voluntaryXchange

Venial Sins of the Environmentalati

“Green Guilt” is a sweet, and engaging piece from The New York Times about serious environmentalists and the personal weaknesses that bug them the most.

Using disposable diapers ranks high on their lists. Others include SUV’s and powerboats, glue, insufficiently dirty water down the drain, and plywood.

I have a lot of empathy for these folks … we all have our guilty pleasures.

But the inability to recognize that their negative externalities can’t be that big does bug me.

Take disposable diapers – maybe you’re going through $3 a day of these. No, they’re not the best thing for the environment, but do you really think the costs that the manufacturers avoided are large compared to the ones they passed on to you? If you don’t … how did you get so frigging blessed? The whole role of many people involved in the production process is to make sure they they do pass those costs along.

And then there are the costs we add to those diapers. Again … what exactly is your baby putting out that is so costly compared to the amazingly high-tech diaper that you’re using? What are you feeding the munchkin? Gold?

Alright … I’m done. Back to the empathy. I loved this story, and I do feel for these people. My gosh … I compost dog poop because I don’t want it going to my landfill … so I get it. Everyone’s got their secrets, and some are dirtier and smellier than others. And other are … pathetic sometimes.

Technorati Tags: environmentalati,diapers,sins,guilt,green

Obama’s Perpetual Motion Machine

I liked James Taranto's metaphor:

ObamaCare, for example, was described as a fiscal perpetual-motion machine: By vastly expanding government control over medicine, it would reduce costs and provide care to everyone.

If you believed that, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like you to buy (well … as a matter of fact … politicians in the state of New York have bought into the perpetual motion machine many times … so they’re probably entertaining offers on the bridge).

Technorati Tags: obamacare,perpetual,motion,machine

Unhedged Residential Portfolio Risk

I got some inside information on the macro-financial situation.

It seems that institutions that hold portfolios of financial assets based on residential real estate are in a fix.

Two years and counting into the crisis, these markets are still seized up but good.

This means that at least some of those institutions are sitting on portfolios that are riskier than they’d like, and they cannot find partners to trade away that risk to.

This will all just go away if markets continue to moderate. But if markets worsen, there will be losers because of bad luck rather than an inability to recognize the source of the problem.

This is sort of like a game of musical chairs in which the music has stopped, but no one has grabbed the empty seats yet.

Technorati Tags: residential,mortgage,market,seized,up

Precisely

President Obama:

The president told Democrats that making change happen is hard and "if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place."

This is something that we didn’t worry enough about in 2008 (well … I did … a little … but, who cares about me, right).

I had good reasons for thinking that Obama would be a better President than McCain, and I stand by them.

But, I do think that the fatal hubris of the Obama administration is believing that the groundswell that got him elected was composed of serious supporters.

Instead, the fickleness of his support makes it look increasingly like Obama would have won another 271-267 election under normal circumstances, and that there was not any deep meaning to the extra 100 electoral votes that he got.

Technorati Tags: obama,election,fickle

R.I.P. George Blanda

George Blanda has died at 83.

I’m old enough to remember Blanda playing quarterback for more than a few plays (in 1972).

At the time I thought he was impossibly old to be playing.

I’m just about the same age now that he was then.

Technorati Tags: george,blanda

Tim Worstall Dives Right In

Tim Worstall posted a rejoinder about something that I’d posted. It was about this graph, showing that the contribution to future anthropogenic warming is mostly from infrastructure that has yet to be built.

Tim jumps right into my second thought: adjust policy so we build better stuff, and the problem takes care of itself.

For me, the jury is still out.

We spend an awful lot of our energies beating up on existing technologies, and because we argue that they will keep out the better ones.

There is some point to that: it’s really the Parente and Prescott argument about why total factor productivity is low in many less-developed countries – entrenched monopolies that don’t want change.

Tim’s pretty good at spotting our biases that lead us that way (here and here).

What I worry about is that Tim’s suggestion to get the policies right now, has already been hijacked by the people who want the policies of government planned perpetual poverty to be applied to industries who’s dynamics haven’t been stunted yet.

Technorati Tags: infrastructure,anthropogenic,global,warming

I Love Dried Figs … But Now … I’m Not So Sure

Via Marginal Revolution via Andrew Sullivan comes Edible Symbiosis on figs.

I can’t just see the ad copy now:

Figs!

When you really need a digested wasp carcass!

Technorati Tags: fig,symbiosis,wasp

Ethnicity Maps

Eric Fischer is out with more cool maps on Flickr. Here they are city maps where every dot represents 25 people: pink for white, blue for black, orange for Hispanic, and green for Asian.

I’m not sure about the methodology though … to me it looks like it counts 25 people, and then assigns a color based on the majority. That will tend to make it look less mixed than putting a dot every time you total up 25 people of a particular race.

Here’s three cities I’ve lived in:

• New Orleans – in the pink area just to the left of the empty rectangle of City Park
• Salt Lake City – at the far edge of the Hispanic neighborhoods on the northwest side
• Buffalo – in the lilywhite suburbs extending out toward “2 O’Clock”.

Technorati Tags: city,race,map,eric,fischer

Nobel Predictions from Thomson Reuters

I got an e-mail blast from Thomson Reuters offering their Nobel Prize predictions for 2010.

I’m not impressed.

Their 3 top possibilities in economics are:

• Alberto Alesina
• Nobuhiro Kiyotaki and John H. Moore
• Kevin M. Murphy

I’m not sure if this is a ranking or not.

Just an opinion here, since I don’t know any of these guys personally. I don’t think Alesina’s work will ever win a Nobel Prize – I think a lot of people think it’s worthwhile but kind of obvious. Kiyotaki and Moore is very trendy right now, but I’m not sure their work is going to have legs as the crises recede into memory. I think Murphy will get one eventually, but not yet.

I think their list of past predictions is far more interesting (Thomson Reuters seems to have an incentive to put up new names each year). All of these are still eligible:

• Robert J. Barro
• Eugene F. Fama and Kenneth R. French
• Paul Michael Romer
• Richard H. Thaler
• Jagdish N. Bhagwati and Avinash K. Dixit
• Dale W. Jorgenson
• Oliver D. Hart and Bengt R. Holmstrom
• Elhanan Helpman and Gene M. Grossman
• Jean Tirole
• Robert B. Wilson and Paul R. Milgrom
• Lars P. Hansen, Thomas J. Sargent, and Christopher A. Sims
• Martin S. Feldstein
• Armen A. Alchian and Harold Demsetz
• Ernst Fehr and Matthew J. Rabin
• William D. Nordhaus and Martin L. Weitzman
• John B. Taylor, Jordi Gali and Mark L. Gertler

Barro has vocally opposed Democratic programs. This has not always served him well, but it certainly makes him look like a good pick for this year.

Time is running out for 96-year old Alchian – with Demsetz this would be a good pair. Perhaps he’ll outlive those who vote against him because he worked for Rand.

Fama is always good – I’m just not sure if they’ll let French steal some of his thunder.

Romer is always good – but I think he may still be too young.

I have been crowing about Bhagwati since the late 90’s. Perhaps this is his year. I do not think he will get it with Dixit, Helpman or Grossman (although all 4 as a group might be possible).

Jorgenson would be a good solo pick – his stuff is used very widely and there hasn’t been a prize that overlaps with it.

Hansen, Sargent and Sims have contributed hugely to macroeconomics and finance. They are a lock, but perhaps not this year.

Nordhaus is an interesting possibility. He’s staked out a field, and done some interesting stuff. Is it interesting enough, or just trendy? I’ve been warming up to him quite a lot over the last 5 years.

I don’t think I know enough about Hart, Holmstrom, Tirole, Wilson, Milgrom or Fehr to offer a reasonable opinion – so I’ll abstain.

Feldstein and Weitzman will not get prizes. Rabin is too young. I like Taylor, Gali and Gertler, but I don’t think their influence has been broad enough outside of their fields of specialization to merit a prize. Thaler might get a prize, but I think the criticism I made of Alesina applies to him as well.

My prediction remains Bhagwati – nothing has changed over the last 10 years … he’s still huge and unrecognized with a Nobel. Even a broken clock is right some of the time.

Technorati Tags: 2010,nobel,prize,predictions

Faith As a Solution to Free-Riding

Arnold Kling:

It seems to me that over the past two hundred years or so, the role of religion has been taken over by the nation-state. That is, four hundred years ago, if you wondered whether you and a stranger would share the same norms, you would want to know the stranger's religion. One hundred years ago, it would have been more important to know the stranger's nationality.

I wonder if nationality is in the process of giving way to something else. Social networks?

He quotes from Mike Gibson discussing Elinor Ostrom’s work:

The same ingredients that come easily in small human groups are more difficult to achieve in larger groups. Large cooperative groups are only possible thanks to the cultural evolution of mechanisms that interface with our genetically evolved psychology of guarded egalitarianism. When religions are viewed from this perspective, they can be seen as highly adapted to promote cooperation by providing the ingredients that would otherwise be lacking at a large scale. Belief in an all-seeing moralistic god tends to be restricted to large-scale societies, for example, suggesting that it is functioning as a monitoring device...

My gosh … this explains a lot about what students don’t like about group projects. Many professors are not very good at policing free-riding, and yet students think this is a major problem with doing group projects. In some ways, they expect professors to be both omnipotent and vengeful.

Technorati Tags: faith,religion,nationalism,group,project