Honest Toddler author Bunmi Laditan asks: is there something wrong with wet nursing in the wealthy secular West?
ATSRTWT
Cheap, reasonable alternatives abound, so it can't be a matter of BATNA disparity. If anything, the opposite is true. We sort of expect wet nursing to be the recourse of folks who can't afford anything better.
Of course, the same is true of ox tail soup or chitterlings. When I was a boy, those were the foods of poor people. Same goes for growing vegetables in your backyard or canning peaches, or knowing your way around a sewing machine. Time was, there were a whole pile of things that ordinary folks were obliged to do because anonymous, impersonal exchanges were either unavailable or beyond the means of the typical citizen. Not so anymore. We're now wealthy enough to play at being poor. It's a nice thing to be able to claim, that.
I'm on Bunmi's side. Rock on, weird mom. There are a whole lot of other hobbies you might choose that would be a lot worse for you and for them kids. Proust!
h/t Double D
Showing posts with label love in a barter economy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label love in a barter economy. Show all posts
Sunday, August 16, 2015
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Drop The Internet And Put Your Hands Where I Can See Them
"Revenge" porn is the sort of thing that should offend anyone with even the barest hint of a conscience. But should it be a criminal offense?
The Illinois General Assembly and Governor Quinn think so. Recently signed into statute law, Public Act 098-1138 makes the non-consensual dissemination of private sexual images a crime (h/t E.N. Brown).
Ignore for a moment the vague wording of the statute ("'Intimate parts' means the fully unclothed, partially unclothed or transparently clothed genitals, pubic area, anus, or if the person is female, a partially or fully exposed nipple, including exposure through transparent clothing." [emphasis added]) and consider instead the common-sense jurisprudence.
I don't pretend to understand folks' penchant for taking nude photographs or video. There already exists oceans of pornography cheaply and readily available and let's face it: most amateur photographers don't know the first thing about lighting, framing, mise en scene or the countless other photographic and cinematic tricks to making others look good on film, particularly when disrobed. Still, it is evidently a choice people make, and I have no particular moral authority to gainsay what private people elect to do with their time and talent. Even if it is sending each other grainy, wobbly shots of their grubby buttholes or whatever. What I don't quite grasp is how this sort of thing isn't resolvable in tort. It seems far more akin to a strain of defamation law than to an actual jeopardize-the-community crime.
Whatever the case may be, the Governor's office has held up the statute as a model for the rest of the country. And if it manages to survive First Amendment challenges (I am not willing to bet one way or the other on this, though I confess at least a little skepticism to its robustness), I think it may well have a chance to do just that.
Why? Because BATNA disparity. Though less so than yesteryear, there's still a very large downside to having your nude pictures publicized, a downside that does not exist for the one doing the publicizing. This statute, or ones like it, aim directly at this imbalance. The moral intuition is clear: BATNA parity. If for no reason other than this, it'll be a rousing success.
As for the unintended consequences? Well, I'm sure those will sort themselves out eventually. It's not like America is running short on prison space or anything, nor that public defender offices are desperately overbooked and understaffed. And hey, SWAT raids never go wrong, so why not just criminalize more behavior ordinarily reserved for tort, right? Cops don't accidentally kill or maim non-threatening civilians. This is America, after all.
The Illinois General Assembly and Governor Quinn think so. Recently signed into statute law, Public Act 098-1138 makes the non-consensual dissemination of private sexual images a crime (h/t E.N. Brown).
Ignore for a moment the vague wording of the statute ("'Intimate parts' means the fully unclothed, partially unclothed or transparently clothed genitals, pubic area, anus, or if the person is female, a partially or fully exposed nipple, including exposure through transparent clothing." [emphasis added]) and consider instead the common-sense jurisprudence.
I don't pretend to understand folks' penchant for taking nude photographs or video. There already exists oceans of pornography cheaply and readily available and let's face it: most amateur photographers don't know the first thing about lighting, framing, mise en scene or the countless other photographic and cinematic tricks to making others look good on film, particularly when disrobed. Still, it is evidently a choice people make, and I have no particular moral authority to gainsay what private people elect to do with their time and talent. Even if it is sending each other grainy, wobbly shots of their grubby buttholes or whatever. What I don't quite grasp is how this sort of thing isn't resolvable in tort. It seems far more akin to a strain of defamation law than to an actual jeopardize-the-community crime.
Whatever the case may be, the Governor's office has held up the statute as a model for the rest of the country. And if it manages to survive First Amendment challenges (I am not willing to bet one way or the other on this, though I confess at least a little skepticism to its robustness), I think it may well have a chance to do just that.
Why? Because BATNA disparity. Though less so than yesteryear, there's still a very large downside to having your nude pictures publicized, a downside that does not exist for the one doing the publicizing. This statute, or ones like it, aim directly at this imbalance. The moral intuition is clear: BATNA parity. If for no reason other than this, it'll be a rousing success.
As for the unintended consequences? Well, I'm sure those will sort themselves out eventually. It's not like America is running short on prison space or anything, nor that public defender offices are desperately overbooked and understaffed. And hey, SWAT raids never go wrong, so why not just criminalize more behavior ordinarily reserved for tort, right? Cops don't accidentally kill or maim non-threatening civilians. This is America, after all.
Friday, December 5, 2014
Marriage: Private Good, Public Institution
Two friends recently wed. When I first met Pamela, her surname was the same as mine. She was kind enough to grant me the rare luxury of shortening her name to "Pam" for the sake of the rhyming scheme. As of earlier this week, she and BH have merged to form the Voltron we now call #TeamByrmela.
Okay, maybe it's just me that does that.
At any rate, congratulations you guys. And a well-timed one, as Justin Wolfers has been getting some really good press over his latest (impeccable, as always) empirical work on the role of the divorce regime as it relates to marriage stability. The tl;dr version: divorce rates have tanked. People who choose to marry these days tend to stay married. Of course, people have been delaying marriage and having kids out of wedlock and all that stuff. But for those folks who do tie the knot, they seem to be better at forward induction. There are fewer social pressures to wed hastily, therefore the rate of euvoluntary marriage is greater. That's fantastic news, so long as you're in a euvoluntary marriage.
Consider the following distribution:
The right tail has always been good to go. They marry, they stay married, they have decent jobs, live in good neighborhoods, obtain good educations, contribute plentifully to their retirement accounts, get regular checkups, and eat kale. The left tail has always been doomed, and the evidence for that is in the dismal failure of longstanding New Deal and Great Society programs to eradicate measured poverty. Life in the left tail is characterized by periodic joblessness, substance abuse, negative savings rates, unplanned reproduction, you know—pretty much most of the chronic gripes you hear from social conservatives.
But the grey area is what's contentious here. Wolfers is picking up a tendency for these folks to (marginally) postpone marriage until they've found a better match. No hasty marriage at 19 means no messy divorce at 35. My hunch is that the reasons for this are some admixture of both cultural and regime reform. There's less social stigma to being unwed, and that's related, probably by both cause and effect, to the advent of no-fault divorce.
The benefits of a good, stable marriage are unquestionable. The folks in the right tail have better lifetime earnings, more satisfaction, and usually a legacy they take pride in (see some of Double-D's posts on end of life regret for counterexamples). If the folks in the middle of the distribution would simply be more prudent and diligent about participating earnestly in the marriage market, they would find that the discounted present value of a successful marriage far outweigh the costs of obtaining one.
The empirical question is this: how receptive to treatment is that "if"? As Wolfers and Stevenson have noted in other research, the costs of at-fault regimes include higher rates of domestic violence and spousal suicide. Yikes. Restoring the old regime would hit the left side of the gray zone pretty hard.
There are maybe some tax incentives that could encourage the grey zone to shrink, at least a little, and probably only on the right side. But having one mortgage instead of two is already a pretty strong financial incentive, ne c'est pas?
So what remains? The institution of marriage is a public good: it has all the characteristics of a non-rival, non-excludable good. Individual marriages, contrarily, are precious private goods. Typically, when we want to encourage good behavior without the downsides of relying on coercion, we default to rhetoric, to persuasion. In the misty days of my youth, we watched felicitous families on television like The Waltons, or the Cunninghams, or the Ingalls clan out there in that little house on the... I dunno what to call it... savanna I suppose... veldt maybe. As I grew older, Ward Cleaver gave way to Al Bundy. TV families stopped being aspirational and became more cynical. Long time readers might accurately predict that I prefer cynicism in my own entertainment fare, given my cruel and unforgiving temperament, but if Deirdre McCloskey and Virginia Postrel are right, we get more of what we respect, we get more of what we glamourize. Perhaps we'd see more stable marriages out there if viewers would consume more content that raised the relative status of durable marriage.
A public service, if you will, in support of a euvoluntary institution.
Just watch out for hammy tropes though. Audiences know when they're being preached to, and they don't much like it.
Okay, maybe it's just me that does that.
At any rate, congratulations you guys. And a well-timed one, as Justin Wolfers has been getting some really good press over his latest (impeccable, as always) empirical work on the role of the divorce regime as it relates to marriage stability. The tl;dr version: divorce rates have tanked. People who choose to marry these days tend to stay married. Of course, people have been delaying marriage and having kids out of wedlock and all that stuff. But for those folks who do tie the knot, they seem to be better at forward induction. There are fewer social pressures to wed hastily, therefore the rate of euvoluntary marriage is greater. That's fantastic news, so long as you're in a euvoluntary marriage.
Consider the following distribution:
But the grey area is what's contentious here. Wolfers is picking up a tendency for these folks to (marginally) postpone marriage until they've found a better match. No hasty marriage at 19 means no messy divorce at 35. My hunch is that the reasons for this are some admixture of both cultural and regime reform. There's less social stigma to being unwed, and that's related, probably by both cause and effect, to the advent of no-fault divorce.
The benefits of a good, stable marriage are unquestionable. The folks in the right tail have better lifetime earnings, more satisfaction, and usually a legacy they take pride in (see some of Double-D's posts on end of life regret for counterexamples). If the folks in the middle of the distribution would simply be more prudent and diligent about participating earnestly in the marriage market, they would find that the discounted present value of a successful marriage far outweigh the costs of obtaining one.
The empirical question is this: how receptive to treatment is that "if"? As Wolfers and Stevenson have noted in other research, the costs of at-fault regimes include higher rates of domestic violence and spousal suicide. Yikes. Restoring the old regime would hit the left side of the gray zone pretty hard.
There are maybe some tax incentives that could encourage the grey zone to shrink, at least a little, and probably only on the right side. But having one mortgage instead of two is already a pretty strong financial incentive, ne c'est pas?
So what remains? The institution of marriage is a public good: it has all the characteristics of a non-rival, non-excludable good. Individual marriages, contrarily, are precious private goods. Typically, when we want to encourage good behavior without the downsides of relying on coercion, we default to rhetoric, to persuasion. In the misty days of my youth, we watched felicitous families on television like The Waltons, or the Cunninghams, or the Ingalls clan out there in that little house on the... I dunno what to call it... savanna I suppose... veldt maybe. As I grew older, Ward Cleaver gave way to Al Bundy. TV families stopped being aspirational and became more cynical. Long time readers might accurately predict that I prefer cynicism in my own entertainment fare, given my cruel and unforgiving temperament, but if Deirdre McCloskey and Virginia Postrel are right, we get more of what we respect, we get more of what we glamourize. Perhaps we'd see more stable marriages out there if viewers would consume more content that raised the relative status of durable marriage.
A public service, if you will, in support of a euvoluntary institution.
Just watch out for hammy tropes though. Audiences know when they're being preached to, and they don't much like it.
Friday, August 1, 2014
Michelle Goldberg on Constrained Optimization
One important lesson I took away from my chat with Maggie McNeill: criminalizing prostitutes' clients can be worse than criminalizing prostitutes. Clients have more to lose from a conviction, so they'll insist on additional protections, at the expense of the safety of workers.
h/t Ross D & Reihan S
It's good to see the trope spreading, along with folks' willingness to recognize that if sex work looks like exploitation, it's simply because the alternative circumstances are worse, and that it's pretty awful to punish someone from hailing from lousy circumstances.
Michelle Goldberg, channeling Bastiat at his best peers through the veil of intentions to see the unseen consequences of well-meaning policy.
Michelle Goldberg, channeling Bastiat at his best peers through the veil of intentions to see the unseen consequences of well-meaning policy.
Salient quote:
The answer to the question of which law better protects women—full legalization or the criminalization of demand—is as much ideological as empirical. It depends on whether you see Anna as a trafficked, exploited woman mouthing sex-industry propaganda, or as a person with agency making the best choices she can given her constrained circumstances. It depends on how much regulation you’re willing to accept in the name of gender equality, and ultimately whether you think making it harder for some prostitutes to work is a worthwhile price to pay for reducing the number of women in prostitution overall.Driving a trade, any trade, underground makes it harder to identify actual cases of abuse. When everyone is a criminal, genuine criminals find it easier to blend in with the crowd. Prostitution may not be euvoluntary, but it's a dang sight better than violent criminals running amok among women of the evening with impunity.
h/t Ross D & Reihan S
Thursday, May 1, 2014
Res Ipsa Loquitur: The Virgin Auctions, Round Deux
A website (here) allows folks to place a bid on obtaining the virginity of a 27 year old medical student going by the pseudonym "Elizabeth Raine."
According to the site, the max bid as of press datetime is US$550k. I wonder if folks are running sealed-bid scripts against this value like you can do on Ebay. Hm. Whoever wrote the terms and conditions seems to be familiar with elementary auction theory (there's a $100 buy-in).
Anyway, is this euvoluntary? According to the site, she doesn't really need the money. She's a well-to-do white American girl who's lived abroad, and she's studying medicine. She's got a pretty good BATNA. I see no evidence of exploitation, at least in the direction you'd expect. If anything, she might be the one doing the exploiting.
How about unconscionablity? This isn't the first time someone's tried a trick like this. Repetition is what morphs the bizarre into the mundane. How many more high denomination virgin auctions need to happen before the price drops sharply and it's just a dreary routine?
If this story is legit (and I have some reservations), I'm curious if it's a leading indicator of... something. I'm not sure what. I agree with Maggie McNeill that the way prostitutes are treated in the US is egregious, but most of the worst is focused on the discount end of the market. Do high-cash-value transactions help alter public moral intuitions towards the sex workers who would most directly benefit from decriminalization?
According to the site, the max bid as of press datetime is US$550k. I wonder if folks are running sealed-bid scripts against this value like you can do on Ebay. Hm. Whoever wrote the terms and conditions seems to be familiar with elementary auction theory (there's a $100 buy-in).
Anyway, is this euvoluntary? According to the site, she doesn't really need the money. She's a well-to-do white American girl who's lived abroad, and she's studying medicine. She's got a pretty good BATNA. I see no evidence of exploitation, at least in the direction you'd expect. If anything, she might be the one doing the exploiting.
How about unconscionablity? This isn't the first time someone's tried a trick like this. Repetition is what morphs the bizarre into the mundane. How many more high denomination virgin auctions need to happen before the price drops sharply and it's just a dreary routine?
If this story is legit (and I have some reservations), I'm curious if it's a leading indicator of... something. I'm not sure what. I agree with Maggie McNeill that the way prostitutes are treated in the US is egregious, but most of the worst is focused on the discount end of the market. Do high-cash-value transactions help alter public moral intuitions towards the sex workers who would most directly benefit from decriminalization?
Wednesday, April 2, 2014
Interlude: Ice-T vs. Adam Smith
An exercise in analytical moral intuition. Please reconcile the following:
1) "As it is the power of exchanging that gives occasion to the division of labour, so the extent of this division must always be limited by the extent of that power, or, in other words, by the extent of the market. When the market is very small, no person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself entirely to one employment, for want of the power to exchange all that surplus part of the produce of his own labour, which is over and above his own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men’s labour as he has occasion for."
2) "Pimpin' ain't easy"
references
1) Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations Book I ch. 3 (1776)
2) Ice-T album "Rhyme Pays" track titled "Somebody Gotta Do It (Pimpin' Ain't Easy!!!)" (1987)
1) "As it is the power of exchanging that gives occasion to the division of labour, so the extent of this division must always be limited by the extent of that power, or, in other words, by the extent of the market. When the market is very small, no person can have any encouragement to dedicate himself entirely to one employment, for want of the power to exchange all that surplus part of the produce of his own labour, which is over and above his own consumption, for such parts of the produce of other men’s labour as he has occasion for."
2) "Pimpin' ain't easy"
references
1) Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations Book I ch. 3 (1776)
2) Ice-T album "Rhyme Pays" track titled "Somebody Gotta Do It (Pimpin' Ain't Easy!!!)" (1987)
Monday, December 30, 2013
Antifragile Amish
Eccentric columnists are one thing. The infamously hedonistic Amish are quite another. While Thompson urged the young people of this fair nation to flirt with the weird, our dulcet domestic Dutch diaspora demands nothing from us English. Nothing beyond ordinary peaceable recognition of property rights anyway. From the wool I've gathered, the yarn I see spun is that the Appia Amish is one of family and community first. Their take on technology is that alienation is the tip-top cardinal error. Gazing into the unblinking eye of the television (or, egads, Buzzfeed) bears the opportunity cost of foregone time forging social bonds. No and no, and no again. Nein. Neen. Stem tegen.
Incidentally, the rite of rumspringa is of interest to euvoluntary exchangeurs on its own merits, questioning what counts as coercion. Nominally, kids who've finished sowing their wild oats have the option of abandoning the community for good. Few elect to do so. Why? From what I gather, the practice of strengthening community bonds is extremely effective. There appears to be a nice thick margin where the (relative) nihilism of the English Ways is sufficiently terrifying that the home community retains a strong appeal, privations notwithstanding. Does this count as a flavor of coercion? "Sure you can move to Austin and work in an office with people you don't know, an outsider for the rest of your life. Or, you can come back home where everyone you've ever known (for better or worse) is waiting for you." Coercion by... what? Love? Community? Uncertainty aversion? It's definitely (probably? possibly?) not a coercion likely to engage the moralizing sentiments of the moderate English (for those not in the know, "English" is the term the Amish use to describe non-Amish, so even my blushing full-blood direct immigrant Lithuanian bride would be English to Amish folks). But enough digressing, people. I'd like to consider the larger upshot of a robust Amish community.
And that upshot is the preservation of a not-horrendous aggregate BATNA. Amish communities preserve heirloom seed stock, a fine hedge against a tightly-wound GMO monoculture disaster. They retain vast stores of knowledge of animal husbandry, carpentry, masonry... well, pretty much all the skilled trades you need to run a fully-functioning community minus a nationwide power grid or electronic communications network. Should some great gnashing non-ergodic event wipe out global power distribution, the odds that the world would end up looking like a Kevin Costner movie would be at least somewhat hedged by trade in physical goods as well as skill capital between the Amish and the English.
So then to the moral intuition. It's my general impression that most workaday Americans, when they take a moment to even think about the Amish (and I don't mean to focus on them specifically, I think the moral intuitions could apply to Mennonites, Quakers, or other plain-style religious Diasporas) find the notion behind opting out on a community scale to be perfectly hunky-dory, offensive "Amish Mafia"-style nonsense television programming notwithstanding. Question then: is the intuition behind this similar to what I posited for truck systems? Or is it thanks to a widespread appreciation for the First Amendment? Something else entirely? I'm hesitant to pin my hopes on people's appreciation for my BATNA preservation argument. I think that this sort of reasoning appeals to people who support more funding for near-earth collision monitoring, but not to the median voter.
What of it then, my cherished readers? Do you think the various Pennsylvania Dutch are euvoluntary? Why or why not? If not, how far should political paternalism extend into the community? Does your answer to that last question encourage you to think about how far political paternalism should extend into any community? What's the difference?
Incidentally, the rite of rumspringa is of interest to euvoluntary exchangeurs on its own merits, questioning what counts as coercion. Nominally, kids who've finished sowing their wild oats have the option of abandoning the community for good. Few elect to do so. Why? From what I gather, the practice of strengthening community bonds is extremely effective. There appears to be a nice thick margin where the (relative) nihilism of the English Ways is sufficiently terrifying that the home community retains a strong appeal, privations notwithstanding. Does this count as a flavor of coercion? "Sure you can move to Austin and work in an office with people you don't know, an outsider for the rest of your life. Or, you can come back home where everyone you've ever known (for better or worse) is waiting for you." Coercion by... what? Love? Community? Uncertainty aversion? It's definitely (probably? possibly?) not a coercion likely to engage the moralizing sentiments of the moderate English (for those not in the know, "English" is the term the Amish use to describe non-Amish, so even my blushing full-blood direct immigrant Lithuanian bride would be English to Amish folks). But enough digressing, people. I'd like to consider the larger upshot of a robust Amish community.
And that upshot is the preservation of a not-horrendous aggregate BATNA. Amish communities preserve heirloom seed stock, a fine hedge against a tightly-wound GMO monoculture disaster. They retain vast stores of knowledge of animal husbandry, carpentry, masonry... well, pretty much all the skilled trades you need to run a fully-functioning community minus a nationwide power grid or electronic communications network. Should some great gnashing non-ergodic event wipe out global power distribution, the odds that the world would end up looking like a Kevin Costner movie would be at least somewhat hedged by trade in physical goods as well as skill capital between the Amish and the English.
So then to the moral intuition. It's my general impression that most workaday Americans, when they take a moment to even think about the Amish (and I don't mean to focus on them specifically, I think the moral intuitions could apply to Mennonites, Quakers, or other plain-style religious Diasporas) find the notion behind opting out on a community scale to be perfectly hunky-dory, offensive "Amish Mafia"-style nonsense television programming notwithstanding. Question then: is the intuition behind this similar to what I posited for truck systems? Or is it thanks to a widespread appreciation for the First Amendment? Something else entirely? I'm hesitant to pin my hopes on people's appreciation for my BATNA preservation argument. I think that this sort of reasoning appeals to people who support more funding for near-earth collision monitoring, but not to the median voter.
What of it then, my cherished readers? Do you think the various Pennsylvania Dutch are euvoluntary? Why or why not? If not, how far should political paternalism extend into the community? Does your answer to that last question encourage you to think about how far political paternalism should extend into any community? What's the difference?
Wednesday, November 13, 2013
Alternative Currencies and the Transitional Gains Trap
Introducing Stripperbux™, the revolutionary new truck currency that allows the discerning gentleman to avoid the problem of burlesque club inflation. How does it work? Glad you asked.
Club patrons exchange fiat currency for our inflation-indexed Stripperbux at the door. Rates are based on chained CPI with a base year of 2000 (easy to remember that way). Our customers can then relax and enjoy the show knowing they won't be devaluing the services our lovely ladies provide no matter how quantitative the easing is from the FOMC.
[editor's note: this pitch needs 75% more innuendo. Revise and resubmit]
Golly, sounds marvelous (h/t Eric C.) doesn't it? So marvelous that Stripperbux might well take over as an inflation (or other calamity) hedge in the local community, not all that different from other local currencies. Who wouldn't want to buy a box of Betty Crocker cake mix using a dollar with a picture of a pole dancer printed on it?
I think you already know the answer to that question. If you don't think currency has sentimental value attached to it, suggest to a non-economist friend that the US drop the Federal Reserve Note and adopt the Euro (wear protection). What does this imply for these cutesy local currencies? It suggests to me that for any of them to gain ascendancy, you'd need to see 3 things: (1) demonstrated unreliability of the sovereign currency relative to the substitute, (2) a fiat authority unwilling to exercise the coercive power of the state, and (3) widespread coordination strong enough to overcome aesthetic objections.
There's not much the local issuer can do to affect FOMC decisions or Treasury agents from busting down the door on false utterance or money laundering charges, but there is something to be done about item #3. At least for physical currency (Bitcoin might be able to perform better on 1 over time, and it's distributed nature is a fine hedge against 2), the lever is in the mind. Stripperbux would probably fare poorly against its rival, Freedombux™.
And that's why aesthetics are important when thinking about EE. Yes, vagaries of taste are artifacts of the mind, but that does not make them any less real than the socks on your feet or the plastic in your wallet. De gustibus non est disputandum, but that does not imply de gustibus non est validum.
Club patrons exchange fiat currency for our inflation-indexed Stripperbux at the door. Rates are based on chained CPI with a base year of 2000 (easy to remember that way). Our customers can then relax and enjoy the show knowing they won't be devaluing the services our lovely ladies provide no matter how quantitative the easing is from the FOMC.
[editor's note: this pitch needs 75% more innuendo. Revise and resubmit]
Golly, sounds marvelous (h/t Eric C.) doesn't it? So marvelous that Stripperbux might well take over as an inflation (or other calamity) hedge in the local community, not all that different from other local currencies. Who wouldn't want to buy a box of Betty Crocker cake mix using a dollar with a picture of a pole dancer printed on it?
I think you already know the answer to that question. If you don't think currency has sentimental value attached to it, suggest to a non-economist friend that the US drop the Federal Reserve Note and adopt the Euro (wear protection). What does this imply for these cutesy local currencies? It suggests to me that for any of them to gain ascendancy, you'd need to see 3 things: (1) demonstrated unreliability of the sovereign currency relative to the substitute, (2) a fiat authority unwilling to exercise the coercive power of the state, and (3) widespread coordination strong enough to overcome aesthetic objections.
There's not much the local issuer can do to affect FOMC decisions or Treasury agents from busting down the door on false utterance or money laundering charges, but there is something to be done about item #3. At least for physical currency (Bitcoin might be able to perform better on 1 over time, and it's distributed nature is a fine hedge against 2), the lever is in the mind. Stripperbux would probably fare poorly against its rival, Freedombux™.
And that's why aesthetics are important when thinking about EE. Yes, vagaries of taste are artifacts of the mind, but that does not make them any less real than the socks on your feet or the plastic in your wallet. De gustibus non est disputandum, but that does not imply de gustibus non est validum.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
HiDine: Euvoluntary?
Gateway gold-digging?
Is it euvoluntary for a dinner guest to dine and dash on the gentleman's nickel? Is there more to the implied contract than just a delicious meal and some predictable conversation?
Or is this exploitation somehow? It seems patronizing to suggest that women who sign up for something like this are non compos mentis, even if it's something that a lot of folks would find icky.
WWSS?
Is it euvoluntary for a dinner guest to dine and dash on the gentleman's nickel? Is there more to the implied contract than just a delicious meal and some predictable conversation?
Or is this exploitation somehow? It seems patronizing to suggest that women who sign up for something like this are non compos mentis, even if it's something that a lot of folks would find icky.
WWSS?
Wednesday, September 11, 2013
Haggling Norms: Euvoluntary?
Jeffrey Tucker (with special thinks to Cathy Reisenwitz) has a great piece on haggling. The question he wants to us to ask ourselves: how is a woman buying a car in Illinois like an American buying a sponge in Italy? As a former expat, I frequently found myself on the short end of the stick abroad. It upset my wife to no end when I'd get shafted by a vendor who mumbled something like, "he's an American, he's got money" in a language he thought I didn't speak.
Still, a deal's a deal. It was voluntary.
But was it euvoluntary? Does the fact that other folks get better deals make your relatively lousy terms of trade unfair? Why? Which EE condition is violated?
Still, a deal's a deal. It was voluntary.
But was it euvoluntary? Does the fact that other folks get better deals make your relatively lousy terms of trade unfair? Why? Which EE condition is violated?
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Castillo on the EE of Promiscuity
ATSRTWT
EE quote: "Although rarely framed as such, in many ways, the euvoluntary exchange of semen and security for womb space and childcare constitutes one of humanity’s earliest, and perhaps most essential, economic spheres."
Recall that mating quasi-markets are primarily barter-based matching markets. Slut-shaming curbs commodification using social pressure. Some sex is euvoluntary. Not all of it. Why?
EE quote: "Although rarely framed as such, in many ways, the euvoluntary exchange of semen and security for womb space and childcare constitutes one of humanity’s earliest, and perhaps most essential, economic spheres."
Recall that mating quasi-markets are primarily barter-based matching markets. Slut-shaming curbs commodification using social pressure. Some sex is euvoluntary. Not all of it. Why?
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Lovers' Quarrel
English is a decent enough vulgar tongue to get by as a de facto lingua franca most of the time. Unfortunately, it also happens to be rife with pernicious abbreviation, some customary, some intentional, and some hewn from the topsy-turvy timber of accidental conquest.
"Love" is one such unfortunate casualty of the yaw of history.
You see, language helps define perception. Let me give you an example from one of the other languages I speak (poorly). In the Lithuanian tongue, the word ranka means both "hand" and "arm". And the distinction isn't merely a trifle of language. Lithuanians consider the hand (not to include the fingers) to be part of the same object as what we call the arm. It's one thing traveling from shoulder to knuckle. Sure, there are closer descriptive terms to distinguish the carpal area from the ulnar and radial, but like in English, they're specialist, almost medical terms. The Lithuanian vulgate is as I have described it. Similarly, there are different words, not merely adjectives, to distinguish between blue (mėlynas) and light blue (žydras). Yes yes, we have "azure" and "cerulean" and all those crayon colors, but for most folks, blue is blue, and they're just shades of the same color. To a Lithuanian, they're different colors entirely!
And so pity poor English and its lone, lonely "love". Contrast this barren catch-all with the four dazzling flavors from the Greek: φιλία (friend-love), στοργη (family-love), έρως (erotic love), and αγάπη (divine love). The language builds mental artifacts in the minds of the speakers, so you might forgive English-speaking people from confusing eros with storge, or the love of boning with the love of the hearth.
Marina Adshade applies economic reasoning to topics of love, sex, and sorting behavior. When we here at EE plug for legalized prostitution, I think we default to thinking of market-transacting love as purely erotic. When Adshade analyzes pairwise mating, she carefully distinguishes the long-term, barter-driven marriage market from the short-term spot transactions of the sex market. Speakers of Greek understand the difference much more clearly and naturally than speakers of English (on average, of course).
So with the four flavors of classical love, we might want to revisit what euvoluntary exchange looks like in each one. The lowest forms seem to be purely reciprocal in nature. A friendship is freely exchanged and faces low exit costs. Philia (and yes, this is where the whole "City of Brotherly Love" is from) must be euvoluntary, or else it becomes something else. Even mafioso who express familial love towards each other are not to be blamed for their affections, but for their coercion elsewhere. At the other extreme, agape is not really an exchange at all: it flows from the divine to the breast of mankind. Talk about a BATNA disparity!
So trade in the beast with two backs is something else, something apart, something distinct when we employ cautious linguistic partitions? Group X thinks so.
"Love" is one such unfortunate casualty of the yaw of history.
You see, language helps define perception. Let me give you an example from one of the other languages I speak (poorly). In the Lithuanian tongue, the word ranka means both "hand" and "arm". And the distinction isn't merely a trifle of language. Lithuanians consider the hand (not to include the fingers) to be part of the same object as what we call the arm. It's one thing traveling from shoulder to knuckle. Sure, there are closer descriptive terms to distinguish the carpal area from the ulnar and radial, but like in English, they're specialist, almost medical terms. The Lithuanian vulgate is as I have described it. Similarly, there are different words, not merely adjectives, to distinguish between blue (mėlynas) and light blue (žydras). Yes yes, we have "azure" and "cerulean" and all those crayon colors, but for most folks, blue is blue, and they're just shades of the same color. To a Lithuanian, they're different colors entirely!
And so pity poor English and its lone, lonely "love". Contrast this barren catch-all with the four dazzling flavors from the Greek: φιλία (friend-love), στοργη (family-love), έρως (erotic love), and αγάπη (divine love). The language builds mental artifacts in the minds of the speakers, so you might forgive English-speaking people from confusing eros with storge, or the love of boning with the love of the hearth.
Marina Adshade applies economic reasoning to topics of love, sex, and sorting behavior. When we here at EE plug for legalized prostitution, I think we default to thinking of market-transacting love as purely erotic. When Adshade analyzes pairwise mating, she carefully distinguishes the long-term, barter-driven marriage market from the short-term spot transactions of the sex market. Speakers of Greek understand the difference much more clearly and naturally than speakers of English (on average, of course).
So with the four flavors of classical love, we might want to revisit what euvoluntary exchange looks like in each one. The lowest forms seem to be purely reciprocal in nature. A friendship is freely exchanged and faces low exit costs. Philia (and yes, this is where the whole "City of Brotherly Love" is from) must be euvoluntary, or else it becomes something else. Even mafioso who express familial love towards each other are not to be blamed for their affections, but for their coercion elsewhere. At the other extreme, agape is not really an exchange at all: it flows from the divine to the breast of mankind. Talk about a BATNA disparity!
So trade in the beast with two backs is something else, something apart, something distinct when we employ cautious linguistic partitions? Group X thinks so.
Monday, January 28, 2013
Euvoluntary Truck (Sixteen Tons)
North,
Wallis and Weingast (NWW) refine concepts of violence and social orders in
their instant classic “A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History”
(2006, available from NBER) by modeling what they call “limited access orders”,
in which elites curb private predation by establishing well-guarded rents and “open
access orders”, in which elites abdicate strict control over the portals to
political and economic activity.
Some people say a man is made outta mud
A poor man's made out of muscle and blood
Muscle and blood and skin and bones
A mind that's a-weak and a back that's strong
Thursday, December 27, 2012
Barter?! But I Just Met Her!
Bartering is a high-trust activity. My in-laws hail from a small Lithuanian farm. To this day, they still plow the fields with those stout little Baltic horses that look like 3/4 versions of proper draft animals. Things being as they are, it's not at all uncommon for them to round up a few folks from the village and get them to help out at harvest time in return for a heaping helping of delicious Lithuanian vodka. For skilled help, neighboring farmers rely on an informal intertemporal labor pool. You help me yank potatoes out of the ground this fall, I help you fertilize the rye field next spring.
Both of these types of transactions rely on trust. The point transactions are of the caveat emptor type: I'm getting decent labor (while it's still sober) and my hands are getting quality ethyl spirits. The longer-horizon arrangements are part personal trust, part trust in the informal institutions (and maybe some trust in regime continuity, but for bucolic kaimietiai, the goings-on in Vilnius are mostly irrelevant political theatrics). Because trust suffuses these exchanges, it's probably reasonable to expect them to be mostly euvoluntary.
Bartering is likely to be something that happens when both parties are similarly desperate and not especially disparate. That is, barter is an institution poor people of mostly equal station resort to when times are tough. Moral intuitions towards barter transactions are probably predicated on this, so I have a hunch that comfortably wealthy, pampered Westerners might cluck their tongues at the plight of barterers, but they are unlikely to cry exploitation. I can also claim that should such wealthy, pampered Westerners find themselves in a bargaining situation with these poor, benighted souls abroad, they will find themselves utterly fleeced [I cite personal experience here].
I do wonder how portable the moral intuitions are behind barter. How would folks in the West react if they found out oil firms were paying local derrick workers in goats rather than cash? Even if the goats were more valuable than their cash equivalent to the workers, do you suppose network news viewers would be filled with grand indignation? I'd bet even odds they would be.
Barter is unsophisticated trade: it's used by children and underdeveloped societies. Reverting to barter in a cash economy carries with it social and emotional freight. It's fine for close equals to barter, but that's probably the extent of it. Anything else smacks of condescension, rightly or wrongly, irrespective of the opinions of the nominally disadvantaged trading party.
I usually like to close posts like this with a meaningful conclusion or some follow-up questions, but I don't have anything for you today. I suppose that if you're interested, you might ask some people you know about their feelings towards barter. I think you might find that people have interesting and perhaps ill-examined attitudes towards cash transactions. This is one of the reasons I don't much care for monetary economics: I see economics as a holistic discipline and plumbing the public's attitude to media of exchange is probably more challenging than many economists suspect.
Both of these types of transactions rely on trust. The point transactions are of the caveat emptor type: I'm getting decent labor (while it's still sober) and my hands are getting quality ethyl spirits. The longer-horizon arrangements are part personal trust, part trust in the informal institutions (and maybe some trust in regime continuity, but for bucolic kaimietiai, the goings-on in Vilnius are mostly irrelevant political theatrics). Because trust suffuses these exchanges, it's probably reasonable to expect them to be mostly euvoluntary.
Bartering is likely to be something that happens when both parties are similarly desperate and not especially disparate. That is, barter is an institution poor people of mostly equal station resort to when times are tough. Moral intuitions towards barter transactions are probably predicated on this, so I have a hunch that comfortably wealthy, pampered Westerners might cluck their tongues at the plight of barterers, but they are unlikely to cry exploitation. I can also claim that should such wealthy, pampered Westerners find themselves in a bargaining situation with these poor, benighted souls abroad, they will find themselves utterly fleeced [I cite personal experience here].
I do wonder how portable the moral intuitions are behind barter. How would folks in the West react if they found out oil firms were paying local derrick workers in goats rather than cash? Even if the goats were more valuable than their cash equivalent to the workers, do you suppose network news viewers would be filled with grand indignation? I'd bet even odds they would be.
Barter is unsophisticated trade: it's used by children and underdeveloped societies. Reverting to barter in a cash economy carries with it social and emotional freight. It's fine for close equals to barter, but that's probably the extent of it. Anything else smacks of condescension, rightly or wrongly, irrespective of the opinions of the nominally disadvantaged trading party.
I usually like to close posts like this with a meaningful conclusion or some follow-up questions, but I don't have anything for you today. I suppose that if you're interested, you might ask some people you know about their feelings towards barter. I think you might find that people have interesting and perhaps ill-examined attitudes towards cash transactions. This is one of the reasons I don't much care for monetary economics: I see economics as a holistic discipline and plumbing the public's attitude to media of exchange is probably more challenging than many economists suspect.
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