ideas

ideas ideas sunday, october 21, 2007 moving liberty to cyberspace: help wanted liberty magazine currently has a web site, but the archive of past articles does not go back very far. some of us would like to change that, to get the entire past run online and searchable. doing so probably requires scanning in about eighty issues, ocr'ing and proofing them.one possibility is volunteers. another is outsourcing the job abroad, preferably to libertarians or a libertarian organization somewhere where the relevant labor is less expensive than in the u.s. if anyone is interested, let me know by email: ddfr@daviddfriedman.com. posted by david friedman @ 9:37 am 2 comments links to this post las vegas the city supports itself on gambling, entertainment, commercial sex and the sale of luxury goods--none of which i am a customer for. nonetheless i enjoy it, at least in short doses. it reminds me of the story of the 1920's hollywood director who, after being shown around the lavish set created for a biblical epic, remarked that it just showed what god could have done, if he had the money. posted by david friedman @ 9:35 am 3 comments links to this post prejudice: the watson case in the recent flap over public comments by james watson, one of the things that strikes me is the odd misuse, in attacks on him, of the term "prejudice."a prejudice is a belief held in advance of the evidence. watson's biological claim--that human populations that have spent a long time separated from each other in different environments can be expected to differ in heritable characteristics--is so obviously true that i find it hard to imagine anyone honestly denying it. his application, his conclusion from his own observation that sub-saharan africans are on average less intelligent than europeans, may or may not be correct, but without knowing what his observations have been it is hard to see how one can know that it is due to prejudice.unless, of course, one knows in advance that watson's conclusion is false. so far as i can tell, there is literally no evidence to support that position. at least, in all of the arguments on the subject that i have observed, those arguing for racial equality of intelligence do so not by producing evidence that it is true but by arguing that the evidence that it is false is inadequate or mistaken. even if all of their arguments are correct, the conclusion is not that we know that racial groups don't differ in intelligence but only that we don't know if they do, or if so how.watson's comment was surely tactless as well as imprudent; his conclusion may, for all i know, be mistaken. but all of the prejudice so far exhibited in the case is on the other side. posted by david friedman @ 9:22 am 16 comments links to this post tuesday, october 09, 2007 neither anarchy nor minarchy is necessarily libertarian i have just been reading edward stringham's anarchy and the law, an interesting collection of articles and extracts, pro and con, on the subject of free market anarchism (aka anarcho-capitalism, individualist anarchism, ...). one of the pieces, by david osterfeld, points out that there is no guarantee that anarcho-capitalist institutions would generate libertarian law, especially in a society where most people held some non-libertarian beliefs in common. in a footnote he correctly reports me as recognizing the distinction between anarchism and libertarianism, while incorrectly asserting that i extricate myself from the dilemma by refusing to classify myself as a libertarian.his more fundamental mistake is in seeing this as an argument on the minarchist side of the debate. once you set up your limited government, you too have no way to guarantee that what it produces will be libertarian law. if law is made by direct democracy, the majority might vote to ban heroin or prostitution. if it is made by representative democracy, the representatives might so vote--especially if the position is supported by most voters. if the law is to be kept free by the courts, the courts might come down on the wrong side.the only complete solution to this problem is to cheat--to define your preferred system in terms of outcomes as well as institutions. thus a libertarian anarchist might say that the society he advocates is an anarchist society that produces libertarian law, and similarly for a libertarian minarchist. in either case, once the institutions actually come into existence, they will not be constrained by how their advocates defined them.there is, however, a partial solution, at least on the anarchist side of the argument--one i sketched in my machinery of freedom and, in somewhat more detail, in a later essay. the market for law in an anarcho-capitalist society will tend to produce economically efficient law for reasons related, but not identical, to the reasons that other markets tend to produce efficient outcomes. libertarians believe that freedom works, that libertarian law is closely, if not perfectly, correlated with efficient law. if that belief is correct, there will be a strong tendency for the market for law to generate libertarian law.so far as i know, no comparable argument exists for the minarchist side of the debate, no good reason, short of assuming that everyone has become a libertarian, to expect law produced by political mechanisms to be either efficient or libertarian.neither anarchy nor minarchy is necessarily libertarian. but anarchy comes closer. posted by david friedman @ 8:26 pm 21 comments links to this post pascal's wager revised blaise pascal famously argued that, as long as there was any probability that god existed, a rational gambler should worship him, since the cost if he did exist and you failed to worship him was enormously greater than the cost if it went the other way around.a variety of objections can be made to this, most obviously that a just god would reject a worshiper who worshiped on that basis. but i have a variant on the argument that i find more persuasive.the issue is not god but morality. most human beings have a strong intuition that some acts are good and some bad--that one ought not to steal, murder, lie, bully, torture, and the like. details of what is covered and how it is defined vary a good deal, but the underlying idea that right and wrong are real categories and one should do right and not wrong is common to most of us.there are two categories of explanation for this intuition. one is that it is a perception--that right and wrong are real, that we somehow perceive that, and that our feel for what is right and what is wrong is at least very roughly correct. the other is that morality is a mistake. we have been brainwashed by our culture, or perhaps our genes, into feeling the way we do, but there is really no good reason why one ought to feed the hungry or ought not to torture small children.suppose you are uncertain which of the two explanations is correct. i argue that you ought to act as if the first is. if morality is real and you act as if it were not, you will do bad things--and the assumption that morality is real means that you ought not to do bad things. if morality is an illusion and you act as if it were not, you may miss the opportunity to commit a few pleasurable wrongs--but since morality correlates tolerably well, although not perfectly, with rational self interest, the cost is unlikely to be large.i think this version avoids the problems with pascal's. no god is required for the argument--merely the nature of right and wrong, good and evil, as most human beings intuit them. and, by the morality most of us hold, the fact that you are refraining from evil because of a probabilistic calculation does not negate the value of doing so--you still haven't stolen, lied, or whatever. one of the odd features of our intuitions of right and wrong is that they are not entirely, perhaps not chiefly, judgements about people but judgements about acts. posted by david friedman @ 12:52 am 16 comments links to this post tuesday, september 25, 2007 all colleges ... after our recent trip visiting liberal arts colleges, i now know that at every liberal arts college in america:it is very safe--even if students make a point of locking the doors of their rooms when they are not in them.students are not competitive and don't worry about or compare grades--unlike every other college.students are helpful and friendly to each other--unlike other colleges.the nearby big city is a center for cultural activities, but students practically never go there because there is so much happening on campus.all professors are unusually accessible.all teaching is done by professors, not graduate students--even if there are (undergraduate) teaching assistants who do some teaching (language labs) solo and assist with science labs.the president of the school is friendly, accessible, lovable, and not a stuffed shirt. posted by david friedman @ 8:32 am 21 comments links to this post why colleges are expensive the cost of college has increased faster than prices in general over recent decades. after spending eight days visiting four colleges--all good liberal arts schools--that my daughter is interested in, i have at least two pieces of an answer as to why.1. such schools practice extensive price discrimination, i think more than in the past, so tuition substantially overstates the real cost. judging by some figures i got at one school, the average student receives scholarship support equal to about a quarter of tuition.2. the quality of what students get, and thus the cost of providing it, has gone up.i should add that i have no idea whether the quality of the education has gone up--knowing that would require some reasonable measure of what students know coming in and what they know going out. but the environment in which they are educated is more luxurious, and more costly, than it was. a few examples:all of the schools, so far as i could tell, provide the equivalent of free taxi service in and near campus, usually from the security department, to any student who calls in and says that he is worried about his safety--and in some cases to any student for any reason. details vary, and in one case the service was provided by the town rather than the college.the food service ranges from better than i remember to luxurious.at one college, practically every floor has not only a resident assistant (student) but a "wellness advisor" (also student--these are jobs with which students help pay tuition). the same college had both an "office of the consultant for sexual misconduct services" and a "gender and sexuality center," in different buildings.at one college, when i asked about help for students finding summer jobs in their field, i was told that students could volunteer as unpaid interns--and receive a stipend from the college.the college athletic facilities were more like a high end athletic club/fitness center than what i remember--and i went to harvard, the richest school in the country then and now.expenditure on services arguably related to education has increased too. there are writing centers, where students doing papers can go to get help from (paid) upper classmen. there is the equivalent for math. class sizes are very small. how much good this does in terms of outcomes i don't know. but i expect it makes the learning experience pleasanter.to be fair, all of these were high end schools--six top liberal arts colleges, one top university (not all visited on this trip).the general impression was of a gold plated education--cost no object. it isn't surprising that it's expensive. posted by david friedman @ 8:08 am 9 comments links to this post monday, september 24, 2007 is the warren jeffs case religious prosecution? i haven't followed the case very closely, but it seems a distinctly strange one. jeffs is charged with being an accessory to rape. the person who, on the prosecution's theory, committed the rape isn't being charged with anything. jeffs' crime, so far as i can tell, is using his authority as a religious leader to persuade a girl into a marriage that she now says she didn't want. that might be a good reason not to accept his religion, but treating it as a felony strikes me as a considerable stretch.what happens if we we apply the same legal theory to a more respectable religion, say the mainline lds? mormons are expected to pay a substantial part of their income as tithes. one can easily imagine an ex-mormon who grew up in a small town where everyone was a member of the church testifying that he paid his tithes because of religious and social pressure, even though he never wanted to. if true, does that make the local bishop an accessory to robbery or extortion?suppose jeffs is convicted. isn't the clear implication that preaching certain religious doctrines, such as the authority of fathers over daughters and husbands over wives, is now illegal, at least if people believe the preaching and act on it?am i missing something? posted by david friedman @ 5:06 am 25 comments links to this post saturday, september 22, 2007 imperfect information and suboptimal design i have been been doing online research on digital cameras in an attempt, so far unsuccessful, to persuade myself to replace my beloved pocket digital camera with the latest model in the same line. in doing so i came across an interesting analysis of what is wrong with the current generation of small cameras and why.small cameras have small sensors, which leads to a tradeoff between pixel count and sensitivity. the designer can divide the sensor into lots of individual units, giving the camera a high pixel count but making each unit small. or he can design it with fewer but larger units. smaller units are less sensitive, meaning that they either don't pick up an image with low light or pick it up with noise, giving a poor quality image.the number of pixels in the image a camera produces is close to, although not entirely, an objective fact, routinely included in brief summaries of a camera's characteristics. the sensitivity is a subtler issue. a manufacturer or reviewer can report the highest sensitivity—the equivalent of asa numbers on film—that the camera can operate at. but the manufacturer can increase that number without improving the camera by accepting more noise in the images. a good review will include a discussion of the quality of the image, and examples, but most consumers are unlikely to look for or use that sort of detailed information.that gives the manufacturer an incentive to design the camera with more than the optimal pixel count at the cost of lowered sensitivity and lowered quality of image. he is trading off two desirable features only one of which is easily observed by the consumer, hence will put too much weight on that one. arguably the result is a seven or eight megapixel camera—higher resolution than most photographers most of the time have any use for—that takes lower quality pictures than an otherwise similar five mexapixel camerai don't know enough about cameras or the camera industry to judge whether the analysis i have just offered is true but i see no reason why it couldn't be. that raises an interesting question. are there other products for which the same problem exists? are there other situations where a producer must trade off two desirable characteristics, one of which is much more readily measured by consumers than the other, and produces as a result a suboptimal design?one possibility that occurs to me is the tradeoff in automobile design between miles per gallon, achieved in part by making a car lighter, and ability to survive a crash. other suggestions? posted by david friedman @ 8:04 am 20 comments links to this post sunday, september 16, 2007 judging colleges: an economist's tactic in evaluating sources of information, one of my standard tactics is to try to find some overlap between what the source covers and what i already know and judge the quality of the source, hence the reliability of what it covers that i don't already know, accordingly.currently, we are looking for a college for our daughter, and it occurs to me that i am following a closely similar tactic there. one of the things i know a good deal about is economics. so one way of evaluating a college is by what i can judge of its economic department.this approach was suggested to me by a conversation with an economist at one of the colleges we visited. she commented on how hard it was to teach the economics of pollution to students who regarded pollution not as a cost but as a moral evil and were thus very resistant to the idea that there was some (non-zero) optimal level of pollution. talking with her, it occurred to me that in a school dominated by left-wing orthodoxy, a good economist must feel under siege--and thus that seeing to what degree economists at such schools preferred economics to political orthodoxy was a useful measure of the general temper of the school, in particular the tolerance of its internal society for intellectual diversity.the approach isn't limited to left-wing schools, although as it happens all of the (elite liberal arts) schools we are currently considering are left wing. it is, i think, possible to be both a good economist and a conservative, a liberal, perhaps even, for some senses of the term, a socialist. but it is impossible, or at least very difficult, to be a good economist and an orthodox conservative, liberal, or socialist. there are simply too many political positions incorporated in each ideology that depend for their force on bad economics. that was the point i took from the conversation already described. i don't know if the professor in question regarded herself as a conservative, a liberal, or a centrist. but it was clear that she regarded herself first as an economist.so far, investigating economics departments online, i have found only one where it seemed fairly clear that the members were left wingers first and economists second, if at all. i described that conclusion to my daughter and she decided to cross it off her list.curious readers may ask whether it is possible to be a good economist and an orthodox libertarian. i think that depends on the definition of an orthodox libertarian. for some definitions i think it is not. some of the reasons are, i hope, apparent in part iv of my machinery of freedom (2nd edn). posted by david friedman @ 10:04 am 14 comments links to this post wednesday, september 12, 2007 tipping why do we tip waiters, taxi drivers, and others? why is tipping a common custom in some societies but not in others?the obvious economic explanation is that tipping provides a way in which the customer's information on quality of service can be used to reward good service and penalize poor. that explains why tipping is not limited to unusually good service; if the tip for average service is zero, the customer cannot reduce it further to punish unusually poor service.this explains why we should tip but not why we do. a regular customer at a restaurant may regard the benefit as a private good, an incentive not to provide good service but to provide good service to him. but that does not apply to the passenger in a taxi, who is unlikely to ever see the driver again, or to the traveler who eats at a different restaurant every night. yet they too tip.looking at the practice from the perspective of tipper rather than tippee suggests a different sort of explanation. by tipping we demonstrate, to ourselves and others, our willingness to adhere to social norms, even at some cost. and at the same time we get the pleasure of generosity.not only do we get to be generous, we get, in an odd sense, to be generous for free. if tipping were not customary restaurants would have to pay their waiters more. instead of paying $11.50 for dinner in a world without tipping i pay $10 plus a $1.50 tip. i could stiff the waiter and save $1.50, so not doing so lets me feel both honest and generous, but on average my dinner costs me no more than it would if tipping were not customary.this may explain why tipping is less common in europe. europeans, judging at least by my casual observation, are more concerned than americans with issues of class and status. what an american sees as an opportunity to demonstrate his honesty and generosity, a european may see as a way of claiming superior status--the diner playing the role of the aristocrat tossing crusts to starving peasants. i think that fits the tone of some exchanges on the subject i have seen online between europeans and americans.labels: norms status americans europeans posted by david friedman @ 9:53 pm 36 comments links to this post about me name: david friedman location: san jose, california, united states i am an academic economist who teaches at a law school and has never taken a course for credit in either field. for more details, see my web page. view my complete profile links my novel harald now has its own web page. a chapter from my the machinery of freedom, sketching what a society without government might look like. i have never been able to decide whether this is one of my most original articles or a restatement of the obvious. a positive account of property rights my son patri blogs on catallarchy. my grandson tovar has outsourced his blog to his parents my favorite conversation is the usenet group rec.arts.sf.composition previous posts moving liberty to cyberspace: help wanted las vegas prejudice: the watson case neither anarchy nor minarchy is necessarily libert... pascal's wager revised all colleges ... why colleges are expensive is the warren jeffs case religious prosecution? imperfect information and suboptimal design judging colleges: an economist's tactic archives december 2005 january 2006 february 2006 march 2006 april 2006 may 2006 june 2006 july 2006 august 2006 september 2006 october 2006 november 2006 december 2006 january 2007 february 2007 march 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