). As I show below, this is relative to a baseline of around $550 billion.
I think it’s safe to say this won’t happen. The problem for Kerry, then, is when to discover the deficit. There are three basic options:
fn1. It’s evidence of the startling lopsidedness of the Bush tax cuts, and the explosion of income inequality over the past two decades, that there is, nonetheless, a substantial revenue gain from repealing the cuts for the rich and ultra-rich. About half the benefits of the Bush tax cuts go to those on incomes over $200 000 per year.
Update: Brad de Long points to Kerry’s appointment of Roger Altman as his budget priorities advise as evidence that Kerry will choose Option 1. Kevin Drum is underwhelmed. He supports Option 2 and expects Option 3, or worse.
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by John Q on March 3, 2004
Before I argue that the Borda voting system is fatally defective, it may be worth considering what kinds of weaknesses could justify such a verdict. We know from Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem that any nontrivial voting system will encourage strategic/insincere voting in some circumstances and will not always elect the right candidate (unless ‘right’ is defined to coincide with the outcome of the voting system in question). So a fatal defect must be a lot worse than this. I claim that the Borda voting system is so vulnerable to strategic manipulation that it would be completely unworkable, provided only that there are no restrictions on candidacy.
Note: I did a Google before writing this and couldn’t find anything similar, but of course, when I checked again after doing the work, I found this almost perfect anticipation of my counter-example. But having done the work, I thought I’d post it anyway.
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by Brian on March 3, 2004
The post below, which arose out of some discussion in my philosophy seminar last week, is a fair bit less topical than most posts on CT, but since it touches on some topics in philosophy of science and economics some people here might find it interesting. Plus I get to bash Milton Friedman a bit, but not for the reasons you might expect.
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