The Delino Factor for Kids

2010-05-17T08:41:00.001-07:00

2010-04-22T10:49:00.000-07:00

A DAY OF PROTEST

I found out Obama was speaking at Cooper Union this afternoon, so I figured I should go protest him - get the message out that his "reform" is bullshit and we need to go further to put an end to Too Big To Fail banks.

I put together this nifty pamphlet and a sign, and headed off to bed. Only I couldn't fall asleep. I was too eager with anticipation! Finally at 5AM I dozed off, and after a snooze button fiasco at 7AM I was out of the house at 8 to pick up my sign, which was waiting at FedExKinkos©. On the way, who should I run into but... PAUL VOLCKER!!! He lives in my neighborhood and was hailing a cab to go down to the speech. I ran up to him and said, "Mr. Volcker, Mr. Volcker, I'm a huge fan of yours!" He looked at my 27-year-old sleep-deprived, caffeine-riddled, disheveled ass and was utterly bewildered for about 10 seconds until he muttered, "Uh... thanks." An auspicious start to the day!

I arrived at Cooper Union's Astor Place building to find a ton of cops and Secret Service agents, but no protesters. I was a bit worried, but figured I'd mill about and maybe something would happen. Almost immediately, a reporter from 880 AM NewsRadio interviewed me. I sounded a little bit like a crazed conspiracy theorist, but it went pretty well. Seeing that I was a meme,
a reporter from Yahoo!'s news division then interviewed me on camera for a web piece. At this point, I was emboldened and beginning to feel like a real Pundit, or at least a Man on the Street, so I started handing out my pamphlet.

Ilan showed up just as I was handing a pamphlet to two cute tween girls, who told us, "Yeah Obama totally sucks!" We were encouraged so we handed out some more pamphlets, including one to Ryan Brumberg, who's running for Congress as a Republican in my district.

Brumberg and I had a tete-a-tete about how big banks are getting 3% lower interest rates on debt/equity swaps or something - he was beginning to lose me but then he assured me that "I used to be a lawyer," so I believed him. Then he and his female associate left me to find more media outlets to get interviewed by.

I was slowly realizing that interviews were the coin of the realm, but Ilan and I didn't know where to find any more journalists. Fortunately, a Tea Party lady in gigantic American flag shorts, taking us for Tea Partiers, told us, "We're all over on 9th Street - follow me!" So follow her we did. What we found was... 6 mostly middle-aged, confused Tea Partiers and about 15 cameras trained on them. Here are a couple of my favorites -

The woman in the hat helped us out, there's an Orthodox Jewish Tea Partier, and the signs read "Main Street Needs Wall Street"...

And of course there was a Greg Kinnear-looking repressed middle-aged white Tea Partier about to have a nervous breakdown, Dan White-in-Milk style:

Upon seeing my sign, an Upper West Side Liberal Lady approached me and said, "I'm with you! Not these Tea Baggers- they're despicable!" So I engaged with her, and we agreed Obama was a sell-out/disappointment, but she kept screaming "These people make me sick" about the Tea Partiers right in front of them. She walked away for a little bit and, quick media-whore goat thinking, I moved to next to the Tea Partiers to get in some photo ops. Not wanting them to think I was associated with the Liberal Lady who insulted them, I assured them I was on their side for the most part. But the Liberal Lady overheard this, and asked me, "You're with these people? I thought you were with me?" Now I was really freaking out - I just want to be liked by everyone!

Check out the Liberal Lady saying the right thing but still being an idiot at 0:54 of this vid:

Fortunately, an intrepid Columbia Journalism student asked me for an interview at that moment. As with other interviewers, I said I was anti-Obama, who is too beholden to the banks and is trying to pass off this "reform" as something significant when much more drastic action is actually needed to end Too Big to Fail. But I did say that I respected the Tea Partiers' distrust of government. This attracted the attention of a large black gentleman covered in off-brand Obama gear, who screamed into the camera, "I was a corrections officer for 20 years, and I've seen kids thrown in the slammer for smoking a joint- we need these CEOs to go to jail!" I agreed with the guy, but with the Liberal Lady giving me the evil eye, I decided it was time for us to leave the Tea Partiers and go back to our original base. Ilan wanted to tell a news organization "I've been a corrections officer for 20 years..." but without a well-branded sign, no one would talk to him.

When we got back, a Homeless Lady screamed at Ilan about how Obama is better than Bush, but Ilan retorted that that was a low bar and he was still angry at Obama. To which the Homeless Lady responded, "Well you look a lot happier than me," and walked off. At this point, a full-on Dan Media Frenzy ensued, with TheStreet.com, BusinessInsider.com, and a couple others interviewing me in succession. This made our pamphlets go like hotcakes, as the tourists now crowded around me wanted to see what the Media Sensation was saying, snapping Twitpics all the while [FYI, I can totally see how O'Reilly or any pundit becomes completely self-absorbed and addicted to fame/attention - it's a fucking rush!].

Check me out at 0:14 of this TheStreet.com vid and then my boy Brumberg at 1:19:

Soon, even the Spanish-language media, ever a little slow to a hot story, was in on the game, with a reporter for El Mundo interviewing me in print and then an oddly Obama-looking reporter from Noticias24 interviewing me on TV.

Finally, with the speech over and the Noticias guy listening to Brumberg attempt to court the Hispanic vote, Ilan and I decided to call it quits. But after such a flurry of activity and attention, my dopamine levels were down. I would've given my left nut just to talk to a reporter from a middle school newspaper. Sadly, no one was left. So I sullenly walked beside Ilan toward a restaurant where we could have a debrief sesh about the afternoon's events. The sun was shining brightly, yet my mental weather was seriously cloudy. But just then, a glimmer of light hit my eye - I looked... could it be??? YES! The sunlight was reflecting off something, and that something was PAUL VOLCKER'S BALD HEAD! A DOUBLE-VOLCKER SIGHTING!

It's a sign - I was touched by Paul Volcker, and a couple of overly eager reporters, today. The gods have spoken. I know what I must do. I must blog at Delino Factor not once a year, but twice a year.

2009-12-02T08:25:00.000-08:00

2007-07-27T11:58:00.000-07:00

Does Stare Decisis Make Sense?--lehman

Kingspawn writes:

do you think stare decisis makes any sense whatsoever as a constitutional principle? i think it's either redundant or superfluous. basically idiotic. care to offer a defense?

Not only do I think stare decisis is idiotic, but I'm not clear as to whether it's even possible to coherently formulate the doctrine.

First, let's distinguish between horizontal stare decisis and vertical stare decisis (I have borrowed the terminology from the Wikipedia article). Horizontal stare decisis refers to the principle that lower courts have to treat the rulings of higher courts as authoritative. So, for example, if an appeals court were ruling on the constitutionality of a speech regulation, it could not substitute its interpretation of the First Amendment for the Supreme Court's. This seems to me uncontroversial.

What is bizarre to me (and Kingspawn) is the idea that past interpretations of Constitutional provisions can somehow bind future decisions by the same court. At first blush, this is a bizarre concept. If the Constitution says that a law is unconstitutional, why should it matter if a past Supreme Court thought otherwise?

Here are some O'Connor quotes from a controversial application of stare decisis; Planned Parenthood v. Casey:

(1) Application of the doctrine of stare decisis confirms that Roe's essential holding should be reaffirmed. In reexamining that holding, the Court's judgment is informed by a series of prudential and pragmatic considerations designed to test the consistency of overruling the holding with the ideal of the rule of law, and to gauge the respective costs of reaffirming and overruling.

(2) The Roe rule's limitation on state power could not be repudiated without serious inequity to people who, for two decades of economic and social developments, have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail. The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives. The Constitution serves human values, and while the effect of reliance on Roe cannot be exactly measured, neither can the certain costs of overruling Roe for people who have ordered their thinking and living around that case be dismissed.

(3) Only the most convincing justification under accepted standards of precedent could suffice to demonstrate that a later decision overruling the first was anything but a surrender to political pressure and an unjustified repudiation of the principle on which the Court staked its authority in the first instance. Moreover, the country's loss of confidence in the Judiciary would be underscored by condemnation for the Court's failure to keep faith with those who support the decision at a cost to themselves. A decision to overrule Roe's essential holding under the existing circumstances would address error, if error there was, at the cost of both profound and unnecessary damage to the Court's legitimacy and to the Nation's commitment to the rule of law.

O'Conner offers a fairly typical justification of the application of stare decisis: People have structured their lives around and otherwise rely on Roe, and overruling it would be costly for them. Furthermore, overruling prior decisions causes the Supreme Court's legitimacy to suffer, and in the present case makes it appear as though the SC has caved to political pressure.

While it is certainly true that overruling prior decisions is costly, it is not generally the Supreme Court's job to evaluate the public policy consequences of its Constitutional rulings. For example, suppose the Supreme Court declined to enforce the "cruel and unusual" punishments provision of the 8th Amendment by arguing that, though cruel and unusual punishments are costly to the accused, these costs are outweighed by the benefits such punishments confer on society in the form of deterrence. Obviously we would not tolerate this. The SC should not be able to ignore the Constitution just because it thinks enforcing it is a bad idea. However, functionally speaking, whenever the SC declines to overrule a precedent on stare decisis grounds, it does just this. In other words, the SC weighs the benefits to society of following the Constitution against the reliance costs concomitant with overruling itself. Is there any reason to suppose that "reliance costs" are any different from any other sort of cost that enforcing the constitution might impose upon society? If not, why should we be willing to let reliance costs, and not other social costs, influence Supreme Court decisions?

The same goes for whatever cost the SC imposes upon society in the form of its decreased legitimacy. The point here is even more salient because while it's arguable whether society's reliance on legalized abortion makes it bad public policy to make it illegal, I don't think it's plausible to say that the SC's legitimacy is in any danger of decline. The suggestion that adhering to stare decisis helps the Supreme Court avoid the charge of politicization is pretty laughable.

The court is in no position to uncover the relevant facts necessary to balance reliance costs and legitimacy costs against the benefits of overturning precedent. The decision whether to exercise stare decisis is bound to be heavily influenced by the philosophical inclinations of the justice making it, and even if it weren't, the inquiry is at bottom an attempt to analyze the proposed law on its merits--a pursuit more appropriate for a legislature than a court.

2007-04-08T11:13:00.000-07:00

One Bad Reason to be a Vegetarian--Lehman

I can think of three reasons to be a vegetarian:

Health.
Stance on the moral status of meat producing animals.
Thermodynamic efficiency.

This post is about how reason 3 isn’t a very good reason.

First, what do I mean by “thermodynamic efficiency”? Basically the idea is that it takes a lot more energy to produce complex organisms that it does to produce simple ones because energy as lost as you go up the food chain. So, e.g., it might take 1000 units of energy in the form of grain to produce 100 units of energy in the form of cow flesh. The argument is that if you are a vegetarian, and thus consumed energy in the form of simpler organisms like grain, you are being more efficient because you don’t waste energy converting it into a more palatable form.

This much is true—it is more efficient to be a vegetarian. However, even if one wishes to act unselfishly with society’s best interests in mind, the efficiency gain of vegetarianism alone does not compel a lifestyle change.

The reason for this is that when we attempt to maximize efficiency, we have to consider all costs and benefits. So while wasting X energy to convert food to animal flesh is bad, it also generally comes with a concomitant gain, Y, in tastiness. So the question you must ask yourself is “Is the harm to society in the form of wasted energy greater than the harm to me in the form of lost taste.” If the answer is yes, you should consume grain instead of cow, and if the answer is no, you should consume cow instead of grain.

How does one answer this question? Fortunately for us, the answer is built into the price system. Grain is more energy efficient and for this exact reason it is cheaper to purchase per unit of energy. Likewise, cow flesh is less energy efficient and more expensive. The energy loss to society is entirely reflected in the difference in the price per unit of energy of meat and non-meat. Why is this? If it weren’t, producers would have no incentive to convert grain into cow flesh because unless they were paid more per unit of energy, they would lose money relative to just selling the grain. Thanks to the price system, the only question we have to ask ourselves when determining whether we should eat meat is “Is this steak worth $X to me?” If it is, that means that the deliciousness outweighs the wastefulness. If it isn’t that means that your preference for meat isn’t strong enough to outweigh its wastefulness and that you should consume grain instead.

Now, this is not to say the other two reasons aren’t sufficient to compel a lifestyle change. In particular, I would say that morality almost certainly compels us to be vegetarians in the sense that it’s impossible to square the intuition that it is immoral to light a cat on fire for no reason with the intuition that it is okay to raise animals in torturous conditions for the sole reason that we enjoy the taste of their flesh. Unfortunately (or fortunately for egoists like myself) our society has brainwashed us to see a non-existent difference between cat torturers and meat eaters just as it has brainwashed us to see a non-existent difference between negligent drunk drivers and people who choose to go to the movies rather than save 1000s of starving Africans lives.

2007-03-11T00:00:00.000-08:00

Some thoughts about "Occam's razor"

People often invoke "Occam's razor" ("OR") to justify a particular claim or conclusion. Roughly, OR is something like "All things being equal, the simplest explanation tends to be the best one." People often use OR without realizing it to explain mundane events like one's driveway being wet. What makes rain a better explanation than a cult dousing your driveway at midnight with buckets? Well, it's simpler.

This sort of reasoning works pretty well, but where people get into trouble, I think, is when they (implicitly or explicitly) invoke OR to defend more abstract philosophical theses. So, for example, someone might say "evolution is a better explanation for our existence than God is because of OR". To see whether OR is applicable in cases like these, I think we need an account of some terms the definitions of which OR takes for granted--namely "simplest" and "explanation".

The best way to analyze OR is with the language of conditional probability. This will require some notation: From now on we will say "P(A|B)" when we mean "the probability event A happened given that we know event B happened".

What is the probabilistic definition of "simpler"? Say we observe the event "my driveway is wet". We can ask about the following probabilities P(it rained|my driveway is wet), P(a cult doused my driveway|my driveway is wet). I believe that when we say "it rained" is a better explanation for my driveway being wet than "a cult doused it" what we REALLY mean is P(it rained|my driveway is wet) > P(a cult doused my driveway|my driveway is wet). While my driveway COULD be wet because a cult doused it, 9 times out of 10, it will be wet because it rained. Therefore, "it rained" is a better explanation.

What is the probabilistic definition of "explanation"? I would say it's something like this: A explains B iff P(B|A) = 1 (and, trivially, A does not equal B). For example, "it rained" qualifies as an explanation of "my driveway is wet" if and only if it having rained guarantees that my driveway will be wet.

So then what OR tells us to do is, given an event A, list all the events that would guarantee that A would happen. Then find the event MOST likely to have occurred given what we know about A. This event is the best explanation of A because it is the event most likely to have brought A about.

So far so good. But now that we're being rigorous, how do we calculate P(A|B)? Well, the easiest way is to use something called Bayes' theorem, which states P(A|B) = (P(B|A) * P(A))/P(B). But if we're trying to analyze how good A is at explaining event B, we know P(B|A) = 1 from our definition of "explanation". Thus, Bayes' theorem reduces to P(A|B) = P(A)/P(B). So for example, in the driveway case, here is how we would analyze whether "rain" or "cults" is a better explanation:

P(rain|driveway wet) = P(rain)/P(driveway wet)
P(cult doused|driveway wet) = P(cult doused)/P(driveway wet)

so, P(rain|driveway wet) > P(rain|cult doused) iff P(rain)/P(driveway wet) > P(cult doused)/P(driveway wet). But this is true just in the case in which P(rain) > P(cult)! So what happens more often--rain? Or renegade dousing cults? If the answer is rain, then rain is the better explanation of how your driveway got wet.

The problem then is what happens when you try to apply this method of reasoning to the god case:

1) Evolution is a better explanation of humans than God is iff P(evolution|humans) > P(god|humans)
2) This is true just in the case that P(evolution) > P(god)
3) But this requires knowing what P(god) is!

So in complicated cases like this one, OR is useless. It purports to determine the best explanation for the existence of humans, but in doing so it begs a question that’s even more difficult to answer.

2007-02-28T13:52:00.000-08:00

THE "WAR ON DRUGS"

I have some very long posts coming up but for now this is just a short link to this wonderful post by Gary Becker about the stupidity of the "War on Drugs". Who profits from this War? Law Enforcement agencies, third-world dictators, and a handful of kingpins. Who is harmed by this War? The American taxpayer (through prison costs for non-violent drug offenders, military action in drug-producing countries, use of police time and resources), and more importantly poor minorities and their communities. The "war" will never be won, it is just a waste of billions of dollars and ruins the lives of millions of mostly black and Latino non-violent offenders while not making a dent in the drug trade and inflating prices. Eric Schlosser, of Fast Food Nation fame has a good section on this in his book Reefer Madness.

The Republicans are of course worse on this issue, but sadly the Dems are not that great either. If you are interested in any sort of activism of this type, check out NORML's website. And to read the daily abuses conducted in the name of the "War on Drugs", check out this site. Any change on this issue will require courageous politicians, so it could be a long ways off but it is worth fighting for.

2007-02-12T09:04:00.000-08:00

THE REPUBLICAN VIRUS (Part I of VI)

I will detour from the Neo-Con Delusion for a brief period here to talk about the Republican Party, in a 6 part series. The next five parts are devoted to the GOP's general radicalism, its stances on social issues, its attitude toward government regulation, its treatment of government programs, and its stances on foreign policy.

Some people say that Democrats are the Mommy party, and Republicans are the Daddy party. The idea of Republicans as Daddy is interesting, but it's not quite specific enough. The Republicans are actually the Daddy who won't let you do anything fun, gives you no allowance, saves nothing for your college fund, steals from your piggy bank, and then for good measure beats you, sodomizes you and gives you AIDS.

The Republican Party is a virus infecting America, and the only cure for it is blog posts. So here goes...

2007-01-31T19:26:00.000-08:00

RE: THE POST BELOW ABOUT NEO-CON HACKERY

This article from the Nation beautifully details how the Democrats have their own "Strategic Class" of "Experts" who are similarly ignorant and arrogantly belligerent. I want to note that while the end of the last post suggested relying on diplomats, generals and analysts as Experts, I am really making a distinction here because the Neo-Cons and the Democratic Strategic Class are both characterized largely by their lack of experience in any setting except the Washington DC cocktail party set. The generals, diplomats, and analysts, by contrast, are less political and ideological and have far more practical experience.

2007-01-31T07:58:00.000-08:00

NEOCON DELUSION, CONT'D

Before I get to some of the specifics of the situation in the Middle East, I want to tackle another broader issue. Let's leave aside for the moment the Neo-Cons' inability to distinguish between American national security and Israeli national security (and a narrow, militaristic vision of Israeli security at that).

The main point I would make here about the Neo-Cons, and here I am talking about people who were and are in the Bush Administration, especially in the Office of the Vice President/Defense Department/ and NSA- Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Scooter Libby, John Hannah, Liz Cheney, David Addington, etc - is that THESE PEOPLE ARE NOT EXPERTS IN ANYTHING.

The politically appointed Neo-Cons do not have any kind of serious grasp of the internal dynamics of Middle Eastern countries- Iran, Iraq, the Palestinian Authority. None of them speak the languages spoken in the Middle East. None of them have seriously studied the history of the region. None of them have spent significant time in these countries. Because of this lack of actual knowledge, the Neo-Cons rely heavily on expatriates like Ahmed Chalabi from Iraq and a whole bunch of Iranian expats in the U.S. The problem is that these people are wholly disconnected from the Middle Eastern street and simultaneously hate the Middle Eastern regimes and love America to a far greater degree than the average Iraqi or Iranian or Syrian. Incidentally, this is the same problem we have with relying on Cuban expats from Florida- Foreign Affairs has a great article about how Neo-Con-ish thinking over the last 50 years has led to a bungling of the US's Cuba policy.

What the Neo-Cons of course end up with is a cartoonish vision of the Middle East (and the world in fact- see North Korea, Latin America) filled with the Good Guys and the Bad Guys, and the Bad Guys are so evil you can never talk to them, while the Good Guys are good no matter what they do. And the Neo-Cons' solution to every problem is always MORE WAR! The word Diplomacy is not in these peoples' vocabularies.

And what about War? The Neo-Cons have ZERO EXPERTISE ABOUT WAR! None of them have ever served in combat. None of them have ever commanded troops or dealt with an insurgency before. They have no idea what they're talking about when it comes to the military, but they puff their chests out as if they are tough guys who know how to take care of business.

The sad thing is that the U.S. Government is filled with actual experts on Middle East in the State Department and the CIA, but President Bush chooses to listen to these Neo-Con charlatan hacks. Similarly, on military matters, OUR OWN MILITARY EXPERTS virtually all tell him not to do the "surge," but he does it anyway because his Neo-Con advisers tell him to. A sane foreign policy would take under advisement the expert advice of seasoned diplomats, generals, and intelligence analysts. Of course, a willfully ignorant attitude is not at all surprising coming from a president with a "faith-based" view of science and economic policy.

2007-01-14T12:01:00.000-08:00

THE NEOCON DELUSION-

I recently read an article in Foreign Affairs entitled "Our Values - and Theirs" by British PM Tony Blair. The basic premise of the article is that We, The West, are in a global struggle with Them, the Islamofascists, which we absolutely must win in order to preserve Our way of life. This is essentially the Bush Administration line, with a few words changed here and there. As the Bush-Blair-Neocon axis would have it, there is a New Cold War going on, and you are either with Us (U.S.?) or with Them. Being with Them means being with the Islamofascists, and the Islamofascists believe only in hatred, death, and fascism.

To the average American, this view of the world might not seem so unreasonable. The men who attacked The West on 9/11 were Islamic extremists from the Middle East, and so were the Madrid and London bombers. And Iran and Syria are both unsavory regimes- they are undemocratic, their people have limited freedom, they rail against the "Western and Jewish devils," and they fund Hezbollah and other militant Muslim groups who operate in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East. Within Iraq and Afghanistan, there are those pesky jihadists who try to ruin the Iraqis' freedom through suicide bombings and IED explosions- maybe with Iranian support. So it sounds like there is a group, the Islamofascists, who is conspiring to mess up the Middle East and stop Freedom from spreading. And these people are extremists- none of them will negotiate, neither the state actors nor the nonstate actors. So how else do you deal with these irrational extremists BUT with overwhelming military force?

The problem with this Neo-Con worldview, of course, is that it is wildly simplistic to the point of having little relationship to reality. The truth is that you cannot tease out so easily who are the "good guys" and who are the "bad guys" in the Middle East, and assuming that "pro-U.S. = good guys" is a very misguided view of the region. It is not even a good idea to look at the Middle East through a "good guys v. bad guys" lens, because that is just far too simplistic. There is no such thing as a widespread unified Islamofascist movement. The Global War on Terror is a concept that has grown so broad as to have lost any meaning. Many of the conflicts that President Bush tries to relate to terrorism on American soil actually have nothing to do with domestic terrorism at all. There are almost no Global conflicts - most of the conflicts are pan-Middle East conflicts, and some of them are really basically Intranational conflicts. And the Bush Administration is constantly presenting the American public with false choices that do not represent the full spectrum of options available the the U.S.

More Truth to come very soon....

2006-08-22T09:56:00.000-07:00

Delino Factor Impact Segment

Looks like those pinheads at the NYC Department of Environmental Protection are reading the Delino Factor and taking note of my ideas, because the City has decided to lower its allowable decibel levels for everything from nightclubs to garbage trucks (the worst offenders IMHO). The city will issue larger fines (I was unaware of the whole fine scheme in my earlier post), which is great news. Meanwhile, the Delino Factor will keep looking out for YOU, because the spin [circular hand motion] stops here!

http://www.amny.com/news/local/am-noise0822,0,1900386.story?coll=am-topheadlines

2006-08-14T13:24:00.000-07:00

As anyone who has tried to have a cell phone conversation with me during business hours can tell you, Midtown Manhattan is incredibly noisy. Now most of you would probably resign yourselves to this fact. But I would argue that something should be done about this urban nightmare. And that something is...

A Noise Tax! As economics whiz-kid Tom will tell you, the economic transaction wherein a supplier in Illinois sends a truck (it is mostly trucks that cause the noise) to a retailer in Midtown Manhattan creates a negative externality of noise that ruins my prana (the yoga life force- yes, i do yoga) and prevents me from talking on the phone (I get the irony of me polluting midtown with noise on the phone, but there are degrees, and cell phone chatting cannot compare to the belches of a Mack Truck). Under the current situation, the truckers, suppliers, and retailers have no economic incentive to take into account my suffering. This is why we need a noise tax, whereby we set a certain acceptable decibel level for trucks, and tax them if they exceed that level. I am not suggesting we single out trucks, since people playing loud boom boxes or doing any other noisy activity would be subject to this tax too.

In thinking about it, I realized that this noise issue is probably closely related to the issue of air pollution (noisy trucks likely are the same ones which are the worst polluters), and since there is probably already an air pollution tax maybe this is already covered. But clearly the incentive scheme is not working, as evidenced by my inability to hear callers on my cell phone. Finally, I would note that city buses are much quieter and more energy efficient than the trucks, so clearly less noise is possible if given the right incentives. Dear readers, think of my poor prana

2006-06-09T04:13:00.000-07:00

Here is a counter-intuitive one that now seems obvious:

Voting (in presidential elections or generally as part of a reasonably sized electorate) makes no sense.

The basic logic is this: In general you are more likely to be hit by a car on the way to vote than you are to affect the outcome of the election with your vote. Therefore you should only vote if you would prefer getting hit by a car to having your preferred candidate lose. (Therefore it makes no sense to vote)

Since I am unable to see any convincing counter-argument in favor of voting, I ask you, (numerous) readers to explain in comments why you vote if you vote and why this (unimpeachable) argument does not convince you.

In advance, two arguments that are particularly silly and you should not waste your time with:

1) "What if no one voted?" Well, if I had advance knowledge that no one was going to vote, the liklihood my vote would make a difference would be much higher and therefore I would vote. However, I can say with relative certainty that this is not the case, and I see no reason to evaluate the decision to vote as if it were. What makes this counterfactual more reasonable to act upon than "What if everyone voted for my candidate?" If this were the case it would certainly make no sense to vote.

But then I suppose some people will say that it is correct to judge the morality of actions based on some idea of universalizability. But even if you accept this (highly questionable) basis for morality, the objection still fails. The maxim one should test by universalization must include the relevent facts surrounding the action, not just the action itself. If you just include just the action, every maxim fails. For any X, if everyone, right now, did X, disaster would ensue. (eg, what if EVERYONE ate dinner at 7pm tonight? Society would fall apart. But surely it is not prohibited that I eat dinner at 7pm tonight.)

In this case, the relevent factors include the participation rate of the electorate. So the maxim is something like "given the facts of voter participation, I will not vote." Or, more broadly "I will decline to take an action for which the costs outweigh the benefits." This maxim universalizes fine.

2) "Voting makes me happy." Fine, do what makes you happy, but I doubt that voting intrinsically makes you happy. Ie, if you knew that your vote would go in the trash, would voting still make you happy? If so, then voting is rational in the same way that avoiding cracks in the sidewalk is. If your happiness is contingent on your vote being counted, however, then it is based on a mistaken view of the relative costs and benefits involved.

2006-05-24T21:40:00.000-07:00

The Economics of Divorce

I assume most of those who support governmental regulation of divorce do so for religious (irrational) reasons. However, there is a good prima facie case to be made for regulating divorce (after the birth of children) on economic grounds.

The idea is this: before children are born, divorce is pareto optimal[1]—all parties involved prefer it to the status quo, and therefore the state need not regulate. However, once children are born, the decision to divorce involves an uncompensated externality: the effect of the divorce on the child’s welfare. Essentially, the state should “conscript” couples to stay together if the harm of the divorce to the child’s life outweighed the (trifling) inconvenience to the lives of the parents. How might the state accomplish this? Quantify the dollar harm to the child’s life[2], and force the parents to pay up[3]. This would give couples incentive to “work it out” iff it is socially optimal for them to do so.

Now, this probably seems counterintuitive. Is this because of the problems mentioned below? Or is there reason to believe that divorce benefits the child enough of the time to remove the need to protect his welfare? I suppose this could be the case if “forcing” parents to stay together just wouldn’t work. But it seems to me that many marriages would work if compelled (there are a high number of “boring” marriages relative to “abusive” marriages—a lot of people these days “stay together for the kids”).

Or, maybe the threat of divorce forces each party to treat the other better, and once you remove this threat, quality of life will fall to just above the threshold at which divorcing is cheaper. This too I find implausible. Not many people would have the guts to engage in this pyrrhic strategy.

Despite the clear need to evaluate the need for governmental regulation of divorce based on the harms to children, the liberal and libertarian left acts as irrationally as the religious right. Whether the left thinks that divorce ought to be unregulated on principle (as I suppose libertarians would) or on the grounds of some conception of fundamental rights (as I suppose the liberals would), it ignores the welfare of children by excluding them from a choice that influences their well being.

INTERESTING ALTERNATIVE:

Allow children with divorced parents to offer themselves for adoption. This is of course is extremely problematic, but pleasing in theory.

More Potential Problems:

[1] Is it? Maybe we want to say that if one party to a divorce REALLY wanted to stay together, and the other only SLIGHLTY wanted to get divorced, the state should force them to stay together.

[2] Obviously a big measurement difficulty here. Sociologists do this maybe?

[3] By forcing them as a group to come up with the money you force them to bargain over their relative shares. Bargaining may break down.

2006-04-04T11:28:00.000-07:00

It is time for a post on eminent domain. I just can’t resist.

To review: Eminent domain is when the state takes ownership over your property and pays you compensation (usually) equivalent to its “fair market value.”

My previous work in this subject has dealt with limits on the state’s power of eminent domain, but here I am going to talk about a more basic question:

Should a state have the power of eminent domain at all?

The argument in favor of allowing the state to use eminent is based on an appeal to economic efficiency. Sometimes holdouts and other transaction costs prevent resources from flowing to their most valued use via voluntary transactions. When this happens, the state can increase economic efficiency by compelling the transfer. The argument is essentially 1) States should act to promote economic efficiency (/maximize wealth/maximize utility). 2) Eminent domain promotes efficiency in some cases. 3) Therefore the state ought to use eminent domain in those cases in which in it promotes efficiency. Commentators like Finnegan have attacked this position by essentially denying 1). Compulsory sale of property is a moral wrong in itself—efficiency consequences be damned. This is the position I will consider today.

There are two basic counterarguments to this position:

The Practical Argument: Even if you think efficiency isn’t the whole story, if you eliminated eminent domain, efficiency losses would be too high for even the most committed deontologist to bear—e.g., we would not have any highways or railroads.

I find this argument pretty convincing. But even if you don’t, either because you don’t believe me or you are fine with living in a world in which no one can build highways or railroads, there are more subtle philosophical problems with the anti-eminent domain stance. This brings us to

The More Theoretical Argument: Let us start with an example:

Suppose you own some coastline property valued to you at $2M. The state wants to build a park there, and uses eminent domain to take your land. This is what we want to disallow. Fine.

But suppose the state wants instead to prevent coastal erosion. It passes a statute prohibiting you (and other similarly situated landowners) from building on your property. However, your land's sole value comes from it being an ideal spot for a luxury condo. Your land is now worth $40, but you still own it (phew). The question is how this situation is any different from the situation in which the state just takes title to your land. The answer is it really isn't. In fact, there is a huge body of doctrine about so called "regulatory takings" by which the Supreme Court evaluates regulations (like the one described above) to see if they go "too far" and “become” eminent domain. (The example I described above is a real case. Check out Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council)

The problem with the anti-eminent domain position is that if one dislikes eminent domain, one should also dislike all regulations like the one described above. If the state cannot take your land in the name of the greater good, we certainly shouldn’t let the state (merely) render your land valueless in the name of the greater good. In fact, regulations are even worse than eminent domain. In addition to destroying your property rights and being non-voluntary, they don’t even require compensation.

The point is that there is nothing special about "owning" land, because when you "own" a piece of land, you really own a bundle of property rights, not one big lump. You can sell a "stick" in the form of an easement, but each "stick" is real property in the same way that the title to the land is. If one is against non-voluntary redistribution of property rights, then one is against all regulations, whether they actually take title to the land, or (merely) eliminate all of its economically viable uses.

But why stop here? Presumably non-property related regulations are the same. I.e., I'd be willing to give up a certain amount of property for CT to repeal the statute that makes bars close early. Isn't it then fair to say that CT has "taken" my property (without compensation, mind you) when it forces bars to close early? Any statute that makes me involuntarily worse off destroys my "property" in some sense.

The anti-eminent domain position is consistent only if it also rejects all transactions that are not Pareto optimal. But the only way to ensure that no one gets hurt by a transaction is to require that every decision be made by unanimity rule. Why is unanimity rule bad? Well, the same reasons why we need eminent domain in the first place! Holdouts and transaction costs.

Let me put this more clearly: Without transaction costs or holdouts, unanimity rule is great. Why? If there is a surplus, the winners can compensate the losers and everyone is better off. But sometimes the transaction costs borne by members of the community in discovering the set of Pareto-optimal outcomes outweighs the gains to those who are saved from risking exploitation under a majority rule. Without unanimity, someone might be "exploited," but this is justified because the cost everyone bears avoiding this exploitation by adopting unanimity rule is greater than the cost borne by the exploited party.

Likewise, sometimes the transaction costs associated with voluntary exchange are greater than the cost the landowner has to bear when eminent domain is used. If you're against eminent domain in all circumstances, you must be in favor of unanimity rule in all circumstances on pain of inconsistency. But of course requiring unanimity rule in all cases is impossible and absurd. Therefore, the anti-eminent domain position is untenable.

2006-03-21T15:46:00.000-08:00

With the recent release of the very entertaining Thank You for Smoking, I feel like a post about cigarettes would be topical.

Should cigarette companies be held legally responsible for the negative health effects of their products?

Most liberals would probably say something like “the companies should be liable because they are knowingly selling a harmful product and therefore should have to pay for the damage it causes.”

Conservatives, on the other hand, would probably say something like “on the contrary, no one forced these people to smoke cigarettes, and they should be held personally responsible for their lifestyle choices.”

I think that both of these ways of thinking are wrong. Liberals are wrong because they act as if smoking cigarettes is an irrational act. The choice to smoke entails both costs and benefits. The benefits include the nicotine high, suppressed appetite, and the Jeremy-esque image. The costs include the cost of the raw materials and the labor to manufacture the cigarettes but also the cost to the user's health in the form of reduced quality and length of life and future medical treatments. Only people for whom the benefits outweigh the costs should smoke.

If this is the case then, are conservatives correct? No, conservatives are wrong because they act as if consumers have full information. Cigarettes have both health costs and manufacturing costs, but only one of these costs is known. Consumers know the manufacturing cost of a pack of cigarettes because it is printed on the pack in the form of the price—however, if consumers are entirely responsible for their own actions they are almost wholly ignorant as to the health cost of a pack of cigarettes.

This is problematic for the conservative position. For example, if a pack of cigarettes gives me $20 worth of pleasure, and the price of the pack is $5, should I buy the pack? Well, only if the cigarettes do not cause more than $15 worth of damage to my health. But how can I possibly know this? Short of engaging in an extensive empirical study, I can’t.

This is the problem with the conservative position. Because consumers do not know the hidden health cost of cigarettes, absent manufacturer liability, they will make inefficient choices.

Now, consider the effect of holding cigarette companies legally responsible for the health effects of cigarettes. If they were held responsible, cigarette companies would have to pay for both the manufacturing of cigarettes and the health damage they cause. This means that the cost of production, and therefore the price, would include the expected health damage as well as the manufacturing cost. This would in turn inform consumers of the true danger of cigarettes and help them make efficient purchasing decisions.

Furthermore, holding cigarette companies liable would also give them efficient incentives to innovate. Absent liability, companies have incentive only to minimize the manufacturing costs of cigarettes because that is the only cost they have to bear. However, from a policy perspective, we want companies to minimize the total social cost of cigarettes, which includes both health costs and manufacturing costs. Liability would give companies the incentive to do so.

So what have we learned? Should manufacturers of all potentially dangerous products be held legally responsible for the damages the products cause, or is the cigarette case unique in some way? The cigarette case is somewhat unique because besides the decision whether to purchase cigarettes, consumers do not have to make decisions that effect efficiency. That is, suppose there were a particularly dangerous but pleasurable way to smoke a cigarette. If companies were held completely liable, consumers would have no incentive to avoid smoking cigarettes in this manner. But there is only one way to smoke a cigarette, and so this issue does not arise. However, in the case of, say, gun manufacturer liability, we do have this problem. If gun manufacturers were held strictly liable for gun injuries, consumers would have no incentive to exercise caution when using guns.