Eric Rasmusen’s Weblog

THE FILIBUSTER is an example of the kind of lovable tradition that is so much a part of the English and American political systems, like the New Hampshire primary being first and the Democratic and Republican parties alternating whose convention comes first. This kind of tradition depends on fair play and reciprocity, though. The Democrats have innovated by using the filibuster to establish a veto on routine appellate court nominations. As many have noted, including Professor Eastman in National Review, the filibuster is not only not in the Constitution; it pretty clearly can be overturned by a majority of senators at any time. Just as the Senate of 2000 cannot pass a law that says that future Senates cannot ever pass a tax increase, so no Senate can pass a law saying that future Senates cannot end debate except by a 60% vote.

The filibuster, like the New Hampshire primary, has survived because it has been tolerated–as part of “playing fair”. Now the Democrats have stopped playing fair. The obvious response is for the Republicans to retaliate by adhering to the letter of the Constitution, especially since that will also preserve its spirit, and to go further by ending the filibuster for everything, not just for nominations.

The Democrats would not have done this if they had foreseen that response. Rather, they expect the Republicans to either (a) acquiesce, or (b) return to the status quo, by passing a rule that nominations are not subject to filibuster. In case (a), the Democrats have succeeded marvelously. In case (b), they are no worse off than before. Thus, this was probably a smart, if immoral, move.

It is curious that the Democrats pursue this strategy in domestic politics, while eschewing it for foreign policy; and the Republicans do the opposite. Saddam Hussein tossed out the weapons inspectors in the hope that either (a) Clinton would acquiesce, or (b) Clinton would threaten war, and Saddam could back down and be no worse off than before. Clinton’s response was to acquiesce.

Mark Kleiman has a good post, Tanakh Notes: 1 Samuel 28 from a UCLA faculty Bible study.

The group, now called the Hirshleifer Tanakh Study Group after the much-lamented Jack Hirshleifer, a great economist and for many years our guiding spirit and note-taker, embraces a mix of disciplines and levels of textual, linguistic, and traditional knowledge; occasionally we are joined by the learned and great-souled UCLA Hillel rabbi, Chaim Seidler-Feller. As the least learned in the group, I have somehow become the replacement note-taker.

I wish I’d had a chance to participate. Jack Hirshleifer was a wonderful person to talk to, and one of UCLA’s best features was the weekly poli-sci discussion group with him and Jeff Frieden.
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I’m coming to think more and more highly of the Baye-Morgan (2001,AER) article on Information Gatekeepers. Those are firms which report the prices and terms of other firms that actually sell the product. The gatekeeper firms thus are selling information to the consumer– though maybe they are paid for this by the ultimate sellers, not by the consumers directly.

This is an example of a solution to a modern predicament: the multitude of products and of sellers for each product. Our consumer choice problem is getting more and more complicated. This problem much precedes the Internet– even the Yellow Pages shows it graphically– but the Internet is intensifying it. Also, the problem is not just for prices of goods, but for information generally. In Googling, the great problem is to know which sites are most worth checking out. Google are Wikipedia are doing good jobs, but the institutions are still evolving.

“Information Gatekeepers on the Internet and the Competitiveness of Homogeneous Product Markets” Michael R. Baye; John Morgan The American Economic Review, Vol. 91, No. 3. (Jun., 2001), pp. 454-474.

I’m going to Oxford on sabbatical next year, to Nuffield College. If anybody hears of a 3 or 4 bedroom furnished house to let during roughly August 10, 2007 to July 1, 2008 please let me know, especially if it’s in near North Oxford in the St. Philip and James School catchment area. St. Ebbes, to the south of the City Center, looks like a good school too.

Not unrelatedly, I will have a 4 bedroom furnished house to rent in Bloomington, Indiana during that same period.

SODOMY LAWS are a good test for distinguishing between conservatives, process libertarians, result libertarians, and liberals. Conservatives are for laws against sodomy (though varying as to the extent to which the laws should be enforced). Process libertarians are against them, but believe the legislature should write the law rather than the courts. Result libertarians are against them, and want the courts to strike down any such laws. Liberals are for sodomy laws, but only the kind of law which encourages sodomy by granting it special protections.

That thought was stimulated by John Derbyshire ’s National Review column, “Confessions of a Metropolitan Conservative”. Here is the part of it that poses the key question:

“Ah,” she said, in the tone of someone who has just had her worst expectations confirmed, “that’s typical of you National Review types! Milk and water conservatives! You talk a good game, but when it comes down to it, you’re just another bunch of metropolitan liberals!”

I was thinking about this all the next day. The lady had a point, of course. I seriously doubt there is anyone at National Review who would vote for a sodomy law. None of those NR writers who have declared on the matter have come out in support of such laws. That is not the same thing as saying that a state should not be permitted to have such laws, if the people of that state want them. We are mostly Tenth Amendment, strict- construction types here at NR, and I’m guessing that my position on the constitutional point is widely shared. We don’t want to lock up homosexuals, though.

Now, 43 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll last May said that homosexual relations between consenting adults should not be legal. So the uncomfortable question arises: If we NR-niks are to the left of 43 percent of Americans on this issue, just what kind of conservatives are we?

Derbyshire’s link to the Gallup poll is broken, but I found another link for the fact that 42% of those polled believed homosexuality should be illegal (for the year 2001).

Scooter Libby has been convicted of perjury for making false statements to a grand jury that was investigating whether someone had criminally leaked Valerie Plame’s identity to the public. It looks to me like he did make the false statements, and I would trust the jury on that. But is it a crime? I don’t see how it could be.

It is a crime only if the false statements were material to the investigation. They weren’t. Prosecutor Fitzgerald already knew that Richard Armitage had leaked Valerie Plame’s identity. He also must have known whether it was a crime to leak her name. He has not charged Armitage, so it must not have been a crime. In any case, the investigation had concluded its task, and Fitzgerald has not suggested that it had any other crimes to investigate. The grand jury’s job was over, though perhaps the jurors did not know it (I don’t know if Fitzgerald told them about Armitage). How, then, could Libby’s testimony have been material?

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I think Proust has a good point in Times Rediscovered about starting from individual attitudes to understand national attitudes. It is the opposite approach of that in Plato’s Republic, of looking at the nation to understand the individual, but both approaches have their place. As always, it is a matter of starting with what is easier. (more…)

I had an invitation to write an entry for the International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, 2nd edition, but declined it when I found that they require gender-neutered writing. They wouldn’t allow a sentence such as, “If a player in the game is informed, he will never react in that way.” It’s interesting how politicized academic writing has become– and how many academics implicitly condemn everything written before 1990 as insufficiently supportive of feminism.

People criticize Intelligent Design as being a theory meant to fill in gaps in our knowledge. That, however, is often the role of theory (always?)— to make better sense of stuff that doesn’t fit our current thinking completely. The neutrino is a good example. It was posited to explain a gap in theory in 1931, but there was not experimental evidence “finding” it until about 30 years later. As “What’s a Neutrino?” tells us:

• 1931 - A hypothetical particle is predicted by the theorist Wolfgang Pauli. Pauli based his prediction on the fact that energy and momentum did not appear to be conserved in certain radioactive decays. Pauli suggested that this missing energy might be carried off, unseen, by a neutral particle which was escaping detection.

• 1934 - Enrico Fermi develops a comprehensive theory of radioactive decays, including Pauli’s hypothetical particle, which Fermi coins the neutrino (Italian: “little neutral one”). With inclusion of the neutrino, Fermi’s theory accurately explains many experimentally observed results.
• 1959 - Discovery of a particle fitting the expected characteristics of the neutrino is announced by Clyde Cowan and Fred Reines (a founding member of Super-Kamiokande; UCI professor emeritus and recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in physics for his contribution to the discovery). This neutrino is later determined to be the partner of the electron.

Greg Mankiw has a post on a NYTimes op-ed by Austan Goolsbee on why the very rich do not spend more on consumption or donation. It is easy to see that more consumption isn’t worth the trouble. Mankiw and Goolsbee focus on bequests. Something I think might be the key is the timing of donation. (more…)

I wonder if a carbon tax might not be a good idea even if it has absolutely no effect on global warming. The reason is that it is a flat tax rather than a progressive tax.

If taxes simply increase, that is of course more distortionary than our present system, but presumably if we imposed a carbon tax we would reduce the income tax to keep revenue constant. Then the two questions are (a) how distortionary is a carbon tax compared to a tax on labor, rents, and capital income, and (b) if the carbon tax is more distortionary in general, does its lack of progressivity and loopholes nonetheless make it less distortionary?

Of course, it could be that carbon is a luxury good, in which case a carbon tax is progressive in effect even if it is flat as applied. Or, it could be regressive in effect, which would increase its efficiency even more by reducing the tax effect on the marginal dollar.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION obviously got Jayson Blair his job at the New York Times despite his dishonesty and incompetence. But that is to be expected, even by supporters of affirmative action. The whole idea is that the employer chooses workers who are more likely to be dishonest or incompetent, because he is trading off that extra probability against the benefit of having a person of the race he prefers. If he isn’t doing that, it’s not affirmative action– it’s just hiring the most honest and competent person. So affirmative action proponents should be pleased if they see evidence of black and hispanic incompetence— it’s a sign, and an inevitable one, that affirmative action is being widely practiced.

Jonah Goldberg brought up an example of this today– students in the Bakke case:

Or recall the profile of Patrick Chavis, a black doctor who had been admitted to the UC Davis Medical School under the race-quota scheme that rejected Allan Bakke. Bakke, of course, sued and the result was the Bakke decision now under review by the Supreme Court. In a 1995 article, “What Happened to the Case for Affirmative Action,” Nicholas Lemann, a writer as talented as he is liberal, contrasted the two doctors. Chavis was a heroic obstetrician working in Compton. Bakke was a mediocrity toiling in obscurity in Minnesota. Giving Chavis an opportunity — according to Lemann and the activists and politicians who rallied to the article — was a boon not only to Chavis but to the community, the nation, humanity, indeed all carbon-based life forms. Alas, two years after the article appeared, the Medical Board of California suspended his medical license, partly on account of Chavis’s “inability to perform some of the most basic duties required of a physician.” Chavis was found to have been guilty of gross negligence and incompetence in three cases; the judge overseeing his case ruled that letting Chavis “continue in the practice of organized medicine will endanger the public health, safety and welfare.”

Goldberg got the story from William McGowan’s Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism.