As a person and a driver I’m a laid back guy. Unlike a lot of my friends and family I rarely get road rage and generally handle sitting in traffic pretty well. As an economist I hate waiting in line. I have to admit that I would rather premium and get where I’m going faster than sit around and waste that time.
In american history, there are plenty of heroes that don’t get villainized enough like FDR and Lincoln, and there are plenty of villains that don’t get glorfied enough, like Rockefeller and the robber barons. Sometimes people buck the trend and present some alternative perspective that makes you totally change the way you think about these historical figures. Being an Italian, I hesitate to put Columbus in the first group, especially since it seems that smashing him could be just the politically correct thing to do. But as I think Bryan Caplan points out there’s little room to saving Columbus from such criticisms.
I came across, this article on digg.com (a unique application of the social netowrk process itself) about the unique and important qualities of facebook.com. In case you’re unaware, I’m a big fan of facebook and most social networking websites. I think they are not only great ways to keep in touch with past aquantences and associates, thus making such relationships easier to maintain over time. But they have an unprecedented ability to distribute new information and ideas.
The article seems to be unconsciously informed of how reputational norms are weak in completely anonymous settings, a concern that Pete Boettke (1, 2, 3) often brings up in regards to the effects internet publications have had on academia. Do the weak ties displace the strong? Facebook with its ability to limit and control network access to different portions of a user’s profile achieves levels of trust, legitimacy, and authority of signals sent through the network channels to greater degrees than other social network sites like myspace.
Another recent post on the mises blog points to facebook as the next breading ground for libertarian activists.
Stringham’s piece demonstrating that social drinking builds social capital is fun and intelligent. It makes complete sense that when the alternative to having a couple of drinks at the bar with co-workers or potential clients, is sitting at home watching TV, the drinking man is king. If anyone needed a little bit of convincing that drinking was for their own good, now they’ve got it and they’ve got Ed Stringham to thank.
This related piece, linked to by Tyler Cowen has me a little more sceptical. At first glance, I can’t help but think it suffers from an availability bias. It states in the abstract that they hold constant for drug use. I’m curious what proportion of the sample was elliminated by this. My guess would be a huge chunk. What we really have to ask is, what kind of tenth grade binge drinker doesn’t recreationally use drugs as well? My guess would be somone destined to earn a significantly higher wage than the rest of his peers.
I couldn’t resist cross posting this gem of a blurb from Jeff Tucker over at the Mises Institute.
My comments on the feed are as follows:
Jeff Tucker’s articles and blog posts are refreshing and wonderful in two distinctive ways. The first is his dedication to empirical applications. Despite some of my fellow earlier commentators’ impulse to incite a praxeology v. empirics riot, I beleive applied theorizing to be one of the most important competitive advantages of Austrian economics and sound economics in general. Applied theorizing is simply the task of using theory to explain the world around us, that’s what theory is for after all. On this margin Jeff’s writings are always gems, which leads into the the second margin which Tucker always seems to impress me on; his willingness to never remove his economic lenses. In a true econo-geek fashion, Jeff sees the basic principles of economics in everything from his shoe selection, shaving routine, to his olive theivery. In this sense he is a true exemplar of spreading the economic message. Economics is not just a drawer of useless platitudes and formalistic assumptions it’s a way to see the world around you and a perspective with which you can gain understanding about the complicated problems that the world presents.
In the fall 2005 semester, I enrolled in Special Topics in Public Choice, taught by Gordon Tullock. Many of my classmates and I continually made note of the mere experiential quality of the course. Just to have the opportunity to say that we had taken a class with Gordon Tullock, was a substantial benefit to taking the class. Tullock was a veritable wealth of historical and insightful knowledge throughout the semester. Aside from taking typical notes of important concepts, dates, and diagrams, I couldn’t help myself from jotting down some of his more caustic and biting remarks. They are reprinted to the best of my recollection below. Please understand that any offensiveness is most likely a result of the phrase being taken out of context. The following phrases were recorded in good fun and entertainment.
I’ve been bothered by something lately stemming from applications of welfare theories in economics. Without going into technical explanations of the two welfare theories, I’d like to draw attention to the notion of social value. Some Austrians have asserted that the free market does lead to social benefits. More formally represented, think of person A trading with person B, this claim would state that despite the local nature of persons A and B, who feel direct benefit from this transaction, society benefits as well. An accusation could be made that such claims are committing interpersonal utility comparisons. We have no way of knowing the preferences in regards to benefits or losses inferred by third parties outside of a particular commercial transaction. Surely someone may claim a loss, a curmudgeon if you will. This accusation seems reasonable at first but I really hate the idea of curmudgeons and I’d hate to be promoting such behavior so let me write a little more and see what develops.
Sometimes when I talk to friends about the possibilities of entrepreneurship to promote technology and growth, they look at me a little funny. I don’t intend to come off sounding like I place a degree of faith in science fiction-esque gizmos to solve the real world problems of today. What I do tend to emphasize is what Lachmann referred to as radical uncertainty. In other words we have no idea what types of products and services may lie right around the proximate corner or far off into the distant future. Unfortunately for us, the same truth holds for the state. I’m currently re-reading Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty for class and came across this paragraph on page 216:
The problem assumes the greatest importance when we consider that we are probably only at the threshold of an age in which the technological possibilities of mind control are likely to grow rapidly and what may appear at first as innocuous or beneficial powers over the personality of the individual will be at the disposal of government. The greatest threats to human freedom probably still lie in the future. The day may not be far off when authority, by adding appropriate drugs to our water supply or by some other similar device, will be able to elate or depress, stimulate or paralyze the minds of whole populations for its own purposes. If bills of rights are to remain in any way meaningful, it must be recognized early that their intention was certainly to protect the individual against all vital infringements of his liberty and that therefore they must be presumed to contain a general clause protecting against government’s interference those immunities which individuals in fact have enjoyed in the past.
Eerie isn’t it…
I’m reading Thinking Strategically: The Competitive Edge in Business, Politics, and Everyday Life. Aside from being the most expansive introduction to game theory on the market, the historical stories and anecdotes are very interesting. For example the following paragraph is quoted from page 227:
“To arrange a self-enforcing cartel is difficult. It is all the better if an outsider enforces the collective agreement limiting competition. This is just what happened for cigarette advertising, although not intentionally. In the old days, cigarette companies used to spend money to convince consumers to ‘walk a mile’ for their product or to ‘fight rather than switch.’ The different campaigns made advertising agencies rich, but their main purpose was defensive – each company advertised because the others did too. Then, in 1968, cigarette advertisements were banned from TV by law. The companies thought this restriction would hurt them and fought against it. But, when the smoke cleared, they saw that the ban helped them avoid mutually damaging and costly advertising campaigns and thus improved their profits.”
Well congratulations to the federal government on another job well done.