July 2012

(probably the last post I’ll be doing on these issues for a while)

“Tyler Cowen has a further response”:http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/07/how-to-improve-firms-treatment-of-workers.html. His argument – I think I am presenting it correctly – is that regulation may not improve the lot of workers facing specific depredations, because firms will find other ways to screw them, leading to “indeterminate” outcomes, which might or might not be to workers’ long term benefit. His preferred alternative is an improved welfare state, which will enhance workers’ bargaining position vis-a-vis firms.
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Via John Siracusa, a really nice exercise in crowdsourcing and data visualization on Bostonography.

… we’re running an ongoing project soliciting opinions on Boston’s neighborhood boundaries via an interactive map. We want to keep collecting data, but we’ve already received excellent responses that we’re itching to start mapping, and when we hit 300 submissions recently it seemed like a good enough milestone to take a crack at it. (That’s actually 300 minus some junk data. If you offer the ability to draw freeform shapes, some people draw random rectangles and triangles, and some people draw… er, other long, tipped objects.) There are many questions to be asked here. Where are the areas of consensus? Where are the disputed zones? Where are the no-man’s lands, etc

Boundaries are fuzzy, but not uniformly so, the consensus center of a neighborhood need not be its geometric center, and so on. Lots of interesting stuff. It’d be great if they could collect data on the social distribution of this knowledge, too. It’s like an updated version of Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City, with shades of Rick Grannis’s classic paper The Importance of Trivial Streets. Very nice work. Check out the full discussion.

Levy Izhak Rosenbaum gets 30 months (though he may end up being deported to Israel) for brokering kidney sales in New York, something which I don’t think has happened before in the United States:

He pleaded guilty in October to three counts of organ trafficking and one of conspiracy. … Three ailing people in New Jersey paid Rosenbaum a total of $410,000 to arrange the sale of kidneys from healthy donors, and an undercover FBI agent paid him $10,000. … Rosenbaum told a federal agent that he began brokering kidney sales around 1999, recruited Israelis to sell their organs and charged Americans as much as $160,000 a kidney. He told the agent that he had arranged “quite a lot” of transplants, according to a criminal complaint. … Before the judge imposed sentence, prosecutors presented testimony from a doctor and administrator from Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia. Rosenbaum organized about a dozen kidney transplants there from 1999 to 2002 and the hospital didn’t know the surgeries involved black-market kidneys, they said. … A New York man born in Israel, Elahn Quick, told the judge that he sold his kidney for about $25,000 in 2008 in a transplant organized by Rosenbaum. Becky Cohen, the daughter of the man who bought the kidney, testified that the family paid Rosenbaum $150,000 for the organ. The transplant surgery itself was financed by Cohen’s family insurance. A locksmith, Quick, 31, said he sold his kidney because he needed the cash and thought doing so was a good deed.

The role of the transplant center in Philly is an interesting one—I wonder where they thought the kidneys were coming from. Perhaps some story about relatives?

Both the legal and illegal sides of the transplant industry are embedded in the wider world of health care provision. As Bryan O’Sullivan remarks, the third paragraph of the article, setting up the story, inadvertently does quite a good job of describing US healthcare as a whole:

“It’s a kind of trading in human misery,” Thompson said of black-market kidney sales. Rosenbaum “charged a fee” for kidneys and “used a complicated web of transactions” to finance his business. “He corrupted himself,” the judge said.

“So as you can imagine it was quite difficult for us to build a case against him”, Thompson did not add.

Back around Christmas I had a come-to-Jesus moment, ebooks-wise. I posted some iPad optimized ebooks of Dickens and Spenser, trying to make the illustrations look good. I joked that PDF was the future! Then Santa gave me an iPhone for X-Mas and I discovered that I actually like reading books on a phone, which seemed a priori impossible before that.

So, when I volunteered to make our Red Plenty PDF ebook – here it is – I also decided to try to make my first Mobi format ebook (5 megs) (that’s what you need for your Kindle); and an EPUB version (1 meg). No, I don’t know why the Kindle version is so much bigger, thanks for asking. Both versions have some humorous bugs I’ve not yet worked out, and I gotta catch a plane. So I’m just going to post them and let other people kick the tires.

WARNING: We have a reliable report that the EPUB version crashes Nooks. Very sorry about that. I really need to get back on this, and clean out the bugs. Haven’t had time.

Here’s the cover:

A response to “Matt Yglesias’s response”:http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/07/06/ten_theses_on_labor_market_regulation.html. I understand from email that his original post responding to me was intended to be read together with an “earlier post”:http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/07/04/labor_market_regulation_freedom_and_property_rights_are_red_herrings.html, where he separates out questions of freedom and economic efficiency, and argues, more or less, that the best way to increase the bargaining power of labour is by pushing full employment. This means that he does not, after all, treat market outcomes as being in some way natural. So consider those specific objections withdrawn. But I still think that there is something fundamentally wrongheaded about the way that he is analyzing these questions. And not only that – but Matt Yglesias himself (2004 vintage) would seem to agree with me.
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Corey Robin has “two”:http://coreyrobin.com/2012/07/08/hayek-von-pinochet/ “posts”:http://coreyrobin.com/2012/07/09/but-wait-theres-more-hayek-von-pinochet-part-2/ on Friedrich von Hayek’s admiration for Augusto Pinochet, quoting extensively from a new article by Andrew Farrant, Edward McPhail, and Sebastian Berger.

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Because not every post should be about libertarianism! [click to continue…]

My alma mater had a celebrity professor of political science who was principally known for two things. First, for accidentally leaving his wireless mic on during mid-lecture restroom breaks. And second, for the slogan “Politics is a good thing!” which he relentlessly promoted via mediums as diverse as lectures, TV appearances and TA’s t-shirts.

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“Matthew Yglesias has a post responding”:http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/07/05/life_is_good_for_skilled_workers.html to my post below. My original intention was to roll it into an update – I then decided it was worth responding to on its own because it exemplifies a number of common mistakes in thinking about markets. In order:

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Open Data are the basis for government innovation. This isn’t because open data make government more transparent or accountable. Like Tom Slee, I have serious doubts about whether it does either of those things. In any event, shining a light on the misdeeds of ineffective institutions isn’t as imperative as redesigning how they work.  Instead, open data can provide the raw material to convene informed conversations inside and outside institutions about what’s broken and the empirical foundation for developing solutions together.

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“Tyler Cowen”:http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/07/david-gordon-emails-me-on-the-workplace.html thinks he has a gotcha.

bq. David Gordon emails me on the workplace

bq.

I enjoyed reading your excellent post on the Crooked Timber workplace coercion piece. Many of their complaints also hold for the university classroom, e.g., limits to free speech, students have no say in what work is required, etc.; and often there are costs to refusing to enroll in classes the student finds onerous, such as failing to obtain the desired degree. But I doubt Bertram and his friends would regard this situation as coercive.

bq.

Best wishes,

bq.

David

bq. Nor is it always easy to switch schools…

and who knows – when Chris, Corey and Alex start advocating for students to be penalized for having (or not having) abortions, being monitored at home, making, or failing to make, the right political donations, supporting (which was _far_ from a hypothetical question for Corey in his own graduate student experience – he notoriously was the victim of retaliation by one of his professors) or failing to support unionization drives or the like, it might actually _become_ a gotcha. But in the universe that we inhabit at the moment, this continues an extended (and indeed rather _ostentatiously_ extended) exercise in refusing to get the point, let alone addressing it.

Still, if Tyler is in the market for analogies of this sort, I do have one for him. He suggests in his “previous post”:http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/07/libertarianism-and-the-workplace.html that the problem is on the side of the employees rather than the employers:

bq. I am not comfortable with the mood affiliation of the piece. How about a simple mention of the massive magnitude of employee theft in the United States, perhaps in the context of a boss wishing to search an employee? … When I was seventeen, I had a job in the produce department of a grocery store. … I did observe … massive employee shirking … If I ponder my workplace at GMU, I see many more employees who take advantage of the boss, perhaps by shirking, or by not teaching well, than I see instances of the bosses taking advantage of the employees.

But let’s draw the comparison out a little. What would the world look like if GMU economics professors were treated similarly to workers in low-paid jobs with little protection? No offices – at best open cubicles, so that a supervisor could stroll by, making sure that the professors were doing the job that they were supposed to be doing. Monitoring of computers to prevent random websurfing. _Certainly_ no air conditioning. Compulsory random drug testing. Body searches, in case professors were sneaking office supplies back home. Monitoring – at best – of bathroom breaks, and written demerits and termination of employment for professors who took too many of them. Perhaps Tyler might want to argue that such pervasive distrust and supervision would hurt productivity rather than help it – but it would seem difficult plausibly to reconcile such an argument with his prior claim that mooching, slacking and skiving off is endemic among his colleagues.

Knowing professors quite well, including economics professors, I can very safely predict their reaction if they found themselves subjected to such vigorous supervision, (perhaps as a result of some general bill attacking academic privileges passed through the Virginia legislature). And it wouldn’t be a careful consideration of contracts, and a measured conclusion that given the inevitable incompleteness thereof, they would have to put up with it until they could find a job at some more enlightened institution. It would be sputtering, semi-coherent outrage at what they would perceive as a humiliating and direct assault on their professional and human dignity. Indeed, they’d have a point. But it isn’t only professors who have dignity as workers and human beings. And that’s a rather important point too.

Oh Christ. IMAGINATIVE EMPATHY FAIL. The imaginative empathy fail button at CT headquarters is turning around and blaring and stuff and I am sick so I don’t have time to deal with this plus it’s an annoying sound. Everyone, please try to imagine you are a poor person for at least 45 seconds at a minimum. Also, if you look at an 80-comment thread and only one commenter with a visibly female handle has said anything, would you please just, go get someone off the street or something, or like maybe the woman next to you at Starbucks, to comment? Don’t tell her it’s about libertarianism!! Don’t be hitting on her either. Unless you’ve got mad game like Kells. Tell her I asked you to. Anyway.

Do you know how becoming a Jesuit differs from taking on a job that is unpleasant? You don’t need to become a Jesuit to get money to buy food and clothes for your family! For real! You’re not even supposed to have a family! So is there an issue there, about whether one can potentially contract oneself to SeaOrg or the Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church and come out missing your freedom? Yes, and that is what separates cults from churches in most people’s mind. This could be an interesting sidebar discussion but it has nothing to say about the “putting up with awful things to have a job” issue.
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