Alternative Kidney Advertising

Spotted in Fresno.

In the absence of a properly-functioning market, people will go to extraordinary lengths to get what they want.

It Snowed in Ferguson: the Logic of Prohibition

Earlier this month, I argued the logic of prohibition. The gist of the economics is this: if a market exists, outlawing it rearranges the institutions supporting exchange, but does not necessarily eliminate trade.

Consider hydromorphone hydrocloride, aka dilaudid. Dilaudid is a powerful analgesic, stronger than morphine, and classified on schedule II in the US (Substances in this schedule have a high potential for abuse which may lead to severe psychological or physical dependence. [source]). Despite its potency and potential for abuse (just ask any med-surg RN), dilaudid seldom joins the pantheon of street drugs the way MDMA, peyote, LSD, and marijuana do. Or more importantly, the way its close cousins morphine and heroin do. And why is this the case? Price elasticity. Dilaudid is a semi-synthetic opioid—its manufacture is a delicate process requiring specialized equipment and knowledge. Morphine and heroin require no hydrogenation process, and are therefore (relatively) less capital-intensive. These differences are reflected in the relative prices and the attending quality control and legal institutions in each market. Consumers can still obtain the pleasant effects of their opioid of choice, the costs simply move margins between strike price and risk premium. The market itself is not destroyed by prohibition.

I've come to wonder lately if there isn't a similar market for racial animus. What would a world look like if the legal market for bigotry were thwarted? As with opioids, I expect there might still be some underlying demand and a creative entrepreneurial class to serve that demand. I expect that by forcibly denying bigots, no matter how loathsome their intentions, the freedom to refuse association that they may turn to less accountable institutions that serve similar purposes.

You may read this and say something like, "hey, this guy is claiming that the 1964 Civil Rights Act caused blue-on-black brutality in Missouri. What a jackass." Let me disagree with the first half of that statement. I am not claiming that an end to the oppression of minorities created hate in anyone's heart. I am claiming that given the existence of hate, the institutions meant to govern it matter a great deal. What we seem to have done is apply a liberal dose of wishful thinking to the dilemma of hate in America. You can legislate a market in bigotry away no more effectively than you can a market in opium. Product bans in alcohol put power in the hands of crooked mobsters. Product bans in narcotics put power in the hands of crooked cartels. Product bans in bigotry put power in the hands of crooked police. Bigotry is scandalous and obscene. If the constituency has an interest in reducing or eliminating its trade, an orderly wind-down in an open setting of voluntary exchange is far better than employing para-military state thugs to harass and murder with impunity and unaccountability.

As I mentioned to Sarah, good cops are good; good institutions are better.

Markets in Nothing: Is Virtue Inalienable?

"What kind of a woman do you take me for, sir?"
"We've already established that, now we're just haggling over the price."
- NOT Winston Churchill

Is virtue for sale? Should it be? Consider Aristotle's example of the man throwing down arms and fleeing the field of battle. If that's the end of the story, he's (presumably) guilty of cowardice: a lapse in the virtue of courage. But what if he were paid to throw down arms and flee the field of battle? I think almost everyone would agree that paid desertion is a far worse offense. It's no longer cowardice, it's betrayal. Judas Iscariot's woeful tale put him at the very nape of The Beast in Dante's Inferno because of his treachery. Thirty pieces of silver are the wages of the worst eternal torment.

The curious thing is that it's tough for even me to be objective about this. I'm trained to be very sensitive to act consequentialism (that is, it's the outcomes of human action that warrant analytical consideration), but I cannot for the life of me shake the moral intuition that the incentives behind an act are morally relevant.

Taking a bribe to look the other way is ignoble. Taking a bribe to look the other way to pay for your kid's cancer treatment is not quite so ignoble. Unfortunate? Yes. Risky? Sure. Ignoble? Maybe not.

Incentives matter, but so does context. Virtue is local. Arete is personal, eudaimonia sees to the end of the block, and if phronesis isn't kept on a leash, it'll poop in the neighbor's flower bed. Pretending otherwise saps and impurifies autonomy and community responsibility. If you're skeptical of national-scale politicians who promise you otherwise, rest assured that your skepticism is probably well-founded.

And if you must sell your virtue, make sure the terms of the trade are as euvoluntary as possible.

MIE: Fakebook Girlfriend Edition

via Vipul Naik, the headline says it all: "I will be your New Facebook Girlfriend for 2 days and will leave Sweet Notes for $5"

link

Euvoluntary? If not, who is exploiting whom?

Also, for half the price, I'll be your facebook boyfriend for 4 days and will leave Sarcastic Notes for $2.50.

FEEL THE STING OF MY MIGHTY COMPETITION

Private Crime Detection: Euvoluntary?

Generally speaking, economists will happily endorse a normative version of economic efficiency. That is to say that arrangements that provide exactly one dollar's worth of extra benefit for one dollar's extra cost, no less, no more, are hunky-dorky, a-okely-dokely. Of course, that's just generally speaking. A whole lot of the back material of principles texts (and a whole buncha lotta the blogging & op-eds) is devoted to deviations from strict economic efficiency.

Consider firefighters. Anyone with two brain cells to rub together will acknowledge the peril of paying fire brigades by the blaze. Arson is typically hard to detect, so in the probability-weighted calculus of firebuggery, the incentive to watch as the match makes a graceful arc to the floor is higher for a piecework fire department than for a salaried one, all else equal.



Of course, finding out exactly who set a fire is only typically tough, and in the case of arson, the incentive to investigate is disproportionately weak for the politically disenfranchised and disproportionately strong for the well-connected. Though the FBI won't out and out admit that this is the reason they strongly discourage researchers from using arson data in their crime statistics, even a novice Straussian can spot it clear as day. But some sorts of arson investigations do indeed pass the market test: insurance adjustment investigations.

Now, this doesn't mean that the insurance adjuster is some hem-singed Columbo. An adjuster won't spend more on an investigation than a payoff is worth. If the claim is worth $1M, it would be a spectacularly stupid business decision to blow $2M on an investigation. Even a casual observation of the profit margins of the (non-health) insurance industry suggests they're pretty efficient (they get clobbered by railroads, for example). So, not too much, not too little. Publicly-funded investigations? Two dickheads with pressure cookers suspended the Fourth Amendment on a beautiful spring day in Boston last year.

So how about expanding this idea to regular law enforcement? Much like for homeowners' insurance, crime insurance firms would have a pretty strong incentive to help policyholders prevent crime in the first place. And depending on the terms of the contract (something else they have a good incentive to get right), swift justice would be in their narrow self-interest too: lingering investigations cost firms treasure and reputation. Moreover, cases would get closed once the cost of pursuing the bad guy gets too high. The victim would get compensated, and that's that: maybe not justice per se, but at least some closure. If the alternative is the crook just gets away scot free (and we don't even know for sure how many crimes go unreported for reasons related to this), having this option available is better than nothing, right?

By now, if you're like most people, you're having trouble reading through your tears of mirth-rage. Private law enforcement would only benefit the wealthy, right? Because the existing system doesn't already do that, and socialize the costs to boot or anything, right? RIGHT? But the facts of the matter don't seem relevant to the moral intuitions. Law enforcement is a public good, isn't it? Even softcore libertarians admit that. Turning the keys to the coercive arm of society over to private industry turned out abysmally for prisons, so why should we expect better results for crime investigation? Besides, Lloyd's of London will insure whatever the hell you want. You don't see them writing a lot of contracts for muggings. And besides, there's a collective action problem when it comes to the broken windows theory (not to be confused with the broken window fallacy): no single firm has an incentive to police petty crime, thereby leading to a degenerative spiral that leads to yet more crime. Of course, to forecast that result, you've got to ignore a pretty large research project led by Econ Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom. But we're talking about moral intuition here, not aseptic reasoning.

My guttiwuts tell me that the median voter would laugh off private crime investigation, even though private bounty hunting is pretty well accepted, despite a light dusting of $20 bills on the ground. And I'd wager that it's mostly grounded in the impression of a BATNA disparity problem.

What do you think, friends? Would you be comfortable with Pinkertons pounding the pavement for perpetrators? Why or why not?

How Do I Sold Babby?

Should you be able to sell your infant to the highest bidder?

No, I'm not asking this question just so I can imagine the smoke curling from your ears. I'm being quite serious. The first-order effects are likely to be welfare-enhancing. In a voluntary transaction, the biological mother is better off, by definition with the cash instead of the baby, the adoptive parents are better off with the child than with the cash, and the child itself is better off in a relatively affluent home than abused, neglected, or aborted by a mother who didn't want to keep it.

But that's mere first-order reasoning. We've all studied economics and criminal justice. We know that an unregulated market in children turns kids into chattel and young women into biological factories, right? Wouldn't child pornographers have an incentive to buy up kids and force them into brief lives of unimaginable horror?

Isn't that what they do anyway? How would making it legal for childless couples to transact for adoption affect their sordid business model in the slightest? It's still illegal to produce child pornography, so what changes?

And is a career as a surrogate mother really so bad that it needs to be banned outright? Is the risk of ex post regret systematic or idiosyncratic? There's no fraud as far as I can tell, so it has to be the latter. Unpaid surrogacy is perfectly legal, so I have a hunch that the paid version has something to do with BATNA disparity. How dare those rich people take advantage of poor women by paying them to bring another human life into the world? Exploitation!

Exploitation that redistributes not just money but genes. It seems to me as if Rawls would approve. I don't see how it's any better that the child have no chance of life at all or that it's raised in relative destitution.

But even if I could convince you of all that, there's still an interesting bit of residual moral intuition. It seems to me that holding everything else constant, folks would probably be more okay with paid surrogacy than with the sale of a child already born. If my hunch about this is true, what's the difference? And does that difference engage with folks' moral intuitions on other reproductive rights topics?

Should It Be Illegal to Buy Hair?

Women's hair is quite valuable.  A good head* of long hair is worth at least $500.  Hard to trace, easy to sell. 

So, people are stealing it.  Especially in the "People's Paradise" that Sean Penn (pronounced by as "Champagne!" by Emilio) is such a fan of, for the poor people.

My question:  is the purchase of human hair wigs ethical, given that the chances of it being stolen hair are increasing?

Before you answer, remember that saying "No, make human hair wigs illegal" will substantially increase their value.  And that will make the black market demand for stealing hair go UP, making the problem worse.  All you get by making wigs illegal is that warm "I'm a do-gooder, and I like to do good!" feeling.  You actually hurt poor people with your moral smugness.

Of course, it may be worth it.  Moral smugness is VERY valuable.


*Don't start.

You Gonna Eat That?

I assume this is a goof, but if the remarks from the SF Health Department are legitimate, it's a goof that has officials flustered.

It's an app that allows strangers to finish your lunch for when you can't cram the whole thing down your facehole yourself. My initial thought (beyond "this is a silly joke") is "f-ing nasty, man", but you know, different strokes and all. If someone wants to risk, I don't know, mononucleosis or something for a lukewarm, sloppy Reuben, that's their business. Caveat comedor.

What do you think? Public health hazard? Price discrimination? Recycling? What's the right analytical approach? Is LeftoverSwap euvoluntary?

AirBnB: Cost and Choice.

AirBnB is an online service that matches travelers with property owners. The two can then negotiate for a night's stay. Yesterday, I scanned past a comment somewhere that warned of thinking that this idea is all that much of a boon. After all, the opportunity cost of peer-to-peer hosting is that established hotels lose out on business. The comment surprised me, coming as it did from an economist I respect quite a bit.

Consider the purpose of production in very broad terms. The means of production exist to serve the ends of human wants. Here, we've got a matching problem. Under the technology of its time, hotels were a way to match the itinerant with a soft pillow, a roof, and a mass-produced flea market painting. Before that, medieval codes of hospitality had to suffice. Before that, you slept in your caravan or more likely never traveled at all. And it's BATNA all the way back. I've slept under the stars before, and you probably have too. So one way of looking at it is that AirBnB is just another technology that fulfills human wants. And it's not like access to the impersonal market is barred, so folks are unlikely to find systematic exploitation in the business model.

It seems then that most of what the AirBnB service does is permit transfers from firms to property owners. It injects substitutes into the market, making overnight stay services more competitive, more elastic, and therefore closer to marginal cost. Hello people, that's economic efficiency. AirBnB is a high-volume, low-overhead mancgere.

From there, it's a matter of comparison. Compare the reliability of reputational capital between private homeowners and hotels. Compare arguments about economies of scale when it comes to housekeeping and laundry services, or about the lumpiness of opportunity cost. It's easy enough for modeling purposes to assume that people value their time equal to their wage rate, but that's just an assumption. There's no a priori reason to confidently assert there's a linear relationship there, at least much beyond the bounds of a normal workday.

The residual euvoluntarity is a curious question. City elites seem to be comfortable protecting the rents of hoteliers (no surprise there, PAA), and you might see how this service could grate against conventional capacities of trade and ownership and trip over the regret condition. Despite this, I have a hunch that the democratizing of overnight stays is a power-to-the-people sort of thing and I expect that if not this particular service necessarily, then some clone of it will end up the new normal with a bit of spit and polish.

Bet on it.

A Puzzle of Fortune

Why is fortune-telling tolerated? Gazing into a crystal ball and saying sooths is 24 carat grade-A bunkum down to the tips of its whiskers. It's legalized fraud. Yet for that, it's pretty lightly regulated. No, it's not entirely unegulated, since practitioners still have to obey local licensing requirements, conform to ordinances, dot the ts and cross the js. To avoid crossing legal thresholds for actionable fraud or negligence, they'll often offer an "entertainment purposes only" disclaimer, but that dog only barks in a court of law. Compared to, say, dairy farmers who want to meet consumer demands for unpasteurized milk, state authorities almost completely ignore fortune tellers.

When I thought about this late last night, my best guess was that when it comes to tarot cards and tea leaf readings, there's not that much in the way of BATNA disparity. Sellers are small potatoes and the alternatives to seeking supernatural advice are to, well, keep on truckin'. The wrinkle in that... er... thinkle is the Ouija board. Though the idea behind it can't be fully protected by IP statutes, Hasbro is the big seller. That's right, a big[ish] (market cap 6.01B, NASDAQ) publicly traded corporation is the supply side of the biggest selling piece of supernatural kit on the market. Why isn't "corporate greed" busy exploiting gullible customers in this case?

I think it might have something to do with self-deception. Fortune-telling is flattery without being too overt. It violates equality norms to solicit praise: "hey, tell me how awesome I am" is crass. But "hey, tell me who I was in a previous life... ...oh I was a general in Hannibal's armies? Awesome, bro" is fine. It's pleasant self-deception, a bit of validation that would be obnoxious in another setting, and folks' finely tuned sense of hypocrisy gets its hackles up when that's threatened. That might also be why the farmer norms that dominated for so long wanted to quash the practice: it undermines hierarchical ordering if a peasant thinks himself equal to a lord because some Romany crone with flashing eyes tells him he's got a Great Destiny or whatever.

But I'm still not super convinced that's the story either. I can't generate particularly strong priors here. Other interpretations are welcome. Please feel free to share your ideas in the comments.

Chiromanoplasty: Euvoluntary?

Levitt & Dubner feature a curious markets in everything: cosmetic surgery for the lines on your palms.

I saw the source article a couple of days ago and tried to judge this transaction's euvoluntarity. I mean, it seems like a clear rip-off, but unless the surgery is botched, it doesn't seem like there's much to regret. If someone wants to believe in palm-reading, what's the harm done?

What do you think? Superstitional surgical alteration of the palms: euvoluntary or not?

Pit from Payola

Way back when lil' Mungo was still in diapers, that most munificent body the US Congress held a series of investigations spearheaded by the House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight into the grievous immorality of "payola", an investigation that nearly derailed the career of the Dickensian vampire most of us know as Dick Clark.

To make sense of this investigation, it helps to know what "payola" is and why it works. Put simply, it's a direct payment from an artist (or an agent thereof, usually) to someone (a radio DJ with a large audience) in exchange for playing their record. That's it. That's what prompted the "greatest deliberative body in the world" to drop its socks and grab its subpoenas. Trading money for airplay.

Now, the Public Choice of this is trivially obvious. Incumbent music industry elites had rents to preserve and this upstart rock and/or roll music threatened these rents. What dost thou when thine rents are besieged? Hie thee to Parliament and beg thy Lord exchequer for relief of course. But this dog won't bark without at least some appeal to popular moral sentiment, says I. The median voter theorem for all its flaws still has teeth in its head. Congress can't just up and flaunt the will of the people and not expect a modicum of comeuppance.

So what misery lurks in payola? Two things I think. Both are predicated on an asymmetry of attention. DJs are specialists in their field. They do the hard, unpleasant work of screening the kelp-festooned, brine-shrimp-encrusted seawater that is musical artistry before it floods your burning ear holes. They have sort of a BATNA disparity, only it's a disparity of knowledge rather than money or political power. Think of it as a drop D tune down of the BATNA disparity enjoyed by university professors: mere specialization gives them dissemination power over the worldview of their audience. The simple act of selecting what material to present gives an edge to which ideas thrive, which wax platters folks think of picking up.

And that points to the other EE violation: uncompensated externalities. The ultimate scarce resource is attention. A catchy earworm consumes a large part of your attention. Don't believe me? You are now silently humming Dexy's Midnight Runner's classic hit "Come on Eileen" and you will be all day unless I let you off the hook. Too-ra-loo-rai-ay.

I think there's something to the claim that DJs are partly reflectors and partly creators of the affections of the audience. They make their bread and butter by catering, which includes giving folks what they want, but also giving them what they didn't know they wanted. And much like the hidden menu at In-N-Out Burger, people may not know what they want until someone shows them. That person is a kingmaker for Animal Style fries.

So, we've got well-entrenched record executives protecting old rents against upstarts and Congress justifying an inquiry into the matter on curious moral grounds. See, someone still has to make programming decisions, and I guess everything else is still under consideration, like retaining a fickle audience and yet more fickle advertisers, but cash payments are out. You can give it away, but you can't sell it. Sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. How about that.

Okay, okay. Here. I'm not a monster.



Now the only thing you've got left rattling around in your head is an image of a baby Munger crawling around  a Florida bungalow, an oversized safety pin securing a cloth diaper. You're welcome.

Hume and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

For those of you who haven't read the 1974 Robert Pirsig classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy. It's a quick, breezy primer into an often felt, but seldom articulated gulf between art and artifice.

But he didn't get there first, not by a stretch. David Hume, Essay XV:

Even in those productions, commonly denominated works of art, we find that the noblest of the kind are beholden for their chief beauty to the force and happy influence of nature. To the native enthusiasm of the poets, we owe whatever is admirable in their productions. The greatest genius, where nature at any time fails him, (for she is not equal) throws aside the lyre, and hopes not, from the rules of art, to reach that divine harmony, which must proceed from her inspiration alone. How poor are these songs, where a happy flow of fancy has not furnished materials for art to embellish and refine!

But of all the fruitless attempts of art, no one is so ridiculous, as that which the severe philosophers have undertaken, the producing of an artificial happiness [emphasis in original], and making us be pleased by rules of reason, and by reflection.

Art: the product of happy nature, a graceful dalliance with a winsome muse and the reflection of a sensitive scribe.

Artifice: the pretense to, "regulate, refine, or invigorate any of those springs or principles, which nature has implanted in me."

'Tis the cold heart of a clod what never has known the tug of authenticity. You don't need an artist's soul to appreciate a fiery sunset or the geometry of a snowflake or the dazzling athleticism of an NBA final match. No painters beret need ye don to lose yourself in an elegant snippet of C# code or engross yourself in the majesty of the stars or unmoor your imagination to swim in the oceans between sweeps of ink that bind a narrative together. Everyone knows art, yet it's often that we consume artifice. We buy bottled sugarwater, see blockbuster films, and God forbid, drive a Toyota.

And what of the ticky-tacky attempts to bridge that gulf? What of the saccharine platitudes that urge us to buy "fair trade" coffee and intentionally smash teacups so that we can mend them for the elusive wabi-sabi aesthetic? Do the way we rank these things in our quiet inner places match how we rank them in an objective marketplace? Should they be ranked alongside each other? Or is it a distinction made irrelevant by individual calculus? Do I have any right to be offended by either epicureans or ascetics? By elitist snobs or dreadful boors? Is it not enough that I have access to my own euvoluntary exchanges that I have to get wound up by those of others?

What are the bounds of uncompensated externalities? Does the bad taste of others count?

Traffic Ticket Insurance? Yikes!

From the website of Trafficare International:

When a TCI member receives a moving citation, a traffic ticket, the member has several options;

TraffiCare will reimburse you for a specified number of qualified traffic violations provided that it meets terms and conditions listed in our AGREEMENT.

If/when you receive a qualified ticket for reimbursement, simply scan and email, fax, or express mail your ticket to us. That's it. It's that simple. Once your ticket is received, we will qualify the ticket and inform you of "next steps" within 24 hours.

There are different packages available, all with different monthly premiums, so the discerning moving violator can select her level of moral hazard.

Now, unless several reputable news organizations got roundly snookered, and this is just a lingering April Fools' Day joke, this is actually a thing. It's a thing where a third party will offer to transform a marginal cost into a sunk cost. For those of you who have taken an intro economics course, you should be able to pretty easily predict the likely outcome when that happens.

But is it euvoluntary? Ha ha, not by a long shot. Look, one of the reasons the states use traffic enforcement is to alter behavior. There is some probability-adjusted cost associated with traffic violations. It's nothing more fancy than Pr(being caught)*(value of the fine). The regulating authority can play around with the probability by putting more cops in police interceptors or they can adjust the fine amount in the legislature. These things raise the marginal cost of traffic infractions (that is, the expected cost per incident [edit] for the next incident of breaking a traffic statute), but this insurance scheme sets the marginal cost to zero, or close to it (there's still some time foregone and a bit of humiliation or fear when being pulled over). As long as there's still some marginal reward to making an illegal U-turn or driving 15 over, customers of this service will be more likely to flaunt the rules.

Seriously, a decent high school economics course is all you need to get this. It's not that confusing.

And if we further assume that traffic regulations are meant to provide guidelines that guard against instances of negligent harm, an increase in the rate of risky activity increases the likelihood of unintended harm to others i.e. negative externalities.

So not only is Trafficare International not euvoluntary, but it's plain idiotic in a world where demand curves slope down. I can't offer you stock advice, but if I were a betting man, I'd short the hell out of these guys. If people get their undergarments in a twist over payday lending (a voluntary exchange between consenting adults), there's no way in Hades they'll do anything but shut these guys down faster than you can say, "sir, do you know why I pulled you over?"

Right?

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes

The CFTC has cheerfully complied with industry elites and blocked US citizens from participating in prediction exchanges (good commentary here). Part of the published justification for shutting down prediction markets is that they don't serve the public interest. This is a peculiar claim, but one very interesting for euvoluntaryists.

The benefits of prediction markets are unambiguous: their existence forces people to put up or shut up. With thick, ubiquitous prediction markets, cheap talk would dry up in a hurry. John Law-type flim-flam artists would find themselves out on their ear. But lest we forget, Law had the ear of Louis XV. Ditto for the Motion Picture lobby: Hollywood and DC enjoy a notoriously cozy relationship.

So the ban on Intrade is classic Olsonian public choice: concentrated benefits (to sleazy studio stuffed shirts) and diffuse costs (to folks who might have otherwise benefited from higher-quality forecasts i.e. everybody else). That's not how the CFTC sold it though. They made a euvoluntary claim: something about the "public interest". Even more interesting, the actual claim against Intrade was over commodities, as if off-exchange futures trades threaten to destabilize the market (I think?). I'm not entirely sure what logic underpins this argument.

The bit that interests me is the breakpoint at which elite collusion snaps. I wrote a post a short while ago about collusion in the three estates, and it occurs to me that the same mechanism that throttled the Church/State alliance might also strangle the bedfellowing of film executives and Congress. Intrade and sites like it present obvious efficiency gains to consumers, but squashing these services won't generate any theses nailed to the doors of your local AMC. The closest we see is the backlash against attempts to regulate the Internet and those are largely quite tepid. What would it take to defang Hollywood and dissolve their pairing with the Legislature? Could well-made video games possibly be our version of the Lutheran Church?

The rhetoric is also charmingly misleading. This case has a whole lot of cheap talk papering over a decision to shut down an institution that serves to reduce cheap talk. That's, what... maybe not ironic, but certainly obnoxious. Maybe even predictable. Hilarious, if you're of a particular bent. Which I am.

Ha ha ha.

Pay for Say

In most of the secular West, buying votes violates statute legislation. Quite apart from being an unenforceable contract, it is a baldly unethical agreement. It's also one of those rules that rubs the natural law the wrong way. Folks have strong moral intuitions that buying votes is just wrong. Voting represents pure civic-minded ideals, uncorrupted by the vices of the market.

Now, you may or may not be sympathetic to the suggestion that it is the overlap between governmental authority and the functions of trade that seem to generate the most corruption, but I think you'd have to admit that the fairy tale of democratic participation is a cornerstone of Western Civilization.

So why the moral outrage? What's so all-fired corrupt about vote-buying? Suppose you've got a fair chunk of the population that's basically indifferent between Candidate A and Candidate B. Why not just pay them directly to basically flip a coin instead of usurping their scarce attention with political advertising? Yes, all else equal, the wealthier candidate wins, but how is that all that different than what we've got now? Politicians all but bribe the public with promises over the disposition of their own money anyway, so how is this any different? Under what precepts are campaign promises more euvoluntary than vote-buying?

Constrained Euvoluntarity: Roth and Kidney Exchanges

The big news today is that Al Roth and Lloyd Shapely won the Nobel in Economics. The responses from my economist friends have been largely tepid. I mostly understand their reservations, though I do not entirely share them. To me, Roth is a directional euvoluntaryist.

For those of you who may not be familiar with his work, he is less an observational economist and more of an engineer: he's created kidney exchanges where folks who need kidneys can pool and match donors with recipients. Family and friends can join in. The matching algorithms these exchanges use are suitable for a whole host of applications, from online dating to custom-made reduction gear replacement and even farming. For our purposes here, the interesting application is the kidneys. We've pointed out before that organ sales are aesthetically unpleasant and the resulting popular opposition can generate ugly consequences. Dialysis is not fun. Rather than shaking his fists at the misdirected moral intuitions of the median voter, Roth put his nose to the grindstone and created a matching algorithm that increased the number of transplants without offending  folks' anti-mercenary moral foibles.

So, is Roth a destination euvoluntaryist? If he were, he'd be pounding the pulpit for the freedom for people to do as they wished with their own bodies, including voluntary sales of vital organs, decrying exchanges as mere half-measures. No, I think he's a directional euvoluntaryist, interested in consequences, but willing to admit that the first-best solution is out of the field of play. I am quite confident that the people who have been able to obtain life-saving transplants thanks to his hard work certainly appreciate everything he's done. I for one favor his practical approach to expanding the freedom of association in a world of very real political constraints. Bravo.

Markets in Everything: Sandel

The brillian Michael Sandel has an article in the April Atlantic that will be on my syllabus from now on. For the article...

Excerpt: We live in a time when almost everything can be bought and sold. Over the past three decades, markets—and market values—have come to govern our lives as never before. We did not arrive at this condition through any deliberate choice. It is almost as if it came upon us.

As the Cold War ended, markets and market thinking enjoyed unrivaled prestige, and understandably so. No other mechanism for organizing the production and distribution of goods had proved as successful at generating affluence and prosperity. And yet even as growing numbers of countries around the world embraced market mechanisms in the operation of their economies, something else was happening. Market values were coming to play a greater and greater role in social life. Economics was becoming an imperial domain. Today, the logic of buying and selling no longer applies to material goods alone. It increasingly governs the whole of life.

Nod to J-Ro, who is also brilliant.