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Related to Ted’s point below, could I just clarify that there are only two ways in which it can be true that X is “not a covert CIA operative”.
1) X is not a CIA operative
2) X is a CIA operative who is not covert
If you are making the claim “X is not a covert CIA operative”, then it may be helpful to your audience if you explain which of the two claims above you are making. I can draw a Venn diagram if it makes things clearer.
Everyone should take a look at this; it shows what 30-second advertising slots in the Fall schedules went for this this year. Most expensive show is Friends (obviously), followed by “Will and Grace” (surprising?). I don’t really have a handle on US media, but I can’t believe that a lame one-joke effort like W&G is pulling in the ratings, so it must have really good demographics (the pink economy, I guess). I’m also surprised that Monday Night Football is only in the middle of the table and cheaper than “The Simpsons”. Anyway, enjoy.
Update: Closer perusal shows that the priciness of Will & Grace is unlikely to have anything to do with the pinkness or otherwise of its viewers. It’s just that CBS seems to totally own Thursday night, and W&G is in a slot between “Friends” and “ER”. The mystery is actually why “Scrubs” and “Coupling” are comparatively weaker; they’re both pretty bad, but I wouldn’t have said that they were between 10% and 30% worse than Will & Grace.
Maria’s post on the Adam Smith Institute blog1 reminded me of an old joke from the ASI’s halcyon days of the 1980s when Sir Keith Joseph was at the heart of Margaret Thatcher’s government pushing a serious Hayekian agenda. In those days, the role of the ASI was described as “taking ideas from the edge of lunacy to the edge of policy”. I only thought of this joke after reading Thomas Friedman‘s latest effort in the New York Times (I actually read it by mistake; I thought that Krugman had shaved off the bottom half of his beard and if you look at the two photos side by side it’s an understandable error).
Time was when a man who seriously talked about the likelihood of imminent uprising by the French Muslim population and called articles things like “War With France” could safely be laughed at, or at least confined to the WSJ’s increasing eccentric online editorial supplement. Time no longer, apparently. Oh dear. Friedman is possibly wrong, by the way, in claiming that “France, with its large Muslim minority”, would necessarily see its “social fabric” hugely affected by Islamic militancy; as a French acquaintance pointed out to me recently, the Islamic population of France is heavily concentrated in metropolitan Paris and Lyon, and France is actually a country of small towns. But mistaking Paris for France is a common enough error (particularly by Parisians) so I’ll let that pass.
We’re having a good old back and forth slagging off each other’s music tastes and calling each other fascists in the comments section at John Holbo’s site. As you can see, the issue of “whither the music industry in a world of reduced intellectual property” is bound to bring out a lot of interesting opinions; I think this is because a) we don’t know what the heck will happen b) we’d all like to believe that the answer will involve us all owning loads and loads of fantastic music for next to no cost but c) we all suspect that it probably won’t. As you can see if you follow the link, my role in the debate appears to be partly to snipe about obscure, irrelevant and probably wrongly remembered points of price theory and partly to act as the de facto defender of the music industry as she currently stands. I’m not sure that this reflects my genuine views, but in all similar discussions, I have historically ended up in it because of a number of points on which I think people are badly misunderstanding the economics of the music industry. I don’t want to start on a five thousand word thesis which will never be finished on this, so I’ll try to list my points of disagreement one by one in a series of posts. Starting with the easiest point and the one on which I’m most sure of my ground; micropayments are not going to happen any time soon.
Apparently the Cancun ministerial conference of the World Trade Organisation has got to such an appalling standstill that they all decided to pack up and go home. And the interesting thing is that what killed it wasn’t EU intransigence on agricultural subsidies, but rather something called the “Singapore issues”; a set of proposals about foreign investment on which the developed world is more or less united. Which is really rather a scandal., but as I argue below, the good thing about the Cancun collapse is that it allows us to get the measure of the character of the WTO as an organisation.
A week late and a couple of dollars short, here are my thoughts on the now defunct Policy Analysis Market. I’d note right up front that this “market” always looked suspicious to me; even when it was going, the website seemed to consist of precisely five flat, static HTML pages, and this for a website that was meant to be going live with active trading in October. Particularly since nobody seems to be at all clear on the details of what this market was meant to achieve (was it open to the general public? Only to specialists? Was it going to trade “assassination futures”? Or just derivatives on the EIU political stability indices?), let alone on its clearing arrangements, confidentiality clauses, etc, I rather suspect that the whole thing was disinformation from start to finish. That’s why I didn’t want to comment on it at the time.
However, I do want to comment on the fact that a number of bloggers analysed it in terms of Hayek’s concept of tacit knowledge and markets as information-creating social entities. Henry had an excellent first cut at trying to develop a more rigorous Hayekian analysis last week, but I’d like to take issue with some of his points and make a couple of my own about the characteristics of successful markets.
Tyler Cowen’s got more of his Macroeconomics series up. It’s nothing like as bad as the monetary economics post that I objected to yesterday. Part Three on fiscal policy is OK ..ish. I don’t agree with him on Keynes, and think his comments on deficits and interest rates are naïve (I include by citation Brad Delong posts on this subject passim ad nauseam), but I can see how others would class my disagreements with it as probably political rather than technical. And Four on open economy macroeconomics is actually quite good, although the omission of any discussion of optimal currency areas is a bit of a lacuna. Part 2 has one very serious error, but in being bad, it is actually good, because it’s clued me into what went wrong in the train wreck which was Part One.
I am somewhat uneasy about writing this, as it is about the fourth post in recent weeks having a go at the Volokh guys, and one of quite a few on Tyler Cowen specifically, but I simply could not let this post pass without comment. It’s part one of a “Guide to Macroeconomics in Five Easy Lessons”, on monetary economics. I wholeheartedly support the idea of someone producing such a guide, but the actual statements made about monetary economics seem to me to be horribly confused. So much so that I’ve been reduced to commenting on it line-by-line; I wanted to write a proper response, but grew worried that by concentrating on my main disagreements, I would be implicitly endorsing some of the errors I didn’t single out.
I’ve edited this twice to moderate some of the more temperamental remarks, but the tone is still pretty angry, as I’m genuinely annoyed that this is being fed to laymen. As a result, I have perhaps been excessively inclined to pick nits; that’s how I get when I’m angry. I will accept the judgement of Brad DeLong as definitive on the question of whether I have been unduly harsh and will post an apology here if he thinks I have been. I pre-emptively apologise to Mr Cowen for the lack of civility inherent to the “fisking” genre; as I mention above, I tried and failed to come up with alternatives.
Since it’s “contrarian” silly ideas week on CT this week, here’s another one for fans of Tyler Cowen’s telemarketing argument (see below). It’s something that’s bugged me for a while. Various versions of the libertarian creed seemed to be based on allowing people to do anything they like as long as it doesn’t involve “force or fraud”. My question is; why have they got such a downer on fraud?
The prohibition on force is easy to understand. Force is nasty; it harms people directly and interferes with their liberty. But defrauding someone is just offering them an opportunity to harm themselves. Rather like selling them heroin, or persuading them to opt out of a defined benefit pension scheme, two activities that most of us would support people’s right to do, even though we might disapprove of the consequences. If we’re going to establish a strong principle of caveat emptor, as most libertarians seem to think that we should, why should we have a prohibition on that form of free speech known as “lying”? If someone wants to be fooled by a smooth-talking charmer, or decides rationally that they can’t be bothered verifying the accuracy of claims made to them, why should the govenrment step in and paternalistically demand that they be insulated from the consequences of their actions?
I can’t think of any Nozickian or other libertarian grounds on which one should be able to object to someone earning their living as a confidence trickster; it’s a non-productive activity, certainly, and it degrades the general institution of trust, but these are social objections, not available to a consistent libertarian. None of us ever signed a contract saying we wouldn’t lie to each other, so we needn’t feel bound by any social objections. So I suggest that “or fraud” be dropped from the slogans of the Libertarian Party, and we leave it to the free market to weed out the dishonest timeshare promoters, merchants of patent medicines, Nigerian advance fee scam artists etc.
America has become a second rate power. The trade deficit and the fiscal deficit are at mightmare proportions …. sorry, I was just memorising the opening paragraph of Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is good”1 speech. Though it did amuse me how his opening remarks had become topical again. “Wall Street” was on Sky TV at the weekend, and it reminded me that I’ve always wanted to do a particular kind of review of this film. I’m not really qualified to carry out a proper critique of it as a piece of work2, and the film probably deserves better treatment than to look through it for hilarious ’80s kitsch3.
But what I would like to do is make the following case; very few of the actions which bring down the whole house of cards on Bud Fox and Gordon Gekko were actually illegal under securities law at the time. In fact, I’d make a case that any sequel to this film would have to start with the premise that Gordon Gekko was acquitted on all charges of securities fraud.
Given that we have at least two or three contributors who hold down paid jobs as philosophers of one kind or another, and it’s a Friday afternoon, I thought I’d take the opportunity to ask a question that’s been on my mind for a while.
Why is it that no moral or political philosophy of which I am aware has a satisfactory explanation for the fact that snitches, grasses and tattle-tales are almost universally reviled? In most other areas of moral philosophy, it is considered generally unsatisfying at least to have what is known as an “error theory”; a set of principles which commits you to the belief that the majority of the population are wrong in some of their strongly held beliefs. But in the case of snitches, grasses and squealers, most of the moral philosophies I’ve ever heard of seem to be more or less entirely committed to an error theory? Why?
It came to my attention that Condoleeza Rice is attempting to explain to us that 16 words of outright falsehood isn’t really all that much in the context of a two hour speech, not all of which has yet been proved to be untrue. How wonderful; I never realised before that she had much of a sense of humour. I have never been a great fan of this kind of reasoning, ever since an unscrupulous waiter once convinced me (I was young and drunk) that one obviously putrid, blackish-green prawn wasn’t really all that much in the context of a very generous paella. Three bloody days on the pot I was because of that one.
Anyway, it gave me an idea for a competition; how much can you say, how grandiose and extraordinary a claim can you make, in 16 words? “Let there be light” is only four, so I’m guessing that things could get pretty extreme. “Let there be light and I did not have sex with that woman Miss Lewinsky” is fifteen words, and fits the spirit of the joke whose punchline forms my title above.
In terms of a blanket condemnation of as many things as possible, I’m going for “The set of all sets of sets of sets of sets of cardinality aleph(1) is evil” as my entry; if anyone thinks that they can better it, have at ye. I might award prizes, but most likely only the glory.
Nobody comes particularly well out of this story. After winning a lawsuit with the Diana Foundation about rights to the image of the Princess of Wales (that’s the Princess of Wales as immortalised in the song, “Goodbye England’s Rose”, god damn you Elton John), the Franklin Mint, purveyors of granny crap1 to the world, decided to do what comes naturally to an American corporation with lawyers, and countersue the Foundation so hard that their regal ancestors feel the pain. Presumably pour decourager des autres; after all, there are a lot of celebrities on their last legs and I can see how it might be inconvenient to have to go through a prolonged court battle every time before you can get down to the business of milking the grieving fans for the price of a commemorative plate.
Anyway, the Diana Fund trustees have realised that they are potentially personally liable for the costs of this lawsuit, and in order to protect themselves against possible action for wrongful trading, have frozen all the accounts of the Fund until the suit is completed. Bad news for all manner of cute, furry animals and disabled children. I am not entirely sure who decided that it would be good publicity for the Franklin Mint to bankrupt Princess Diana’s legacy and close down a number of charities, but there you go. As I say, nobody comes particularly well out of this one.
1Since these people are apparently quite litigious, I would like to point out that I am using the term “granny crap” to refer generically to kitsch ornaments of all sorts. The term “granny crap” is not specifically meant to refer to the products of the Franklin Mint but rather to be a general pejorative comment expressing my opinion of the general aesthetic of celebrity-themed merchandise. To show goodwill, I am prepared to give the following unsolicited testimonial; I believe that the Franklin Mint is the finest manufacturer and direct marketer of granny crap currently operating today.
This series of reports in the Guardian is incredibly worthwhile, not just as an insightful piece of reporting on crime in the UK, but as a general example of what goes wrong when you try to manage things “by the numbers”. In general, if business school taught me anything it’s that companies with no strategy process of their own end up being managed by their most junior budget analyst (because he’s the one who writes the report and therefore picks the ratios to concentrate on), and it appears that something similar goes on in the public sector. While we’re on the topic, a couple of other fun facts for UK criminology nerds:
1. A prize for the first confirmed sighting this week of a report on the Home Office crime figures which attempts to find an explanation for the “massive increase” in the murder rate in the UK without the author realising that all 215 of the murders attributed to Dr Harold Shipman over a fifteen year period were booked in the 2002/3 numbers because that’s when the total was finally established.
2. One of the big driving forces behind the misbegotten policing “reforms” detailed in the Guardian article above was an “epidemic” of street crime in last year’s figures. It was particularly noted at the time that thefts of mobile phones had gone through the roof …. oh dear. It appears that more than half of reported mobile phone thefts and up to 10% of the total reported street crime in London is the result of people claiming to have had their telephones stolen in order to claim on the insurance. It gets worse … there is a distinct suspicion that some of the less reputable mobile phone shops are encouraging people to do this, in order to get the insurance companies to unwittingly subsidise upgrades in an increasingly competitive phone market. I’d always wondered how the industry was going to finance the transition to 3G handsets …
Both of the anomalies above, by the way (as well as the fact that, after a few years’ campaign to improve reporting levels, it is now the case that domestic violence accounts for a quarter of the violent crime in England and Wales, much more than anywhere else), can be avoided by serious researchers by always using victimisation survey data wherever possible.
The Cato Institute has published a new edition of its annual report on The Economic Freedom Of The World, endorsed by Milton Friedman and not to be confused with about a million other such reports produced by rival thinktanks (I seem to remember that Heritage were the first to get into this game, but their index is based on subjective scoring and is really bad, while Cato’s is based on publicly available economic and survey data and is only quite bad, from a scientific point of view.)
Lovers of liberty will be pleased to know that the forward march of human civilisation continues unabated and we are all precisely 0.15% freer than we were at the time of the 2002 Report; the Index of World Economic Freedom apparently increased from 6.34 to 6.35 in 2001. Is it me, by the way, or is it pretty pathetic that such a self-important document is only produced with a two year lag? Anyway, as usual the dominance of the rankings by a bunch of incredibly rich free-ports and tax havens at the top and a bunch of horribly poor kleptocracies at the bottom, means that they can publish their usual diatribe about how “economic freedom is closely correlated to wealth, equality, development, relief from aching piles etc”. But the interesting thing to me is the extraordinary level of philosophical incoherence of the whole exercise.