voluntaryXchange

Children Anointed?

Thomas Sowell's Vision of the Anointed lays out a useful way for thinking about the world: that the major division is between those that view the world in terms of intentions, and those that view it in terms of outcomes. He labels those for whom intentions are more important than outcomes "the anointed".

I don't intend this as an insult to my friends who fall into that category, but my 5 year old is displaying routinely inappropriate 5 year old behavior that I would characterize as consistent with the anointed. I am correcting him.

So, what's he doing? He has a sister who is 2 who he enjoys terrorizing (and vice-versa). But, being 2 she is often scared of things. The 5 year old is getting sensitive to this, and approaches the problem with the best of intentions: if she is scared of something he will bring it closer, in a less threatening way, and show her why she shouldn't be scared of it.

Here's the rub: if the 2 year old then becomes more frightened, has the 5 year old done something wrong? As a parent who values household peace there is an easy answer: yes he has, and he should back off! But to a 5 year old, who is beginning to think clearly about the world, he is being good because his intentions are good. He is anointed in Sowell's sense. Fortunately, we can still steer him towards thinking of the effects of outcomes on others rather than his own internal intentions.

Do I do this because (generally) I do not fit in well with the anointed? Or is this parental behavior that is emminently reasonable, and probably supportable by a majority? If that is the case, where do anointed adults come from? Are they trained that way by parents who don't act like I do? Or, are they reprogrammed by society at some formative age? Or, are they only anointed on certain issues, particularly ones of public policy?

And ... think again about how I worded the end of the paragraph before the last. Who could argue with "thinking of the effects of outcomes on others". It seems to be a character fault of many Democrats these days to view Republicans badly because they want to frame debates this way (and in no way am I claiming that Republicans haven't done this in the past, just that it is a particularly Democratic problem at this time). As a mostly serious Republican this irks me. Oh well ... I guess I'll should start torturing puppies, since some people assume all Republicans do that anyway ;)

ROFL: One Opinion from All Things Considered

I like All Things Considered, and I miss it (my commute isn't long enough where I've lived since 2000 to bother tuning in).

But, when I tune in I know what I'm going to get too. And I tuned in for about 20 minutes in the middle of the show Tuesday.

And I almost had to bust a gut laughing when the guest commented something to the effect that voters settled for Reagan in 1984 and Clinton in 1996 even though the country wasn't in perfect shape.

So ... let me get this right ... when a (Republican) incumbent comes arguably closer to winning the electoral college unanimously than anyone else, it shows that voters settled for him? And Clinton in 1996 is in the same boat? Ahem...

Economic Growth Saves Lives

Haiti's experience with Hurricane Jane is proof positive that economic growth translates directly into human lives. This is not the first time we've seen a huge death toll in a developing country resulting from an otherwise "mild" disaster. But this time around we've got a nearly perfect matched pair for the analysis!

Economists are often accused of being insensitive, and macroeconomists are often accused of stretching reason when they equate economic growth with well being.

This thinking is naive, and the proof is in the death tolls from natural disasters. Take the case of Hurricane Jeanne. The storm skirted the north shore of Hispanola, the island with the Dominican Republic on the east side, and Haiti on the west. For most of this time, it was only a tropical storm.

In Haiti, the results were over 1,500 dead, plus over 200,000 homeless. They're not even sure. The humanitarian disaster continues (of course).

In The Dominican Republic it is hard to find news about damage from Jeanne less than two weeks after the fact. If you go to one of the best websites for Dominican news and scroll backwards, you can find reports of 6 dead, perhaps 10. Up to 30,000 people left homeless. Other sites are similar. There is a lot of news about getting the tourism industry back on track.

What does this have to do with economics? Haiti is a well known example of doing just about everything wrong with policy, and it shows in their GDP. The Penn World Table is the definitive source on this data, and it shows that the annual per capita real GDP in Haiti is $1760, while it is $4,676 in The Domincan Republic. Yes, that's right, same island, similar nasty colonial experience, and a history of U.S. military interventions. Yet there is a 165% higher standard of living in the Dominican Republic. And, it's safe to say that this difference has a lot to do with the gross difference in the number of lives lost.

P.S. The name of this hurricane uses the same unusual spelling as my mother's name, but there are no other similarities. Mom is more like a steady drizzle.

I Loved This!

I'm not particularly religious, but I've always liked Biblical analogies. Can't say why that is, but here's the best one I've seen in a long time:

If cheap goods from China are bad for the United States then surely zero-priced Manna from Heaven must have been terrible for the Israelites.

Read the whole post entitled "Manna from China" at Marginal Revolution.

Twinkle Twinkle Little Star

People either love or hate the rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star that has appeared in a new television advertising campaign for Sheraton Hotels. Here's the skinny.

First off, you can't currently buy that song, but you may be able to in the future. Read on.

The rendition was produced by Sheraton as part of their advertising campaign, and belongs to them. They are not currently offering it for sale. However, there is a blurb about the song out on the net.

But, you have to wonder if there is some disinformation here because they misspell the name of the artist singing the song. They say it is Danya Kurtz, but the web is pretty dead under this name. If you dig a little bit, you can find out that the singer is Dayna Kurtz (yep ... most people think it's a man, but it is in fact a gravelly voiced woman).

Dig down into the message boards, and there is an explanation from the singer herself:

...we don't own that version of the song, unfortunately, sheraton does. BUT - i'll be in the studio with randy and dave (who played on the jingle too) in the next couple of weeks, and we're going to re-record the song, almost exactly the same. maybe with a tambourine or something too. and probably post it for a while. then put it on an EP we're putting together soon. i'll keep you posted!

And later:

... the re-tooled version sounds almost identical to the original, we just, for legal reasons, had to re-record it so the masters were ours ... we're also more than likely gonna put it up on i-tunes too. just have to get home long enough to make it all happen ...

And about the blurb:

... i tried like hell to get the sheraton folks to correct that, but nothing ever came of it. it's a good idea to register the misspelling of the name with the search engines...

Now you know. You like you buy...

P.S. As a B-school professor, I've always wondered if there is an archive somewhere of print and TV advertisements - there are a million of them I'd like to use in class as examples. If you know of any, please comment about them.

Lost Tribe Found?

A lost tribe of (ancient) Israel may be living in ... eastern India.

Perhaps that's an overstatement. It would be more correct to say that there are people currently living there whose ethnography is too close to that of (ancient) Israel to be easily dismissed. This is the thesis of a book by Hillel Halkin I've just gotten around to reading entitled "Across the Sabbath River" (the title refers to a legend that the lost tribes live on the other side of a river that stops flowing on the Sabbath).

What is certain, is that Halkin has documented a group who say and believe they are descended from the lost tribes, who tell a tale of a migration from the Middle East, and who apparently have observed important Jewish holidays until very recently. They may not be descended from the lost tribes, but they certainly seem to have had contact with seminal Jewish practices that end with the Mosaic teachings.

Outsourcing Trivia

In India, they sell facsimiles of foreign liquors that they make locally. It is called IMFOL: Indian Made FOreign Liquor. I've never had it, but by reputation it is awful.

Presumably they do this out of some misguided bureaucratic attempt to keep jobs in India, rather than permit the import of a higher quality product made by workers located outside of India. This is what keeps countries like India poorer than they have to be.

Official Christian Anti-Semitism

In case you missed it, the Presbyterian Church - U.S.A. passed a resolution at its annual conference this summer to divest from Israel. This has been reported in the legacy media, and also by bloggers.

There is now also news that the Anglican church may divest from Israel too.

In fairness, what was recommended was:

... exploration of a selective divestment of church funds from those companies whose business in Israel is found to be directly or indirectly causing harm or suffering to innocent people...

But the thinking behind this is just wooden-headed:

... the church has called for an end to the occupation, as the principal cause of the conflict ...

So, let me get this right: there was no conflict before Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967?

It gets dimmer:

Although the decision ... may be presumed by some to invite comparison of Israeli policies with those of apartheid South Africa, the assembly has not asserted any moral equivalency between the two.

Is this supposed to help their case? The possibilities show a stunning lack of awareness for their own actions. They're clearly saying Israel isn't like South Africa of 20 years ago, which would be a good thing, given all the factual evidence like civil rights and the absence of homelands that might stifle the comparison. So, Israel isn't like South Africa. But what is it then? The documents don't offer much of a clue. They are very big on Israel building a security wall, which is asinine on the face of it considering that many countries have something like that. I'm not claiming it's a great plan, but it isn't a crime either. I'm sorry, but what I'm left with is that Israel is not like South Africa because the latter was dominated by a Calvinist church, while the former is inhabited primarily by Jews. I am sorry, but what this position is saying is that apartheid was a good reason to be against the government of South Africa 20 years ago, and the fact that Jews are trying to defend themselves is a good reason to be against Israel today.

The idiocy continues with:

The focus of this action is to explore use of a proven tool of economic pressure to motivate real change in Israeli policies and movement toward peace.

Do these people really believe their own BS: that 1) private divestment helped move South Africa in the right direction, and 2) that South Africans are better off today? Spare me - there has been change but not necessarily improvement, and to claim that divestment had something serious to do with it is to engage in high-minded moral snobbery that is an insult to the thousands of people on the ground who died trying to change apartheid.

Please bear in mind that these are the opinions of a current and committed member of a church that belongs to the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. This whole situation just turns my stomach.

Carnival of the Capitalists

Carnival of the Capitalists is up for this week at Crossroads Dispatches. I especially liked the analogy between TV and pharmaceutical production in the post entitled "Drugs and Television" at The Electic Commentary.

Why Is There a Market for This?

A textbook representative just called me to talk about how I can use their new service to create custom books (with some chapters excluded) from their standard textbooks.

Is it rational for a professor to pursue this sort of offer? I'm not sure I know the answer.

I have always been insensitive to student's complaints about the cost of books. The differences in the prices of the books are just not that large compared to the differences in content.

So, what could a professor gain with custom book? Obviously it would be more convenient for them (and I have occassionally custom printed a text, but not as a habit). The publisher argues that they can produce the book at a lower cost, and pass those savings onto the students. This only helps me to the extent that it makes my students happier ... which don't get me wrong, is certainly a benefit. But, the cost of this is that the custom book has almost no resale value. It has some, but only if I teach the same class to about the same number of students every semester. That's a pretty dubious assumption.

It seems to me the only way that this can be rational is if the wedge between the list and buy-back price on a tradiational text is larger than that for a custom text. In a lot of situations this is probably true (it certainly seems to be true when buying cars). But I can't see that it would work for textbooks. Am I wrong?