Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

Tom Smith at RC has a wonderful post on Professor Susan Estrich, “Faster than a U-turning Swiftboat . . .”

For those of you just joining us, the good Professor only recently penned this now infamous (but still pretty obscure) screed, in which she revealed that she and her Democratic friends were out for blood, hoping to bribe tattlers to tell all about W’s inglorious past, everything from AWOL antics to illegally procured abortions, not because it was easy, but because it was the right thing to do. We are mean Democrats, hear us roar. But suddenly, all has changed. Just like that! A new dawn has dawned, a new day has dayed. Now that the dirt from the memo-gate hand grenade has exploded, lodging shrapnel in, to extend a metaphor, the collective Democratic hind-quarters, it’s time to move on.

But Susan, I’m not ready to move on! Couldn’t we please have the Democrats try again, just one more time! There must be other stories out there that could be so unbelievably, spectacularly mismanaged that they could bring a major media institution to its knees, and kick the remaining life out of a floundering campaign! In fact, you must hurry, or Kerry-Edwards might just die of its own. You owe it to your fans. We haven’t had this much fun since watching the anchor-persons’ faces as they read the result in Bush v. Gore.

Wonderfully written! In particular, “the anchorpersons’ faces”, “We are mean Democrats, hear us roar”, “bring a major media institution to its knees, and kick the remaining life out of a floundering campaign!”, “the dirt from the memo-gate hand grenade has exploded, lodging shrapnel…”

It’s interesting how the Muslim and Jewish vote is going in the 2004 election. Best indications are that Muslims have shifted en masse from Bush (whom they supported in 2000) to Kerry, while the Jewish vote is going to be as solidly Democratic as ever. This is the main reason why my electoral college map gives Michigan to Kerry.

I decided to collect data on this. Bottom line: the best, though not top-caliber polls say the Muslim Arab-American vote is Kerry 96, Bush 4 of voters making a choice, and the Jewish vote is Kerry 77, Bush 23….
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Via Alex Tabarrok at MR, I discover Glen Whitman at Agoraphilia

Say Ted would like to talk on the phone every two days , whereas Sheila would like to talk every day . You might think Sheila would call Ted about two-thirds of the time — but in fact, she will call him every time . If they talk on Monday, Ted plans to call on Wednesday; but then Sheila calls him Tuesday. His clock reset, Ted plans to call on Thursday. And then Sheila calls on Wednesday. Eventually, Sheila decides Ted doesn’t care about her, because he never calls….

Alex Tabarrok at MR has a post I’ll use in my class tomorrow, since we are discussing property rights and the problem of defining “property”:

The Canadian health care system is falling apart. Bill Binfet needs both knees replaced. He waited 4 months to get an appointment with a specialist who then put him 290th on a waiting list. It’s been a year and still no surgery despite the fact that his arthritis is now so bad he has bone grinding on bone.

In desperation, Binfet has placed an ad in the local paper offering to buy someone else’s place on the waiting list . The provincial health care minister tut-tuts and says “it would be unethical for a doctor to trade places on a surgical wait list for an exchange of money.”…

One reason our precautions against hijackers are silly is that a simple bribe can get around any of them. Via Tyler Cowen, the September 17 Washington Post tells us

A thousand rubles, or about $34, was enough to bribe an airline agent to put a Chechen woman on board a flight just before takeoff, according to Russian investigators. The agent took the cash, and on a ticket the Chechen held for another flight simply scrawled, “Admit on board Flight 1047.”

The woman was admitted onto the flight, while a companion boarded another plane leaving Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport the same evening. Hours later, both planes exploded in midair almost simultaneously, killing all 90 people aboard.

It would take more than $34 in America, but I think $2,000,000 would do it, not a large sum for a group that is willing to use up its own members’ lives.

I do have a solution, though I don’t think we’re using it: entrapment. We need to immediately send out FBI agents to offer numerous two million dollar bribes to airport personnel, and we must publicize the firing (and perhaps the criminal prosecution, even if conviction fails) of those who succumb to temptation. Lots of people would give up their honor for two million dollars, but if there is only a 1 in 100 probability that the briber will pay rather than turn you in, the expected payment falls to $20,000, with a 99% chance of losing your job.

Rasmussen Reports has a webpage comparing the 2004 and 1896 elections that is worth reading. But it is wrong. The election to compare with 2004 is not 1896, despite what Karl Rove may think, but 1864….
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“Arnie’s Party” in the American Spectator gets things depressingly right. As my wife said to me one night, it really doesn’t seem possible to get away from the median voter on domestic policy. Foreign policy, interestingly, is different, perhaps because moderate policies so often clearly are worse than either extreme (e.g., invade Iraq, but not with enough troops to win). At any rate, the Republican Party of 2004 is closer to Rockefeller’s policies than to Goldwater’s, even if Rockefeller’s political descendants have all become Democrats. Here’s Neumayr on the liberal’s victory in the Republican Party: ….
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UPDATE, Sept. 30: I see that Farrell and Shapiro mention the “profit-stealing” I discuss below, as a “well-known principle”, citing Mankiw and Whinston, 1985, RJE, on entry into oligopolies.

I was just skimming Mark Lemley’s working paper, “Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding”, on the recommendations of ProfessorsSolum and Volokh. On page 39 it cites Farrell and Shapiro’s 2004 working paper, “Intellectual Property, Competition and Information Technology” on the point that a patent monopoly does not reward the inventor enough. I haven’t read their paper, though I know I ought to (especially since Farrell was on my thesis committee back in 1984), but I thought about the idea, and I’ll write these notes for myself, weblog readers, and those three authors….
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I was just reading Christian Perspectives on Legal Thought, edited by Michael McConnell Cochran, and Carmella. I found it disappointing, but it did make me think about how the questions of a Christian’s attitude towards laws might be more crisply raised. Two exemplars that should come naturally to lawyers are Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, with its assertions, objections, and answers, and the various Restatements of the American Law Insititute, which assert rules for subjects such as Tort, Agency, and Contract, and then show how they apply to hypotheticals. My style here will be more like the Restatements, but I’ll start with the hypothetical and then go to analysis….
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Professor Bainbridge of professorbainbridge.com was here yesterday to present a scholarly paper. I won’t comment here on his paper, partly because it was stimulating enough that I spent a lot of time not listening to him but thinking about one of the big, classic, issues it raised: what is a firm? (I would actually pay closer attention to a boring talk, because a boring talk leaves the listener’s mind completely blank, unable to do anything but keep listening in the hope that the speaker will eventually say something to make a few neurons fire off.)
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Beldar’s “Judicial Watch strikes out with demand for Navy Dep’t investigation” is extremely good. The Navy has said that John Kerry’s medals were awarded by correct procedures, and that it isn’t worth looking at the substance of whether they were awarded properly….
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Professor Bainbridge of professorbainbridge.com was here today to present a scholarly paper, about which I might or might not blog separately. Before his talk, we were discussing whether a corporation’s board of directors could take the unusual action of firing a low-level employee directly, bypassing the corporation’s president, rather than having to get the president to do it by threatening to fire him (or actually firing him). Think about Viacom firing Dan Rather. Or, think about how Nixon first needed the resignation of his Attorney-General then his Number Two, before Number Three finally fired the Special Prosecutor in the Saturday Night Massacre. (Number Three was Bork, who also considered resigning but was told not to by Number One and Number Two, who thought enough protest had been registered.)

Ordinarily, corporate boards can fire employees if they want to, even though it would be highly unusual to bypass the usual chain of command and micromanage. There might be contracts in the way, though. What if the president’s contract says he has sole right to hire and fire lower employees? Professor Bainbridge had, on March 2, 2004, blogged on Eisner’s contract with Disney. The “duties” section makes Eisner CEO….
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At the Law and Econ Lunch yesterday, we were discussing how hard it is to get data. I’d asked if anybody knew of evidence as to how whether if two college applicants appeared with identical high school records, we would expect the student from a poor family to do better in college than the one from a rich family. Admissions offices have the data to find this out, but they are secretive. Have they done the studies themselves? We speculated as to whether they had the expertise. Professor Stake is an expert on these things, having done more than anyone to figure out how US News rankings of law schools works and having authored “The Ranking Game” website. He thought it quite possible the studies hadn’t been done, and knows from experience that it is hard for even quasi-insiders (e.g., the chairman of a faculty admissions committee) to get the data.

At any rate, Dr. Stephen Peck, a first-timer who is visiting SPEA for the year, brought up his difficulties in getting health data from the nuclear power industry. He’d wanted to study cancer incidence at low levels of radiation, but couldn’t get the data. That made me think about hormesis– the idea that often low levels of poison seem to increase health rather than reduce it. He would have had a good test of it, and, indeed, some studies conclude that low levels of radiation reduce cancer rates. Whether the studies are right is a different matter– one oughtn’t to trust that kind of study without seeing what they actually did, since epidemiological estimates, even ones published in reputable journals, are often quite worthless because they so often omit relevant variables….
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At the 2004 Foursquare Reunion, which now has a photo database sortable by keywords, I learned that Marie Williams Bellet has come out with a few CD’s that sound interesting:

Drawing on her experience as a mother of seven, Bellet sings of the everyday life of a wife and mother, and offers a vision of what it means to be a “fulfilled” woman today. Heartfelt lyrics are brought to life by Marie’s rich singing.

Mine was one of the few classes that lacked a Williams (Marie was ‘78, I think), but I was fond of her brother John, who has become a priest and will no doubt be a bishop some day– I had him pegged to become a successful conservative Congressman.

I got nostalgic last night after talking to the Battery Chemist, who had been following Ra^thergate since the first night, and after skimming over The Guardians, the recent book about the Eastern Establishment- Kingman Brewster, Mac Bundy, Bishop Paul Moore, John Lindsay, and their pals. I’ll blog another time on their interesting mix of talent, high-mindedness, and failure. For now, though, I’ll note that Tom Veal has a good post on “John Kerry’s Yale Political Union”….
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Ra^thergate has some interesting economics to it. Stanley Kurtz has a demand-side theory for why CBS is refusing to admit defeat:…
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This post is notes mainly for myself (or for others who have heard about this subject) on risk. I’ve started reading Roger Lowenstein’s When Genius Failed, about the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management in 1998. Besides the lessons for finance, thinking, and life generally, Professors Merton and Scholes were involved. On page 62 Lowenstein talks about risk, and that started me thinking.

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The story below is from CBS, so I don’t know if it can be trusted, but it did make me think about why Senators don’t become Presidents, even though that is their dearest ambition. My thought: they’re rotten administrators, so they can’t even run a successful campaign.

In 2004, Senator Kerry’s campaign is in disarray. In 2000, Senator Gore (later VP, but that doesn’t help) lost to a governor. In 1996, Senator Dole lost to a governor. In 1992 we had a President vs. a governor. In 1988, Senator Dukakis lost to a CIA manager-Republican chairman-businessman. In 1984, Senator Mondale lost to a president. In 1980, we had a President versus a governor. In 1976, we had a President versus a governor. In 1972, Senator McGovern lost to a President. In 1968, Senator (later VP) Humphrey lost to Senator Nixon- narrowly. (Humphrey had been a mayor, I think, so maybe this is an exception.) In 1964, Senator Goldwater lost to a President. In 1960, Senator Nixon faced Senator Kennedy. And so forth.

Senator Harding did win in 1920. That’s the first exception I can think of (note that I’m giving credit to Truman for having been President 1944-48 before he faced Dewey). Harding was notorious for his density, though, which means he was probably smart enough to let someone else run his campaign without interference, and I don’t remember whether Cox was a senator or not. …
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A little while ago John O’Sullivan wrote this about reading between the lines in the Soviet Union and CBS. It applies to political conventions too….
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I have often wondered what junk processes– things the computer does without your asking– Windows inflicts on my computer, clogging it up. I’ve also wondered which processes are legit, when I want to shut down suspect ones. Windows XP does give you a list of processes, but with mysterious names in computerese. But finally I have found my Rosetta Stone. ….
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