Can one of my more knowledgeable readers answer this?
If there are 23 cabinet positions, of which, say, 6 are vacant and 17 are occupied, what counts as a majority for purposes of the 25th amendment? Is it half of 23 or half of 17?
I realize there are additional ambiguities in the 25th amendment, which talks about “principal officers of the executive department”, without ever using the word “cabinet”. But I think I understand those issues. I’d just like an answer to the specific question above.
If you’re wealthy enough to be sure you’ll never spend it all, you might be thinking — especially at this time of year — about giving away some of the excess. Unfortunately, that’s impossible.
What you can do is force some people to give to other people, and you might very well want to do that. But as for your own excess wealth, you can’t give it away, because you already have.
There are two ways to explain this. Pretty much everyone agrees that one explanation is much clearer than the other, but it seems like they’re split about evenly as to which is the clearer one. So I’ll offer both and you can take your choice.
Continue reading ‘Merry Christmas’
I hold this truth to be self-evident: It is downright crazy to try to distribute vaccines without using prices. I said as much last week.
The question then becomes: How should those prices be implemented?
Method I: Distribute vaccine rights randomly and let people trade them. This suffers from the fact that you can’t know how much the vaccine is really worth to the people you’re bargaining with, which is a barrier to efficient bargaining.
My immediate instinct (which I still think is a pretty good one) is (after pre-vaccinating certain key groups like first responders and health care workers) to give everyone a choice: You can have your vaccine now, or you can have a check for (say) $500 and your vaccine in six months. This suffers from the need to get the price right (presumably involving some trial and error) but I stand by it as far far better than the Soviet-style central planning we’re about to actually get.
But now Romans Pancs has done far better than I have, by actually thinking about the details of the optimal auction design and getting them right. His paper is here. (You’ll need to sign up for a free account before downloading.) Anyone who actually cares about getting vaccines distributed efficiently should start by reading this paper.
Here is a scenario not unlike many that could well play out in the near future, courtesy of our friends at the Centers for Disease Control:
Now: A vaccine becomes available. The CDC decides that people over 65 will be near the front of the line to receive it.
Question 1: Should Edna be allowed to sell her place in line to Irma? Should Tina be allowed to sell her place to Gina?
Question 2: Do you think the CDC will allow that?
I am quite sure that the answer to Question 1 is yes, and nearly as sure that the answer to Question 2 is no. Which means something is wrong.
It is tragic that so much of pandemic-management policy has been made in defiance of basic science. It is equally tragic that so much policy is about to be made in defiance of basic economics. Because if there’s one thing that economics teaches us, it’s that you cannot distribute a scarce resource efficiently unless you use the price system. No bureaucrat at the CDC has enough information to distinguish Edna from Irma, or Tina from Gina. Therefore they won’t even try.
Essentially everyone understands that it would be insane to try to distribute food or housing or pretty much anything else without using prices. But when it comes to Covid vaccines, the reasoning seems to be that vaccine distribution is uniquely important, so we should do a uniquely bad job of it. Go figure.
If you think it would be a nightmare for all the Edna/Irma and Tina/Gina pairs to negotiate individual contracts, there’s a simpler way to accomplish the same thing: Let Irma and Gina buy their way to the front of the line, then take all the money you collect and redistribute it to the population as a whole so that Edna and Tina get their shares. In other words, let the price system do its job.
Suppose there are two vaccines available. Suppose also that:
Which vaccine do you prefer to receive, X or Y?
I’ll give my answer in a few days, or chime in sooner if someone else gives my answer first.
Hat tip to the ever-thoughtful Romans Pancs, who emailed me the relevant analysis.
Edited to add: Well, that didn’t take long. Jim Ancona nailed it in comment #2 — and expressed it so clearly that I feel no need to explain it in any words other than his.
I also want to commend the first of the two answers in Dave’s comment #1, which brings up another factor that hadn’t occurred to me. Of course (in Dave’s scenario) you won’t be the only one thinking this way, so it’s not clear that in equilibrium you’ll prefer X, but it is clear that some people will prefer X for Dave’s reason. Once enough of them have chosen X, you can be indifferent between X and Y.
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Alabama Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville is quoted as saying:
I tell people, my dad fought 76 years ago in Europe to free Europe of socialism. Today, you look at this election, we have half this country that made some kind of movement, now they not believe in it 100 percent, but they made some kind of movement toward socialism. So we’re fighting it right here on our own soil.
Over at MSNBC, Steve Benen responds:
It’s true that Tuberville’s father fought in France during World War II, but if the senator-elect thinks the war was about “freeing Europe of socialism”, he probably ought to read a book or two about the conflict.
Apparently, reading a book or two about World War II is not a prerequisite for writing commentary at MSNBC. I wonder which of the following points Mr. Benen has overlooked:
I’d elaborate, but I’ll keep this short just in case Mr. Benen drops by this blog. Apparently he doesn’t like to read very much.
(Found on the web with no attribution; I’ll be glad if someone can identify the source for the purpose of proper acknowledgement).
If you’re worried about the president subverting the electoral process, you might pause to give thanks for the electoral college. If the election were conducted by a federal authority, or if any single authority were responsible for aggregating all the votes from around the country, it’s a fair bet that either this president or some future president would be exploring ways to intimidate that authority.
How is it that so many of the very same people who express grave concern about a president clinging to power by manipulating or ignoring vote totals are so quick to disdain the institution that makes it essentially impossible for him to do exactly that?
It’s always dangerous to centralize power. It’s doubly dangerous to centralize the power to decide who wields power.
More thoughts on this can be found in my piece in today’s Wall Street Journal.
I don’t always enjoy being interviewed, but I do always enjoy being interviewed by the thoughtful and provocative (in the best way!) Bob Murphy. You’ll see why if you listen to the latest episode of the Bob Murphy show, where we discuss why there is something instead of nothing.
Although this is intended primarily as an audio podcast, those who prefer video can watch here.
I was recently asked to speak at the awards ceremony for the winners of the Witwatersrand math competition. This presented a particular challenge, because there were winners in age groups ranging from nine-year-olds to college students. Here is the talk I ended up giving:
I take it that the following states are undecided:
Pennsylvania
Georgia
Michigan
North Carolina
Wisconsin
Nevada
By my calculations, this election is a tie if Trump wins (precisely) any of the following three subsets:
A = {Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan}
B = {Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada}
C= {Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada}
It is a Trump victory if Trump wins any of the following:
1) Any superset of A, B or C.
2) Any superset of {Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin}
3) Any superset of {Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Nevada}
I went to bed believing that 98 – 47 = 41, and therefore had this all wrong, but I think it’s right now. Does anyone want to check my arithmetic?
I like my eggs poached and slightly runny. If you feel like I just wasted a moment of your time, you might want to stop reading. What follows is mostly opinion, and I’m not sure my opinions about politics are worth any more of your time than my opinions about eggs.
That said:
1) Liberalism — by which I mean the societal presumption that it’s okay for people to disagree about fundamental things and not have to kill each other over it — and even better that they can live in harmony and respect their differences — is only a few hundred years old. It is also, I suspect, a lot more fragile than it appears to those of us who have had the good fortune to live in a time and place where we could take it for granted.
2) Not coincidentally, prosperity — by which I mean that a great many people are not starving — is approximately the same age, and likely to be just as fragile. A few hundred years is, in historical time, the blink of an eye.
Continue reading ‘The State of the Union’
There are (at least) two ways to test the efficacy of a vaccine. The Stupid Way is to administer the vaccine to, say, 30,000 volunteers and then wait to see how many of them get sick. The Smarter Way is to adminster the vaccine to a smaller number of (presumably much better-paid) volunteers, then expose them to the virus and see how many get sick.
A trial implementing the Smart Way is getting underway at Imperial College London. In the United States, we do things the Stupid Way, at least partly because of the unaccountable influence of a tribe of busybodies who, having nothing productive to do, spend their time trying to convince people that thousands of lives are worth less than dozens of lives. Those busybodies generally refer to themselves as Ethicists, but I think it’s always better to call things by informative names, so I will refer to them henceforth as Embodiments of Evil.
Last night, while I was attempting to calculate the amount of damage that these Embodiments of Evil have caused, I was interrupted by a knock on my door. It turned out to be a man from Porlock, who wanted to consult me on some mundane issue. At first I tried to turn him away, explaining that I was in the midst of a difficult calculation and could not be distracted. But my visitor brought me up short by reminding me that the economist’s job is not just to lament bad policies, it’s also to figure out ways to circumvent them. So we put our heads together and this is what we came up with:
First, design a vaccine trial that is, to all appearances, set up the Stupid Way. We vaccinate people, we let them go their own ways, and we track what happens. But we add one twist: Any volunteer who gets sick after being vaccinated receives an enormous payment. Call it something like “Compassionate Compensation”.
Here are the advantages:
Continue reading ‘Vaccine Testing: The Smart and Sneaky Way’
Here are the opening paragraphs of my (paywalled) op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal.
For nearly four years, I’ve looked forward to voting against Donald Trump. But Joe Biden keeps testing my resolve.
It isn’t only that I think Mr. Biden is frequently wrong. It’s that he tends to be wrong in ways that suggest he never cared about being right. He makes no attempt to defend many of his policies with logic or evidence, and he deals with objections by ignoring or misrepresenting them. You can say the same about President Trump, but I’d hoped for better.
The great tragedy of the Trump administration has been that the President’s obvious mental incapacity has tended to discredit, in the minds of the public, even the good policies that he (apparently randomly) chooses to endorse. As a result, many good policies will never get the consideration they’re due.
For example: Trump happens to be right that we can design a system a whole lot better than Obamacare. But he’s never explained why, and he’s never even attempted to sketch out what such a system might look like. This (appropriately, and probably accurately) makes him appear to be an idiot, and therefore (inappropriately) leads the public to dismiss meaningful health care reform as an idiotic policy.
Likewise: Trump happens to be right that lockdowns and other mandates have enormous costs, which need to be weighed against the benefits of fighting a pandemic. But instead of focusing on that important point, he’s garbled it all up with the ridiculous notion that you’d have to be dumb to wear a mask (and no, his occasional weasel words on this subject do not erase his primary message). This (appropriately, and probably accurately) makes him appear to be an idiot, and therefore (inappropriately) leads the public to dismiss meaningful cost-benefit analysis as an idiotic exercise.
There are a thousand more examples; feel free to share your favorites in comments.
The next time somebody asks me why there have to be billionaires, I will point that person to this tweet from Elon Musk:
Musk went ahead and invested about $100 million in SpaceX and $6 million in Tesla — totaling about half of his proceeds from the sale of PayPal, in which he was an early investor.
Who invests $100 million in a project that has a 10% chance of success? Answer: Essentially nobody who doesn’t believe that success will bring a reward of at least $1 billion.
I devoutly wish that Ruth Bader Ginsburg had lived on for a very long time. She was fair-minded, thoughtful, and occasionally brilliant. I valued her reasoning even when I disagreed with her conclusions, and because she was a careful thinker, I am confident that there were times when she was right and I was wrong.
I devoutly wish that Donald Trump were not the president of the United States, largely because he is everything that Ginsburg was not.
But clouds have silver linings, and I take great solace in the fact that Trump will (probably) appoint Ginsburg’s successor. History suggests that a Trump appointee will share the Ginsburg characteristics I most admire, and that a Biden appointee would probably not. The world is a complicated place.
This Saturday at 2PM Eastern time, I’ll be talking to the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking on “Why is There Something Instead of Nothing?”
Unfortunately, times are such that I’ll have to give my talk over Zoom. Happily, this means that no matter where you are in the world, you can attend. Register by visiting the upcoming meetings page and scrolling down to “Click Here to Register” (near the very bottom), or just visit the registration page. Registration is free but required.
As my good deed for today, I’m posting a solution to a problem that I’m sure is plaguing others. I hope Google points them here.
I’ll say this much for brick-and-mortar booksellers: Not one of them ever sold me a book, then showed up at my house two years later, pulled the book off the shelf and started highlighting passages for me. I can’t say as much for Amazon, which has been selling me books for many years and has suddenly decided to highlight passages in all of them. Effectively, they’ve vandalized every book they’ve ever sold me.
Yes, I know about the checkbox in the settings for “Show Popular Highlights”. (This is in the Android Kindle App.) Yes, I have that box unchecked. I am not an idiot. Unchecking the box has no effect. Checking it and then unchecking it again has no effect. The highlights remain highlighted.
Here are some other things that don’t work: Clear the app cache. Reboot the phone. Express rage.
So I called Amazon customer service and had the good luck to hook up with Brandi G., who was fantastic. She instantly understood the problem, instantly understood everything I had tried to do to fix it, and, unlike what I’ve come to expect from customer service reps pretty much everywhere, she did not insist that I try all the same things again. Instead, she suggested that I uninstall the app completely and reinstall it, and she stayed with me on the phone to see how things would turn out. Presto! Problem solved. Yay Brandi.
Then an hour later, the popular highights came back.
So I uninstalled and re-installed about six more times (because that’s the kind of guy I am) and finally called Amazon again. This time I had the bad luck to hook up with Devan J., who kept me on the phone for 35 minutes, mostly in silence while he researched the problem. (When I suggested that we hang up and he could call me back when he had an answer, he insisted that I stay on the line, to no apparent purpose.) One of the first things I asked him was: What if I install an older version of the app? No, said Devan, unfortunately that’s impossible.
Like an idiot, I spent about 24 hours believing him. Then I decided to go ahead and do it. Here is the solution:
1) Fully uninstall the app. This means going to the phone settings, then Apps, then Amazon Kindle. First choose “Force Stop” and then “Uninstall”.
2) Go to apkpure.com, search for the Kindle app, and you’ll be presented with a great variety of choices, all representing different vintages of the same app. I chose one from June 2020, two months ago, well before my problems started. Click to download, click to install, and voila. Problem solved.
I hope this works for you too.
Coming soon, I hope: Tricks I’ve discovered for setting up a new Windows 10 machine, which has been something like a fulltime job for me for the past two weeks. Why can’t things just work out of the box?
A short time ago, in a Universe remarkably similar to our own, a team of researchers investigated racial differences in cognitive skills and concluded, with high degrees of certainty and precision, that the correlation between race and intelligence is zero. They submitted their results to a journal called Science, which is remarkably similar to the journal called Science in our own Universe. The paper was accepted for publication, but the editors saw fit to issue this public statement:
We were concerned that the forces that want to downplay the differences between the races as well as the need for racial segregation would seize on these results to advance their agenda. We decided that the benefit of providing the results to the scientific community was worthwhile.
Which of the following best captures the way you feel about that statement?
A. Bravo to the editors for advancing the cause of truth, even if it might be misused.
B. Boo to the editors for even thinking about suppressing the truth, even if the truth might be misused.
C. WHAT?!?!? Since when is a failure to share the editors’ political priorities a “misuse” in the first place?
D. Both B and C.
E. Other (please elaborate).
My vote is for D. It is outrageously wrong for the editors to even consider using the resources of their journal to promote their private political agenda. It is doubly wrong for them to even consider doing so by suppressing a paper they would otherwise accept. And it is triply wrong for them to even consider imposing on the owners and readers of the journal to support a political agenda that some of those owners and readers will no doubt find deplorable.
I happen to be one of those who deplore the expressed agenda, but that has nothing to do with my point here. The outrage would be exactly as great if the editors were focused on protecting capitalism instead of segregation.
Now let’s come back to our own Universe, where the editors of Science (the real Science) accepted a paper suggesting that a large fraction of the population might already have a sort of pre-immunity to Covid 19, and somehow saw fit to issue the following statement:
We were concerned that forces that want to downplay the severity of the pandemic as well as the need for social distancing woud seize on the results to suggest that the situation was less urgent. We decided that the benefit of providing the model to the scientific community was worthwhile.
As I said, the two Universes are eerily similar. The statements made by the editorial boards in both Universes seem about equally outrageous to me.
The real-world editors, if they cared what I thought, might want to respond that my analogy fails because “the need for racial segregation” is a political stance, whereas “the need for social distancing” is a scientific one. If so, they’d simply be wrong. Biologists have no particular insight into whether people would be happier in a world with both a little more Covid and a few more hugs. If any group is uniquely qualified to estimate the terms of that tradeoff, it’s the economists — but I wouldn’t want the editors of an economics journal making this kind of call either.
I’m glad that the editors did the right thing. I’m appalled they even considered doing the wrong thing, and concerned that this means they might do the wrong thing in the future, and might have done so in the past. It is not okay to suppress truth in the furtherance of a political agenda. It is not okay to presume that all good people share in your agenda, or to co-opt other people’s resources in order to advance it.
(Hat tip to David Friedman, whose blog made me aware of this.)
Walter Block is under fire from a bunch of very silly people, for reasons that he recounts in this week’s Wall Street Journal.
Unfortunately, if you’re not a Journal subscriber that link probably won’t work for you. Fortunately, it doesn’t matter, because these people are as unoriginal as they are silly, and the issues are pretty much the same as they were when a bunch of equally silly people ganged up on Walter six years ago. So you’ll be pretty much caught up if you just re-read the accounts from back then.
You could, for example, re-read my 2014 blog posts titled Block Heads and Chips Off the Block. I’ll even make this easier for you by reposting the first one right here:
The righteously irrepressible Walter Block has made it his mission to defend the undefendable, but there are limits. Chattel slavery, for example, will get no defense from Walter, and he recently explained why: The central problem with slavery is that you can’t walk away from it. If it were voluntary, it wouldn’t be so bad. In Walter’s words:
The slaves could not quit. They were forced to ‘associate’ with their masters when they would have vastly preferred not to do so. Otherwise, slavery wasn’t so bad. You could pick cotton, sing songs, be fed nice gruel, etc. The only real problem was that this relationship was compulsory.
A group of Walter’s colleagues at Loyola university (who, for brevity, I will henceforth refer to as “the gang of angry yahoos”) appears to concur:
Traders in human flesh kidnapped men, women and children from the interior of the African continent and marched them in stocks to the coast. Snatched from their families, these individuals awaited an unknown but decidedly terrible future. Often for as long as three months enslaved people sailed west, shackled and mired in the feces, urine, blood and vomit of the other wretched souls on the boat….The violation of human dignity, the radical exploitation of people’s labor, the brutal violence that slaveholders utilized to maintain power, the disenfranchisement of American citizens, the destruction of familial bonds, the pervasive sexual assault and the systematic attempts to dehumanize an entire race all mark slavery as an intellectually, economically, politically and socially condemnable institution no matter how, where, or when it is practiced.
So everybody’s on the same side, here, right? Surely nobody believes the slaves were voluntarily snatched from their families, shackled and mired in waste, sexually assaulted and all the rest. All the bad stuff was involuntary and — this being the whole point — was possible only because it was involuntary. That’s a concept with broad applicability. One could, for example, say the same about Auschwitz. Nobody would have much minded the torture and the gas chambers if there had been an opt-out provision. And this is a useful observation, if one is attempting to argue that involuntary associations are the root of much evil.
Continue reading ‘Block Heads, Redux’
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Thoughts on what it takes to be a successful presidential candidate, circa 1980.
From Joseph Kraft:
The emergence of President Carter and Ronald Reagan as the nearly certain nominees of their parties expresses not a failure of the system, but a true translation of how much the majority prefers nice men to effective measures.
From Florence King:
We want a president who is as much like an American tourist as possible. Someone with the same goofy grin, the same innocent intentions, the same naive trust; a president with no conception of foreign policy and no discernible connection to the U.S. government, whose Nice Guyism will narrow the gap between the U.S. and us until nobody can tell the difference.
People who have a lot of money very rarely give it away. Some invisible hand prevents them.
| —Iris Murdoch |
| Henry and Cato |
This was Woodstock. As Jeffrey Tucker reminds us, Woodstock took place in the midst of a global pandemic that claimed more American lives than has Covid-19 (at least so far) — at a time when the population was much smaller . After correcting for population size and demographics, Tucker estimates the Hong Kong flu epidemic of 1969 killed the equivalent of 250,000 contemporary Americans, compared to under 100,000 so far for the current affliction.
Yet in 1969, American life went on pretty much as normal. As Tucker points out:
Stock markets didn’t crash because of the flu. Congress passed no legislation. The Federal Reserve did nothing. Not a single governor acted to enforce social distancing, curve flattening (even though hundreds of thousands of people were hospitalized), or banning of crowds. No mothers were arrested for taking their kids to other homes. No surfers were arrested. No daycares were shut even though there were more infant deaths with this virus than the one we are experiencing now. There were no suicides, no unemployment, no drug overdoses attributable to flu.
Media covered the pandemic but it never became a big issue.
The Woodstock producers flew in a dozen doctors to have on hand in case of a fast-spreading virus, but they seem to have given no serious thought to the prospect of cancelling.
Why such a difference between then and now? Tucker suggests a few possible culprits (the 24 hour news cycle, political and cultural shifts, etc.), but the first thing that came to my mind was that folks today are a whole lot richer than folks in 1969, and can therefore much better afford to take a few months off. If the average worker in 1969 had taken a four-month unscheduled vacation without any assistance, he’d have gone hungry — and the amount of available assistance was limited by the fact that everyone else was a lot poorer then too.
Here are the key facts we need to test that theory:
Taken together, these facts imply that the value of a life in 1969 was about 58% of what it is today, which in turn implies that people would have been willing to put up with only 58% as much lost income in exchange for the same amount of safety. If you’re willing to tolerate six months without a paycheck to avoid, say, a 1% chance of death, then your 1969 self would have been willing to tolerate only about three-and-a-half months. If avoiding that 1% chance of death requires, say, a five-month lockdown (or any other length longer than three-and-a-half months but shorter than six), then you’re going to favor that lockdown, though you’d have scoffed at the thought of it in 1969.
Even this fails to account for another factor: A national shutdown of a given length would have been a lot costlier in 1969 than it is in 2020, when a good 30% of us can work from home. Perhaps a six-month lockdown only costs us (on average), say, three month’s income. (I pulled that “three months” out of my hat. I’m sure with a little research I could have done better.) If that’s what we’re willing to tolerate for a given amount of safety, then our 1969 selves would have tolerated only a one-and-three-quarter months’s income loss, which might have meant something like a two month lockdown. Where we’d tolerate six months, they’d tolerate only two.
In other words: Nobody considered locking down the economy in 1969 because they couldn’t afford to (or more precisely, given their relative poverty, they preferred to spend their wealth on other things). Today’s lockdown is widely supported because it’s a luxury we’ve grown rich enough to afford. In other words, the lockdown is yet another triumph of capitalism.
That, at least, is what the back of my envelope says. I expect there are people who have thought about this a whole lot harder than I have. I hope we hear from some of them.
Herewith an excerpt from Chapter LIV of The Way We Live Now, by Anthony Trollope, first published in 1875.
The background:
Mr. Augustus Melmotte, reputed to be in possession of a great fortune, of which both the magnitude and the provenance are cloaked in considerable mystery, has declared his candidacy for the Parliamentary seat of Westminster. Some say he’s much less wealthy than he claims to be, others that his wealth has all been effectively stolen from stakeholders in the vast enterprises that he’s run into the ground. His supporters say he’s a financial genius, and that this is a sufficient qualification for the job. He is accompanied on the campaign trail by Lord Alfred Grendall, a member of the Conservative establishment from Indiana London who has hitched his wagon to Mr. Melmotte’s star:
There was one man who thoroughly believed that the thing at the present moment most essentially necessary to England’s glory was the return of Mr. Melmotte for Westminster. This man was undoubtedly a very ignorant man. He knew nothing of any one political question that had vexed England for the last half century, — nothing whatever of the political history which had made England what it was at the beginning of that half century. Of such names as Hampden, Somers and Pitt he had hardly ever heard. He had probably never read a book in his life. He knew nothing of the working of parliament, nothing of nationality, — had no preference whatever for one form of government over another, never having given his mind a moment’s trouble on the subject. He had not even reflected how a despotic monarch or a federal republic might affect himself, and possibly did not comprehend the meaning of those terms. But yet he was fully confident that England did demand and ought to demand that Mr. Melmotte should be returned for Westminster. This man was Mr. Melmotte himself.
Continue reading ‘The More Things Change…’
