RED vs BLUE

Atrios spins this study as showing that Red states are stealing money from blue states.

I wonder just how much he really wants to push this theme. I thought it was us classical liberals who dismiss government programs as a feeding frenzy for the politically connected, while "progressives" (they aren't scare quotes, I just don't think their preferred policies will create progress) think the govenrment does good, useful work. So Atrios must believe either a) that all of the valuable Federal Government work must axiomatically be evenly distributed among the 50 states, or b) government programs really are just a feeding frenzy for the politically connected, and the Red states are hypocrites because they're better at it than the blue states. It seems to me that (a) requires some defending, while (b) just plays into the anti-progressive hands.

Indiscriminate economics

Indiscriminate economics
Megan McArdle quotes the following:

“Our country has not,” Schroeder said, “become economically strong through the law of the jungle, through indiscriminate hiring and firing.”

Is it really necessary to point out that no country (or business) becomes economically strong “through indiscriminate hiring and firing.” They become economically strong through discriminate hiring and firing.

Brad DeLong confuses me.

Brad DeLong confuses me.

How can the same person who makes this observation:

Daniel Davies has a solution to the problem of how to finance the creation of interesting content in the information age: simply repeat the BBC model. He's right, of course. There is, however, one key problem. How do you get the committees of the great and good that tend to boss government-funded enterprises to engage in the experimentation and then to register user feedback so that the system can provide programming users actually want to watch? It won't be a problem for me--the great-and-good's tastes are like mine. But experimentation and feedback are processes that markets are pretty good at. And we badly need to figure out alternative non-market ways of generating them...

Which displays the rare (among statist liberals) understanding that their tastes are not the objective and univerally correct tastes, also make the following observation:

The libertarian in the highly intelligent and articulate Jane Galt mourns the abrogation of property rights that is associated with New York City's plan to ban smoking* in restaurants and bars starting March 30, 2003.

I find this--as I find much of modern libertarian thought--bizarre, incoherent, and self-contradictory. You see, I had always thought that libertarians believed that your right to swing your arms comes to an end when it comes into contact with my nose.

Isn't it obvious that by entering into a bar that allows smoking one is agreeing to accept that environment? That, shudder!, bar patrons, on the whole, might actually prefer it?

In general the "right to swing your arms com(ing) to an end when it comes into contact with my nose" is the default rule for people who have no other contact with one another. People who make other arrangements among themselves, such as, obviously, boxers in the ring, and frequently other professional athletes who agree to have the occasional passion-induced fight adjucated by means that the rest of us do not use, have chosen their own rules.

Eugene Volokh is an “optimistic libertarian.” His arguments are uplifting. I wonder if he listened to today’s Talk of the Nation, featuring Liberalism’s public enemy number one, John Banzhaf. (Remember the definition of “Liberal” employed in this site.)

Banzhaf’s anti-tobacco and anti-fast food arguments are totalitarianism pure and simple. Mr. Banzhaf's opening rhetoric (that is, after he finished gloating about the success of the anti-tobacco cabal) is that he'd prefer legislation, but that hasn't worked, so he'll try litigation. He never, I suppose, stops to consider the possibility that legislation hasn't worked because people basically don't agree with him.

Can there be a shred of a doubt that next lowest hanging fruit on the “bad personal habits” tree will eventually succomb to the trial lawyer onslaught? Eventually they’ll find a 300lb 8 year old girl to sue everyone from MacDonald’s to Hersey. Does personal choice stand a chance?

The health naziis make major hay out of a probably inaccurate claim that tobacco and fast food lead to increased government costs. It is simply assumed that this gives the government the right, even the mandate, to regulate "unhealthy" behavior. But, as a former economist-in-training, I have to note that the point behind getting individuals pay the full social cost of their actions is to ensure that they consider all costs before making their choices. It's not actually to change their behavior per se, but to ensure that they change their behavior if the full social costs of their actions are greater than their private benefits. But surely the private cost of a potentially early death swamps the partially social cost of additional, earlier medical expenses. In short, it isn't at all obvious that almost all of the people who eat 10 Big Macs a week wouldn't do exactly the same thing even if they did pay the full social cost of their actions. So the distributional question becomes "should they eat 10 $12 Big Macs, with $8.50 a mac going to the Dickie Scruggs of the world (or the government), or should they get to keep their money

Banzhaf succeeds in debates because his arguments are so larded with linked non sequiturs that his opponents are left to either go into excruciating logical detail in explaining his mis-conceptions, or actually skip over them and just defend fatty foods and tobacco and push over-blown rhetoric of their own. Banzhaf’s opponent does the former to a reasonably acceptable degree, and the latter to a rhetorically unappealing degree. This is an argument best left to essayists..

Where did real Richard Epstein go?

Richard Epstein is one of my favorite academics. He was consistently thoughtful and liberal until this bizarre clunker (in a REASON review of a new Glenn Loury book):

That virtually every major private corporation and private university embraces some form of affirmative action suggests that state institutions doing the same tasks should be allowed the same latitude. A bar against any form of affirmative action is a tough position to defend inside any organization, public or private. The great danger here is legislative fiat, such as California’s Proposition 209, which forces all public universities to conform to Ward Connerly’s monochromatic vision of human nature.

Epstein understands better than almost everyone else that in all sorts of environments the Government must operate under different rules than private individuals because it has different incentives than private individuals. Even if there is some sort of optimal degree to which affirmative action is actually beneficial to society, there is no reason to believe that public university administrators are going to get it right, or come even close to getting it right. They have no reason to get it right, because they pay no cost for getting it wrong. (One is hard pressed to find much of a cost for getting it wrong at Harvard or Stanford, either, but that’s another story.)

At least private corporations will feel the cost of hiring less competent people, if that’s what their affirmative action brings. And if they actually end up with more competent people because they’ve expanded their pool of qualified applicants (which was, after all, the original goal of affirmative action in the first place), then they have a positive incentive to continue it.

Public university administrators, OTOH, pay a very small price for indulging their private whims. Especially if the entire university culture endorses affirmative action. IIRC, a couple generations ago Jewish scientists were something like 10 times more likely to be employed in private industry than in academia. Surely the fact that industry pays a price for discriminating against Jews that academia doesn’t played some role in that disparity. Same principle. Just different favored groups.

Epstein also swing and missed on Loury’s “racist beliefs amongst employers can be self-fulfilling” argument, which looks like this:

Racist employer suspects that blacks are less productive than whites.
Therefore racist employer watches over black employees more carefully, and is less likely to give black employees the benefit of the doubt.
Thus, a higher percentage of equally productive blacks end up being fired, confirming the original racist beliefs.

This is fine as far as it goes, buuuuuut, fails to recognize that market competition systematically weeds out employers who make inaccurate inferences about employee productivity. That those observations sound superficially plausible really doesn’t matter. If the inference is wrong, the market systematically disfavors people who think it is right.

In general Glenn Loury, and everyone else who truly believes that blacks earn less money because they are systematically discriminated against by employees should get out of academia and start a business. If they are right they will both make a ton of money and help a lot of people. If they’re wrong, they won’t be dragging the rest of the country along for the ride.

From A SANE ENVIRONMENTALIST at Andrew Sullivan’s book club:

Having a greater diversity of opinions in this Book Club discussion would really have helped. Your readership is what it is, but given it's rightward slant, you're getting a lot of "head nodding" without much to counter it.

I couldn’t agree more. Where have you been? Speaking only for myself, of course, I was intensely hoping for some genuine environmentalist counter-arguments. But basically none were forthcoming.

This is particularly obvious in the answers to the question of "what motivates the environmental movement." Ever since I started paying attention to what the anti-enviro crowd has to say about environmentalists, I've been both aggravated and amused at how we are portrayed, and how it seems so removed from my own day-to-day experience of working in an environmental field. If you want a personal opinion on what drives this environmental advocate, it's simple: in very broad terms, I believe that making the transition to a more sustainable economy would actually make things better for us all. Basically, thinking more "sustainably" would mean using less to get more - using resources more efficiently, taking advantage of new technologies that can help us get way more output for input than could have been imagined just 100 years ago, or just thinking smarter about how we do things.

That’s awfully coy, isn’t it? How does this differ from all of the design engineers in the world? Or, for that matter, from Jack Welch? Doing more with less is a recipe for riches. It doesn’t differentiate environmentalists from anybody else.

It doesn't involve living in a cave or returning to some mythic, pre-industrial paradise. It actually means moving forward to use 21st century knowledge and resources - and, crazily enough, I think we can do it. It won't be simple or easy, and we'll make mistakes along the way and will bump up against other priorities, but the goal is still a good one. So, there you go, that's what drives at least one environmentalist.
Does that sound crazy? I doubt it, but to hear the you, the Wall Street Journal, the Hudson Institute, etc - you'd think I must be a tree-hugging, people-hating, anticapitalist, social-authoritarian, pantheistic, unscientific Luddite boob.

Dodge Viper. What do you think of the Dodge Viper? “Using resources more efficiently” doesn’t mean “using resources more efficiently as defined by me.” Viper owners think the resources devoted to creating that machine were worth the cost. I.e., they were efficiently utilized. Does your concept of efficient resource utilization allow for the possibility that the Viper is an “efficient” automobile? I have no trouble saying it is, using the appropriate definition efficiency: providing more benefit to its owners, as subjectively perceived by them, than the next best alternative use of those resources.

What do you think about CAFÉ requirements? The most recent “Environment Show,” (a reasonably well-made local public radio show) aired an “environmentalist” complaining that American cars don't get high enough gas mileage. Well, an exhausting one minute web search revealed that Chevrolet makes a car that gets 40mpg, and Ford one that gets 36mpg (both highway). This person is obviously can’t be complaining that GM and Ford don’t make high mileage cars. He’s complaining that, darn it, they make other cars, too! And those stupid consumers go and buy ‘em!

When environmentalists stop arguing that people who don’t share their tastes in cars constitute a “problem” to be “dealt with” by the government, I’ll stop considering them authoritarian.

The "Luddite" claim is particularly annoying, as most mainstream environmental organizations focus a lot on advocating use of advanced technologies (fuel cells, for example) and are roundly denounced for doing so. I'm always confused - am I a Luddite, or am I a techno-wacko who wants us all to drive Borox-fuelled cars?
So, I'd like to counter the question about what drives enviros with another - what drives the persistent, seemingly reflexive anti-environmentalism of the right in this country? It's a problem for the American right, I believe, that they have failed to develop a coherent, credible environmental policy, and instead just react (negatively) to proposals by the liberal/left.

I am reflexively anti-environmentalist, but I used to be reflexively pro-environmentalist, as I suspect most people are. I changed because being pro-environmentalist went from adding catalytic converters, removing lead from gasoline, and installing smokestack cleaners where previously none existed to arguing over whether a child could eat a teaspoon of dirt a day for 83 days or 245 days and driving water impurities down to levels that couldn’t even have been detected 10 years ago. Somewhere between 1970 and now the environmental movement went from advocating reasonable restrictions that almost everyone would agree with if they only had the proper knowledge, to pushing policies that no one would agree with if they truly knew the facts. The movement itself is still living off of capital accumulated during the 70’s when it was doing obvious, recognizable good.

Let me be clear: I want to be an “environmentalist.” I want to have the government take proper, prudent actions to protect the environment. But the outrageous zealotry of professional environmentalists has cost them my trust.

Sad to say, when asked to trust General Electric or the EPA (dredging the Hudson for PCP’s dumped by GE a generation or two ago is a big local issue at the moment), I have to hold my nose and go with GE, because they at least have to overcome the withering glare of recognized self-interest. I can’t see the EPA as any more disinterested than GE (they don't get budget increases when they don't find problems), but it’s rarely ever portrayed that way. Glenn Reynolds likes to note that the winners of Brown vs Board of Education wished they were up against better lawyers so that the case would have generated better law. The EPA needs to be up against better public scrutiny for analogous reasons.

Lying in Ponds performs a useful and interesting service, and I have no trouble believing that Paul Krugman is the most partisan columnist around. But I can't help wondering what my partisanship rating would be were I commenting on a Virginia Postrel Administration with, say, Ralph Nadar as the leader of the opposition.

Paul Krugman is a poor, and purely partisan (honestly, did anyone expect Paul Krugman to choose to become a poor man's James Carville?), columnist because he goes out of his way to attack the Bush Administration for anything and everything, pretty much regardless of a) his professional competence in question at hand, and b) the Bush Administration's actual complicity in the matter. But I'm sure that I would have a similar Lying in Pond's partisanship rating during a Postrel Presidency, simply because I've yet to find any political issue on which Virginia and I differ by more than about three hairbreadths. The difference? In my hypothetical, I'm being intellectually honest. I don't think many people (at least in the corner of the blogosphere in which I hang out) think Krugman is.