voluntaryXchange

Not What You Want to See In the Morning

I cannot explain this.

I turned off the shower this morning and saw this in the door.

Certain that there was no real dinosaur outside, I stepped out, grabbed my phone, and took the picture.

I spent some time looking at the situation, and I still can’t figure out where this shadow is coming from (it’s not in the condensation on the door, and it’s not a decal of some sort).

In Memorium

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

**********************

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.

When I Was A Young Prof

The first time I was invited out to dinner with a seminar guest was a few weeks into my first job at The University of Alabama (I was an ABD with a visiting position).

The guest was Henry Butler. And he told what to me was an astounding thing: most federal judges had little education in economics, but he was running a program to bring them up to speed.

Thirty years later, Butler is a law school dean, and there’s evidence that the program helped.

Economics likely changed how judges perceived the consequences of their decisions. If you teach judges that markets work, they deregulate government. If you teach judges that deterrence works, they become harsher to criminal defendants.

Taken from "Ideas Have Consequences: The Impact of Law and Economics on American Justice" by Elliott Ash, Daniel L. Chen, Suresh Naidu.

Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.

Tsundoku (There’s a Word for That)

Tsundoku, “a Japanese word for a stack of books that you have purchased but not yet read”.

Taleb claims that although people tend to place a higher value on the things they know than on the things they don’t know, it is the things we don’t know, and therefore can’t see coming, that tend to shape our world most dramatically.

A person’s library is often a symbolic representation of his or her mind. …

Taleb argues that a personal library “should contain as much of what you do not know …  Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.”

That’s from The Black Swan. The author adds to that:

People like Taleb, Stillman and whoever coined the word tsundoku seem to recognize only two categories of book: the read and the unread. But every book lover knows there is a third category that falls somewhere between the other two: the partially read book.

Keep those books:

The sight of a book you’ve read can remind you of the many things you’ve already learned. The sight of a book you haven’t read can remind you that there are many things you’ve yet to learn. And the sight of a partially read book can remind you that reading is an activity that you hope never to come to the end of.

Perhaps the Japanese have a word for that.

Do note that I don’t object to digitizing some books, particularly those I’ve read but am not certain to reference at a later date.

And, in truth, my antilibrary has gotten bigger with the advent of ebooks. I am not sure that’s a good thing; you know, letting intent have more relevance than reading.

Grousing

For the first time in my life, my university built a new building and gave me an office in it. I like that part.

I do not like the penny-wise-pound-foolish decision to not provide enough shelves.

Here’s Bill Nordhaus in his office:

Last I checked, professors used books. And the best place to store them is on shelves.

In my new office, I have four. Shelves. Not bookcases. Shelves.

BTW: This does not seem to be a university wide problem. The English faculty, who got refurbished offices instead of new ones, have 21 shelves. And, our old bookcases (I had 3 of them) have been repurposed for the use of the Geosciences faculty.

Charles Aznavour, R.I.P.

Charles Aznavour has passed away.

I can’t believe I’m writing this … but … I discovered a few years ago that I liked some of this stuff.

I have the vaguest memories of that name being around on TV when I was a kid (he was probably on The Mike Douglas Show or some such). And I did know he was French. But that was the limit of it until about ten years ago.

And then I saw his stuff playing on one of those blogs where people used to broadcast stuff they liked (before it all became more or less free on YouTube). And I liked some of it:

Yes. It’s an acquired taste.

In 2006, he was quoted:

There are some people who grow old and others who just add years. I have added years, but I am not yet old.

I like that sentiment.

R.I.P. Kitty

Somewhere out there is a woman in her late 20’s who moved away from Cedar City (I believe to San Diego) just before the 9/11 attacks. I knew where that family lived down the street, but I didn’t know the girl. Apparently her parents didn’t let her take her cat.

That house cat was gifted to another girl who lived across the street from us. I am not sure what the circumstances were in that house, but about 8 months later that cat adopted the then three year-old vXboy. He was a never a cat person, and fairly allergic, but that cat … knew what he wanted.

The vXboy was a late talker, so naming the visitor Kitty was a big deal. Kitty visited more and more often, then started begging for food, and staying over in the garage. Within about 4 months we had to tell the family across the street that if their cat was going to live in our garage we were going to take it to the vet for shots, and neutering, and make sure it was fed consistently. We weren’t cat people, and all of us were allergic, but he was welcome to live in our garage if he caught a mouse once in a while.

We rarely saw Kitty with a mouse, but we haven’t had one in about 12 years. Never found a scorpion around the garage either. Unfortunately, we had birds galore back then, and again for the last few years, but they avoided our yard for over a decade.

Kitty also brought a friend. Within weeks I was met at the door coming home and told the vXboy had something to tell me. All he could get out was “Shhh Kitty” and some pointing. But there in the bushes was another cat. This one was much shyer, and more beat up. We earned his trust too. Shhh Kitty evolved into Secret Kitty and eventually into Bumpy. Here they are in insulated boxes I built for them to winter in:

Bumpy died a couple of years ago of extreme old age. Given that he was older, and the two of them got along so well, we eventually decided they were either half-brothers or father and son.

While Kitty had apparently lived indoors quite a bit, he turned into the king of a very large outdoor domain. I confirmed sightings of him as far as 20 houses away, so I figure his range was 100-200 acres.

He fought some awfully big tough-looking cats and came away minimially scratched up. And the two of them were absolutely fearless of single dogs. We have quite a lot of wildlife in our neighborhood too, and Kitty never had a problem with those either.

Dogs really were a sight to behold. When we adopted a fostered rescue we were told he had problems with cats. We told the agency that our cats would train him. And they did, and they made it look easy: lots of eye contact, and fearless, slow and deliberate walks, right through that dog’s reaction zone. Honestly, I think dogs wondered how the cats got as high in the pack as the humans.

Kitty did have a problem with the chief of police in 2012. A cat lady about a block away was harboring a dozen or so, and they’d taken to pooping on the chief’s lawn. Baited traps were laid. How long would you expect an outdoor cat to live? By this time Kitty was at least eleven, and we’d begun to coach the vXkids that some day he would probably just go off by himself to die. And then he disappeared, so we assumed the worst. We’d given up on him when after about 10 days the vXgirl mentioned that maybe we ought to check the animal shelter for him. So I went, looked through all the cages, and in the second to last one there he was. I got the familiar “Mreow”. I paid the small fine and made a larger than expected upkeep donation. Even though the chief lived about 10 houses and 2 blocks away, Kitty was gone within a couple of days. I went back to the pound, and paid the much bigger fine that came with the citation, and made another donation. Litter boxes and canned food were in order to keep him near home. I wonder how many other times he got caught and let go? The animal control officer made clear that technically these were all violations, but was sympathetic when I noted that they were putting bait out for a smart cat who still ruled the neighborhood.

Kitty declined over the last several years. He still had most of his teeth. But he lost a lot of his hearing and sight a few year’s back. And he was having a lot of trouble walking: nothing too serious, but you knew he had to have arthritis and probably disc problems. I noticed this spring that he no longer jumped to the top of our low block walls, but instead did this ridiculous rock-climber thing to pull himself up.

We were prepared for a long time to put him to sleep. But he was always around, always forward, always friendly, purring, and he never missed a meal. But it had gotten so that we checked him quite often to make sure he had not expired.

On his last day he challenged our leashed dogs on a walk. Nothing serious, just walking right out to them and making clear that they’d have to go threw him or go around. And he asked for more dry food rather obnoxiously in the late afternoon.

He blundered into the tires of a slow-moving car in the early evening. It was horrible, but very quick.

We bundled him into his favorite summer sleeping spot: an ancient mesh cat house in the form of a rocking sailboat. That went into a box, and we took him to our landfill (the limey soil of southern Utah is not amenable to deep enough home burial). I suspected that any public dropoff spots would be closed by the time we got there, and they were. So the vXgirl and I hopped the fence, passed the box over, and walked it down to a public dumpster. We have a story to tell for a long time.

R.I.P Kitty, (earlier than) 8/2001 – 7/16/2018.

The Cargo Cult Approach to Social Policy

Cold Spring Shops pointed me to Interfluidity, where this point was made:

“Marriage promotion” as a means of address social problems at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder is a bad idea. It’s not a neutral idea, or a nice idea that probably won’t work. It’s inexcusably obtuse and may be outright destructive. It is quite literally a cargo cult.

A cargo cult is a particularly colorful way of mistaking cause for effect. Airplanes do not actually come to remote Pacific Islands because of rituals performed by soldiers at airports. But absent other information, to someone with no knowledge of the larger world, it might well look that way. So when the soldiers leave and the airplanes full of valuable stuff no longer come, it’s forgivable in its way that some islanders populated the abandoned tarmacs with wooden facsimile airplanes and tried to reenact the odd dances that used to precede the arrival of wonderful machines. It is forgivable, but it didn’t work. The actual causes of cargo service to remote Pacific Islands lay in hustle of industries vast oceans away and in the logistics of a bloody war, all of which were invisible to local spectators. Soldiers’ dances on the tarmac were an effect of the same causes, not an independent source of action. That is not to say those dances were irrelevant to the great bounty from the skies. An organized airport is part of the mechanism through which the deeper causes of cargo service have their effect, so something like those dances would always be correlated with cargo service. But even a perfectly equipped and organized airport will not cause airplanes sua sponte to deliver valuable goods to islanders. A mock facsimile even less so.

The case for marriage promotion begins with some perfectly real correlations. Across a variety of measures — household income, self-reported life satisfaction, childrearing outcomes — married couples seem to do better than pairs of singles (and much better than single parents), particularly in populations towards the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder. So it is natural to imagine that, if somehow poor people could be persuaded to marry more, they too would enjoy those improvements in household income, life satisfaction, and childrearing. Let them eat wedding cake!

But neither wedding cake nor the marriages they celebrate cause observed “marriage premia” any more than dances on tarmacs caused airplanes to land on Melanesian islands. In fact, for the most part, the evidence we have suggests that marriage is an effect of other things that facilitate good social outcomes rather than a cause on its own. In particular, for poor women, the availability of suitable mates is a binding constraint on marriage behavior. People in actually observed marriages do well because they are the lucky ones to find scarce good mates, not because marriage would be a good thing for everyone else too.

Cold Spring Shops expands on this a great deal, with other quotes.

Whatever. What got me on this particular day was the realization that a lot of government policy appears to be no more than a cargo cult.

For example, consider the promotion of home ownership. Yes, homeowners tend to do better. But it isn’t the totem of the home that makes them so, but the features of their lives that allow them to obtain, keep, and maintain homes.

But things could get silly.

People who have pets, dogs especially, tend to do better. But can you imagine a bureaucrat observing this and coming up with a policy to encourage dog ownership?

We’re the current long-term masters (4 years plus) of a rescued dog. He was clearly someone’s pet. But he runs. And he has some interesting behaviors … like knowing what prescription pill containers are … that make us question his earlier life. Is he smart enough to have run away from a bad situation?

For that matter, we have a cat that did. He’s happily lived as an outdoor cat in our garage for 16 (!!!) years now. But he fled an indoor cat life with a dysfunctional family that used to live across the street. Hmmm.

So back to government policy. We give people money because richer people seem to do pretty well with it. We subsidize the healthcare of the poor because the rich seem to be pretty healthy and well-cared for.

I think I’m going to have to incorporate that cargo cult metaphor into a lot of future discussions in macroeconomics classes.

Quick and Cool Online Test for (Degrees of) Color Blindness

I got a zero on this test for color blindness (a zero means no color blindness at all).

The test is quick and easy, although I found it worked better on Chrome than Firefox.

Interesting. Back 15-20 years ago, color blindness was something people cared about on the web. The old school scheme here was designed with that in mind (the old WordPerfect white on blue was too). Apparently that’s not a disability we’re supposed to be sensitive to any more.

Via bookofjoe.

R.I.P. Danny Kirwan

Danny Kirwan passed away this week. No one is quite sure, but he’d been homeless for most of the last 40 years. He needs a lot of peace.

I was a Fleetwood Mac teenager in the late 1970’s. I had the two big albums, but the radio exposed me to older stuff: “Bermuda Triangle”,“Hypnotized”, and then “Oh, Well”.

Kirwan played the well-known electric lead on Part 1 of “Oh Well”, while Peter Green played the acoustic lead on the second part.

A year or two after that a used record store opened nearby, and I found Then Play On in the bins there. I still regard that as one of the best single rock albums ever made. Kirwan played on that and three later studio albums, as well as some non-album singles.

Fleetwood Mac had a completely different sound back then, and arguably after Then Play On, a different sound on each track as the band devolved into disgruntled soloists with a solid rhythm section. Honestly, as a fan, none of the Kirwan pieces speak to me.

After leaving the band, he had a very modest solo career. I’m probably the only person left who still listens to the pop-reggae “Mary Jane” from time to time. No doubt it will show up in some Guardians of the Galaxy sequel or some such, and undergo a revival. For me, it was the soundtrack for typing my first serious class paper in economics in March 1982.