Martin Tenbones vs Army of Dorkness

Neil Gaiman, on Twitter:

It's weird thinking that I wrote this in '97... https://t.co/yi57Pv8KDj

— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) March 19, 2016

The panels at the link come from A Game of You, one of the little sidebar miniseries in The Sandman. In contrast to many of the other characters in the run, the cheerleader-type blonde protagonist was what the kids these days are calling a "normie": a plain-vanilla citizen. No spider collection, no multicolored hair, no ancient immortal who sits down to drink tea with emperors. Just a regular girl with a regular life. Well, she is incubating an otherdimensional entity in a fragment of her dreams, a chunk of which escapes into the waking world in the form of a giant talking dog that gets shot by the NYPD, but that's neither here nor there. The point is, Barbie is a Regular Girl, and by using a Regular Girl, Gaiman gets to deliver what I thought at the time to be a particularly nasty barb to comic shop owners. Namely, that their places were inimical to girls.

I thought it was a nasty barb, and my first reaction was that it was a strange thing for Gaiman, who was writing under the fledgling Vertigo property of DC at the time to paint this gruesome caricature of a comics proprietor. It seemed like shitting where one eats, so to speak. But then I've never been a girl in a comic shop. And in 1997, I have to admit, I did know more than one comic shop that, were I a girl, I would have thought twice before entering.

I sort of understand how it could happen, too. My economics training tells me that there's a pretty big premium to be paid if you want to alienate a market segment as large as "all women" so therefore, we shouldn't expect to see nasty, unkempt, leering clerks very often. But on the other hand, there are men who have been on the receiving end of contempt from women their whole lives, and developing a carapace of misogyny is one way of coping with that. Comics and roleplaying games occasionally provide a refuge for these sorts of guys, since they're traditionally boys' pursuits. If girls loathe you, go where the girls aren't. Right?

But then something happened. Some of what happened was Gaiman himself. Girls started liking comics in a big way. Sandman had something like 60% female readership. The relative price of running a sour-smelling, female-hostile comic shop increased dramatically. Shop owners who were unwilling to cater to the new customers lost a lot of business. So you'd expect shops like these to be dinosaurs, relics of a bygone era.

Apparently not. His followers began tweeting sordid tales of how some places have gotten worse, as if the no-girls-allowed sensibility has overtaken the remorseless economics. That should be worrying. There's something in the culture that has some men so badly alienated that they're leaving sales on the table in an industry that hasn't been a guaranteed moneymaker since Michael Keaton was Batman.

I occasionally think there's a larger malaise out there and a lot of this stuff: gamergate, Trump, Sad Puppies, this comic shop thing... I think these all might be symptoms of the same underlying problem. I'm not sure what the ultimate cause is, but even if the source can be accurately identified, I'm not convinced that there is an easy or cheap solution.

Regulatory Penumbrella

There was a lunar eclipse last night. Where I am, the sky was overcast, so we couldn't see it. Even so, pedagogical opportunities like these arise seldom enough that I sat my 3 year old daughter down to explain to her the difference between an umbra and a penumbra. If you recall from your fifth grade astronomy class, the umbra is the region of complete occlusion. It's the full shadow, where the entire light source is obscured. The penumbra is the region of partial occlusion, where the foreign object is only partly covering the light source. Last night's eclipse created a penumbral region on the moon.

It occurred to me as I was attempting to explain this to a child whose attention was fixed on the necklace she was alternately creating and destroying—rather than what her completely, wholly, and utterly fascinating daddy was saying—is that it's pretty easy to see regulatory umbra: black-letter OSHA regulations can be parsed and obeyed, ATF fun police commands are available for perusal, even the PPACA is written down and given how much time has elapsed since it was passed, possibly even read by now. What we might more easily miss are the contours of the regulatory penumbra.

Every now and again, some joker will round up a hard copy of the Federal Register (the collection of regulations issued from DC) and pose in a photograph standing next to it. The puny human is dwarfed by the mighty stacks of dot-matrix printed paper, but even such stunts are a little misleading. If you're ever in my neck of the woods, hit me up and I'll take you to the Jefferson Reading Room at the LoC and we can take a gawk at the non-photo-op version together. It's been some time since I've done the pilgrimage, and I often get a belly chuckle out of opening to a (quasi-)random page to find some gem some long-forgotten rep used to roll a constituent's log oh so long ago. Still, the FedReg (as no one on Earth calls it) is small potatoes compared to the voluminous pile that constitutes the sundry state, county, and local ordinances that "govern" commerce throughout America. Regressively (and aggressively, and repressively), I might add.

What these skeins of interference represent to the bit of me steeped in public choice economics is orgiastic rent-seeking threaded in the weft of American society. Favored constituents plead the sovereign for slime-drenched special favors and with a twinkling of a gilt pen, hey-presto, incumbent hairdressers (to pick some low-hanging fruit) are granted a state-protected oligopoly. Of course, this quite naturally implies that should some enterprising kid seek to hang a shingle of her own, the list of available wildcat profession shrinks with each and every entreaty. And if the stories of cops shutting down kids' lemonade stands represent systemic trends rather than isolated incidents, then the lessons start early.

The regulatory umbra looks at the entrepreneurship trammeled by existing interference. It is large and ominous enough. The regulatory penumbra constitutes those efforts likely to attract the interference of a Bernie of overseers. I casually estimate that it blots out the whole of the sun.

Taking risks is already not particularly euvoluntary. Including a guillotine on hair trigger does not make it more so.

Cheaters Never Prosper

Adultery-facilitating website Ashley Madison has had its user data stolen. 37 million users, many of them presumably real people, are now at risk of extortion, identity theft, and that old-timey blackmail.

You can read Avid Life Media Inc's statement here.

I know what you might be thinking: the only site that deserves it more is maybe Gawker. And while I'm sure that law enforcement will be working diligently to find the culprits and bring them to justice, I might expect most citizens hearing the news will sniff and mutter, "they had it coming." Degeneracy like adultery deserves some sort of cosmic justice, and occasionally justice arrives in a chariot driven by a team of hackers (in this case, amusingly and appropriately named "The Impact Team"). 

I have my doubts that Ashley Madison has 37 million unique active users. But that is an upper bound estimate. 37 million already-shaky marriages further threatened by vigilante hackers is a heck of a lot of mischief. There are probably a heck of a lot of people waking up to a heck of a lot of fresh regret this morning. 

I sure hope if you're reading this, you're not one of them. If you are, godspeed. For you have an awkward, difficult conversation with your spouse to conduct, one that I hope I wouldn't wish on even a miserable moral wretch.

Of course, the first-order harm is the infidelity itself. Exposing it is a comparatively minor evil. Right? It seems that way. I think this might be an interesting enough question to explore in my ongoing altfic at Sweet Talk. Stay tuned.

Euvoluntary Marketing Part 1 of 4: Product

Brock C.: "What's the Euvoluntary view on marketing practices that take advantage of known but unconscious heuristics the brain uses?"

Challenge accepted. This is a post in four parts, each installment dealing with one aspect of marketing.

First, a clarification. I think when many people hear the word "marketing", they think "advertising". To be sure, advertising is a function of marketing, but it ain't the whole enchilada. The marketing apparatus of a firm answers at a minimum the following questions:

1. What do we produce?
2. How much do we ask?
3. To whom do we sell?
4. Where do we sell it?

These are the 4 P's of marketing: product, price, promotion and place [location]. Of course, there are other models of how marketing works, but the idea is that marketing department exist to match the wants of consumers with the capabilities of producers. 

And vice-versa. 

Which is where the rub is for many folks. Drumming up demand where none existed before: isn't that predatory? You're bilking people out of their had earned cash for something they've gotten along without perfectly well their whole lives! How can it possibly be that developing new products is euvoluntary knowing full well that humans have a proclivity towards novelty? 

Here's how I see it: try to think in terms of underlying, personal, subjective value. Consider two people, Angela and Bart. Angela is a novophile: she likes new things independent of their instrumental value. She bought a CD player in 1982 and a betamax player in 1975. What appeals to her is the novelty. Contrarily, Bart is a stodgy late adopter. He still has a land line in his home and uses paper boarding passes at the airport. NB: there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. Angela gives up some certainty for the privilege of being an early adopter (she ends up owning a small pile of movies on dead beta tape), and Bart is stuck with the hassle of standing in insufferable lines at the airport because he's too stubborn to change.

But even if Angela believes Bart to be irrational, she'd be wise to conclude that forcing Bart to hop on the novelty train would not necessarily make him better off. Similarly, Bart knows that Angela's silly heuristic of "it's new, I have to have it" is wasteful more often than not, but he also knows that he is in no position to exercise the virtues of temperance and prudence on her behalf. He might be worried if the costs of her intemperance are made public, but then it becomes a matter of analyzing the institutions that make private costs public, not so much the pseudo-problem of accidental, innocent regret.

So is product innovation euvoluntary? Do we really need a hundred different kinds of toothpaste? Consider your cost accounting. If you don't use but one type of toothpaste, ask yourself if the extra burden imposed on you for having to sort through the choices is really so awful that you'd be willing to deny others the opportunity to find a product that truly appeals to them. 

Thankfully, the answer in most market settings is "no, it's not that much trouble." It's mostly just in politics that choice sets are curtailed by the use of force.

Anjie Brings the Heat (Again!)

Via The Ümlaut, a smashing Castillo piece on the directional euvoluntarity of female sexuality.

EE quote:

Female porn stars provide one case study. These women enjoy Bergner’s vision of uninhibited female sexuality and make money doing it. They preform sexually diverse acts, à la Bailey, and reside at Meanda’s commanding heights of male desire. While many are drawn to the sex industry under less than euvoluntary conditions, we can compare their preferences and outcomes to those of other women of similar socio-economic status. If the first order preference of sexual satisfaction is stronger for these women than the second order preference for a traditional family, we should expect porn stars to be happier and less desiring of monogamy on average than similarly-situated women outside of the porn industry.

While the male porn stars harbored few regrets from their time in “the biz,” many of the women were rattled or reeling. Their fame, power, and sexual satisfaction came at the extreme price of a diminished shot at a normal, “oppressive,” marriage and children. Undoubtedly, social stigma against sex workers is largely to blame for their plight. For better or for worse, the sexual cartel is a harsh mistress. Still, it is worth noting that some women who unwittingly live la vida Bergner jealously eye their sisters’ “shackles.”

People, the sexual menu is expanding. With heterogeneous preferences, Ozzie and Harriet are still on the table, but now so is Caligula. More choices, less stigma? That's the EE way.

Labor is not Euvoluntary: Orphanarium Edition

From Delfi.lt, a story I can't find an English translation for. And the online translator isn't working for me. My Lithuanian readers won't have any trouble, but the other two of you might. Here's the skinny: temporary Lithuanian workers in Norway are having their kids taken into state custody on the grounds that they're living in unacceptably poor conditions.

Never mind that they're there of their own free will or that they've made the express, rational decision to save on material comforts in exchange for a higher standard of living back home in the future or that they're making remittance payments to relatives living in squalor back home. No, it's important that everyone is equal, and if that's not the case, the Norweigan Barnevern (CPS) will relocate your children as one of the delightful public services they offer.

How enlightened.

Bastiat squirmed.

Reproduction is not Euvoluntary: Gamete Edition

Alex Tabarrok on the rent-seeking culture in assisted reproduction. Note the language used in the brief: "compensation 'should not be so excessive as to constitute undue inducement.'” Sounds an awful lot like BATNA disparity. Underprivileged women could be coerced by circumstance into selling ova.

Which is, of course, horsepuffles. Premium prices are attached to premium genetic material. It's the eggs of 23 year old PhD candidates with blonde hair and blue eyes that earn the most dough. But that's neither here nor there. I'm most fascinated by the odd paternalism that travels with both BATNA disparity and ex-post regret. You see, you can make a pretty solid argument that the kid in China who swapped his kidney for an iPad a few years back probably ended up regretting his decision. But eggs? Seriously? The alternative is... well, you're all grown-ups. You know what happens when Aunt Flo comes to town.

What's to regret? Prices rise, therefore inducing more women to donate, and what? They get paid more handsomely and some family gets the baby they've always wanted. If that's coercion, well, let's have more of it.

They Go Together Like a Horse and Carriage

It seems like all voluntary domestic living arrangements should also be euvoluntary. It seems like the only EE condition we might butt up against is ex post regret, and it also seems like the way around regret is to preserve no-fault divorce as the default common law dissolution arrangement. It seems like the role of the state should extend no further than ensuring folks aren't being coerced or defrauded into entering into a marriage contract. It seems like as far as the government is concerned, there isn't ten cents' difference between a nuptial contract and, say, an insurance policy.

It seems like it should be that way, but that way it sure ain't.

I make a big deal out of political kayfabe, but I don't mean by this to claim that there isn't religious and corporate kayfabe as well. The reason I focus so closely on the bloviations of elected officials is that they enjoy an unchecked monopoly not found in either the pulpit or the boardroom. Well, at least in the US. Here though is an interesting example where religious kayfabe may well mask an underlying aesthetic objection to alternative forms of marriage. I think there's pretty good Biblical evidence to allow Christians to support a clear division between the roles of Leviathan and Pontiff (Matthew 22:21, eg.). I see no necessary tension between believing that (a) Leviticus 20:13 has something interesting to say and (b) the state should act as an impersonal arbiter of contract terms. When this division goes unobserved, when folks strive to resurrect collusion between the first and second estates, I find myself puzzled about the moral intuitions underpinning this urge. It seems possible that the moral dimension is Haidt's sanctity/degradation, which always struck me as girded by atavistic aesthetics rather than deliberate moral or ethical calculus.

If there's an issue of fiscal externalities, where a baker or a photographer can be sued in court for refusing to provide wedding services for a ceremony they find offensive, this highlights a flaw in civil law. If the problem is with children being raised in unorthodox households, we've got a reasonable empirical question that must be answered with good empirical analysis (instead of evidence-free appeals to imagination as seems commonplace). If the problem is a weakening of the national moral fiber or something, I think I'd like to see a better explanation of how it is that the boundaries of an optimal moral zone are simultaneously determined with political borders. In what sense did the Louisiana Purchase extend the particular sphere in which the median American voter was granted legitimate authority to impose moral calculus on others?

Look, there are reasons to debate the form and function of the relationship between contract arrangements and state enforcement. But let's not kid ourselves when it comes to the source of our disagreements. De gustibus non est disputandum, sed de gubernum fortitori est*. The scope of government is applied inappropriately when it's granted the authority to determine winners and losers in the game of matrimony just as surely as it's misapplied when determining winners and losers in mineral exploration or agricultural production. I can sort of understand some sort of (extremely cautious) state intervention in non-euvoluntary exchange, but intervention when the arrangement is, but for other existing public policy, entirely euvoluntary seems an untoward usurpation of the common presumption of liberty.



* My Latin is terrible, so that's probably grammatically incorrect. Apologies.

I'm Happier When I'm Forced to Give?

Prosocial Spending and Well-Being: Cross-Cultural Evidence for a Psychological Universal 

Lara Aknin et al. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming 

Abstract: This research provides the first support for a possible psychological universal: Human beings around the world derive emotional benefits from using their financial resources to help others (prosocial spending). In Study 1, survey data from 136 countries were examined and showed that prosocial spending is associated with greater happiness around the world, in poor and rich countries alike. To test for causality, in Studies 2a and 2b, we used experimental methodology, demonstrating that recalling a past instance of prosocial spending has a causal impact on happiness across countries that differ greatly in terms of wealth (Canada, Uganda, and India). Finally, in Study 3, participants in Canada and South Africa randomly assigned to buy items for charity reported higher levels of positive affect than participants assigned to buy the same items for themselves, even when this prosocial spending did not provide an opportunity to build or strengthen social ties. Our findings suggest that the reward experienced from helping others may be deeply ingrained in human nature, emerging in diverse cultural and economic contexts.

Sometimes people caricature the "happiness" research.  But the above is beyond caricature.  It just works fine, quoted verbatim and in context:  If the citizens in country A are forced to give money to citizens in country B, then BOTH countries will have happier citizens.  It is the opposite of the usual claim made about free trade:  If an exchange is voluntary, both parties are better off.  Here, if a transfer is INvoluntary, then both parties are better off.  A genuinely remarkable finding, a new step in scientific research.

Coerced by Conformity: Macklemore & Ryan Lewis Edition

Apart from being a rather charming earworm, Thrift Store by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis contains lyrics that  speak directly to the conditions for euvoluntary exchange. Buried amidst a glorious paean to welfare-enhancing price discrimination and market-based recycling is a verse expressing puzzled disdain towards the peacock effect: an evolutionary arms race where contestants compete over a fixed prize. In this case, the peacock's tail is expensive clothing and the presumptive prize is the right to mate.

Pay attention around the 2:35 mark, when the artist notes: "They be like: 'Oh, that Gucci, that's hella tight.' I'm like, 'Yo, that's $50 for a t-shirt' ... I call that getting swindled and pimped. I call that getting tricked by a business."

Swindled by a business? Perhaps. Under the assumption that relative status is a zero-sum game, it is in the interest of a firm to associate their product with a higher probability of attracting the attention of prospective mates. To the extent that this association is credible, designer clothes-as-peacock tails is a stable equilibrium. In this interaction, the demand effects are as much to blame (perhaps more?) as the supply effects. Why is the association of clothing with mating so strong? Advertising? The fop of the 17th century seems at odds with this hypothesis.

At any rate, just because it's rational don't make it right. There's plenty of good off-equilibrium play available; there are fine countersignals to be sent, and if you can look incredible in my grandpa's clothes, well sir, that's hella euvoluntary.

 

Warning: salty language

Meta-Euvoluntary: A Metaphor

Friend of EE and my personal pal Zac Gochenour adroitly points out that I haven't adequately defined what I mean by "meta-euvoluntary". Please let me try to remedy that.

Imagine that the galaxy of laws, rules, regulations and norms that characterize the landscape of trade works much the same way as a factory. Instead of producing rubber baby buggy bumpers, these institutions generate exchanges that fall somewhere on the euvoluntary spectrum, which runs from pure-as-the-driven-snow euvoluntary all the way to nakedly coercive.

Price Discrimination, Surprise, Stealth Assassination

Ever get the feeling you're being ripped off, even when you know you're not being ripped off?

Every so often, a popular online video game service offers deep discounts on popular titles. It's usually a great opportunity to grab some of the year's sleeper hits or games that were just a little bit too expensive the first time round. Among this year's offerings, there was a particular game with a stealth assassination mechanic set in a steampunk-inspired world. I had been putting off buying it in favor of some of the year's other, more compelling titles, including a run-and-gun, loot heavy FPS and a space opera cover-based shooter. Still, given the right price, I could justify picking it up as a Christmas present to myself.

So that's just what I did. I'd had my eye out for a sale, and when the price dropped from $60 to $45, I grabbed it lickety-split (there's an idiom not seen much these days--I wonder why it fell out of fashion). Well, Christmas season and all, what to my wondering eyes did appear the very next day? The retailer had deepened the discount by another 25%. The game is selling for $30 at the time I type this.

Imagine my mental anguish. Here I am, squire to Sir Munger in the Kingdom of Euvoluntaria, defender of the morality of voluntary trade and I'm all bent out of shape because I learned that if I'd have waited a day, I could have saved another 15 bucks? Come on.

Look, at the time I made my purchase, I did so with all the knowledge I had available to me. I felt I was getting positive consumer surplus. I had no way of knowing the price would be dropped the next day. In econ jargon, the future, unobservable market is irrelevant at the time of purchase. The transaction was euvoluntary when I made it.

Did it suddenly cease to be euvoluntary the following day? If so, I presume it's because of the regret condition? If so, which cell of my regret matrix would it be in? High search costs and high information asymmetry? If you agree with me that this is the bad box to be in, do you think it would be appropriate for government agents to interfere with the terms of the sale?

I will offer this: very often in brick and mortar stores, if a customer shows up ex post with a coupon and a valid receipt, they can claim an adjustment. Bed Bath and Beyond does this, at least. I'm not sure if I can haggle down the purchase price of my game another 15 bucks, nor am I sure if it's worth the time and hassle, but boy-howdy, despite my economics training and my sensitivity to the principles of euvoluntary exchange, I sure am smarting over this. It's kind of soured my enthusiasm for the game itself, which is an innocent bystander in all this.

Tomáš Sedláček on Self-Interest

Interesting Spiegel interview with Tomáš Sedláček, philosopher / economist and adviser to the Czech Republic.

I don't think he's talking about "greed," exactly. I'd call it purposive human action.

Excerpt:
SPIEGEL: Mr. Sedláček, in Oliver Stone's 1987 film "Wall Street," the fictional tycoon Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, pronounces the provocative motto of neoliberalism: "Greed is Good." Has the crisis in financial capitalism reduced greed to what it was once before, one of the seven deadly sins?

Sedláček: Gekko succeeds with his greed, but then he falls victim to it. Mankind's oldest stories tell us that greed is always Janus-faced. It is an engine of progress, but it's also the cause of our collapse. Being constantly dissatisfied and always wanting more seems to be an innate natural phenomenon, forming the heart of our civilization. The original sin of the first human couple in the Garden of Eden was the result of greed.

SPIEGEL: Not of temptation and curiosity?

Sedláček: Desire and curiosity are sisters. The snake merely awakened a desire in Eve that was already dormant inside of her. According to Genesis, the forbidden tree was a feast for the eyes.

SPIEGEL: Just like the suggestive images of modern advertising.

Sedláček: Eve and Adam grab the opportunity and eat the fruit. The original sin has the character of excessive, unnecessary consumption. It is not of a sexual nature. A desire for something she doesn't need is awakened in Eve. The living conditions in paradise were complete, and yet everything God had given the two wasn't enough. In this sense, greed isn't just at the birthplace of theoretical economics, but also at the beginning of our history. Greed is the beginning of everything.

In Sedlacek's writing, he is a bit more nuanced. There are two things going on here: 1. Greed is good, or 2. Greed is.

Compare it to gravity. Gravity is a fact. We build things that help us manage it. Without gravity, we have real problems with...well, everything we know. Life in the forms we know it is pretty much inconceivable without gravity.

But would you say, "Gravity is good!"? Probably not.

I think of greed the same way. Social scientists, or idiots like Che Guevara, who try to think of how to get rid of greed make no more sense than telling physicists that their job is to change the physical properties of gravity.