No Extra Credit for You!

An interesting exercise.  I may try this in the fall for my large "Intro to PE" class, especially since there is no risk of actually having to give out any extra credit given how people will react.

The story.

The bottom line:  The "question"... Click for an even more self-interested answer.

The obvious response is that in classes that are small, and communicate, they have some chance of solving this.  But in large classes, with anonymous responses and secret scoring....not much risk to the prof., I'd say...

Walking on Air

Click here. Scroll up for the conversation, and the photographic evidence.

The short version: Brad Anderson is the Greatest Living American Hero. I posted a nonsense cocktail recipe as a joke on Twitter, and he actually followed the instructions to the letter. He drank the whole thing and livetweeted the photo evidence.

The recipe (and why it's relevant for this blog) for the "Instant Regret":

In a collins glass, mix equal parts:
sweet vermouth
heavy whipping cream
ketchup
Midori
silver tequila

 garnish with hash browns

The 140 character limit cut off the remainder of the instructions, which were to serve on a bed of chilled mayonnaise and chase with olive-soaked havarti.

And here's why Mr. Anderson is the Greatest Living American Hero: the "beverage" is called the Instant Regret, and he quaffed it regardless. Right there on the label, it's clearly not euvoluntary. Did he care? No. He knew the hazards and he defied them anyway, thumbing his nose at an overcautious nanny culture. His suffering became for one bright, brief, shining moment the immense pleasure of anyone there to witness his heroics.

The lessons are twofold. First, it is better to regret something you have done than to regret something you haven't done. And second, pernicious regret arises under conditions of information asymmetry, not from information incompleteness. Brad knew what he was doing. And so I doff my hat. Well done, sir. Well done.

Also, I invite you all to think of the general equilibrium of ubiquitous warning labels. There's really no good way using text alone to signal the severity of risk or the nature of the conditional probability involved (not in a way that makes much sense to a semi-numerate public anyway).

Warning labels suffer a pooling equilibrium problem: t/f? Explain.

Res Ipsa Loquitur: The Virgin Auctions, Round Deux

A website (here) allows folks to place a bid on obtaining the virginity of a 27 year old medical student going by the pseudonym "Elizabeth Raine."

According to the site, the max bid as of press datetime is US$550k. I wonder if folks are running sealed-bid scripts against this value like you can do on Ebay. Hm. Whoever wrote the terms and conditions seems to be familiar with elementary auction theory (there's a $100 buy-in).

Anyway, is this euvoluntary? According to the site, she doesn't really need the money. She's a well-to-do white American girl who's lived abroad, and she's studying medicine. She's got a pretty good BATNA. I see no evidence of exploitation, at least in the direction you'd expect. If anything, she might be the one doing the exploiting.

How about unconscionablity? This isn't the first time someone's tried a trick like this. Repetition is what morphs the bizarre into the mundane. How many more high denomination virgin auctions need to happen before the price drops sharply and it's just a dreary routine?

If this story is legit (and I have some reservations), I'm curious if it's a leading indicator of... something. I'm not sure what. I agree with Maggie McNeill that the way prostitutes are treated in the US is egregious, but most of the worst is focused on the discount end of the market. Do high-cash-value transactions help alter public moral intuitions towards the sex workers who would most directly benefit from decriminalization?

No Animals Were Harmed in the Writing of this Post

I'd have to ask someone who lives in NC if this is a real story or not, but if it is, what do our EE conditions tell us about the transaction?

Conjugation with non-human animals is illegal, immoral, and gross. Publicizing the footage even more so, since it disseminates the grotesquery. But what about the marginal offense of selling the footage? Are those proceeds worse than committing the act, filming it, and publishing it?

Don't think too deeply on this though. I don't want to be responsible for conjuring too many unfortunate images.

An Apology to my Readers

I've been posting here at EE since January of last year, and in that time, I've been writing under the warrant that fully euvoluntary exchange is universally acceptable. That indeed, if all six conditions are met and the exchange itself isn't morally or aesthetically objectionable, then not only would the tails of the voting distribution shelve any pretense at meddling, but even the busybodies themselves would pass their eye over the exchange in search of more worthy prey.

I was under the impression that the Euvoluntary Exchange thesis had something important to say about the nature of third party interference in mutually beneficial voluntary exchanges. I thought that Munger had made some very compelling arguments that fit well with not only the conflict resolution literature but with my own reflections gathered from close to four decades of trundling my corpulence upon this weary earth. I truly believed that a careful analyst, perhaps backed by frameworks forwarded by leading philosophers and economists could comment meaningfully upon modern instances of state-sponsored coercion.

I was wrong, and for that, I sincerely apologize.

From CBS, through Reason, and handled by the Dub-MOE, we now have irrefutable evidence that the EE conditions are insufficient to explain state intervention into the act of eating a meal in your own home.

Take your time. Read the links, especially the CBS link with the original story.

Now pause for a moment and ask yourself what the difference is between a cholera epidemic and a salmonella outbreak. Ask yourself if there is a meaningful difference between harm and external harm. I used to think there was. I used to think that an airborne contagion that could infect others without their knowledge and consent was substantively different in kind if not merely in degree than a food-borne illness whose risk was already captured in market prices. The metastasis of public health organizations suggests to me that my distinctions were the benighted ravings of an academic crackpot. Public health officials (in this story, retired public health officials) have now conflated private, one-off (minor) health risks with effectively unavoidable airborne pathogenic diseases. I had it all wrong.

I mean, the alternative explanation is that the snout of the state has begun to push past the euvoluntary fold, and that? That's just crazy.