March 2007

For quite a few people, the prospect of seeing my beardless chin (or whatever lurks under there) has been enough to open wallets and maybe hearts. But for the more theoretically inclined, my appeal has served as the basis of some interesting discussions about reciprocity and charitable giving. The general view, it seems to me, is that accepting a gift entails an obligation to reciprocate.

So, having given the best gift of all for blog audiences, a new or at least barely-used topic for discussion, I’m now calling for my reciprocal gift. Click here and donate before the beard comes off on Saturday.

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James Joyner is perplexed by John Quiggin’s beard. Or, more precisely, by this:

bq. All manner of worthwhile charities hold events wherein people are “sponsored” based on how many miles they bike, laps they walk, hours they go without sleep, ropes they jump, or what have you. Why the need for the gimmick? Are there some significant number of people who don’t give a damn about curing leukemia but are nonetheless willing to donate to the cause for whatever pleasure seeing people shave their beard yields? Or who aren’t sure whether breast cancer is more worth curing than some other disease and make that determination based on what physical challenges the antis are willing to undergo to prove their point?

It’s a good question. But I think the answer will not be found in differences in degrees of pleasure or utility between “Cure for cancer” and “Cure for cancer plus John Quiggin having no beard.” Neither is it quite a question of uncertainty about one’s preference for giving money to a charity being clarified by the knowledge that someone is also doing a sponsored walk.

Instead, what we’re seeing here is the norm of reciprocity in action. You give me something, and that means I can give you something back. A cure for breast cancer or leukemia is very worthwhile but from the point of view of the immediate exchange it is a long way off. I know that my money will not buy a cure, at least not in any direct or immediate way. Moreover, when it comes to giving away my money, there are innumerable worthwhile charitable causes that might plausibly make a claim on some of it. What things like sponsored shaves or Walks for the Cure or a Free Car Wash (with a donation) do is establish a local gift relationship with someone in particular, for something in particular. Sure, the particular thing being given (a shave, a car wash) is trivial in comparison to the overall cause (a cure for cancer). Nevertheless, it is the small relationship of reciprocity that makes the exchange meaningful for the giver and thus makes it much more likely to actually take place.

In a strictly economic framework, these kinds of activities are analogous to the deadweight loss of Christmas gifts (why not just give money, after all?), or are simply advertising gimmicks whose only function is to attract attention. But the resolution to the puzzle is also similar: without the framework of mutual reciprocity, the exchange likely wouldn’t happen in the first place — even if in principle a more efficient (no shaving, no car-wash) solution would be available to narrowly rational agents with the right preferences. That is why almost all forms of charitable giving in fact involve some kind of reciprocal exchange, whether it’s something as trivial as getting a badge, or as heavily mediated as the performances by celebrities on a telethon.

There’s been just about nothing in the Anglophone media about the controversy surrounding Volker Schlöndorff’s new film “Strajk: die Heldin von Danzig”:http://www.strajk-derfilm.de/ which deals with the birth of Poland’s Solidarity movement and is loosely based on the role of Anna Walentynowicz in the union. Walentynowicz is outraged at Schlöndorff’s movie which portrays her as illiterate and the shipyard workers as, among other things, hard drinkers. She’s threatening legal action. There’s some coverage “here”:http://www.signandsight.com/intodaysfeuilletons/1232.html , “here”:http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2377595,00.html and “here”:http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aVmHZrXT7C6g&refer=muse . I’d be interested to read comments from Polish or German readers about how the row is being reported in those countries.

A third post mentioning Tyler Cowen in less than a week; this time for his “post”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/03/when_to_boycott.html on the rationality of boycotting. I was thinking of this already today, after reading “Steve Bainbridge”:http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2007/03/nyt_select_open.html on the change in the _New York Times_ paywall policy. As of today, anyone with a .edu email address should be able to “access Times Select for free”:http://www.nytimes.com/gst/ts_university_email_verify.html. I never subscribed to Times Select, mostly because it was a bundled package. I would happily have paid $40 a year to read Paul Krugman’s column on its own – but didn’t, because I would have been paying for Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman and Brooks too (the last of whom I used to find the most infuriating of the lot when I was able to read him, because I felt that he was smart enough to write, think and argue so much better than he did).

Tyler suggests that in general it’s better just to send money to the people that you want to help, but that boycotting may make sense if you want to hurt the individual being boycotted, and know that your boycotting is likely to hurt him/her. I don’t think that the latter this is my motivation here – I’ve no particular desire to hurt any of ’em (although I’d probably pull on Friedman’s mustache of understanding if I was in the lift with him, just because). It’s more that I’d feel uncomfortably intimate if I paid for the service; I’d feel as though I was specifically choosing to support a crowd of people whom I have no desire to support. Which is to say that decisions to buy can sometimes be less market-rational than they are expressive. I suspect that the same is true of many boycotters (though certainly not all) – they aren’t necessarily seeking to achieve concrete results so much as they’re expressing their identity through market choices.

“Becks at Unfogged”:http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2007_03_11.html#006439 is justly skeptical of “Twitter”:http://twitter.com/ yet fears its institutionalization may be inevitable. Kathy Sierra’s Asymptotic Twitter Curve is a sharp summary of the problem:

One question is whether the curve describes some kind of cognitive limit or is a rather more cohort-specific representation of the dangers of adopting technologies developed an increasing number of years after your own core work patterns are established.

When the baby arrived, a friend lent us the entire first season of Bewitched on DVD. Now several seasons are on sale in amazon’s fantastic Classic TV Sale. Browsing through the sale brings back many memories. I’ve watched American classic TV in three stages. First, as a kid in the 70s, I saw whatever got imported to the UK at the time (including oldies like Bewitched). Then, in LA in the mid-eighties I watched the true classics — Dick Van Dyke (DVD on DVD — get it!), The Flying Nun, and The Addams Family – in reruns. The new-to-me-at-that-time show I found it hardest to watch was I Dream of Jeannie, not because it is amazingly sexist (which it is) but because by the mid-80s it was impossible to watch Larry Hagman playing a comic role. Finally, now that the DVD revolution has made everything, however bizarre, readily available, I’m watching whatever I can get my hands on with my kids. Still, guidance would be appreciated. You know what I’m like: recommendations welcome. And hurry so that I can get a good deal.

Gonzales a couple of minutes ago at his press conference:

Let me just say one thing. I’ve overcome a lot of obstacles in my life to become attorney-general. I am here not because I [pause] give up. I am here because I learn from my mistakes, I accept responsibility, and because I’m committed to doing my job. And that is what I intend to do for the American people.

I reckon that’s a “Galbraith Score”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/02/22/livingstone-campbell-galbraith/ of one right there.

As promised last week, an opportunity to discuss the 3rd part of Erik Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias. Part III explores the difficult problem of a theory of transformation.

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Ted Moran and Gary Hufbauer “contemplate the unthinkable”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/b1835cdc-d0c0-11db-836a-000b5df10621.html in the _Financial Times_; a world in which the US actually had to live up to basic International Labour Organization standards. [click to continue…]

Tyler Cowen “announces”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/03/libertarian_ron.html : “Libertarian Ron Paul is running for President”. Well who am I to intrude on the private arguments of a sect of which I’m not a member? But following “the link”:http://www.smallgovtimes.com/story/07mar12.paul.official/index.html Tyler provides I read

bq. He supports controls on immigration and increased use of visas for skilled workers.

In other words, Paul is one of the many Americans who styles himself “libertarian” but actually stands for libertarianism for US citizens and the use of state coercion against outsiders. Instapundit-libertarianism perhaps, but libertarianism? I don’t think so.

Tyler Cowen has a “pretty interesting essay”:http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/03/11/tyler-cowen/the-paradox-of-libertarianism/.

The more wealth we have, the more government we can afford. Furthermore, the better government operates, the more government people will demand. That is the fundamental paradox of libertarianism. Many initial victories bring later defeats. I am not so worried about this paradox of libertarianism. Overall libertarians should embrace these developments. We should embrace a world with growing wealth, growing positive liberty, and yes, growing government. We don’t have to favor the growth in government per se, but we do need to recognize that sometimes it is a package deal. … We need to recognize that some of the current threats to liberty are outside of the old categories. I worry about pandemics and natural disasters, as well as global warming and climate change more generally (it doesn’t have to be carbon-induced to be a problem). These developments are big threats to the liberty of many people in the world, although not necessarily Americans. The best answers to these problems don’t always lie on the old liberty/power spectrum in a simple way. … Intellectual property … Another major problem – the major problem in my view – is nuclear proliferation … In short, I would like to restructure classical liberalism, or libertarianism — whatever we call it — around these new and very serious threats to liberty. Let’s not fight the last battle or the last war. Let’s not obsess over all the interventions represented by the New Deal, even though I would agree that most of those policies were bad ideas.

The essay seems to me to glom together two, quite different theses – that the demand for government increases along with wealth, and that new, complex global problems require more government intervention than most libertarians would care for. Even so, his call for a pragmatic libertarianism seems on target to me (I’d vastly prefer a political debate in which smart libertarians acknowledged that global warming was a major problem in need of a political solution, and contributed insights from their own perspective, to a debate in which many libertarians either minimize the problem or suggest that no real political solution is possible).

The World’s Greatest Shave is an annual fundraiser held in Australia to raise money to support people with leukemia and their families. I’ve decided it’s time to put some skin in the game, for the first time in 30 years, I’m going to shave my beard off. In a gesture of family solidarity, my son Daniel (17) is going to shave his newly-grown beard as well.

The big day is going to be Saturday 17 March. You can visit my profile here to sponsor me. Photos of the aftermath will be posted on my blog.

And I got this cool present:

These are Penguin 60s, the original (orange) series and the Classics, which Penguin brought out in 1995 for their 60th anniversary. (They recently issued a similar series for their 70th, though not in the United States.) When they came out I really wanted the Classics collection, but had no money. I remember there was a certain amount of snotty declensionist commentary on the sort of people who would only spend 60p for excerpts of Civilization rather than reading the originals entire. Well, you can always have The Complete Penguin Classics delivered to your house for a mere $7,989.50 (don’t worry, shipping is free). About 750lbs worth and 77 linear feet of shelving, apparently — according to an Amazon reviewer who actually bought it. If you’re not up to that, just take The American Collection or the 19th Century British Collection instead, which are a bit cheaper.

Right now it’s incredibly hard to read about Suez without thinking about Iraq, and it’s a mark of Peter Hennessy’s confidence that Iraq will long be remembered as a disaster of epic scale that he repeatedly draws comparisons between the two events in his marvelous new book, Having it So Good (UK), (US). The book is a history of Britain in the 1950’s, and I’ll impose a brief review on you later. Suez doesn’t dominate the book, but it is the pivotal moment of the decade if not, in fact, the whole postwar period in terms of Britain’s relationship with the world. And the parallels are striking. In both cases, it is clear that a small handful of policymakers were determined to undermine the targeted dictator, and were not about to be deflected by stupid facts. In both cases democratic scrutiny simply didn’t operate; neither Blair/Bush nor Eden were subject to the kind of hard questioning by their cabinet colleagues that should have stopped them, or at least forced them to act less precipitously. And in each case, as we know only too well in the case of Iraq, neither politicians nor military had any kind of long term plan.

But surely, surely, Suez was nowhere near as disastrous in terms of human carnage? Surely, because the Americans acted so, well, correctly, forcing the Brits to back off, the day was saved, if not for Eden, for the world? Surely my title question is ludicrous? That’s what I’d have thought. (Eszter, at least, might want to read on.)

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