Klingon Bastards

On Twitter:
1)

.@GarettJones Banking crises are not new, so how can we stop history repeating itself? #PalgraveChat

— Palgrave Economics (@PalgraveEcon) November 19, 2015

2)

>@PalgraveEcon Worst case scenario is we have to live with crises: Humans are faddish, bubble-prone. (1/2) #PalgraveChat

— Garett Jones (@GarettJones) November 19, 2015

3)

>@PalgraveEcon Best case scenario is that we can make the financial system (not just banks!) more robust to shocks. (2/2) #PalgraveChat

— Garett Jones (@GarettJones) November 19, 2015

4)

Good trick, if you can pull it off. https://t.co/J20VO9t6qg

— Cold November Duck (@Spivonomist) November 19, 2015

5)

>@Spivonomist Indeed, good policy is hard to pull off, between policy commitment issues, lags, and knowledge problems. #PalgraveChat

— Garett Jones (@GarettJones) November 19, 2015

6)

Good thing we enjoy a high-IQ society. If anyone can get the job done, it's bright people working in functioning institutions. @GarettJones

— Cold November Duck (@Spivonomist) November 19, 2015

7)

@Spivonomist All options are bad, it's a matter of degree: It's the Kobayashi Maru all the way down! #PalgraveChat pic.twitter.com/GS7Pwwt9Vu

— Garett Jones (@GarettJones) November 19, 2015

8)

@GarettJones I still wonder how meta that simulation is meant to be in-universe.

— Cold November Duck (@Spivonomist) November 19, 2015

That last tweet of mine there (I'm Spivonomist) demands a little explanation.

In case you aren't a Trek fan, the Kobayashi Maru is a computer simulation given to last-year Starfleet officer candidates. With the original programming, it is an unwinnable scenario. Your ship receives a distress call from an allied vessel. If you choose to respond, you are quickly ambushed and destroyed. If you ignore the call, your ally is annihilated. There is no classic Pareto-enhancing victory strategy.

Except to cheat.

That's what Kirk did: cheated. Both in the original Roddenberry film and in the Abrams reboot, James Tiberius Kirk surreptitiously rewrote the code for the simulation and emerged victorious over the Klingon (presumably Romulan after the Khitomer Accords were signed) foes. In the Abrams reboot, I think the screenplay suggested that the cheating itself was part of the test. Or if not, by the time Picard's crew was tooling around, it surely would be.

If this test is as meta as I hope, it checks for lateral thinking and a willingness to bend the rules. In 1982, when Wrath of Khan introduced the test, Kirk's cheating came across as sincere cheating. In 2009, the cheating seemed part of the game. If the metaphor was meant to extend to the nexus of politics and financial markets, Jones is right on the money. Even Hollywood sees that the Commanding Heights are big-time cheaters, and so long as the consequences are still beneficial, the audience should be okay with it.

I think Roddenberry [ed. Adam Gurri reminds me that it was Nick Meier, not Gene Roddenberry who wrote and directed Wrath of Khan. Thank you, Adam. ed. add.: via GJ Jack Sowards coined the term Kobaysahi Maru after his neighbors] would have been appalled. There's a certain type for whom the rules are sacrosanct. Cheat not lest ye be cheated. Tinkering with the architecture of big-time institutions is risky on scales I think even pretty well educated people probably don't comprehend very well. And our political and commercial elites have been tinkering for many decades, with no plan to stop. If Jones is right, and I see no good reason to dispute his point, the real trick is to make sure any further tinkering is done with the grave lessons of good public choice economics in mind.

And like I tweeted, this is a very good trick if you can pull it off.

Loud and Vociferous

With apologies to Murray Rothbard, It is no crime to be ignorant of firearm safety, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be the purview of police and the soldiery. But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on firearm subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance.

Kaili Joy Gray evidently cannot be bothered to learn even rudimentary mechanics of how a sidearm operates. As even a complete novice to a range might tell you, the only way a break-action weapon might discharge with an open breech is for a foreign object to strike the primer with accuracy and force mimicking the firing pin. This is a sufficiently unlikely occurrence that should it occur, the direction the muzzle of the shotgun is pointed is of distant concern. Again, this is painfully, dismally obvious to anyone with even a rushed afternoon's introduction to the operation and care of sidearms.

It is an oddity then that someone plainly demonstrating such obdurate ignorance about firearms should retain a loud and vociferous opinion about their handling and accessibility.

Then again, this is America, where we let law professors who lie about their ethnicity establish national-scale regulatory agencies aimed at curtailing poor citizens' access to retail credit markets, so who's to say Gray isn't keeping in the highest traditions of our fair nation?

Firearm irresponsibility is a serious issue and each negligent death is a senseless tragedy. But using a cartoonishly buffoonish example to illustrate the problem saps the discussion of the vigor it deserves. Nincompoopery has a place, but it is not here.

White Angus

Jack White thumbs his nose at OU for publishing the details of his contract, including a very specific guacamole recipe. (h/t the one and only king of the skins Martin Atkins)

The recipe in question:

Click for an even more pit-tastic image.

Here, I'll let ol' Diamond Dave explain the logic behind weird contract riders. It makes pretty good sense once you hear it.



Consider the following two explanations for Jack White's refusal to grace OU with his sick guitar chops anymore:

1. He's a petty prima donna who has his knickers in a twist over being publicly embarrassed. Some snotty college kid at the student newspaper wants to make a fool of him? Up yours, OU. Up yours FOREVER. Ha!
2. The game theoretic logic behind strange, specific demands included in contract riders only work as intended when the punishment threat is credible. If White had folded and said "ha ha, It's just a joke you guys, I don't actually care about f'ing guacamole. It's just to keep the venue on its toes. I have a very demanding schedule what with all the traveling and writing new material and the rehearsing and whatnot. All I'm really looking for is one quick signal that the people supporting my show are being thorough and diligent," then future venues could game this bit of information to shirk consequence-free.

Naturally, these two hypotheses are not mutually exclusive. I don't know White, so I can't comment on the quality of his character, but would you be able to reject either hypothesis on the weight of the evidence presented?

People, ever since Altamont (or West Warwick if you're a little younger), audience safety is a pretty serious bit of due diligence. For conscientious performers, disregarding this duty comes with a penalty. Note that White is effectively burning his own future earnings to send a signal to venues that he takes the terms of his contract seriously. He insists on accepting his BATNA to signal his credibility. 

That? That's integrity. Integrity and humility. To have the world (or at least Oklahoma) think less of your character all for the safety of the audience and one's fellow performers is an act of courage. Well done, sir. Well done.

Fear

Fear, panic, terror: these things arise involuntarily, when the tyger tyger burning bright creeps past the perimeter in the night. I must wonder if they're truly involuntary however.

As far back as I can remember, there's always been some sort of moral panic. I'm not quite old enough to recall firsthand whatever the pearl-clutching du jour of the 70s was (to be fair, dealing with stagflation was probably of legitimate concern), but I do recall panics over: heavy metal music, the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying game, Satanic worship, drugs, teen sex, vaccines, euthanasia, and on and on and on (remember acid rain?). And now, with Newsweek's latest cover story (h/t/ ENB), it looks like we're reaching the event horizon of sex trafficking. 

Actual humans who earn actual paychecks pay actual money for these easily-debunked, flatulent puff-pastry articles with the actual intent of reading them. I find it difficult to believe that people are so deliberately stupid that they'd be willing to accept with open hearts and minds that rubbish like "kids are sacrificing fatted calves to Lucifer in America's cemeteries at midnight" is even remotely true. I find it difficult (sadly, in the absence of decent evidence) to reject the hypothesis that people buy this tripe with the express intent to raise their dander.

Humanity has slain all the dragons. Child mortality is statistically indistinguishable from zero, at least compared to what it was even as recently as a hundred years ago. Proper bloody war is something that happens far from our shores. Bear attacks are rare. Even the ceaseless owl scourge has waned of late. There is little left in the natural world for ordinary folks to fear. Increasingly, there's little in the world of men for ordinary folks to fear (yes, this is an Anglophonic observation, but living standards are rising even among the bottom billion). So could it be that moral panics like the one pictured above is simply a way for a producer to meet consumer demand? People want to be scared of something once in a while. The wolves at the gate are all dead, so why not just pick some random bullshit with a kernel of truth buried in there really deep? Can't that be a euvoluntary transaction?

I suppose it's a matter of proportionality (#TeamAristotle). Moral panics about genuine problems can divert resources towards reducing genuine harms. By the time my daughter is old enough to learn what mesothelioma is, home asbestos insulation will be something from the history books. Maybe part of the trouble is that it's harder to generate indignant panics about chronic heart disease or inattentive driving the way it is about violence in video games. I am beginning to suspect that harm-reduction isn't actually the relevant margin for collective action. Perhaps the telos is that sweet, sweet hit of imminent danger.

Trade Unions

Generally speaking, folks who share the same camp as me tend to shy from supporting the idea of trade unions. Even absent the risk of corruption, even without union management slowly but steadily alienating the workers they represent, even when everything is going according to the stated goals of the organization, it's tough for folks who believe in the freedom of individuals to associate with whom they choose (under the contract terms they find amenable) to support exclusionary labor cartels with great cheer.

Part of Smithian political economy is devoted to the endless task of slaying the mercantile hydra without the benefit of a barrel of pitch. To use a well-worn metaphor, mercantilist economics is concerned with how to divide the pie of national opulence, whereas marginalist economics is concerned with how to make the pie bigger. Who cares, goes the argument, how large your relative slice is, so long as the absolute slice is bigger than it would have been under an alternative arrangement. That's why we here at EE get away with (or try to, anyhow) cheering suboptimal arrangements like sweatshops, organ sales, and drug and sex work legalization. It's not because we're fond of low wages, desperate hawking of a kidney to pay for bread, shooting smack, or visiting a dingy massage parlor. It's because the next most attractive alternative is often dirt farming, starvation, overdosing, and vice units stretched too thin to actually pay attention to the horrors of real-deal human trafficking. Sweatshops at least give their workers the slim change of scrimping a few bucks together to send their kids to college (or to America, God willing). No such options exist for subsistence farmers.

So why bother turning any attention to a dying institution? Trade unions, after all, exist to protect workers' share of producer surplus against a specific threat: the threat of cheaper domestic labor. Unfortunately for the needleworkers, auto welders, elevator constructors... well, check the wiki page for a full list, scabs aren't the only threat to union members' wages. Capital mobility means that firms can shutter domestic plants and hire labor elsewhere in the world. Capital deepening (and cheap credit) means that firms can more easily shift towards capital-intensive production (more robots). If you're a consumer, you welcome the greater abundance of material goods available at lower prices. If you're a neoclassical economist, you welcome the triumph of your discipline over the craven misanthropy of the mercantilists, or something. But if you're one of the poor saps with your leg caught in the transitional gains trap, smug smirks decorating economists' lips is salt in the wound. You, after all, are the one swept up in having to train for an economy that has little to no use of the skills you worked so tirelessly to perfect in yon Detroit factory.

"So you have to learn some new skills" they say, those tweedy, reedy economists. "The gain to society brought by greater productivity more than offsets your personal loss." They remind you from their tenured positions that job security is not in the description, and that uncertainty is an inescapable condition of life. While I share many of these sentiments, I also give occasional thought to alternative institutional arrangements that could both provide a robust, dynamic economy and make sure that workers (who retain dignity both on the clock as workers and off as shoppers) don't get bruised too badly when they get thrown out on their keister by the robot uprising.

There's something of an agreement in economics that the government should provide those public goods not produced by private voluntary associations. Depending on whom you ask, the set of public goods can be quite expansive, or it can be extremely narrow. I'd guess that if you polled a random selection of professional economists (the KFF Survey of Americans and Economists on the Economy doesn't ask this specific question), a majority would claim that low, stable unemployment is a public good, while a very large supermajority would agree that an individual job is a private good (at least for the worker; many would also acknowledge that from the point of view of the public and the firm, labor is a production cost).

I confess to being a bit of a Cassandra when it comes to the pending demographic pressures faced by US residents. An aging population coupled with anti-immigrant sentiments, berserk spending by local and state political elites who find themselves unbound by any hard budget constraints, and a constituency characterized by a curiously strong faith in the ability of the sovereign to immanentize the eschaton by executive fiat. In other words, the US has some very large, very politically powerful public unions whose members will command immense tax-funded pensions upon retirement. And if taxation technology (remember that income taxes are merely one way of funding government) can't keep up with the promises made to police, fire, teachers, & al by politicians now decades out of office, the alternatives will be actuarially messy. Debt financing of pensions can lead to big-brick interest payments (and God forbid you actually have to start issuing debt in order to keep up with interest payments). Giving pensioners a haircut is an option, but the political fallout of that kind of decision would be nasty enough to give even a nation of Scott Walkers pause. You could default on the sovereign debt I suppose, but I'll leave the consequences of that as an exercise to the reader.

Thus the pickle: except for a few wild-haired libertarians, everyone agrees that society needs a decent police force, a reasonable public education system, and (as long as every other sovereign nation on earth is armed) some appropriate level of national defense. We also all mostly agree that the total lifetime compensation for this work should reflect the total social productivity of the work. But future taxpayers might not be able to afford it. Yikes yikes, triple yikes. You don't tug on Superman's cape, and you don't welsh on cop retirement pay (isn't that the plot of the first Robocop movie?). So how do we eat that pickle?

Well, a good start would be to reflect for a little while on the underlying exchange made between constituents and the folks laboring on their behalf. The euvoluntary exchange between police and citizen is the provision of law and order, not the banditry of asset forfeiture, not the goonery of no-knock drug raids, not the petty thuggery of stop-and-frisk. The euvoluntary exchange between educator and student is literacy, not teach-to-the-test one-size-fits-all Ritalin-fueled college prep. The euvoluntary exchange between ATF agents and individual is non-existent because the mere existence of drinking statutes contributes to non-salutary campus binge drinking and all the sexual misconduct that entails.

The culture of petty popular tyranny is not free, and the bill will come due once all the Baby Boomers retire to comfort, leaving the burden of their care to a nation weaned on the fiction of government-as-parent. I wonder whether or not it's too late to renegotiate the terms of some of these big ol' service contracts. Pot legalization is a step in the right direction, so let's not hope it's another disappointing case of closing the barn door after the cows have fled.

From Coruscant To Tatooine in Less Than 12 Parsecs

I met a stranger from a distant land. He told me of grand spaceports, shining plinths, vertiginous superscrapers, and a furious economic bustle that lifted my mercenary heart. His was a spacefaring race, you see. Deep in the hearts of the Galactic Barquentines his folk used to ply the starscape nestled the key to space travel: a core of refined phlebotinum.

Alas, the stranger's heart was heavy. In his land, the stellar vessels were lovingly crafted in his home country of Mungertopia, but every dry dram of raw phlebotinum was to be found in one place and one place only: the neighboring nation of Spivonostan. The Mungertopians were brilliant, productive engineers and scientists, notable for their grace, courage, and professionalism. Contrarily, the Spivonostanis were dour, dull, and poor. Phlebotinum mining had crowded out their traditional way of life and thanks to the conversion of (nearly) all of their physical capital, they were entirely dependent on trade with the Mungertopians to maintain their national income. This, the stranger said, weighed on his conscience. Commerce with his people had the effect, even if unintentional, of sowing dependency in the Spivonostani culture. It was exploitation, so he claimed.

"Hold on a minute," I rejoined. "Isn't there a decent case that they're the ones exploiting you?"

"Huh?" He sounded puzzled and a little amused, as if he was caught between two possibilities: I was either trying to make a dumb joke or our meeting had turned my thoughts to jelly. Either way, there was patient pity in his reply. "We're rich, they're poor. We have an advanced economy, they produce just one thing. They're, in your own words of euvoluntary exchange, desperate to trade."

"But you can't make your spacecraft fly without what they have. Consider yourselves enlightened. Where I come from, our political leaders have installed puppet governments just so we could put cheap bananas on our cereal in the morning." I reminded myself of the embarrassing news coverage I watched as a boy of Operation Just Cause and the terrible rout of Noriega. "Look, your economy is just as dependent on theirs as theirs is on yours." I was warming to the topic. "The trade may not be fully euvoluntary, but it's at least voluntary, right? You said it yourself, the alternatives would be to return to their traditional ways, making both your lands worse off." I wanted to insert a pregnant pause, but he mistook my silence for an invitation to rebut.

"But all that wealth ends up in the hands of the oligarchs that own the mines." I could almost feel the indignation spill from his clenched hands. "They own the mining equipment, they keep wages low, they buy up any patch of land that has even a remote chance of having a vein of phlebotinum underneath it. Trading with these people empowers these oligarchs. It's immoral."

"So you're worried about the inequality in Spivonostan?" I was careful to be a little vague here, intentionally not specifying exactly what sort of inequality he found worrisome.

"That's one part of it, yes. The average Spivonostani earns but a tiny share of the massive gains from trade generated by the phlebotinum economy." I could tell that he was on the cusp of making a common error: comparing his own situation with that of the target of his pity. Luckily, he caught his mistake and proceeded, "I'll grant that they're better off mining phlebotinum on the evidence that they've chosen to do so without being coerced beyond the promise of what we Mungertopians can offer in trade, but Justice demands that gains from trade be proportional. Isn't that what your Aristotle said?"

"It is. Where I come from, prudent, thrifty foreigners save and borrow in the hopes of migrating to my prosperous country to create a better life for themselves and their family. Can't the Spivonostanis do the same?" My pride and prejudice have a hard time passing up an opportunity to flog open borders, after all. "Wouldn't free migration at least mitigate some of the exploitation problems you cite?" I hoped that some elementary economics was part of his education. "Good outside options should help increase the reserve wages of the workers in Spivonostan."

"Would that this were true, young man." I was a little taken aback at being called young by this dude who looked barely out of his twenties. Maybe they've solved the aging problem in Mungertopia. I shrugged it off. "Our land is poisonous to the Spivonostanis. They can't survive here." He sounded forlorn, as if this were old, painful news. "This is a technological problem, not economic, not political, not even philosophical."

At this, he bid me a brief farewell and got back inside his wee spaceship. I watched the "my other ship is a Corellian Corvette" bumper sticker dwindle in the distance as he flew off. And I pondered.

You see, we here in the affluent West are awfully accustomed to being the Mungertopians. We're in the "first world", we're comfortable, we're rich, and we can afford the luxury of indulging condescension towards the rest of the world. But if the Singularity folks are right, we'll sooner or later find ourselves in the shoes of the Spivonostanis and it will be our brain emulation (or maybe AI) descendants who'll be trading asymmetrically with us. And it's worth considering if we want ourselves or our flesh-and-blood descendants to end up the butt of condescending paternalism of the sort we find in the new imperialism.

Why is it worth considering? Because one of the answers to Andrea's Question is that ideas, particularly given weight and time to germinate, can influence attitudes. A revival of bourgeois dignity can help not only boost human flourishing here and now, but it can underpin the approach our mechanical descendants have towards our meatier progeny. The only downside might be to stick a thumb in the eye of our contemporaries who so greatly enjoy fancying themselves to be better judges of our behavior than we are.

Of course, given the right temperament, that might be a virtue rather than a vice.

Euvoluntary Failure

Is failure euvoluntary? Megan McArdle thinks so. Or at least she argues that it should be.

I tend to agree. Failure triggers ex post regret if you let it. Particularly if you've sunk quite a bit of cost. And don't let economists fool you: sunk costs are relevant, if only psychologically. This is good and useful when it encourages sensible prudence. Prudent risk-taking is a crucial component of human progress.

But regret aversion can be unduly paralyzing. When it's driven by worries about social status or from Viagra Culture*, the terminus of dysfunctional regret aversion is stagnation.

And even though individuals have little control over how others elect to perceive them, they can muster enough courage to disregard the little voice in their head that tells them to cling desperately to an ephemeral relative social ranking.

Failure is useful when it encourages prudence. Graceful failure is useful when it does not throttle vital risk-taking. Be extremely wary when supporting institutions that are unable to clearly and accurately tell the difference.





*Revolting Cocks, Viagra Culture (Cocked and Loaded):

Every day, my thoughts are consumed by winning

I must win and everything I do I must win

my car must win
my money must win
my hair must win
my kids must win
my weiner must win
my wife must win
my mistress must win
my trip to the bunny ranch must win

I must win in business
I must win when I mow the lawn
if I do not win I am not control
so I must win
again and again
I don't need more but I must have it
more more
when the game gets old I must win
I must win
everyone else must lose
because I must win
we have met the weapon of mass destruction
and it is us

I Retract My Apology

Hello occupational licensing, my old friend. From Reason TV, via the Girl Poet:

I won't rehash arguments about how licensing has morphed from a consumer protection initiative into the institutionalized banditry you see above. That road is well-trod. Instead, I want to draw your attention to the point the video makes about CA state officials posting video on YouTube.

You can imagine the steam rising from HL Mencken's ears, can't you?

Put on your libertarian shoes for a moment and think about this. Step 1) Otherwise honest people want to make a (as far as I can tell) purely euvoluntary deal about landscaping or housepainting or something. Step 2) State enforcement agents step in and turn these people into criminals. Step 3) These same state officials, under the belief that they act in the public interest, share with the public footage of their activity. Step 5) From the public, crickets. There is no step four.

You don't have to be a staunch Nozickian to find this appalling. Indeed, I suspect you'd have to be well-blinkered to fail to characterize this as anything but above-board thuggery. And they're proud of it. I... I don't even have the words, people. Didn't the radical left of the 60's rail against The Man? This is The Man, on full display, grinningly showcasing its TheMannery for the wide world to see.

I'm not even sure whom to be ashamed of.

Okay, with this story, I now have to grudgingly admit that the looking-glass threshold has been well and crossed. The snout of the state has well and truly snuffled into the trough of euvoluntary exchange and there it browses, proudly showcasing its bedswerving flanks. I was wrong to apologize. Things really are as crazy as they seem.

Here are highlights from the original video:

EE Goes to the Movies Ep. 3: Seven Samurai

Is it possible to have spoilers for a film that came out in 1954? Well, in case you haven't already seen what is probably in the top 5 most influential films of all time, spoilers ahead.

Like every other Kurosawa flick from the end of the war through maybe Yojimbo (and I'd be willing to consider an exception there too), Seven Samurai was foremost an allegory about the dysfunction in Japanese society that produced the Pyrrhic loss in 1945. Think of the last scene where Shimura looks over the village, half his fellows dead (including the brilliantly grotesque Toshiro Mifune) and remarks about how the miserly, miserable farmers were the victors in the conflict.

Now, this film was set prior to the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate (and I think it was even before Nobunaga's campaigns), which means that in the film's universe, regional warlords kept their territories locked down pretty tightly. Stuck in a grim manorial autarky, everyone in the lower feudal ranks enjoyed a lousy menu of alternatives. No voice, no exit. In the film, the titular samurai were scrabbling for work that just wasn't available. You get the sense that they were on the verge of eating their own shoes (a pretty common theme in a lot of Japanese period drama, even in those films made after the economy had recovered), but even they weren't as bad off as the villagers, who in one memorable scene, set to picking individual grains of millet off the dirt floor to avoid starvation. There's no sense that the choice to contract unemployed swords-for-hire is anything but a last resort for the desperate villagers. The poverty of the samurai suggests that what we see is desperate bargaining, not disparate bargaining.

Seen as cinematic penance for 13 Dec, 1937 (and yes, I agree that Rashomon is the better vehicle for this particular apologia), the film encourages a viewer sensitive in EE matters to question if honor, duty, or some bowdlerized version of bushido is a tacit term of any contract proposal. I've mentioned before what Adam Smith had to say about the common duties of a morally complete human towards preventing the suffering of others. This sort of moral impetus is tough to capture in quantifiable measurements. But it sure exists. Tithing is a thing that people do.

So does this mechanism expand or contract the sphere of euvoluntary exchange? Or is it more contextual than that? Does honor or duty make it more or less challenging to adjudge ex post regret from afar? Watch this clip to refresh your memory and tell me if Shimura's character regrets helping the village.



Watch the clip and tell me if Japanese conscripts regretted serving under Hideki Tojo.

It ain't that easy, is it? Now strip the context from a supposedly regrettable exchange and make a big ol' ex ante claim about the regrettability [sic] of terms of trade when non-pecuniary motives are lumpy and heterogeneous. Practical rational choice theory gets a whole lot tougher, especially when filtered through the curious incentives faced by career bureaucrats.

Journalism

When "reporting" becomes ancillary to the regime, how many commonplace transactions become non-euvoluntary?

Will it or no, and I make no character assessments whether you do or don't, your commerce o'er amber waves of grain suffuses agents of the state with the lard they seek to pack the bearings of the war engines sent abroad to rain fire and death.

Don't get me wrong. I admit some bias as a pacifist, but I acknowledge that with unbiased (and by this, I mean the technical definition bit where omissions are random rather than systematically skewed) information, the median voter could still pretty easily come to the conclusion that violence against foreign nationals could be consistent with a rational moral and economic calculus. I might disagree with the rationale that leads to such an outcome, but the thing is, when (h/t Abby Hall) the Secretary of Defense refers to "intervention" in Syria as an option, it beggars belief that a responsible journalist would parrot this language. Or ever stoop to using the term "kinetic action" or any of the other kayfabe-laden doublespeak that oozes from between the lips of politicians.

Commerce that sends tax money to DC to fund fluffy bunny wars isn't euvoluntary.

Commerce that sends tax money to DC to rain hellfire on schools and orphanages is euvoluntary, provided that a) you're aware that this is part of the cost of war and b) you agree that the marginal benefits outweigh the marginal costs.

That the news organizations have selected for editors and journalists who dutifully refrain from approaching the regime with such skepticism suggests to me that the median voter, if better informed, would more likely find foreign aggression to lie a bit further afield from the national interest.

Also, this is probably more of a tweet than a blog comment, but if you really worry deeply about the plight of the oppressed, perhaps a better solution is to offer asylum instead of marching off to war. Just sayin'.

Nudity and Food Service

BBQ joint in TX on the receiving end of a cease-n-desist for body paint-n-pasty food service following customer complaints.

ATSRTWT (SFW)

One of the four reducible forms of a simple game is the BoS game. Some authors will call it Bach or Stravinsky, but the original name is Battle of the Sexes. It goes like this:

A husband and wife both want to go out for the night. The husband wants to see a Bach performance and the wife wants to see a Stravinsky performance. Each would prefer to see their own more than the other's, but they'd rather see the other's than to stay home and watch another soul-crushing episode of Dancing With The Bears or whatever lurid crap is found on the TV. Negotiations ensue. This game is interesting in pure game theory because it helps students understand mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium and to get a fix on the Folk Theorem a bit easier.

But it's a real thing, people! The will of the majority doesn't just apply to electoral politics. If the group wants to go to Topless Tuesday or whatever, you risk ostracism if you stay home like a Grumpy Gus. But neither might you want to see a waitress whose job it is that night to (forgive my French) sit out with her tit out. So what's the remedy? Complain to the health department (in this specific case, the city council) and put a coercive kibosh on "unsanitary" food service.

Because human breasts have nothing whatsoever to do with nutrition. Egads.

But the meta-lesson here is that the game theory of euvoluntary exchange yields interesting results with more players, says I.

Euvoluntary Labor and Workplace Safety in Bangladesh: Wilson on Bill on Yglesias

At Groping To Bethlehem, "Bill" questions Matt Y.'s comprehension of institutional economic analysis in response to the tragic Bangladeshi version of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire that happened in New York in 1911 . Note the points he makes towards the bottom of the post. In a nutshell, the problems of Bangladesh are: industrial monopsony (BATNA), information asymmetry (regret condition), and institutional corruption (coercion by human agency). These three bullet points could have been lifted straight from the EE playbook.

Labor in Bangladesh is not euvoluntary.

Good, it's critical to identify this feature of the Bangladeshi economy, because it helps inform what a reasonable, ethical response might look like. A reasonable, ethical response includes unilaterally lowering any trade barriers that might remain with the impoverished country, and granting unlimited work visas in lieu of open borders (policies that the median voter should support anyway based on the likely outcomes).

Okay, maybe my libertopian flights of fancy, even if there's something close to unanimity in the economics profession supporting free trade (in goods if not necessarily always in migration), might be a bridge and half too far. At the very least, it's important for the sake of Bangladeshi workers that well-intentioned outsiders don't push for disruptions to what is famously one of the most fragile economies in the world.

Look, language is a funny ol' boy. We have at least three terms for the pretty much the same thing: "industrial policy" (meaning protectionist policies), "boycott", and "embargo". The practical result among this trio is the same: inhabitants of the target country (as well as the aggressor country) are made poorer by reduced opportunities to truck, barter, and exchange. The only difference is in the rhetoric and the mood affiliation.

So cries for boycotts aren't really any different than cries for the same kinds of policies the US has been inflicting on the immiserated citizens of Cuba for over half a century and on the oppressed population of Iraq between the close of Gulf War I and the start of Gulf War II, Electric Boogaloo. Treating Bangladeshis like war criminals hardly seems like an appropriate response to an industrial accident. It's probably wiser to recognize that workplace safety is a normal, perhaps superior good: as income rises, so goeth demand. It's probably wiser to do what we can to build wealth and productive capacity (read: trade with the Bangladeshi people) with them rather than throttle the extent of their market.

On a more positive note, I'm encouraged to see that the Bangladeshi people themselves are demonstrating against poor workplace safety standards: it's (weak) evidence that overall conditions could be improving. Truly desperate people don't have the luxury of marching in picket lines. Accidents notwithstanding, things might be looking up a bit.