What are the most libertarian states?
Jason Sorens over at the The Fund for American Studies blog has a series of interesting posts attempting to identify the most libertarian states. Using factors that include Ron Paul’s vote share, the number of Ron Paul donors per state, Libertarian Party vote in the 2008 presidential election, and other variables, he concludes:
The states with the most libertarians are Montana, Alaska, New Hampshire, and Idaho, with Nevada, Indiana, Georgia, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon, Utah, California, and Colorado following.
Just in: Doctors respond to incentives, are human
A new study by Harvard health policy professor Joseph Newhouse finds that when Medicare payments to doctors for chemotherapy are cut, doctors respond by prescribing chemotherapy to more patients than they previously had, thus making up the difference. Predictable or unintended consequence, it’s still Econ 101. Still, policymakers act as if people (and doctors are people) can be immune to incentives. Since the Obama health reform pays for itself in part with medicare payment cuts, expect to see more of this sort of thing.
What’s especially interesting to me is how this underscores the insanely asymmetric relationship we have with doctors. The only difference between a doctor and a car mechanic telling you that you need to replace your Johnson rod is that you’re probably in a much more vulnerable position talking to a doctor.
Thanks, George W Bush, for the BP escrow fiasco
In today’s New York Times, David Sanger analyzes President Obama’s expansive use of the presidency not as a bully pulpit but to act as planner/shareholder/dad-in-chief:
But President Obama’s successful move to force BP to establish a $20 billion compensation fund that the company will have no voice in allocating — just a down payment, the president insisted — may have been the most vivid example of what he recently called his determination to step in and do “what individuals couldn’t do and corporations wouldn’t do.”
With that display of raw arm-twisting, Mr. Obama reinvigorated a debate about the renewed reach of government power, or, alternatively, the power of government overreach. It is an argument that has come to define Mr. Obama’s first 18 months in office, and one that Mr. Obama clearly hopes to make a central issue in November’s midterm elections.
The real issue here isn’t — or at least shouldn’t be — the “size and scope” of government, to employ that chestnut. What’s really frightening about the way that Obama sees his role as unconstrained by law or regulation on what he can or cannot do. If the president decides that a private company should establish an escrow fund with the federal government, he doesn’t need a law or regulation to set up how this works. He just needs what Rahm Emanuel calls “a power other presidents have used — you call it jawboning.”
It may make every bit of sense for companies that drill offshore to, in the case of an environmental catastrophe, have an escrow fund managed to pay the victims of their recklessness, carelessness, or bad luck. And as Richard Epstein argued, BP doesn’t deserve to have its liability capped.
But if this is the case, there should be some kind of legal or regulatory means for addressing this. A whim of the president is not, in a country that can meaningfully be said to be governed by the rule of law, sufficient basis for this. And by putting the money in an “escrow fund,” it gives the illusion that there’s some kind of contractual or due process mechanism at play here. There isn’t. Procedure matters in a liberal democracy; getting to the “right result” isn’t enough.
Of course, Obama couldn’t do this if his predecessor hadn’t teed up such a perfect shot for him. So well done, Republicans. Your insistence that the “unitary authority” of the president allowed him to imprison and execute at will has been reapplied from real people to the legal persons that are corporations. Nothing Obama’s doing is inconsistent with the Bush doctrine on presidential power. The target has merely shifted. Heck, it’s really just a continuation of existing Bush administration policy: Hank Paulson did the same thing when forcing banks to take TARP money, though at least TARP could hide behind the fig leaf of congressional action.
Somewhere from his lair on Skullcrusher Mountain, Dick Cheney is smiling. And remember, libertarians told you so.
International soccer and fiscal policy
The list of countries that qualify for the World Cup is always a motley one. There’s Brazil playing against just-got-in and didn’t-register-properly North Korea, which Radley Balko suggested fielded a side with eight Kim Jong-Ils. Over in Group E there’s defending world champions Italy, we’d-rather-be-playing-rugby New Zealand, Slovakia (motto: “No, sorry, you’re looking for Slovenia; they’re in Group C; no bother, it’s a common mistake”), and Paraguay (notice that every country ending with “guay” qualified for the World Cup).
Qualifying for the World Cup is a big deal and source of national pride (except in the United States). Could this pride be leveraged for macroeconomic ends? I have a modest proposal.
The Stability and Growth Pact limits the ability of Eurozone countries to run excessive deficits and incur excessive debts. Supposedly. As we’re seeing in Greece, it doesn’t seem to be doing a very good job at this. And Greece is far from the only country to openly flout the Pact.
Would World Cup disqualification work any better? That is, what if FIFA or the regional governing bodies (like UEFA) only certified for World Cup participation countries that adhered to some basic rules of fiscal discipline, keeping their deficits in check and debt below some reasonable percentage of GDP?
It wouldn’t be unprecedented. After all, in club soccer,
Obviously this isn’t foolproof, and surely there will be countries that game the system. But it would at least allow the exclusion of countries like Greece who threaten the financial stability of an entire continent. To mix my sport metaphors, Greece deserves some time in the penalty box. That need not be executed just by diplomatic means.
Since the endogenous costs of reckless fiscal policy don’t seem to effectively dissuade countries from marching into the abyss, perhaps the damage to national pride accompanying disqualification from international soccer’s biggest quadrennial tournament would prove more effective.
California: America’s bread basket and food regulator
Baylen Linnekin has published a new law review article that you should read if you care about your right to eat whatever you want. He points out that California is leading the charge in regulating and banning politically incorrect foods, including hollandaise sauce and Caesar dressing, taco trucks and other street foods, eggs, raw milk, trans fats, and many others. This should worry the rest of us because as goes California, so goes the nation. For example, California was the first state to ban foie gras, and soon other jurisdictions followed suit, including famously Chicago.
Before reading Baylen’s article, I had no idea that California was responsible for so much of our food production. When you think of America’s bread basket, you tend to think of the midwest, but in fact it is California:
The sheer volume and variety of crops grown in California defy overstatement. The state leads the nation in production of almonds and walnuts and seemingly every crop alphabetically in between. In addition to almonds and walnuts, California is America‘s sole producer—meaning it is home to ninety-nine percent or more of the country‘s overall production—of figs, raisins, olives, clingstone peaches, persimmons, prunes, pomegranates, sweet rice, and clover seed. The state leads the nation in production of asparagus, avocados, bell peppers, broccoli, carrots, cauliflower, celery, cut flowers, dates, eggplant, garlic, grapes, herbs, kiwi, lemon, lettuce, lima beans, melons, nectarines, onions, pears, pistachios, plums, raspberries, strawberries, turnips, and more than a dozen other crops. All told, California farms account for nearly half of America‘s domestic production of fruits, nuts, and vegetables. California growers ship the vast majority of these crops to other U.S. states. California also accounts for all of America‘s nut exports, and three out of five fruit and vegetable exports.
California also has the most vibrant restaurant industry in the country. To me, this begs the question: If California’s agricultural and food industry is so massive why hasn’t it successfully organized to block food regulation? Is it simply the case that green lobby is much bigger?
Ask not for whom the watch beeps
I’m at a conference in Philadelphia today with about 100 people in an auditorium. Around two in the afternoon, someone’s watch made a “beep beep” sound, and it took me a minute to realize that this was a sound marking the hour and one that I hadn’t heard in years.
Do you remember in the 1980s and 90s when a chorus of digital wristwatches emitted perfunctory peels every hour on the hour? I realized today that this seems to have completely disappeared. Why is this? A few hypotheses, ranging from the blindingly obvious to the more subtle (and therefore less likely correct):
- People are less likely to wear watches. This is the most obvious theory. Some estimates show that watch sales have fallen off over the last few years, but not by the order of magnitude that would be required for the virtual elimination of the hourly watch chime. Even if 50 percent fewer watches were sold this decade, and stipulating for the moment that watches are not durable goods, that still doesn’t explain it. Anecdotal evidence suggests that cell phones and iPods have rendered the wristwatch obsolete (at least as a method for telling time), but they haven’t gone the way of the buggy whip yet.
- Preferences have changed towards analog wristwatches. This makes some sense; since we have the time in our pocket (plus calculators, contacts, appointments, memos, and all the other snazzy things our watches used to do before PDAs and cell phones), watches perform only two functions: telling the time and signaling status.
- People no longer want to be told when the hour strikes. What explains this change in preferences, however? Why would this have changed?
- People never wanted hourly chimes to begin with but watches came with them turned on by default. Call this the Sunstein and Thaler theory.
- People still want hourly chimes but don’t want to wear watches to get them. This makes little sense since presumably cell phones could be made to chime hourly, or developers would create an app. (Oh wait, they did.)
- My sample has changed. I’m in a professional environment now rather than school and college. Since I graduated from college about the time that cell phones became ubiquitous, I have a difficult time disaggregating a number of social trends from this other revolution.
Granted, this is a completely pedestrian observation. But it is remarkable that, at least from my perspective, something as ubiquitous as the hourly watch chime seems to have disappeared overnight, and without much fanfare.
Final thoughts on Disney
I’m back from Disney and here is my verdict: it’s is incredibly ordinary. I’m afraid I have no grand insights to offer, but I’ll take a stab at a few observations.
My last post inspired Jackson Kuhl to riff on how an ideal of cultural authenticity is generally unhelpful, and concluded: “I think perhaps Jerry didn’t want to go to Disney because, as a 30-something dude without kids, riding the Dumbo carousel doesn’t get his heart pumping.” I think that’s absolutely right. Disney is first and foremost for children, and it was for the benefit of my wife’s nephew that we went. It was only through his enjoyment that I could appreciate the place.
Now, two things that struck me. First, vacationing at Disney is like vacationing at a cross of a mall and sports stadium. The entire experience is engineered to get you to buy stuff. At the stores, at the kiosks, at the food court. The vast majority of the stuff is the kind of completely useless garbage that in a previous life I founded Unclutterer to combat. The twist is that there is no competition inside Disney’s walls, so you pay incredibly inflated prices. The company, however, has mastered the art of making folks thankful for the privilege. I am seriously considering purchasing their stock.
The second thing that struck me is that Disney is one of the most massive experiments in privatization we have today. Walt Disney wanted to build more than an amusement part. The immersive experience he had in mind was not just for visitors, but for residents as well. The Magic Kingdom was to be just a small part of the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. According to Wikipedia:
Walt Disney’s original vision of EPCOT was for a model community, home to twenty thousand residents, which would be a test bed for city planning and organization. The community was to have been built in the shape of a circle, with businesses and commercial areas at its center, community buildings and schools and recreational complexes around it, and residential neighborhoods along the perimeter. Transportation would have been provided by monorails and PeopleMovers (like the one in the Magic Kingdom’s Tomorrowland). Automobile traffic would be kept underground, leaving pedestrians safe above-ground. Walt Disney said, “It will be a planned, controlled community, a showcase for American industry and research, schools, cultural and educational opportunities. In EPCOT, there will be no slum areas because we won’t let them develop. There will be no landowners and therefore no voting control. People will rent houses instead of buying them, and at modest rentals. There will be no retirees; everyone must be employed.”
Here is a film of Disney presenting the concept city. In one sense it’s a libertarian dream. A completely privatized city. In a law review article on the subject, Prof. Chad Emerson explains how it was made possible by the Florida legislature creating what amounts to a giant business improvement district the size of Manhattan. It ceded to the Disney Company traditionally governmental functions such as zoning, streets, drainage and even police and fire service. For example, in the elevators of the Disney hotel at which I stayed last week, the usual inspection certificates were posted. The issuing authority was the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which is wholly controlled by Disney. In essence, the company is certifying its own elevators. In theory, the district (read Disney) also has the power to set up its own municipal court, and it even has explicit authority to develop a nuclear power plant.
In another sense, though, it’s a libertarian nightmare. Planned by experts from top-to-bottom with a benevolent Uncle Walt at the head. As I’ve mentioned, there also doesn’t seem to be much room for competition inside the city walls. If Walt had had his way, alcohol would have been strictly controlled. And what exactly would have happened to the old people who wanted to retire? I guess it’s all OK though if you what you’re signing up for and are free to leave any time.
In the end, Disney died before even the Magic Kingdom opened, and the plan for greater EPCOT was reduced to the EPCOT Center park we know today. The top down and controlled nature of Disney is still very present there, however, and I think that’s what gives me the willies about the place. There’s nothing nefarious about it, it’s simply like Walt’s vision for the dome that would have encapsulated EPCOT: climate-controlled to a perfect 72º at all times with no chance of weather. Even Las Vegas–Disney World for adults–as “synthetic” as it is, has an element of unpredictability to it.
Morning Links
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Favorite: "On June 7, 2009, a 60-year-old man from Cressona, Pennsylvania allegedly touched Minnie Mouse's breasts while he was visiting the Magic Kingdom. He was convicted of misdemeanor battery on August 11, 2009."
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I often use NYT.com to check aphorisms and other phrases that I think I may be mangling.
War + Lithium = Democracy. The Aristocrats!
The United States has discovered a trillion-dollar trove of metals in Afghanistan:
The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.
An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and Blackberries.
Referring to a country as “the Saudia Arabia of” anything hardly augurs well for its future since Saudi Arabia is, well, a theocratic petrostate whose rulers virtually imprison a group of foreign workers whose numbers total about a third of the kingdom’s population and whose native population is subject to the whims of a fascist religious police that, among other feats, murdered fourteen schoolgirls in 2002, prohibiting them from leaving a burning school building because they were not sufficiently veiled.
Afghanistan is not a country that has always been an anti-modern failed state, but one that was at one time, not so long ago, a relative symbol of progress and liberalism in the Muslim world. So moving to being the Saudia Arabia of central Asia isn’t really a great step forward.
Perhaps Afghanistan can join Nigeria or Venezuela in the list of countries whose natural resources have done so much to initiate prosperity, growth, and opportunity. But “central Asia’s Nigeria” doesn’t really have much of a ring to it.
For the umpteenth time: natural resources are not an unalloyed good that move a country from poverty to prosperity. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the rule of law and favorable institutions have a lot more to do with it than minerals. Given that the Soviets, then the Taliban, and now the US are presiding over an effectively broken institutional climate in Afghanistan, the discovery of mineral deposits is nothing to cheer about. In many ways, it’s a step backwards. At least for the people of Afghanistan.
An extra room in coach hack
I don’t know if the following is common knowledge, but I was proud of myself for thinking it up unassisted, so I’m going to share it with you anyway. Like most happy couples, my wife and I like to sit next to each other on flights, but neither of us cares for the middle seat. I will insist on taking the aisle because I hate having to ask to get up. My wife is accommodating, but because the middle seat is no picnic, we started to choose aisle seats across from each other, which has worked great. They’re close enough to carry on a conversation without bothering anyone, and four years into our relationship, we can bear to be two feet apart for a few hours.
What I started noticing was that when we did this we often had no one sitting in the middle seats next to us, which made flights extra-comfortable. As you’ve probably already guessed, here’s what I figured out: When choosing a seat online, try to find a row in which both window seats have been taken, then choose the two aisle seats. Unless it is a very full flight, chances are low that any single traveler will choose to take a middle seat. Voila, instant extra room all around. If you wan to sit in the same side of a row, try to find an empty row and choose an aisle seat and a window seat and chances are you’ll have no one sit between you in the middle seat. If someone does, you can ask them to switch and they likely will.
Can some dude without a PhD out teach MIT in math and engineering?
Technology can lower the barriers to entry for many industries. Writers without formal journalism training start blogs, break news, and attract readership that rivals major news organizations. Citizens without formal political training organize Tea Party rallies through the internet, run for office, and even beat establishment candidates in some cases, as election returns showed earlier this week.
But could some dude without a PhD teach college math and engineering? And history and biology? And beat MIT?
Well today, the Chronicle profiles Salman Khan, a 33 year-old former financial analyst, who has created 1,400 educational videos and posted them to YouTube, teaching math, engineering, history, biology, and other subjects that he finds interesting. His “Khan Academy” gets more views than MIT, famous for its early “open courseware” experiment, according to YouTube’s educational section. Iconoclast technology guru Jason Fried of 37signals has even invested in Khan Academy, arguing:
The next bubble to burst is higher education. It’s too expensive for people—there’s no reason why parents should have to save up a hundred grand to send their kids to college. I like that there are alternative ways of thinking about teaching.
Of course, breathless pronouncements about the power of technology have certainly been overstated before. And among businesses that are slow to change, certainly academia must rank among the slowest. But just how fast could academic entrepreneurs like Khan shake things up? I’d be eager to hear your thoughts in the comments.
