Disqus - Latest Comments for Swimmy

Re: In Pursuit of Happiness Research: Is It Reliable? What Does It Imply for Policy?

Swimmy — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 15:46:57 -0000

Finally! I know what I'm doing after class.

Re: New on Free Will: Award-Winning Journalist Kerry Howley!

Swimmy — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:33:22 -0000

I agree that you should press Hanson on the height tax issue. Bring up Megan McArdle's post ( http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/20... ) on why Mankiw's paper doesn't take everything into account, especially for women.

Since I know you follow the Intelligent Design debate, you might want to bring up Hanson's post on Expelled ( http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/05/expelled-... ). He seemed to like it quite a bit more than the average rationalist, especially in comparison to Sicko.

Re: Happy Independence Day!

Swimmy — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 03:39:31 -0000

Fin: You know, after all these years, DC's license plates still say "Taxation Without Representation." But hey, what's one city?

Re: Norberg on Friedman on Klein

Swimmy — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 01:41:08 -0000

Not only is it plainly true, but it's Friedman's justification for his work. He's saying, "I want to change your mind. I want to do so because, when the time comes, your and everyone else's minds are what's going to change national policy." It's a populist appeal rather than an elitist dictate. As Norberg points out several times in his short-but-sweet paper, Klein's interpretation is demonstrably the exact opposite of what Friedman actually says.

Re: Divided Government

Swimmy — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 19:53:17 -0000

What he writes next, however, is nonsense:

"They imagine that under divided government, the wise elders of both parties would sit around a table and 'rise above politics' with pragmatic solutions for everything."

Actually, I imagine that under divided government, there would be such vicious partisanship that nobody could come up with pragmatic solutions for anything. Sounds awesome.

Re: Clarification: It’s Macro that’s Embarrassing

Swimmy — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 22:15:35 -0000

I largely agree with the original tirade. Here's an amusing quote from Stanely Fischer that sympathizers may find amusing:

Q: Why do you think there is more consensus amongst economists over microeconomic issues compared to macroeconomic issues?

A: In part because micro is less important and in part because, believe it or not, I think that the empirical standards are lower in microeconomics. Let me justify what I mean. When Rudi Dornbusch and I came to write our principles book I knew macro well but hadn't done much micro for a long time. I thought it was going to be a breeze, the macro part we know and the micro part is all clear - there would be a thousand empirical equations out there to illustrate demand and supply curves. Well the empirical backing isn't around very much - there are lots of stories and models but I don't think micro focuses on a set of issues in the same way that macro does. Microeconomists are not called upon to explain real-world phenomena to anything like the extent that macroeconomists are. They don't have a daily confrontation with policy makers, the newspapers and the capital markets. One of the very successful micro fields is finance, partly because they are really pushed to come up with something that will stand the test of a lot of very sceptical people.

From A Modern Guide to Macroeconomics, first edition.

Re: Trade and Romance

Swimmy — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 15:52:55 -0000

This is one of my favorite entries yet.

Re: Feedback, please

Swimmy — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 17:03:37 -0000

I don't know about others, but I read the site from a feed aggregator, so I haven't noticed any of the changes. At a glance while I'm commenting, the Snap feature loads too slowly to be useful. But the picture box still pops up, making it kind of an annoyance.

Re: Don't Be Sari

Swimmy — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 07:12:44 -0000

Interestingly, this is exactly the example Friedman used in one of his Free To Choose videos to show the damages of protectionism: Footage of Indian loom workers, outdated since the 60s but protected by their government, and their miserable villages.

Re: Illegal Immigrants

Swimmy — Wed, 13 Jun 2007 19:30:40 -0000

By far the best post I've seen on the relevance of the legal/illegal distinction is from Will Wilkinson: Justifying the System of States. He draws an analogy to property rights that's quite useful. His ultimate point: we must justify the entire system of nation-states, not just our own. As it is, the system of nation-states in which the blessings of citizenry are conferred and barred based on the accident of geographical birth cannot be morally just because it makes and keeps most people worse off.

Re: The change in our standard of living

Swimmy — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 08:30:37 -0000

I actually had an econ teacher who presented the case to my class: would you rather make $50,000 a year now or be a millionaire tycoon a hundred years ago? I was the only one who volunteered to take the former option. After he made the same argument Coyote does, most of the class still said they'd prefer to be late-19th-century millionaires. I've always wondered if that was because of a status-oriented mindset or some sort of bias.

Of course, if I were a millionaire today, I'd probably spend most of it on videogame-related oddities, so maybe I have a little bias too.

Re: The Moment Somone Must Explain that He or She Isn't a Protectionist, You Can Bank on that Person Being a Protectionist

Swimmy — Sun, 09 Dec 2007 11:25:32 -0000

"I'm not a racist, but [insert something blatantly racist]."

About like that.

Re: Natural Disasters and Capital Replacement

Swimmy — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 19:21:28 -0000

It really depends on the market, right? For instance, Robin Hanson thinks that hospitals are likely to buy new capital too early--to use methods and equipment without good track records. This is because patients are biased to think new = better.

But I agree that efficient capital substitution happens plenty often enough that, no, we still shouldn't be seeing a silver lining in natural disaster on this front. Even if old capital doesn't get replaced quickly enough, disasters don't discriminate against new capital either.

Re: Natural Disasters and Capital Replacement

Swimmy — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 12:55:20 -0000

John Dewey:

Sorry, I forgot about my comment here. You can find Hanson's general argument about the problems with health care in Cato Unbound:

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/09/10/robin-hanson/cut-medicine-in-half/

I'm having trouble finding the data he uses to support the particular claim that new treatments are often ineffective. I believe he's using the RAND study and other aggregate studies that find no significant correlation between better health and health spending after a certain point, and extrapolating that new treatments and equipment are likely to be expensive.

I thought about the whole natural disaster thing a little more. (Forgive me if someone already said this; this blog generates a lot of comments these days!) Like I said before, disasters don't discriminate between old and new capital. They're equal-opportunity destroyers, barring some major exceptions--obviously newer buildings tend to have better safety standards than older buildings, but the vast majority of capital replacement we're talking about isn't on this scale. The reporter could still be right if, in fact, businesses are biased to not replace capital often enough. There could still be enough old vs. new capital that a natural disaster prod could fix a market failure. This would also depend on the rate of disaster. One every year would have a much worse effect on capital substitution than one every ten years.

But imagine you're a shopkeeper. You know that disasters don't discriminate. You also know (approximately) the rate of natural disaster in your area. You think you can refurbish your shop, change out your capital, and thereby better serve your customers. Do you? It depends on the risk of a disaster hitting the new capital versus the profit you would make from serving your customers. If you live on the Florida coast, it might be very risky to go ahead and make the capital substitution.

In this case, natural disasters aren't the cure for a market failure of capital substitution--they're the cause. The shopkeeper is absorbing the risk by losing some profit, while customers are absorbing the risk by shopping in a less efficient store. Seems to me that they're all spending the right amount, now that the cause is uncertainty rather than bias. It's as efficient a solution you can get in such a case. I think it's reasonable to believe this is more likely than a bias against capital substitution.