Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

I was just reading a good survey article on what people think is fair (as opposed to the usual article on this topic, which asks what *is* fair),

James Konow (2003) “Which Is the Fairest One of All? A Positive Analysis of
Justice Theories,” Journal of Economic Literature, 41: 1188- 1239 (December (2003)

Alas, the general impression from this long and careful article is that people don’t think very hard about what is fair, and so it all depends on how you phrase the questions. They like equality, sort of, but not if people have exerted different efforts, or if equality hurts general prosperity. Thus, the numerous careful attempts to find out what people think is fair come to grief, because people haven’t thought it through,even if you set up the questions so self-interest does not cloud the answer.
(more…)

It’s remarkable what good work economist Herbert Gintis has been doing since he
turned 60. He, Bowles, and John Roemer (not to be confused with David or Paul
Romer) were the economists standardly named as “Marxian” around 1980 when I
was in grad school. All of them have done far better work– still not quite
orthodox, but now quite sensible– now that Communism is dead. I think they
were liberated as much as Poland was. An example is

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (2002) “The Inheritance of Inequality.”
Journal of Economic Perspectives, 26:3-30 (Summer 2002),

which I excerpt below with my comments in italics.
(more…)

Captain’s Quarters has a new Kerry scandal, separate from all the Swiftvets stuff, about his advocacy of giving fellowships to study Vietnam refugees to North Vietnamese Communists:

Before dissecting Kerry’s intellectual failings, let’s be clear about his
intent. He made it clear that he understood that half of the fellowships went to
Communist nationals in a study that purported to research a refugee catastrophe
their government initiated. Implicit in this letter is Kerry’s contention that
any dissent erupting from this choice would be invalid. This letter is no mere
boiler-plate salutation for a constituent; Kerry knew the situation and gave his
blessing to Bowen’s handling of it.

Is it so unreasonable to say that Kerry is sympathetic to Communism?

Nordlinger at NRO has

… a homemade joke — sent to me by a reader, Mark Turk.
Kerry and Edwards are at McDonald’s, doing some campaigning. An employee, in her
excitement, spills some coffee on Kerry’s hand. Edwards wants to sue– but Kerry
wants to write it up for his fourth Purple Heart.

I might add this:

… because he’s found a regulation that says if you have four Purple Hearts,
you no longer have to answer questions from webloggers about your military
service.

It’s nice to report good news once in a while– and on subjects other than technology.

NPR yesterday had an amazing little oral essay by a lady about how she just spanked her 3-year-old boy for the first time. The theme is that spanking is good, to the narrator’s surprise! After a hellish time with a boy who wouldn’t sit in his carseat, a short spanking resulted in two hours of good humor for all.

It is interesting that so many liberals oppose spanking but favor, instead, various diabolically cruel psychological punishments. Why is that?

Of course, with my own kids I find that spanking is not really a physical punishment. Rather, it is a sign of heavy parental disapproval, so heavy that the crying really is unrelated to the very slight physical pain. I’m not very severe, though I try to be unstoppable, so I usually I will give a count to 5 or thereabouts before I carry out the spanking. By now, 2-year-old Benjamin will usually say, if I say, “I’ll spank you if you don’t do X before I count to five…” with

“Daddy, don’t count!”

and obedience, sometimes grudging, sometimes complete. The very act of counting shows that I truly disapprove, and that’s counting enough.

The worst pain is when I really show alarm. Last night, Benjamin tried to be helpful by giving me the hammer I needed to put up the train poster in his bedroom. I barked a sudden warning to put it down (it was heavy metal hammer, that he had to swing around to try to give to me), and he rushed to a corner and buried his head in a pillow for five minutes, despite my reassurances that he hadn’t done anything very wrong.

Qando has a very
interesting discussion of the Silver Star action. Points to note:
(more…)

I just bought the new Sandisk 1 -gigabyte USB 2.0 thumbdrive for about $200.

This is a device about the size of a thumb which stores 1 gigabyte of data, transferring it quicker than a CD via a USB 2.0 port. The USB 2.0 ports tout how fast they are compared to USB 1, and I find that the difference is worth it for thumbdrives (I’m not sure about for printers, mouses, etc. ). I’ve replace my old USB 1 hub at the office with a USB 2 hub.

This devise will probably make my Christmas List this year.

I’m slowly learning Movable Type. My newest Index Template is here. The new changes are:

1. I’ve added Category archives at the bottom, which list all entries in a given category.

2. I’ve put back the “Syndicate this site (XML)” command. A reader asked me why I removed it. I removed it because I didn’t know what it did. I found a link that explains it (it is some kind of news feed to your computer from my weblog) and have added that link to my webpage too.

3. I figured out how to get rid of the blank space on the left side.

4. I found the standard DeSpamming plug-in, which strips off comments that people use just to increase the Google Count on their websites by citing them. Spammers– you should be ashamed of yourself, and if I had my way, we’d pass a law putting you in jail for a long time. I’ve added the link.

5. Most of the ancillary stuff–archives and so forth– is now at the bottom of the webpage.

I mention all this mainly because although Movable TYpe is a well-designed program, the documentation is lousy. MT currently has its default templates up on its website. What it also needs, very badly, is a set of “Alternative templates”– various templates for the Index and other pages– together with how the output pages from those templates look. I know it’s a free program, so I’m not complaining too loudly, but this would be a good effort for some volunteer. And as a start, you can look at my template, as linked earlier in this post. I’m not the best person to set up a site listing different templates, though, since I don’t know PERL or JAVA or even which of those is the name of whatever these templates are written in.

Update: I forgot to include an intro to this. Here it is.

That Liberal Media started a thread on Searches for how the media covered the charges against Bush on his National Guard service (pretty much just innuendo, by the way– asking for positive evidence rather than giving any negative evidence about his service) versus how reporters are now trying to say that the Kerry Vietnam Fraud story which they tried to ignore has been running too long. I highly approve of quantitative measures of such things, and so offered my improvement on the Google Searches that were offered.

I did a Lexis Nexis search, since it is newspapers we’re interested in, not websites. I searched on August 25 on:

Previous year, full text, General News, Major Papers in Lexis-Nexis:

kerry + “swift boat veterans for truth” 11

kerry + “John O’Neill” 2

Kerry + Thurlow 6

Bush+National+Guard 205

Bush + National + Guard + Records 41

Bush + AWOL 83

Bush + Deserter 1

Of the 11 hits on

kerry + “swift boat veterans for truth”,

6 don’t relate any specific charges. They just say the vets are critical, or are charged with violating campaign finance laws,

3 do lay out at least one specific charge (i.e., that the First Purple Heart was for a band-aid sort of injury),

2 are just letters to the editor.

“Major Papers” includes papers such as the Los Angeles Times, Newsday Daily News (New York), The San Francisco Chronicle, USA TODAY, The Oregonian, The Seattle Times, The San Diego Union-Tribune, Washington Post, LA Times.

This methodology does not catch all relevant stories (e.g., The Washington Post’s important August 22 story showed up in Kerry + Thurlow but not in kerry + “swift boat veterans for truth”, but what is most important is the comparison between the numbers of Bush and Kerry Vietnam stories.

I’ve already discussed the fraudulence of Kerry’s
Third Purple Heart > in great detail. It is clear just from documents at the Kerry Campaign website
and from a Washington Post article– you don’t need to listen to the Swiftvets
if you think they’re all biased and Kerry’s people are not.

We can apply the same approach to the Bronze Star Kerry received for that same
day’s action. In essence, the undisputed facts seem to be that a man fell overboard from Kerry’s boat, and after initially continuing along the river, Kerry turned his boat around to rejoin four other American boats and Kerry personally pulled the man overboard into his boat. Two men who had gone overboard from the boat that hit a mine (and were at least slightly injured) and one man who had gotten knocked off it later while trying to rescue the boat were picked up out of the water by other boats. The big dispute is over whether the Americans were subject to gunfire after the mine explosion, as Kerry, his crew, and the official medal citation say, or not, as all but one person on the other four boats says. It is undisputed that nobody in any of the five boats or of the four men overboard was hit by a bullet.

Suppose we accept Kerry’s story that he was under fire while pulling Mr. Rassmun out of the water. I can’t see how Kerry ought to have gotten a Bronze Star even then. Any gunfire there may have been was not too dangerous, since nobody was hit, including the men floundering in the water. And though four men were pulled out of the water, including two who were at least slightly wounded, only one rescuer got a medal– Kerry.
(more…)

"http://therightcoast.blogspot.com/2004_08_01_therightcoast_archive.html#1092974
55012115977"> Tom Smith at the Right Coast has a classic post on how Thomas Oliphant said that the mainstream press is a shill for the Democratic party.
(more…)

Kerry has made a big deal of his service in Vietnam, and Democrats sneer a lot
at Bush and Cheney. It turns out, though, that Kerry and Bush actually made
very similar choices regarding combat service in Vietnam. Cheney and
Edwards also made similar choices, though a different one than Kerry and Bush.
Kerry and Bush chose to volunteer for military service that had little
likelihood of seeing combat in Vietnam. Cheney and Edwards chose not to
volunteer, and were not subject to the draft under the standard rules.

The brief story is this. Bush served in the Air National Guard, safe from combat
duty because the National Guard was not called up. Kerry served in the Navy,
which he thought was safe from combat duty for non-pilots, but after he
volunteered for small-boat duty, the Navy unexpectedly started sending small boats into
combat. Cheney was exempt from the draft for a year because he was married and
then because he had a child, and he didn’t volunteer, though he could have.
Edwards was exempt from the draft too– maybe because they’d ended it by the
time he was old enough, maybe because he was a college student– and he didn’t
volunteer, though he could have. None of them engaged in the same kind of
dishonorable evasion as Clinton, unless Kerry is unable to refute recent evidence of fraud in manufacturing two of his Purple Hearts in order to escape the combat zone.
(more…)

Kerry has not done much of anything to defend his Vietnam record except to repeat the argument that the U.S. government awarded him those medals, and everybody ought to trust that the government looked into things carefully, even if evidence turns up that it did not. Of course, that’s a bad argument. What makes it worse is that Kerry has never been willing to apply it to George Bush’s military service.
Various people have been citing this
Kerry Press Release:

“If George Bush wants to ask me questions about that through his surrogates, he
owes America an explanation about whether or not he showed up for duty in the
National Guard. Prove it. That’s what we ought to have. I’m not going to stand
around and let them play games.” — John Kerry, NBC News, 4/26/04

On the First Purple Heart, now admitted false by the Kerry cmapagn:
Captain’s Quarters reports that Kerry is backing off from the claim that his first Purple Heart was for an injury received in combat (no backing off yet from the claim that it was too trivial to require a medical officer’s treatment). This is a doubly significant Purple Heart if it is true that he only started pushing for it (after his commander’s initial refusal) when he thought it would be a way to get out of Vietnam.
(more…)

A certain Mr. Rood of the Chicago Tribune has recently come out in support of Kerry’s Silver Star story, and the newspapers are making a big deal of this, as if it is evidence from an unbiased source. Here is
Eriposte quoting
Atrios quoting the Chicago Tribune (Registration–with spam, which is why I
don’t go straight to the source):
(more…)

The August 24 WSJ ($), p. A1, has this good industrial organization story.

When Neil Van Uum opened an independent bookstore in Cleveland last year, he was bucking the odds. Thousands of bookstores have closed in recent years, ravaged by huge rivals with larger selection and lower prices. One of the biggest — Borders — has a store right across the street from Mr. Van Uum’s Cleveland site.

But the 46-year-old bookseller has managed to prevail thanks to an unusual retailing strategy: combat the giants by being even more giant. His Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cleveland is bigger than the Borders, sells merchandise ranging from toys to quilted handbags and boasts a restaurant where flank-steak salad goes for $9.95.

A

Washington Times story says this about Vice President Cheney:

“People keep telling me — they say Senator Edwards got picked because he’s
charming, good looking, sexy. I said, ‘How do you think I got the job?’ ” Mr.
Cheney quipped in a stump speech in Salt Lake City, his sixth in three days.

That is a wonderful line. It is self-deprecating humor good enough to get a laugh, because the listener’s first thought is, “They made a mistake giving the job to someone as ugly as you!”

But it is actually self-apprecating, if I may coin a word, because the reader’s second thought is, “Well, actually you must have gotten the job because you’re wise and talented.”

Then it bends back, because the listener’s third thought is,”And, of course, Senator Edwards was indeed picked because he is good-looking, and his other qualifications are negligible.”

And, finally, the fourth thought is a general lesson:
“Aren’t the media pundits who make a big deal of beauty in presidential candidates silly– much too silly to be worth listening to about anything as imoprtant as government?”

National
Review has this good comment on how another Vietnam vet talks about
medals that he didn’t really deserve.

However in his 1986 autobiography, Cleland downplayed his experience. He wrote
that he was awarded the Soldier’s Medal “for allegedly shielding my men from the
grenade blast and the Silver Star for allegedly coming to the aid of wounded
troops….” But, he acknowledges, “there were no heroics on which to base the
Soldier’s Medal. And it had been my men who took care of the wounded during the
rocket attack, not me. Some compassionate military men had obviously recommended
me for the Silver Star, but I didn’t deserve it.” He also writes that, “I was
not entitled to the Purple Heart either, since I was not wounded by enemy
action.”

Cleland seems to be handling it just right. It reminds me of the proverb that
if your record is a bit shaky it’s better for people to ask why you aren’t
praised more than for them to ask why you are praised so much. An example in
economics is James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock. Buchanan won the Nobel Prize in
economics, largely for work the two of them did together. Afterwards, some
people questioned whether Buchanan deserved the Prize for work of that
quality, and others questioned whether Tullock oughtn’t to have gotten one too,
since his work was as good as Buchanan’s.

CORRECTION, AUGUST 27: I now learn from the article of the article which quoted Cleland’s book that he did *not* in fact, get a Purple Heart. Rather, he is explaining *why it was a correct decision not to award him one.* The point I was making still holds.

(See my Kerry in Vietnam archives for more posts)