Always read the fine print.

As a follow-up to the More on Libertarian priorities post, here are the actual factors that played into the freedom index:

Fiscal Policy (35.3%)

 The fiscal policy dimension consists of the following categories: Tax Burden (28.6%), Government Employment (2.8%), Government Spending (1.9%), Government Debt (1.2%), and Fiscal Decentralization (0.9%).

Regulatory Policy (32.0%)

 The regulatory policy dimension consists of the following categories: Freedom from Tort Abuse (11.5%), Property Right Protection (7.6%), Health Insurance Freedom (5.4%), Labor Market Freedom (3.8%), Occupational Licensing Freedom (1.7%), Miscellaneous Regulatory Freedom (1.3%), and Cable and Telecom Freedom (0.8%).

Personal Freedom (32.7%)

 Personal freedom dimension consists of the following categories: Victimless Crime Freedom (9.8%), Gun Control Freedom (6.6%), Tobacco Freedom (4.1%), Alcohol Freedom (2.8%), Marriage Freedom (2.1%), Marijuana and Salvia Freedom (2.1%), Gambling Freedom (2.0%), Education Policy (1.9%), Civil Liberties (0.6%), Travel Freedom (0.5%), Asset Forfeiture Freedom (0.1%), and Campaign Finance Freedom (0.02%).

So the single largest component of the Freedom index is "Tax Burden" (28.6%) followed by "Freedom from Tort Abuse" (11.5%).  Yet I had always assumed that the Libertarian alternative to government regulation was to allow lawsuits to proceed?  What other mechanism do they have for solving disputes that are resistant to amicable resolution? 

Meanwhile, "Assest Forfeiture Freedom" (at 0.1%) suddenly looks like the way to finance the freest possible government as you cna be awful on this scale and still do pretty well as Tax Burden is 286 times as important.  One can go on and ask about things like "Freedom from discrimination" but the real acid test is what are the most important parts of the index.  The largest category is Fiscal Policy and it is dominated by less government spending.  That may actually be a libertarian goal (under theories like the Night Watchman State) but that seems to conflate political preferences with actual empirical measures of freedom. 

More on libertarian priorities

I recently had a post where I wondered about what Libertarians in the United States focused their attention on.  It seems I am not alone. Consider these examples:

Personally, I do think freedom is important so fortunately we can salvage the concept from the wreckage of Mercatus. Some of the problem here arise from arbitrary weighting of different categories in order to simultaneously preserve libertarianism as a distinct brand and also preserve libertarianism's strong alliance with social conservatism. Consequently, a gay man's freedom to marry the love of his life is given some weight in the rankings but less than his right to purchase a gun with minimal hassle. A woman's right to terminate a pregnancy or a doctor's right to offer a pregnant woman treatment she considers appropriate are given zero weight. You might think at first that abortion rights are given zero weight for metaphysical reasons rather than reasons of cultural politics, but it turns out that permissive homeschooling laws are given weight as a factor in freedom. Children, in other words, are considered fully autonomous agents whose rights the state must safeguard vis-a-vis their own parents from birth until conception at which point they lose autonomy until graduation from high school.

.  I think he meant from conception until birth, above.  And also consider his later examples:

Nor is there any coherent treatment of the question your "freedom" to trample all over my legitimate interests. New Hampshire, for example, ranks number one in "travel freedom" in part because New Hampshire has lax laws about your right to engage in the dangerous practice of driving while talking on a cell phone. Obviously states attempt to curb unsafe driving in part out of paternalistic interests, but also because safe drivers have a strong interest in not seeing our property or our persons destroyed by unsafe driving. One possible reply is that instead of prophylactic rules about safe driving practices we could let people drive how they want and address claims of harm ex post. But "freedom from tort abuse"—i.e, making it difficult for the victims of the reckless behavior of others to secure financial compensation—is considered a dimension of freedom. What's more, while Mercatus does consider the right to buy cheap beer to be an important dimension of freedom and also considers the right to dangerously talk on your phone while driving a car, they don't consider the right to drive while drunk to be an important dimension of freedom. Presumably because that would be considered beyond the pale politically.

Part of the problem here is that freedom is a very broad concept and different people can have very different weighting functions on what they see as being the key freedoms.  It is also a factor in economic opportunity -- without the ability to feed and clothe oneself, it is rather academic how much the locals enforce no cell phone use while driving. 

But this is precisely what I was talking about. The idea that Texas is less free because of municipal debt is odd.  People can be less free because they have mortgages but we normally consider the freedom to enter long term contracts to be a good thing. 

Now it may be that I do not have the whole picture.  But I look at the free states and I wonder exactly how these rankings reflect the actual experiences of the residents. 

This guy REALLY doesn't like MOOCs

The guy in question is Jonathan Rees. He's a history professor at Colorado State and his blog, More or Less Bunk (which I recently came across by way of Lawyers, Guns and Money), seems to be all MOOC, all of the time. I don't agree with all of his points, but he does make some good ones and given the embarrassingly low thought-to-hype ratio we normally encounter on the subject, posts like “My MOOC is a pale imitation of the class I teach on campus.” provide some badly needed balance.

Weekend blogging -- 61 seconds from the world's most prolific film composer

If the whip cracks don't give it away, you're not watching enough movies.




* At least among major players, I dare you to find an IMDB page to compare to this one.

A few brief thoughts on Timothy Noah's reaction to the firing of Timothy Noah

I didn't really have any strong feeling about the firing of Timothy Noah, but when I came across this Politico excerpt in Talking Points Memo, it seemed rather odd to me.

“Once, shortly after he bought it, he said he liked a piece I'd written advocating an energy tax,” Noah wrote. “Another time, after I wrote a piece about Jim DeMint's departure from the Senate headlined 'Requiem For A Wingnut,' he emailed me to say ... wait, I've got it here: ‘I have little esteem for Jim DeMint, but I also want us to make a rule of not name-calling in headlines. We have strong opinions, but name-calling so outrightly undermines the seriousness of what we are trying to do here.’”

“I quietly changed the headline to the somewhat clumsy, ‘Farewell, Filibusteringest Senator’ and quietly worried whether the magazine's new owner (who around that time also told an audience at the Kennedy School that he'd like to co-brand a chain of cafes called the New Republic) might be a young man with more money than sense,” he said.

And, he added, “my firing is an additional data point.”

I've read this over a few times and it still seems a bit strange. A publisher told a writer to tone down a title. There was nothing particularly special about the title and the the publisher gave a reasonably sounding explanation for why he wanted the change. This bothered the writer enough to cause him to worry about the publisher's competence and to later use it as the basis of a very public criticism.

I realize that Noah may be understandably angry, but even factoring that in there seems to be a weird disconnect here, as if, when he tells me that a publisher changed one of his titles, he expects me to conclude that there's something wrong with the publisher. It's not immediately clear to me that the publisher was wrong, either about this particular title or about the policy of avoiding taking shots in a title, but even if the publisher were clearly wrong, it would still strike me as part of the normal friction of putting out a magazine.

I also get the feeling that Mackenzie Weinger, the author of the Politico piece, had the same reaction as Noah, especially given the snark about the New Republic cafes. (two quick points: first, speakers at events like this are expected to toss out big, interesting, out-of-the-box ideas like co-branding seemingly unrelated businesses; second, weird co-branding ideas are common. By the standards of the field and in the context of the speech, this suggestion wasn't particularly outrageous.)

What makes this more interesting than just than just another case of an ex-employee griping about a former boss is the way it supplies what Noah might call an additional data point for some ongoing concerns about the state of journalism, the idea that the profession has a problem with arrogance and tribalism.

To the tribalism point, this is the second time in recent memory when Politico's Media column has uncritically taken the side of Washington journalistic insiders (such as Noah) against outsider (such as Hughes). It was the Media column where Dylan Byers went after Nate Silver because, to be blunt, he was making the the DC journalism insiders look bad and, more to the point, expendable.

And having journalism critics who uncritically take the side of other journalists is not a good thing.

Do the connotations of "property" influence the "intellectual property" debate?

Tim Taylor has a great post on the history of the term "intellectual property" and the way wording may be shaping our thinking. (via Thoma)

Mark Lemley offers a more detailed unpacking of the concept of "intellectual property" in a 2005 article he wrote for the Texas Law Review called "Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding" Lemley writes: ""My worry is that the rhetoric of property has a clear meaning in the minds of courts, lawyers and commentators as “things that are owned by persons,” and that fixed meaning will make all too tempting to fall into the trap of treating intellectual property just like “other” forms of property. Further, it is all too common to assume that because something is property, only private and not public rights are implicated. Given the fundamental differences in the economics of real property and intellectual property, the use of the property label is simply too likely to mislead."

As Lemley emphasizes, intellectual property is better thought of as a kind of subsidy to encourage innovation--although the subsidy is paid in the form of higher prices by consumers rather than as tax collected from consumers and then spent by the government. A firm with a patent is able to charge more to consumers, because of the lack of competition, and thus earn higher profits. There is reasonably broad agreement among economists that it makes sense for society to subsidize innovation in certain ways, because innovators have a hard time capturing the social benefits they provide in terms of greater economic growth and a higher standard of living, so without some subsidy to innovation, it may well be underprovided.

But even if you buy that argument, there is room for considerable discussion of the most appropriate ways to subsidize innovation. How long should a patent be? Should the length or type of patent protection differ by industry? How fiercely or broadly should it be enforced by courts? In what ways might U.S. patent law be adapted based on experiences and practices in other major innovating nations like Japan or Germany? What is the role of direct government subsidies for innovation in the form of government-sponsored research and development? What about the role of indirect government subsidies for innovation in the form of tax breaks for firms that do research and development, or in the form of support for science, technology, and engineering education? Should trade secret protection be stronger, and patent protection be weaker, or vice versa?

These are all legitimate questions about the specific form and size of the subsidy that we provide to innovation. None of the questions about "intellectual property" can be answered yelling "it's my property."

You could go further and argue that copyrights and patents actually restrict property rights. since they limit what people can make and sell. This aspect has caused some notable libertarians to voice concerns about the seemingly inexorable expansion of these government-granted monopolies.

Some similar issues are raised by the different meanings of the term "rational." "Rational" means something very specific when used in the context of economics. All sorts of behavior we would normally consider rational is irrational in the economics sense. Unfortunately, some economists have used the negative connotation we associate with "irrationality" in its general usage to argue against decisions that are irrational only in the strict technical sense..

Some people just insist on being tied to their possessions

Joseph appears to have had somewhat mixed feelings about this New York Times piece by Graham Hill, a multi-millionaire preaching the freedom of not getting tied down by your possessions. Joseph wondered how this philosophy might work for people on the other end of the spectrum

Assuming things haven't changed greatly since 2003, you can probably get a pretty good idea from this LA Times story from Carla Rivera about a service that provided storage bins for the homeless:

At 7:45 on a recent morning, the nondescript building looked as busy as a checkroom at an airport or train station, with a line of people hauling backpacks, duffle bags and grocery carts.

Chris Thorn, 47, was sorting through a brown leather satchel on rollers, pulling out thick sweaters and other winter clothing to store in anticipation of warmer weather.

Thorn said she has been homeless for a year and has been staying at the Midnight Mission, where there is limited space for belongings.

"It's especially important to have someplace to store clothes for when you get a job," said Thorn, who says she occasionally does painting and construction work.

Nearby, Ruby Simmons, 61, struggled to maneuver a grocery cart overflowing with blankets, sofa pillows, purses, comforters, books, toiletries, an umbrella and a knob-ended, sturdy stick that she said is useful for walking or protection.

Even after filling a bin, Simmons had a cart full of blankets, clothing and her westerns and mystery novels to keep with her.

Simmons was nonplused when asked what she considered the most important of her belongings, some of which she has had since moving from Missouri more than 30 years ago.

"I got the pillows from a minister who was giving stuff away. You'd hate to lose any of it," said Simmons, who has been homeless off and on for years and was recently living on the street. She said she hopes that, in another year, when she reaches retirement age, Social Security will provide enough for a hotel room or apartment.

Graham Hill

I have some aspirations to be a bit of a minimalist.  But I was struck by the New York Times piece by Graham Hill.  In it, a multi-millionaire talks about how he was able to live a life of freedom wandering around the globe and how possessions were a chain.  The correct response to this piece is to ask how it would have worked out if he had decided that his cash assets were also a fetter. 

Based on anecdotal evidence from talking to homeless people, I suspect it would not have been fantastic.  Consider this episode:

But I was just going along, starting some start-ups that never quite started up when I met Olga, an Andorran beauty, and fell hard. My relationship with stuff quickly came apart.

I followed her to Barcelona when her visa expired and we lived in a tiny flat, totally content and in love before we realized that nothing was holding us in Spain. We packed a few clothes, some toiletries and a couple of laptops and hit the road. We lived in Bangkok, Buenos Aires and Toronto with many stops in between.
 

Travel is an extremely expensive luxury.  With a decent career I still have to work to scrape up the money to visit my very geographically dispersed family and friends.  I think few people without financial assets would be able to simply pick up and live in a succession of expensive, world-class cities.  Again, my homeless person surveys are strictly anecdotal, but beautiful women or dashingly handsome men as companions seem absent from their accounts of living rough. 

As for being poor, it made a huge difference for my freedom in the periods of my life that I had the cash to compensate for mistakes or broken things.  It's much less of a sacrifice to live in a studio apartment if you can rent a suite at a local hotel whenever it gets claustrophobic. 

It is fine to be able to make the decision to have few possessions.  It is completely different to not have a choice in the matter. 

Recommended Reading

See here for a discussion on a recent paper on health inequality.

 The best sentence in the blog post? 

Cynics may spot the benefit of such an approach for those at the top of the income distribution…

Intellectual Property

Mark Thoma points us towards a potentially really important finding:

By linking a number of different datasets that had not previously been used by researchers, Williams was able to measure when genes were sequenced, which genes were held by Celera's intellectual property, and what subsequent investments were made in scientific research and product development on each gene. Williams' conclusion points to a persistent 20-30 percent reduction in subsequent scientific research and product development for those genes held by Celera's intellectual property.
 

As we have long discussed on this blog, the justification for intellectual property is to encourage and promote innovation.  There has long been a concern that the innovation would have happened with or without the patent (software patents are a good example of this phenomenon) but a general consensus that the profits from patents increase innovation (due to the rewards generated by a successful innovation).  However, if the granting of a patent were shown to decrease innovation then the argument for granting them would be weakened.

If granting a patent reduces future innovation and the patented innovations would have occurred with or without the patent then the patent process becomes pure rent seeking.  It's clear that these two conditions do not universally hold (i.e. medication discovery as currently constructed is too expensive without a clear path to future profits).  But the possibility that this could be true for same areas of technology is a sobering thought indeed. 

New advice column

Emily Oster has an advice column.  Read here.

It contains an excellent explanation of opportunity cost with respect to child rearing.   

Libertarianism

Chris Dillow is strident:

Instead, I suspect what we see with her and with Ukip - and, one could argue, with some who support press regulation whilst favouring social liberalism in other contexts - is asymmetric libertarianism. People want freedom for themselves whilst seeking to deny it to others; this is why some Ukippers can claim to be libertarian whilst opposing immigration and gay marriage. This debased and egocentric form of libertarianism is more popular than the real thing.

But I think he might be on to something.  I have long wondered why Libertarians focus on certain positions (e.g. taxation) and not others (e.g. prisons).  I am not saying all Libertarians focus on taxes and no Libertarian is worried about the criminal justice system.  That would be a straw man version of the argument.

It is more that the attention to these issues seems to be rather selective.  Not all of them: I can find individuals with consistent positions on the hot button issues like drugs, criminal offense, personal freedoms and so forth.  But the focus on, for example, lowering taxes seems much stronger than the focus on reducing the prison population.  Or at least that is one outsiders view.

Weekend movie blogging -- meta spoilers

I was starting to write a post about an old but nicely done 70s movie of the week (Ed Asner, Cloris Leachman and Lloyd Bridges all doing good work but -- God help me -- it's Robert Reed who knocks it out of the park in his big scene). I was specifically interested in the odd way the writer handled the big reveal, having characters start to speculate about it in the middle of the film.

I started to contrast it with a Henry Fonda film that ends with a with a masterfully executed blindside twist but I realized that simply by saying ____ has a great surprise ending I could spoil the film. You might not guess the ending but knowing something was coming could keep you from buying into the story. When the rug was pulled out you'd already have one foot off of it.

Likewise, an Ira Levin novel I was also going to use as an example derives much of it effectiveness from the skillful way the writer slips something very big past you without putting you on your guard, If I tell you Levin pulls a fantastic narrative trick in ____, there's a much better chance that he won't pull it off.

The idea that simply telling someone that there's a spoiler can be a spoiler reminded me of a class of puzzles where before you can solve the puzzle you have to know if you have enough information to solve the puzzle. These are discussed at length by Raymond Smullyan in What Is the Name of This Book. I'll try to dig up my copy and update the post with some examples.

75 years of progress

While pulling together some material for a MOOC thread, I came across these two passages that illustrated how old much of today's cutting edge educational thinking really is.

First from a 1938 book on education*:

" Experts in given fields broadcast lessons for pupils within the many schoolrooms of the public school system, asking questions, suggesting readings, making assignments, and conducting test. This mechanize is education and leaves the local teacher only the tasks of preparing for the broadcast and keeping order in the classroom."

And this recent entry from Thomas Friedman.

For relatively little money, the U.S. could rent space in an Egyptian village, install two dozen computers and high-speed satellite Internet access, hire a local teacher as a facilitator, and invite in any Egyptian who wanted to take online courses with the best professors in the world, subtitled in Arabic.

I know I've made this point before, but there are a lot of relevant precedents to the MOOCs, and we would have a more productive discussion (and be better protected against false starts and hucksters) if people like Friedman would take some time to study up on the history of the subject before writing their next column.



* If you have any interest in the MOOC debate, you really ought to read this Wikipedia article on Distance Learning.

Wow, just wow!

Via Thomas Lumley:

You may have heard about the famous Hawthorne experiment, where raising light levels in a factory improved output, as did lowering them, as did anything else experimental. The original data have been found and this turns out not to be the case.

The mind boggles at just how often I have used this example and how wrong it was.  I have read the paper once, not that closely, but the overall impression I have is that Levitt is correct here.