Category: Uncategorized

It’s never pleasant to find out bad things about yourself, and I just did.

I occasionally go over to Marginal Revolution, a weblog run by Alex Tabarrok and Tyler Cowen. They are very pro-free-market economics  lecturers and the  weblog attracts a lot of libertarian capitalist types: obviously I disagree with them on just about everything.  I post the odd comment — usually just a short dig at something they say — and then I go again.

So yesterday morning, just before going to work, I took a look, and Alex Tabarrok had just posted a piece on Le problème du pain, asking "why bread isn’t nearly as good in the United States as in Paris". It’s a problem a little bit like why beer was bad in Britain for so long, which is something I recently wrote about. The piece I wrote is called Learning By Drinking, and its point of view is pretty much the opposite of most of those at Marginal Revolution, including Alex T. I was one of the early commenters in the thread, and I put a link to my own piece in my comment. No big deal.

But then Alex Tabarrok added a comment to the thread, and said this [emphasis added]:

… Combined with Tom’s comments about well-informed consumes and the
lemons problem (do read his longer post) I think this could get us
somewhere …

And with that, all kinds of people came over to my site looking at the piece in question. As  I mentioned just the other day, this is a quiet corner of the Internets, getting a handful of visitors each day. But all of a sudden I got 100 visitors yesterday and another 100 or so today, all thanks to Alex Tabarrok. And traffic, where weblogs are concerned, is a Good Thing.

Now I like to think I’m more open minded than these pro-market types, but here is Alex T. sending people my way from his far more popular site to read a piece that he probably disagrees with. And I would not have thought to send people his way without a little dig at whatever it was they wrote. So it begins to look as if he is more open minded and generous than I am. Which obviously can’t be the case because he is on the other side of the political fence from me.

I guess I have to face it. I owe Alex T. a thank you. Come on, you can do it….

"Thank you Alex Tabarrok for recommending people to my web site."

There. Not too bad. Now off to eat some humble pie.

Saturday saw another post on what is surely the best of all weblogs. There’s so much stuff written about Iraq every day, it consistently amazes me that Riverbend’s material gives both a perspective and basic information that I don’t see anywhere else. Plus, she writes ridiculously well. Whoever she is, she’s a hero.

Link: Baghdad Burning.

I started this weblog because of the book, thinking that now it is going to be published I might as well do it right, and that means creating a little extra material around it if I can. It (the weblog) has now hobbling along for four months, with a post or two a week (mainly on weekends).

I’ve learned that I am not a natural blogger, which is why I changed the title text to emphasize that this is "an occasional weblog…". I simply don’t have that much to say, and even though I would not call myself busy by many people’s standards, I don’t always have the time to post something when I do think of something to say, or to find the article that prompted my thought again. There are plenty of weblogs out there which are updated multiple times a day.  Such people are some combination of (a) well organized, (b) brilliant, or (c) egotistical. Let’s just say there’s a mix, and leave it at that.

There is a mismatch between blogging and other kinds of writing anyway. I wrote a book because it is a quiet occupation that suits me. It is a way of arguing without be ingdistracted by other people — and other people, let’s face it, usually just get in the way of a well-thought out argument. Plus, it is a way of avoiding the hurly-burly of actual debate where you have to think on your feet and assert positions you are uncertain of. While blogging is not exactly like real life, it is a bit closer to it than the book thing: if you aim to gain an audience you have to pick up on what other bloggers are writing about and respond within hours. So really, blogging just isn’t my thing. The arguments go nowehere, no one changes their mind, and the signal/noise ratio is very low. The blogging world is a world built for quick-typing extroverts who don’t go in too much for second thoughts.

And there is more to my agblosticism. With a book, you have to get a stamp of approval before
inflicting your thoughts on readers (in the form of a publishing
contract), so there is something un-egotistical about a book: "I’m not the one claiming that my scribblings are worth reading, someone else thinks they are too". But with a blog, or other intermediary-free publishing mechanism, there is something about the effort — "Here Are My Thoughts, Listen To Them!" — that is presumptious, almost distasteful. I’ve decided, though, that (with some exceptions) this impression of presumptiousness is wrong. I am not claiming that I have Thoughts You Should Know, I’m just keeping some writing here in this little corner where few people will look and using it as a place to keep my stuff. And if I end up wasting a few minutes of your time because you googled a combination of words that led you here instead of somewhere more useful, well I’m sorry, but perhaps you should try a library instead of Google anyway.

So, to go back a couple of paragraphs, I have learned that I am not a natural blogger. Nevertheless, I’ll carry on with this effort. There are benefits, even without an audience (although hello there EAS, JC, and JAS, if you are still around). It is a useful place to keep some notes. It is a useful discipline to occasionally try to articulate thoughts that otherwise would remain even more foggy. I’ve heard from two people that I had lost touch with (hello PJM and MC) [which reminds me, I owe you both an e-mail]. And I still hope it will help to accumulate some additional material that may be of use to readers of my book, which is what this is all about.

But my advice to readers of this weblog is "don’t expect anything and you won’t be too disappointed".

Is this true? And does it apply in Canada? I will have to find out…

Another little tidbit gleaned from April’s Food & Wine:
those sticker numbers on your fruit actually mean something. Here in
the US, fruit often comes with stickers on it, sometimes telling you
where it’s from and/or what it is. There’s also a number, but I never
paid attention to that. But on p. 72 I spotted this interesting bit of
information:

"[T]he sticker labels on fruit: The numbers tell you how
the fruit was grown. Conventionally grown fruit has four digits;
organically grown fruit has five and starts with a nine; genetically
engineered has five numbers and starts with an eight."

Yesterday I checked out the organic apples at the market, and yes,
the numbers did indeed have five digits and started with a nine.

Link: Read the numbers on your fruit, via Boing Boing.

Jeremy Zawodny draws my attention to a technical conference called Waterfall 2006 coming up at the beginning of next month. It tackles the thorny question of software development methodolgies, and should be compulsory for all serious technical people. Sign up now.

Link: Attending Waterfall 2006 (by Jeremy Zawodny).

From Mark Thoma yet again, an example of just how entrenched the unrealistic picture of perfect markets is. A lot of my book is spent arguing that the simplistic free-market picture of the world is too influential and that we really need to get rid of it from public debate. From time to time I wonder if I am being unfair and setting up a straw man. Then I look around and it really does seem that even (or especially?) influential, high-profile people do have this simplistic view of the way the world works stuck firmly in their brains. Greg Mankiw was Chairman of the President’s Council of
Economic Advisers from 2003 and 2005.

In Mankiw on Globalization: People Should Move Mark Thoma reports a panel discussion chaired by now ex-Harvard president Larry Summers:

Summers urged the economists, who kept returning to nuanced policy
discussions, to come up with more practical political advice. Referring to
Flint, Mich., where workers’ jobs are being outsourced, he challenged the
academics to come up with a realistic suggestion for the Buick-city mayor.

“That’s the political reality,” said Summers, pointing to former Senator Bob
Graham D-Fla. in the audience who was nodding in agreement. … “…Maybe the answer is [to] put an economics
course in every high school and we’ll be OK,” said Summers, taking a jab at
Mankiw who earlier suggested that introducing economic principles to Americans
in high school would help people better understand globalization.

“I don’t know about the mayor, but I know what the people should do,” Mankiw
said, “The people should move.”

Summers countered, “Where do you think the people in Flint should go?”…

"Where money speaks, there all law is silent" – Anon, reign of Henry III (1216 – 1272).

MarketThinkers like the Cato Institute, have a blind spot when it comes to inequality, and David Schmidtz has it in spades, judging from his Cato Unbound lead essay "When Inequality Matters".

Schmidtz distinguishes two forms of egalitarianism: the "liberal egalitarianism" ("liberal" meaning something closer to conservatives or economic libertarians in the context of Cato Institute papers) and plain ol’ "egalitarianism". The former (which Schmidtz approves of) is focused on eliminating inequality of rank and status (the "right to command"), and Schmidtz is all in favour of getting rid of "any natural ranking of individuals into those who command and those who obey." Fair enough. The later is apparently focused on reducing inequality of (wealth) distribution, and this is not something Schmidtz likes. He sums the difference up by saying "Liberal egalitarianism has a history of being, first and foremost, a concern about status, not stuff."  Most of his essay is talking about why he opposes inequality of status, but is happy with inequality of "stuff".

But these two are absolutely and intricately mixed, as Anon recognized three quarters of a millenium ago. You can’t have inequality of stuff without inequality of status. What do people do with their "stuff"? They buy political influence and use their economic power when bargaining with others. In short, they use it to promote an inequality of status. There is no significant difference between the two, and for some reason Cato and those just don’t see this. I have no idea why not.

There is a discussion at Crooked Timber: Cato on inequality but it goes off the rails.