Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

CUBA UNDER CASTRO has in no sense been a success story. Sometimes you hear people say that although GDP has not done so well, Cuba has good social services. That is plausible, because a country can get good social services (and a good army) by taxing away everything else. But it turns out that although the army is no doubt much bigger than under Batista, pre-Castro Cuba *already* had strikingly good living conditions, as I discover from Brad DeLong via Instapundit:

Just because people begin their papers with quotes from Ludwig von Mises does not automatically mean that they are wrong:

http://lanic.utexas.edu/la/cb/cuba/asce/cuba8/30smith.pdf

http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/asce/pdfs/volume12/perezlopez.pdf

The hideously depressing thing is that Cuba under Battista–Cuba in 1957–was a developed country. Cuba in 1957 had lower infant mortality than France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Cuba in 1957 had doctors and nurses: as many doctors and nurses per capita as the Netherlands, and more than Britain or Finland. Cuba in 1957 had as many vehicles per capita as Uruguay, Italy, or Portugal. Cuba in 1957 had 45 TVs per 1000 people–fifth highest in the world. Cuba today has fewer telephones per capita than it had TVs in 1957. , 03.05.20b.htm ]

This was drawn for Amelia at her birthday party by RK.

BUSH’S DIPLOMACY seems to have achieved what that of previous Presidents could not: it has persuaded Syria to shut down the offices it allowed terrorist groups to publicly flaunt. As the Guardian says,

DAMASCUS, Syria (AP) - Doorbells and phones went unanswered at the Damascus offices of Palestinian militant groups the United States accuses of terrorism. Instead of veteran campaigners ready to rail against Israel for hours, visitors were greeted by posters of Palestinian “martyrs” on the walls outside - and silence.

All signs pointed to what neither the Palestinians nor the Syrians will acknowledge: Syria has bowed to U.S. pressure and curbed the radicals it has hosted for years.

Reached at home Tuesday, Ahmed Jibril, secretary general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command, confirmed that his group and nine others have closed their Damascus offices, but refused to say why.

Remember how everybody’s been saying that Gulf War II may have been a success, but it’s set back U.S. influence everywhere in the world? Not in the Middle East, apparently.

On page 72 of Richard Dawkins’s, The Ancestor’s Tale: A
Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, we read why absence of
fossils helps confirm the truth of the theory of evolution:

It is in the nature of sedimentary rock that its materials are
continually being recycled. Old mountains such as the Scottish
Highlands have been slowly ground down by wind and water, yielding
materials which later settle into sediments and may ultimately push up
again somewhere else as new mountains like the Alps, and the cycle
resumes. In a world of such recycling, we have to curb our importunate
demands for a continuous fossil record to bridge every gap in
evolution. It isn’t just bad luck, that fossils are often missing,
but an inherent consequence of the way sedimentary rocks are made. It
would be positively worrying if there were no gaps in the fossil
record. Old rocks, with their fossils, are actively being destroyed by
the very process that goes to make new ones.

This is not a fallacious argument, but it is in the spirit of the
equally valid “God of the Gaps” argument which Dawkins so criticizes.

WHICH WARS ARE JUST can be a difficult question, but what one hears commonly this spring is that a just war is a defensive war, where “defensive” means that you wait until you’re attacked. I didn’t see anyone point it out, but this implies that Hitler was fighting a just war against Britain. He did not attack Britain in 1939; indeed, he said publicly that he had no quarrel with Britain, and that is quite believable, since he had several countries to conquer first before he had anything to gain by attacking Britain. What happened was that in 1939 Prime Minister Chamberlain, deciding a bit too late that Hitler couldn’t be trusted, issued a unilateral statement saying that Britain would defend Poland against an attack by Germany. Germany attacked Poland later in the year, telling Britain to stay out of the fight. Instead, Britain decided to attack Germany.

Britain was justified, of course, but that does not alter the fact that this was a pre- emptive war against Germany, started by Britain not because of any imminent threat from Germany, but out of fear that without a war in 1939, Germany would be strong enough to beat Britain five or so years later. And, indeed, Germany’s U-boat program was not ready yet, having been scheduled for a later war.

BILL BENNETT”S GAMBLING is an interesting story. He is a rich man who thinks many things are sinful, but, typical of Catholics, not gambling, and he does gamble large sums several times a year. The best article is Jonah Goldberg’s in National Review, which says,

“But the biggest reason I find these Bennett articles so troublesome is what they reveal about the kind of society we ‘re building. Hypocrisy is bad, but it’s not the worst vice in the world. If I declared “murder is wrong” and then killed somebody, I would hope that the top count against me would be homicide, not hypocrisy. Liberal elites — particularly in Hollywood — believe that hypocrisy is the gravest sin in the world, which is why they advocate their own lifestyles for the entire world: Sleep with whomever you want, listen to your own instincts, be true to yourself, blah, blah, blah. Our fear of hypocrisy is forcing us to live in a world where gluttons are fine, so long as they champion gluttony.”

The rest of the article is well worth reading too.

Pete Dupont has an excellent op-ed in the WSJ on global warming, with a coda about DDT and malaria.

Sunspot activity has reached a thousand-year high, according to European astronomy institutions. Solar radiation is reducing Mars’s southern icecap, which has been shrinking for three summers despite the absence of SUVS and coal-fired electrical plants anywhere on the Red Planet. Back on Earth, a NASA study reports that solar radiation has increased in each of the past two decades, and environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg, citing a 1997 atmosphere-ocean general circulation model, observes that “the increase in direct solar irradiation over the past 30 years is responsible for about 40 percent of the observed global warming.”

… Half of the past century’s warming occurred before 1940, when the human population and its industrial base were far smaller than now.

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DIVERSITY sounds like a good thing in education. But so does uniformity. I hear lots of complaints from professors that it is hard to teach a class because the students differ so much in ability. It is easier to teach all smart students or all stupid students than a mix, which is one reason required courses are tougher to teach— they get a random sample of abilities.

I actually have never heard a professor say a class was hard to teach because the students were not diverse. The closest is perhaps years ago when I heard Arthur Miller of Harvard Law say that the class dynamics changed a lot if he had even one or two outspoken conservative students in the class. I don’t remember if he thought the change was for the better or not.

It is easy to take blessings for granted. I am warm, well-fed, healthy in body, with a secure job, recognition in my field, a wife, children, undivorced, and with no fear of violent death or immediate fear of natural death. Yet I take all that for granted.

It’s interesting that in modern America being warm, well-fed, and with no fear of violent death or immediate fear of natural death is almost universal, unlike in earlier times. But in earlier times having a secure job, a wife, children, and no divorce was almost universal, unlike now.

Here’s a comment I submitted to John Tierney’s blog.

Prof. Zimring and the criminologists didn’t predict the drop in crime that started in the 90’s, but it was what a simple model of deterrence would predict: when the probability of punishment rises to the level of the 1960’s, crime will fall to that level. (Actually, the probability didn’t rise that much for most crimes except murder, and the rates didn’t fall that much either). I didn’t predict it, but that’s because I didn’t have enough faith in the simple model.

For some figures, see this 1999 report by Morgan Reynolds.

http://www.ncpa.org/studies/s229/s229.html

I looked for examples in the Bible where using experiments to test for God’s presence was mentioned. I have a number of excerpts below, from Luke (the Temptations in the Wilderness), Judges (Gideon’s fleece experiment), and Exodus (water from a stone in Massah). I think there might be one involving David, too, but I can’t remember where.

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I can’t remember where I’ve seen the attitude of the quote below from Proust’s Times Rediscovered– it’s been a long time since I was at Yale, which is probably where— but I like it. It’s good both that rich people feel themselves a special class, with duties, and that they also respect talent. Indeed, unless an untalented person has pride in something such as birth, it is hard for him to accept that someone else is more talented. If he does have pride of birth, then he is not threatened by intellectuals.

…that mental attitude of the faubourg Saint-Germain with which those who believe themselves the most detached from it are saturated and which simultaneously gives them respect for men of intelligence who are not of noble birth (which only flourishes in the nobility and makes revolution so unjust) and silly self-complacency. It was through this mixture of humility and pride, of acquired curiosity of mind and inborn sense of authority, that M. de Charlus and Saint-Loup by different roads and holding contrary opinions had become to a generation of transition, intellectuals interested in every new idea and talkers whom no interrupter could silence. Thus a rather commonplace individual would, according to his disposition, consider both of them either dazzling or bores.

Many intelligent men have written at length about God, but none that I know of about ghosts. Ordinary people often believe in both. Belief in God thus does not seem to be just a rationalization of a folk belief.

Larry Samuelson’s “Modelling Knowledge…” in JEL 2004 is a very good article about common knowledge, no trade theorems, and such. (more…)

Here I found out how the Justice Dept. can charge a $500 million fine for Sherman Act violations when the Act’s maximum fine is $10 million:

18 U.S.C. § 3571(d) provides that the government can set as an alternative to the statutory maximum fine an amount that is twice the gain or twice the loss from the conduct. The principal reason for the Antitrust Division’s success in this area is that corporate defendants usually enter into a negotiated plea agreement rather than challenge the Division at trial and, if necessary, at a contested sentencing hearing. Plea agreements may include non-prosecution provisions involving other product areas or for corporate executives, resolution of U.S. travel status for individuals who are not U.S. citizens, or other benefits that outweigh the cost of agreeing to a fine much higher than the Sherman Act statutory maximum. Since 1996, the Division has obtained fines in excess of the statutory maximum $10 million in more than 30 cases, obtaining a fine as high as $500 million from a defendant of the vitamins cartel.

The 2003 State Department report on religious freedom is out, I see from Christianity Today’s weblog. Here is one place where the State Department does a good job. I read a few of the entries. Here are some excerpts from the part on France. It seems that after World War I, France allowed the churches in Alsace-Lorraine, just acquired from Germany, to retain their state funding.

For historical reasons, the Jewish, Lutheran, Reformed (Protestant), and Roman Catholic groups in three departments of Alsace-Lorraine enjoy special legal status in terms of taxation of individuals donating to these religious groups. Adherents of these four religious groups may choose to have a portion of their income tax allocated to their religious organization in a system administered by the central Government.

Central or local governments own and maintain religious buildings constructed before the 1905 law separating religion and State. In Alsace and Moselle, special laws allow the local governments to provide support for the building of religious edifices. The Government partially funded the establishment of the country’s oldest Islamic house of worship, the Paris mosque, in 1926.

I was reading Dani Rodrik’s “Goodbye Washington Consensus…” in the Dece. 2006 JEL. He argues that the pro-market policies everybody has been pushing for economic development in the past 20 years are misguided and they don’t seem to have worked. I’m skeptical, though. The last part is where he makes his own recommendations, which it turns out are no more based on proven empirical success than the ones basic price theory suggests. I also wonder about his claim that the standard recommendations have worked badly. He cites Argentina, for example, as a failure, but the problem there was exactly the huge government deficits that are one of the Washington Consensus’s main targets. I bet if he looked at the results of particular policies, rather than overall growth, he’d see things differently. On the other hand, it’s also true that economies are robust to a lot of bad policies. The Communist countries did develop; Europe is not regressing in wealth; with world technical progress, it’s hard not to advance; the investment rate matters more than tariff policy.

It is often taken as obvious that God is omnipotent, but what evidence do we have for that? It seems to me something that cannot be determined. God is clearly much more powerful than we are, is able to perform miracles, create something from nothing, and so forth, but that is not the same as omnipotence. It seems likely that if God created the earth, He could destroy it too, but we don’t have a lot of information on the subject (ending it at Judgement Day is different from being able to end it at any time).

Similarly, how could we decide whether God foresees all things? I do not view that as intrinsically unlikely, but I don’t know the evidence for it. That God can foresee *many* things is not the same.

The only place to find evidence would be in the Bible, and I wonder whether there are any passages sufficiently broad in context. God is mighty and can do miracles– agreed. God can predict the future– agreed. And those are the most important points. But to make as precise statements that God can do anything and knows everything requires more detail— useless detail, perhaps–0 than the Bible usually provides. I say “useless” because if it turned out that God could do anything except destroy the planet Jupiter, that would mean he was not omnipotent but was for all practical purposes omnipotent.

Maybe this points to a solution to the Problem of Evil: God cannot prevent all evil. This need not be full-fledged dualism, just acknowledgement of lack of omnipotence and constraint by someone or something. In fact, even if God is omnipotent, evil is evil, and while it may be required for some greater good, an even better thing would be to have the greater good without the necessary evil. Some kind of facts constraint even the omnipotent God. But we must still grant that God, being powerful, could prevent much evil, if not all of it. So this is not a true solution to the Problem.

How would we quantify the amount of racial discrimination going on? Let’s take admission to colleges as an example. Suppose that we are in 1950, and a black student with a test score of 900 is rejected, while 80 white students with test scores of less than 900 are admitted. We could measure discrimination in terms of number of people in two ways. We could say that 1 person was discriminated against, or that 80 were discriminated in favor of. (We could look at the size of the test score discrepancy too, but let’s put that aside for now.)

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Would you say that it was a shame that having even two female students in your Informatics class was a high number, and the university ought to do something about that, promoting diversity? I heard that in a meeting this morning. Why does promoting that kind of diversity have any value? Does a uniquely feminine view of Unix need to be taught? Or, to get to what is no doubt the real, but still mysterious, motivation: Why should the professor like seeing people of both sexes in his classes?

What if I had 95% female students in all my classes? It would feel odd at first– not bad, but odd– but I expect I’d get used to it pretty quickly, just as professors teaching at single-sex colleges do. Certainly I have no trouble getting used to classes that are almost all male, or foreign, or Asian.