voluntaryXchange

Marking Time

It was a year ago, just about right now, that my son and I threw all his perishables into a box, grabbed a few things, and abandoned his college apartment.†

He doesn’t have a car, so he needed a ride. I-15 was congested going north: lots of Alberta plates, cutting their snowbird season short. Coming south, the road was deserted.

Less than 10 weeks before that, I’d first heard of the unusual cases of pneumonia in China.

Less than 8 weeks before that, I’d first told my upper level macroeconomics course that they needed to start paying attention to what was going on in China. Putting together that first Monday lecture took non-stop work from the time class had ended on Friday. I started it by noting the pandemic “might be economic if it gets bad enough”.

Less than 6 weeks before that, we’d flown him down here for a fancy birthday dinner.

Less than 4 weeks before, we’d told him to start buying extra pantry stuff on each trip to the grocery.

Less than 2 weeks before, the University of Washington was the first one to close down for the remainder of the Spring semester.

The week before I picked him up had been spring break at his school. He’d stayed (like he usually does). As his break progressed, he shifted from I’m not coming back, to maybe next week, till after this thing I have to do early next week. By Thursday he was saying Sunday might work. Early Friday afternoon, he said come within 24 hours. He’d been in his favorite professor’s office when the calls started, one-by-one cancelling his travelling engagements for the next several months.

It was our last week before spring break. I literally told that advanced class on Monday that it would take a “basketball player or a game show host” getting sick to convince people this was real. On Wednesday night, the former happened. Best and worst prediction I’ve ever made.

I knew the death rates. I ran the math. At that time, the odds were better than 50/50 that someone in my immediate family would die.

It’s a year later. That college student is still living with us. For him, remote learning is actually an improvement. Not one of us has gotten COVID-19. Another kid moved out, but she stays healthy and safe. Two of us have been vaccinated.

† I’m going by the 365 day calendar. It was a Saturday that I’d made that trip. He paid rent on that empty place. Two months later, we drove up there together and put all his stuff in a storage unit.

It’s That Time of Year

I was old enough, and we had the news on in my house enough, to be cognizant of the loss of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald.

In the fevered imaginings of an 11 year old, the complete disappearance of the ship (its wreckage was found only after a few days) was yet more evidence of Bermuda Triangle-like anomalies.

This infographic is timely:

Various authors have used pretty much all of these to explain the disaster.

Some Cognitive Dissonance

Some people want:

• Relaxed mail-in voting rules or ID rules
• The U.S. to be governed more like other OECD countries.

Here’s the dissonance:

… There are 36 member states in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Forty-seven percent ban mail-in voting unless the citizen is living abroad, and 30 percent require a photo ID to obtain a mail-in ballot. Fourteen percent of the countries ban mail-in voting even for those living abroad. [emphasis added]

The percentages are higher if we restrict the comparison set from the OECD to the European Union.

My experience with mail-in voting is that the damn things just show up in the snail mail. Yet in other countries you have to present your ID to even get one. Funny that.

If concern about voter fraud with mail-in ballots is delusional, it is a delusion that is shared by most of the world.

You can read the whole thing in that bastion of conservatism and Trumpers, Newsweek.

But wait … you can’t actually have cognitive dissonance until you’ve at least heard both sides of the argument.

How to Build a Pyramid

How did the Egyptians build the big pyramids? Want facts? Read “How to Build a Pyramid” at the Analog Antiquarian. Lots of good details in there.

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A lot of people attach great significance to they pyramids. A little mechanics would go a long way towards disspelling this. Once you learn about the angle of repose. After that, the mystery and romance is gone, and you realize they are really big piles of rocks. What would truly be something is if the Egyptians had built something that exceeded the angle of repose for that material. Of course, you probably live in a structure that does that, so it doesn’t seem that impressive. It is.

Midway

There’s a new movie coming out about the Battle of Midway. I have not seen it yet.

Before it comes out, I’ll note that the 1976 version actually gets the history of the battle down pretty well. Plus there’s a lot of now deceased stars you’ll recognize, and plenty of older contemporary ones that you get to see when young.

I always wonder how a new one will turn out. Personally, I do not give the director of this one, Roland Emmerich, a lot of credit for that.

Reelgood tells me that the 1976 version is not streaming anywhere, but you can rent it from many of the big sites (just not Netflix).

George Bush Had It Right

Matt Welch, reflecting on the history we lived through almost 30 years ago:

Bush, like other world leaders of the time, deserves credit not for making all that happen, but mostly for allowing it to happen, in the form of not overly getting in the way. The powerful don't have a particularly good track record when faced suddenly with their own leaking relevance …

Former president Barack Obama had it about right earlier this week, at a Rice University event with former secretary of state James Baker: "When it comes to foreign policy, the work that President George H.W. Bush did with Jim at his side was as important and as deft and as effective a set of foreign policy initiatives as we saw in recent years, and deserve enormous credit for navigating the end of the Cold War in a way that could have gone sideways, all kinds of ways."

Things of course did go sideways—they always do at least a little …

… Let one the lessons of his passing be that sometimes American presidents don't have to know it all, and don't have to control it all, either.

I’ll say it again: Bush is the most underrated President of my lifetime.

I hope Ross Perot is spinning in his grave.

Yes, I’m aware he’s still alive.

Hat tip to Cold Spring Shops.

Pershing On the Armistice

I had never heard this before:

Only one military leader dissented from the armistice agreement: Gen. Pershing. Although in the end he bowed to his commander in chief and his fellow Allied generals, he never gave up his belief that total military victory was the key to lasting peace. “We never really let the Germans know who won the war,” he said in 1923. “They are being told that their army was stabbed in the back, betrayed, that their army had not been defeated. The Germans never believed they were beaten. It will have to be done all over again.” [emphasis added]

From “The Danger of Rushing Into Peace,” by Arthur Herman, which appeared in the November 12 issue of the Wall Street Journal.

Having lived through two wars in Iraq, it seems to me that someone should have brought up this quote in 1991.

In Memorium

One hundred years since “the war to end all wars” ended.

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My paternal grandfather served in combat in France, and got a purple heart.

He ran away from a farm in Iowa when he was 20 and enlisted in the army.

They sent him to Texas, and then Mexico, to chase Pancho Villa.

When the U.S. entered World War I, he was 22, with experience, and was promoted and became an NCO.

He had two buddies on either side of him sometime in 1918: Gilbert and Russell. Last names no longer remembered. When the gas hit (family lore says it was phosgene, since he smelled hay), my grandfather got his mask on. Russell and Gilbert did not.

My grandfather has some breathing difficulty for the rest of his life. He named his second son (my uncle) Russell Gilbert.

They all passed away before I was born.

As late as 2009 there was an album of photos showing some of this. Believe my mother threw it away; my grandfather was not a good man.

Why Is Macro So Hard: Tribalism and Identity

Macroeconomics is hard because we define some things tribally first, then do the economics second … and wonder why it doesn’t make sense.

I was discussing this just this morning in response to a student’s question about whether or not (international) trade agreements are beneficial or not.

That’s a really hard thing to assess because most people presuppose that trade can’t take place without governments. But that has it backwards. Trade is between pairs of people and firms. Then the government decides that some of those trades are different from others.

Don’t believe me? Think about these questions.

• If an American trades with an American, is it (international) trade?
• If an American trades with a Mexican, is it (international) trade?
• If an American trades with an American who happens to be in Mexico, is it (international) trade?
• If an American trades with an American and they both happens to be in Mexico, is it (international) trade?
• If an American trades with a Mexican who happens to be in America, is it (international) trade?
• If an American trades with a Mexican who happens to be in America illegally, is it (international) trade?

If you can answer all those questions correctly, and do it rapid fire, you may have a chance of understanding the arbitrariness of international trade policy. But, if like most people, you can’t … you’ll probably fall for a lot of tribalistic mumbo-jumbo about trade.

The mere fact that I had to add the word “illegally” because that distinction makes a difference should give you pause. It gets worse. Consider these:

• If an American trades with a Mexican who happens to be in Mexico, is it (international) trade?
• If an American trades with a Mexican who happens to be in America legally, is it (international) trade?
• If an American trades with a Mexican who happens to be in America legally but can’t find their visa, is it (international) trade?
• If an American trades with a Mexican who happens to be in Mexico (which is obviously legal, but whether or not they could find their visa would be unimportant), is it (international) trade?

All of these distinctions emphasize the tribalism of international trade policy.

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On PRI’s “The World” this afternoon, I heard two clergyman discussing justice in Northern Ireland.

"It's Jonathan Sachs who says peace causes a crisis of identity," Farren said, quoting the prominent British rabbi.

"When we're fighting, we know who we're not. We might [not] know who we are, but we certainly know who we're not. And we're not the other crowd."

"We create differences to shore up our insecurity," he added. "The tribal way we're living in our world, it's everywhere.

I love that.

A lot of the problems in understanding economics is that the economics is actually way down our list. We don’t even know who we are, so we focus on what we’re not. And then later on, after organizing our world through the circular hole of that world view, we try and pound a square peg of economics into the hole.

(Somewhat) Lost to History

Given the inglorious end to apartheid, it isn’t surprising that parts of it are forgotten or surpressed.

Forty or so years back, the creation of predominantly black “homelands” was in the news.†

From the CIA’s achives, here’s a map of that plan.

Some of you may remember when Sun City was a destination resort, and there were controversies over entertainers that played there. The issue was that Sun City was in Bophutatswana (just about in the center of the map).

I get why apartheid was worse than comparable systems like Jim Crow, but I can’t say I was ever sure why these homelands were worse than, say, Indian reservations in the U.S.

FWIW: And what dimbulb thought the portmanteau “Bantustan” was a good name for these things?

† I’m not that comfortable calling them black. But native won’t work either, since there have been non-black emigrants living in South Africa for a few hundred years now.

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