Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

I listened to three 20-minute student presentations of economic research recently, and noticed something all three had in common: Each would have been better if the overhead projector had been destroyed and the student had just written on the blackboard instead.

The problem was that the speakers threw up numerous detailed slides that were too complicated to have any meaning to the audience. and without putting the notation on the board. Having to write things down would have slowed them down enough that the audience could have followed them. Also, the mathematical notation could have been up on the board for the audience to see, and they could have studied equations for more than the few seconds they are up on a screen.

It’s interesting that for a short talk overhead slides are such a trap for the novice speaker. For the experienced speaker, overheads are all the more important if a talk is short, because he can save time otherwise spent writing on the board. The experienced speaker does not need the discipline of being limited to just a few equations by his writing speed.

I should note, too, that this problem is not limited to theory papers. Empirical papers are subject to it too, because the student is tempted to post too many numbers, showing too many of his different specifications. In twenty minutes, one regression equation is plenty! (combined, of course, with detailed discussion of its meaning)

At the end of my post, “The Just Wage– A Christian Approach to the Market” I wrote,

It is worth keeping in mind that Rerum Novarum comes from the era in which the Roman Catholic Church was uncomfortable not just with free markets but with other modern things such as secular governments and elected governments . See my old post ofAugust 2003 , which I ought to update some day (it doesn’t talk about elections vs. monarchies, on which seeIMMORTALE DEI (1885), just about whether church and state should be separate). Anyone citing papal encyclicals of that era in support of government regulation had better be ready to support other encyclicals less appealing to the modern mind.

Those old papal encyclicals on politics are actually worth looking at. ….
(more…)

My thought when I split up my weblogs was that I could better keep track of categories. Now, I’ve decided it was a bad idea. So until further notice, anything new, whether on politics or other subjects, will be at what I used to call the Not-Politics site,

http://www.rasmusen.org/x/

My thought when I split up my weblogs was that I could better keep track of categories. Now, I’ve decided it was a bad idea. So until further notice, anything new, whether on politics or other subjects, will be here at the website you’re at now, formerly the Not-Politics site.

Here are two new words I’ve come across. Both of these look like they might be useful, if I could remember them and if anybody else knew what they meant.

APORIA A*po”ri*a [L., doubt, Gr. , fr. without passage, at a loss; priv. + passage.] A figure in which the speaker professes to be at a loss what course to pursue, where to begin to end, what to say, etc.

FACTICITY fac·tic·i·ty
Pronunciation: fak-’ti-s&-tE
Etymology: French or German; French facticité, from German Faktizität, from
Factum fact, from Latin factum
: the quality or state of being a fact

In an earlier post, “Why Marijuana Should Be Illegal,” I argued that marijuana should be illegal even if it is a neutral activity, like watching bad TV shows, because neutral activities displace good activities. In that post, I explicitly put aside considerations of the cost of enforcement, noting that they could reverse the conclusion. But on reflection, I think I was wrong to say that. If we have decided that marijuana should be illegal, putting aside enforcement costs, then high enforcement costs would not reverse the conclusion.

The reason is simple: just because we make something illegal doesn’t mean we need to enforce the law. To be sure, our current marijuana laws, though by no means vigorously enforced, are costly– we do devote police time to tracking down major growers and dealers, even though I doubt police are spending any time tracking down users (as opposed, perhaps, to arresting them if they smoke in front of a policeman who is passing by for other reasons). But we wouldn’t have to. We could limit ourselves to going after marijuana fields that the policeman happens to see while patrolling, and going only after dealers who advertise on national TV. The degree of enforcement is an important policy question– an issue where the advocates of marijuana have largely won– but it is separable from the legality issue. Minimal enforcement is close to costless (it could even be profitable, with fines and seizures); tight enforcement would probably be more costly than the current lax enforcement.

It’s not obvious to me, though, that tight enforcement would be more costly to non-criminals than the current lax enforcement. Currently we investigate, prosecute, and punish dealers. This is expensive because enough profit is at stake for them to hide their activities carefully, to be dangerous to the police, and to hire talented lawyers, and we punish them with prison time, which is expensive. Users are more numerous, but each is cheaper.

The idea that illegality and enforcement levels can be separated applies generally. We could make pornography, adultery, homosexuality, cruelty to animals, and necrophilia illegal while spending minimally on enforcement. And in fact we tolerate high levels of many crimes. Consider burglary. We spend vast sums of money to catch and imprison burglars, but the War on Burglary has failed, a critic might say. Burglary is still common. But that we’ve failed to stop burglary does not tell us that it should be made legal, or that we should spend less on suppressing it.

A good site that lists the results of state presidential polls is RealClearPolitics-polls

Orin Kerr at VC asks whether the pro-war blogosphere is disheartened by events in Iraq. I’m not. In fact, though I used to be firmly in the camp of people who thought that the war was a good thing but that we should have departed after our victory and left Iraq to stew in its own juices, things are going better than I expected, and I’m now wondering whether maybe we will pull off this “First Arab Democracy” business. It’s costing dollars and casualties, to be sure, but no more than I would have predicted, and perhaps less.

More generally, I hope the following questions will help sharpen thinking on the value of the Iraq War. We have something akin to a controlled experiment. In 2000, two adjacent countries worried us with their domestic tyrannies and aggressive foreign policies. We overthrew the government of Iraq, but not that of Iran….
(more…)

I usually don’t write posts just to “vent”, but the latest outrage from Jimmy Carter seems to call for an exception. Mere weeks after certifiying a fraudulent election in Columbia, our national champion in the category of self-righteous hypocrisy (a highly competitive category, including, remember, buffoons such as Dan Rather), says that Florida’s elections are fraudulent. There can be no doubt that the word “anti-American” applies to Carter. Not only did he accept a Nobel Prize which was publicly stated to be a criticism of U.S. policy; he says that the U.S. government, unlike that of the many dictatorships he has cuddled up to over the years, is illegitimate.

If I were in Congress, I would make a motion to censure the ex-President. Even though he is private life now, he still has a duty not to embarass his country. Here is what he says in the Washington Post
(more…)

I was at a dinner Thursday night where the Indiana University President gave a good speech. In particular, he quoted Emerson as saying something like

(1) “An institution is the lengthened shadow of a man.”

Looking this up on the web, some unreliable sources such as Brainyquote say

(2)” Every great institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man.”

while others such as
Bartleby have

(3) “An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.”

Bartleby, which uses Bartlett’s 10th edition, at least cites Emerson’s
“Self-Reliance,” First Series (1841). I wish there were a quotation book that did a tolerably good job of giving citations.

At any rate, I much like version (1) the best. It is both the punchiest and the most true. Institutions are usually *not* the shadows of one man alone, and great institutions, especially, are not.

I’ll have to remember to tell my students in G492 not to indiscriminately trust web sources for quotations.

Manski has an Econometrica article about markets like the Iowa presidential market where people trade on probabilities of events happening. If the market price of a Bush contract paying $1 if he wins is .70, does that mean the market puts a 70% probability on a Bush victory? Sort of, but not really. Michael Stastny writes at MR:
(more…)

UPDATE: The
Kerry Campaign has issued a press release saying that Brinkley mis-spoke. He stands by his book’s story

“A story in the September 24 New York Times leaves the false impression that I think John Kerry was not ‘the war hero we thought he was.’ Nothing could be further from the truth. He was a great American fighting man in Vietnam and deserved all of his medals. Over the past year I have vigorously defended Kerry’s military record and will continue to do so.

“My comment was meant to be about the political consequences of the anti-Kerry Swift boat attacks vs. the anti-Bush National Guard ones. I was speaking about public perceptions not my personal beliefs.”

So he didn’t mean to say he doubted Kerry’s truthfulness- probably just a Freudian slip. Brinkley, in fact, stands by the discredited stories in his book.

The press release also says:

Paid for by Kerry-Edwards 2004, Inc.

That is OK, but it seems a bit crude to put such emphasis on how the Kerry campaign is pulling Brinkley’s strings.

Kerry’s official biographer seems to be turning on him! September 24 New York Times says

“Every American now knows that there’s something really screwy about George Bush and the National Guard, and they know that John Kerry was not the war hero we thought he was,” said Douglas Brinkley, the historian and author of a friendly biography of Mr. Kerry’s war years, acknowledging that Mr. Kerry’s opponents had succeeded in raising questions about his service….

(more…)

I’ve fiddled with my templates in Movable Type a lot, and one problem is that if I want to see the effect of my changes, I have to wait a long time for lots of files to rebuild.

Here’s a trick I’m now going to try. Movable Type makes it very easy to create new weblogs. I have created a new one just for testing. It will have just two weblog entries. Thus, rebuilding won’t take much time at all. I’ll try out my template revisions there, and then cut-and-paste them to my two real weblogs.

I’ve just added Notifier Plug-In for Movable Type. What it does is allow commenters on my weblog to check a box and get an email whenever someone else replies to their comment or makes new comments. I’ve wanted this feature ever since seeing something like it at the Swiftvets Forum.

I used the old version 1.4 of Notifier, since I haven’t updated to MT 3.0. The documentation was obscure, and I had to sniff around the User Forums and experiment before I learned that I needed to add the following code to my Individual Archive Entry

LLLinput type="checkbox" name="subscribe"GGG  Check here if you want to be notified of new commments in this thread

where LLL represents the lesser-than sign and GGG represents the greater-than sign.

Otherwise, Notifier is ready to accept check marks, but the Commenter has no box to check!

Via Drudge, the Washington Times has an interview with Karl Rove that tells us about the extent of polling in presidential campaigns: …
(more…)

Via IP, I see that Michael Totten says

In one of the cover stories Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael B. Oren (author of the indispensable Six Days of War) explain how Israel beat back the intifada. Here’s the short version.

Israel’s triumph over the Palestinian attempt to unravel its society is the result of a systematic assault on terrorism that emerged only fitfully over the past four years. The fence, initially opposed by the army and the government, has thwarted terrorist infiltration in those areas where it has been completed. Border towns like Hadera and Afula, which had experienced some of the worst attacks, have been terror-free since the fence was completed in their areas. Targeted assassinations and constant military forays into Palestinian neighborhoods have decimated the terrorists’ leadership, and roadblocks have intercepted hundreds of bombs, some concealed in ambulances, children’s backpacks, and, most recently, a baby carriage.

At every phase of Israel’s counteroffensive, skeptics have worried that attempts to suppress terrorism would only encourage more of it. [Emphasis added.]

The doom-mongers were wrong. Period. Just as they were wrong when they predicted disaster in Afghanistan. Just as they were wrong when they predicted disaster in Iraq the first time around. Just as they were wrong when they (although it was mostly Republicans this time) predicted disaster in Kosovo.

Those who keep insisting we or one of our democratic allies will actually lose a war have been wrong for a third of a century now. I am thirty four years old. The last time the doom-mongers were right I was three. They have been consistently wrong throughout my entire living memory. (Am I forgetting something? Have we lost a war since Vietnam?)

It’s always the same refrain. Only the details are different.

I might add that we didn’t lose in Vietnam either, except by default. The US and South Vietnam destroyed the Viet Cong in 1968. American ground troops then left, and South Vietnam fought off North Vietnam in the 1972 offensive (with lots of US supplies and air support). Until 1975, North Vietnam didn’t conquer a single provincial capital. But then South Vietnam collapsed, when North Vietnam attacked and the U.S. would not provide backup. That’s not surprising, since countries such as West Germany wouldn’t have remained independent after a U.S. pullout and announcement of neutrality either.

Some time back Eugene Volokh had a post on VC in which he discussed whether the CBS forgeries were illegal. He found some obscure laws that might apply, but pretty much concluded that they were not illegal, and would not have been even if CBS had typed them up themselves.

The extent to which the Kerry campaign is involved in this is still being discovered, but let’s turn the situation into a hypothetical for discussion.

Bushgate: President Bush, believing that rival John Kerry aided the Communists in 1970, tells staffers to forge documents as proof, and to leak them to CBS News. CBS News reports them as genuine, but immediately bloggers prove that the documents are forgeries, and within a week Bush’s involvement also becomes known….

(more…)

Thomas Sowell’s memoir, A Personal Odyssey, is very good. It actually reminds me of the memoir of his advisor, George Stigler. Despite his fame, Stigler had very few students, probably because his wit and his blunt criticism intimidated people (I wouldn’t be surprised if a blunt Stigler letter was one reason for my tenure difficulties at UCLA back around 1990). After reading this memoir, I can see that a willingness to get into fights is a theme in Sowell’s life, as both his strength and his weakness.

I read the library’s copy, but will be buying my own. I forgot to note down the page number before I returned it, but here is a story that gives the flavor of the book…
(more…)

I come very late to the Muller-Malkin debates over Japanese internment in World War II, but maybe that’s not a bad idea, since they’ve written summary posts by now. I’ve only skimmed, but they don’t seem to address what interests me most: whether internment can be explained simply as a special interest economic grab.
…
(more…)

The New Yorker reports that Mrs. Heinz Kerry is surprisingly sound on the subject of “national liberation movements”:

Heinz Kerry’s father moved back to Portugal with his wife after the Socialist regime of Samora Machel came to power in Mozambique, in 1975, and the country became independent. Machel nationalized private property. “My father wanted to die there,” she told me with bitterness. “He didn’t come to make money to take back to Portugal. He had nothing in Portugal.” But, as crime rose and the economy crumbled, white nationalists who had supported frelimo felt, she said, increasingly embattled and marginalized. “The Portuguese colonials were not bad people compared to the crooks who took over,” she told a reporter in Fort Lauderdale last March, and added that she could empathize with the Cuban exile community in South Florida because her parents had also “lost everything to the Communists.”

But what did she think of John Kerry’s support for the Communists in Vietnam n the 70’s and for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua in the 80’s? Ten years after the independence of Mozambique, Kerry was still saying–emphatically– that the Sandinistas were good-guy liberators supported by the people, not the corrupt looters they actually were. This just intensifies the biggest mystery of John Kerry’s life: how he got Theresa Heinz to marry him.