voluntaryXchange

Carnival of the Capitalists

Carnival of the Capitalists is up this week at Ideologic LLC.

I recommend

• Photon Courier's post about ultracapacitors - I hadn't heard about these, and if you know anything about electricity you'll recognize the potential here.
• Professor Bainbridge write about the broken Hollywood business model that relies too much on summer blockbusters - I'm interested, but I've posted before that I think this predilection is an overrated problem.

Interesting (Pornographic) Economic Anomaly

A Random Walk notes that the porn industry is not as uptight about technology as mainstream Hollywood. The conjectures are that this is because the product cycle is shorter in porn, and because the industry is less dependent on big releases.

I like the latter explanation. Porn seems to me to be characterized by perfect competition -  I mean, really, have you ever heard of anyone arguing that the product is differentiable?

On the other hand, mainstream movies seem to be going more towards monopolistic competition, with a heavy reliance on either trying to create a differentiable product or else on quick and dirty attempts to use free entry to horn in on positive economic profits before they are arbitraged away.

4th Quarter Growth Update

Would you believe that the upward revision of 4th quarter real GDP growth to 1.6% - announced in this morning's preliminary release - raises the grade to a C on my standard curve, and to a B on a grading scale representative of what we award college students?

Admittedly those are borderline grades, and if the final report matches those I would give them both minuses.

For those who want more detail, this raises last quarter from the 13th to the 18th percentile.

Yes ... you are interpreting that correctly ... you can get a B by being in the 18th percentile in college these days.

Grading Euphemism

Cold Spring Shops describes grading:

...The stack of blue books is full of red marks and then returned to their authors.

Interesting Voting Anomaly

I didn't pay enough attention when voting systems were discussed in graduate micro. I find the result discussed below interesting, but confusing.

I am on faculty senate here (unfortunately). They have been operating under an outdated constitution for a long time. But, the proposed replacements have all been voted down.

Last year was the most recent attempt. It too was voted down.

This year, a more savvy person said, let's not change a thing, instead let's just break it down into individual amendments and have a vote for each of them.

Every single amendment passed - most by 80/20 margins, give or take a bit.

So, what we have is a single document that was voted down, and a set of individual documents which were all passed, and which in total comprise the same document.

Posner On the Summers Fiasco

Brilliant:

To appreciate the sheer strangeness of the situation, imagine the reaction of the CEO of a business firm, and his board of directors, if after the CEO criticized one of the firm's executives for absenteeism, ascribed the underrepresentation of women in the firm's executive ranks to preferences rather than discrimination, dealt in peremptory fashion with the firm's employees, and refused to share decision-making powers with them, was threatened with a vote of no confidence by the employees. He and his board would tell them to go jump in the lake. But of course there would be no danger that the employees would stage a vote of no confidence, because every employee would take for granted that a CEO can be brusque, can chew out underperforming employees, can delegate as much or as little authority to his subordinates as he deems good for the firm, and can deny accusations of discrimination.

If, however, for employees we substitute shareholders, the situation changes drastically. The shareholders are the owners, the principals; the CEO is their agent. He is deferential to them. Evidently the members of the Harvard faculty consider themselves the owners of the institution.

They should not be the owners. The economic literature on worker cooperatives identifies decisive objections to that form of organization that are fully applicable to university governance. The workers have a shorter horizon than the institution. Their interest is in getting as much from the institution as they can before they retire; what happens afterwards has no direct effect on them unless their pensions are dependent on the institution's continued prosperity. That consideration aside (it has no application to most professors' pensions), their incentive is to play a short-run game, to the disadvantage of the institution--and for the further reason that while the faculty as a group might be able to destroy the institution and if so hurt themselves, an individual professor who slacks off or otherwise acts against the best interests of the institution is unlikely to have much effect on the institution.

Read the whole thing. (Don't judge me harshly either - I am not a Summers fan).

Instant Dinosaur Expertise

New Scientist has a webpage called Dinosaur: Instant Expert. Three pages of light prose with about 60 links to readily accessible articles published there over the years about what's new in dinosaur paleontology.

Blinkered Thinking About Polygamy

The largest polygamous sect in the U.S. is a criminal racket, and it is blinkered of Tyler and Alex at Marginal Revolution and Tim Harford to avoid this fact.

Don't get me wrong - I do think there is some merit in their arguments.

However, economics is more about the actions that people do take rather than the actions they might engage in. You guys know better than to not do your research.

What brighter and more widely cited economists like Tyler, Alex and Tim need to focus on is not why polygamy might make economic sense, but why the holders of a belief that for good or bad is currently illegal, are also broadly engaged in a wide variety of actions whose illegality is not open to discussion!

The FLDS sect - which practices polygamy - has a strong presence in 3 states and a Canadian province, and membership running into the mid 5 figures. It has engaged in bank fraud, mortgage fraud, welfare fraud, misallocation of tax dollars, blatant theft, and a host of other activities. It's leader is on the FBI's most wanted list, and has been on the run for over a year. It maintained a police department and local judicial system in which violaters of the law were allowed to keep jobs - just this morning a polygamist judge who had been on the bench for over 20 years was removed from office. Sect members also systematically looted a school district of both physical and more intangible wealth. All of this is summarized in my subject category - and I don't include everything I see or hear about in the local news. Please note that my argument carries considerable weight without the need to be extended to the murkier but widely known mistreatment of women and children within this sect.

N.B. The FLDS sect is an offshoot of the LDS church, but these groups consider each other apostate. It is relatively common for members of the latter to disparage the former. While I live among an LDS majority, I am not LDS, and I hope that my position is not viewed as a knee-jerk response based on faith.

Domestic Terrorism

Connect the dots - why was there ricin inside a roll of quarters in a dorm at the University of Texas?

P.S. Don't forget, they never did figure out who was mailing anthrax a few years ago.

Karma

At 4 PM yesterday we became dogless for the first time in 12 years (see the previous post).

By dinner, sadness had turned into playful reminiscence, and plans to get two puppies in no less than a few months, and perhaps quite a bit longer. As a token of relief, I offered around 7 PM to go do some grocery shopping with the vXgirl.

There are 25K people in my town, and going to Wal-Mart always includes intersections with acquaintances. After extricating myself from the first one in the foyer, I turned towards the pharmacy.

There was Shawn, one of my better acquaintances on campus from outside my college and building. His first words were not "Hi Dave", but "Want a puppy?"

I was flabbergasted.

He went on. Free puppies. First choice. Four days old and we could have one in about 2 months. Springer spaniel border collie mixes. Shawn teaches things on marriage, family relations, parenthood, socialization, and so on - so I suspect they come from a good home. He also goes to the same vet that we do, who confirms a good household.

I also grew up with springer spaniel border collie mix.

I pushed Shawn off to call the vXspouse. She believes in signs. She was flabbergasted.

When I came home she had me call him. The line was busy. She called back, introduced herself, and asked if we could have two puppies.

Now what do you name two puppies you acquire this way? Karma and Dharma? Karma and Chameleon? Calvin and Knox? Providence and serendipity? Fate and destiny? We're leaning towards peanut butter and jelly, but we'll have to wait and see if the names fit the personality.