Bryan Caplan's Blog, page 144

Huemer's "The Use of Hypothetical Examples", by Bryan Caplan

Mike Huemer's defense of hypothetical reasoning is so excellent that I feel like I'm cheating EconLog reader when I only quote a few sentences.  So here's his complete discussion, featuring a shout out to David Hume qua economist.  From Huemer's "Why I Am Not an Objectivist":

5.3.1. THE USE OF HYPOTHETICAL EXAMPLES

Unfortunately, Objectivists usually object to the use of
hypothetical examples to test moral principles, on the ground that
the hypothetical examples do not represent reality. How, one might
ask, can we draw
conclusions about how the world really is from purely hypothetical
premises, i.e., premises about some imagined but not actual
situations?

This objection is vaguely felt by many who object to
thought experiments in philosophy in general, but it is a logical
error. You can validly deduce a categorical proposition from
hypothetical premises.
For example:

A -> (B -> C).

B -> not-C.

Therefore, not-A.

is a valid form of inference, where the "->" stands for the "if ...
then" relation (i.e. "If x were true, y would be true") (N.B. not
the so-called 'material conditional' of first-order formal logic).
And this form of inference
is relevant to the way hypotheticals are used in philosophy to test
moral principles. The typical form of thought-experiment-based
arguments in moral philosophy is as follows: "If moral theory T
were true, then
in situation S, it would be right to do A. But in situation S, it
would surely be wrong to do A. Therefore, T is false." Notice
that this form of argument is perfectly valid: the conclusion
deductively follows from
its premises (it's a variant on modus tollens). Notice also that
both premises are hypothetical - i.e., both are about what would be
right if so-and-so were the case. But the conclusion is
categorical.

Some Objectivists refuse to even consider statements of
the form "if A then B" where A is known to be false. I'm not sure
whether they think that such statements are never true. If so,
this would be
another logical error. The proposition, "If A then B" does not
assert A. To say, "If you lose your mittens, you will get no pie,"
is not to assert that you will lose your mittens. Likewise, to
assert, "If I were a brain
in a vat, I would have no knowledge of the external world," is not
to assert that I am a brain in a vat; it is not even to suggest
that I might be. This is obvious to anyone who understands the
English word "if".
In general, to say, "If A were true, then . . ." does not
imply that A is true, it does not imply that A is likely
to be true, and it does not even imply that A might
be
true (if anything, with the use of the subjunctive mood, it
implies that A is false). For example, I can say, "If I lived in
Alaska, I would have more clothes than I presently do." This is
true. It is true in spite
of the fact that I am not in Alaska, and I know
I am not in Alaska. When I say that, I am not implying that I
might really be in Alaska right now, and not in New Jersey as it
appears.

Some will still want to know, reasonably enough, why
thought experiments are useful. Even if they are in principle
capable of proving conclusions about actuality, why are they
necessary?
Why can we not learn at least as well through the
consideration of actual or at least realistic examples? Briefly,
the reason is that hypothetical thought experiments provide a means
for conceptual
controls that often cannot be reproduced in reality. Or,
in other words, they provide a way of mentally isolating
a causal, explanatory, or logical factor for examination on its own
which normally, in the real world, cannot be isolated, and to do so
while still discussing a concrete situation.

Let me give an example to show what I mean. David Hume
once came up with this thought experiment: suppose that in the
middle of the night, the paper money in everyone's wallet, safe, or
other
stash, suddenly doubled in quantity - so there is twice as much
money, but no other changes are made. Would the country then
suddenly be enormously better off - would we all be twice as
wealthy
as we are now? No, in fact we would have exactly the same amount
of wealth as we presently do, for there would be exactly the same
amount of capital around, and the same availability of labor.
(Everyone
could then double their prices.) What this shows is that increases
in the money supply do not translate to increased wealth; it can
also be used to explain why increases in the money supply cause
inflation.

Of course, such a scenario is impossible: all our money
cannot magically double in quantity. But that is not the point.
The reason the thought experiment is useful is that this way of
thinking of
it enables you to mentally isolate just the one factor
desired for consideration: the quantity of money. We imagine
just the quantity of money changed and nothing else. In
the
real world, one cannot do this. In the real world, it is not
possible to change the money supply uniformly (i.e.
increasing everyone's money, without redistribution) and it is
impossible to change
the money supply without affecting the economy in some other way at
the same time. So I cannot cite a historical case in which nothing
but the money supply was altered. This is why thought experiments
are
useful.

A similar thing is true of thought experiments in moral
philosophy. If we want to examine the significance of one morally
relevant factor for the evaluation of actions, people, or states of
affairs, it
is useful to be able to imagine and compare cases which differ
only in respect of this one factor of interest, whereas
there may be no actual cases of which this is true.

A thought experiment, in short, is not an exercise in
fantasy but a tool of logical analysis that is necessitated by the
need for conceptual clarity (sc. distinguishing different relevant
factors from one
another in your thought), together with general facts about the
nature of reality (sc. that morally relevant, or otherwise
explantorily relevant characteristics do not come isolated in the
real world). It is a way of
concretizing abstract reasoning.

Now, if someone gives an argument against your moral
theory in which the premises are true, and the conclusion follows
logically from the premises, you can not escape from the argument
by refusing
to entertain his premises, i.e., refusing to listen to the
argument. I am going to give an argument against egoism which has
those characteristics. The premises are true hypotheticals, i.e.
true "if ... then" statements,
and the conclusion that egoism is false logically follows from
them. I will not regard the mere fact that my premises are
hypothetical as showing that they must be irrelevant to (i.e. can
not entail) their conclusion,
which is categorical. I have shown above that hypothetical
premises can entail a non-hypothetical conclusion. Nor will I
regard the mere fact that the hypotheticals are counter-factual,
i.e., the antecedents are
false, and known to be so, as showing that the whole "if ... then"
proposition must be false. Both of those would be gross logical
errors. If, therefore, an Objectivist wishes to answer my
argument, he will have
to do more than point out one of the aforementioned facts, and he
will have to do more than simply refuse to listen to or refuse to
think about my premises.

(7 COMMENTS)

When Do Hypotheticals Cover Their Cost?, by Bryan Caplan

Suppose I asked, "Where would you buy steaks if you only shopped at stores starting with the letter Q?"  A few people would wrack their brains for an answer.  But most would dismiss the question: "That will never happen, so who cares?!"

Economically speaking, the popular reaction seems perfectly sensible.  The cost of devising a contingency plan has little to do with the probability of the contingency.  The expected benefits of devising a contingency plan, in contrast, heavily depend on the probability of the contingency.  So when someone confronts you with an extremely unlikely hypothetical, spurning the question is usually the prudent course. 

This seems like an awkward conclusion for me.  I habitually propose remote hypotheticals.  If you could save either one American or x foreigners, how big would x have to be before you'd save the foreigners?  If a million farmers were stuck in Antarctica, would allowing them to
migrate to a more favorable climate enrich non-Antarcticans?  If six trillion Nazis were sadistically savoring the Holocaust on interstellar television, would the Holocaust still be wrong? 

When thinkers refuse to engage such hypotheticals, I tend to see them as evasive or anti-intellectual.  But couldn't they just as easily be prudent people who value their time too much to devise contingency plans for these extraordinarily remote contingencies?

No.  Hypotheticals serve two radically different functions.  Devising practical contingency plans is one such function.  The other function, however, is to achieve intellectual clarity in a complex world.  Pondering a hypothetical is fruitful as long as it serves one of these two functions.

"Where would you buy steaks if you only shopped at stores starting with the letter Q?" is indeed a useless hypothetical.*  The scenario will never occur, and it fails to illuminate any broader issue. 

My other hypotheticals are even less likely to occur.  But each shines a spotlight on a big question.  "If you could save either one American or x foreigners, how
big would x have to be before you'd save the foreigners?" provides a clean measure of the respondent's nationalism.  "If a million
farmers were stuck in Antarctica, would allowing them to migrate to a more
favorable climate enrich non-Antarcticans?" shows how immigration can enrich non-immigrants.  "If six trillion Nazis were sadistically favoring the Holocaust on interstellar television, would the Holocaust still be wrong?" exposes the moral absurdity of Kaldor-Hicks efficiency maximization. 

Each of these topics is important.  Why not stay close to the real world when we analyze them?  We typically do.  Unfortunately, the real world is so complicated that thinkers who stay close to the real world keep getting bogged down in side issues.  Quality hypotheticals push the debate forward by stripping side issues away and getting to the heart of the matter.  As my favorite philosopher Mike Huemer patiently explains:

Some will still want to know, reasonably enough, why
thought experiments are useful... Why can we not learn at least as well through the
consideration of actual or at least realistic examples? Briefly,
the reason is that hypothetical thought experiments provide a means
for conceptual
controls that often cannot be reproduced in reality. Or,
in other words, they provide a way of mentally isolating
a causal, explanatory, or logical factor for examination on its own
which normally, in the real world, cannot be isolated, and to do so
while still discussing a concrete situation.

Five-year-olds have been known to barrage their parents with tiresome hypotheticals.  "Where will my birthday party be if there's a fire at Pump It Up?"  "Then we'll do laser tag."  "What if the laser tag place burns down too?"  And so on.  The lesson to draw is not that hypotheticals are immature, but that five-years-olds pose immature hypotheticals.  Instead of teaching kids to make all their questions realistic, we should teach them to make their fantastic questions insightful.  Yes, some hypothetical questions fail to cover their costs.  But unless you entertain hypothetical questions, you can't even enter the idea business in the first place.

* Except in this post, where it's a useful example of a useless hypothetical.





(11 COMMENTS)

The Missing Arguments, by Bryan Caplan

Libertarians have a reputation for silly absolutism.  While there's truth in the stereotype, libertarians are at least as likely to make intellectually lazy exceptions to their general principles.  This is especially true when the people losing their liberty are foreigners or other outgroups. 

The clearest symptom of this intellectual laziness is making arguments for specific exceptions that imply far broader exceptions.  Even libertarian heroes like Milton Friedman have been guilty here.  How so?  Let me outsource to the noble Don Boudreaux. 

I am convinced that Milton Friedman's most regrettable contribution to
public policy is not the relatively minor role he played during WWII in
implementing a system of income-tax withholding in the United States.
 Rather, his most regrettable contribution is announcing that, while he
favors open immigration in principle, he opposes it when the home
government runs a welfare state...

[A]s far as I know Friedman never qualified his passionate, powerful, and principled case
for drug legalization by claiming that legalization, while desirable in
principle, is unworkable (or undesirable, or impractical, or
unrealistic, or whatever) in a world with a U.S. welfare state.  But it
seems to me that if Friedman genuinely believed that the existence, and
likely permanence, of a welfare state in America is a strong-enough
reason to empower government to do what that government otherwise ought
not do - in the case of immigration, forcibly prevent people from
migrating to the United States - then he should also have qualified his
argument for drug legalization with the same condition; namely, in the
case of drugs, forcibly prevent people from getting high by whatever
peaceful means they choose.

The fact that Friedman (again, as far as I know) never qualified his
case for drug legalization with the condition that the welfare state
first be rolled back suggests to me that Friedman's case for restricting
immigration (at least as that case has now come down to us in lore) is
at odds with his case for drug legalization.

Don then turns to a case doubly dear to my heart:

And, while we're at it, doesn't the existence of the welfare state
require government also to restrict which majors college students
choose?  Without a welfare state, students would be more focused on
finding gainful employment after they graduate.  But with a
welfare state, the risk of being unemployed for long periods - or of
earning very low pay for most of one's working life - as a result of
majoring in the likes of "race studies" or "dance criticism" will too
often be ignored by irresponsible or lazy students, who rely upon
welfare-state payments to subsidize their indulgence in majors that
promise no decent monetary rewards.

Don concludes:

Where does the enhanced scope for government action end once we admit
that government buys for itself, by illegitimately exercising power W, an indulgence for the exercise of otherwise illegitimate power R?
 What sort of distrust of the motives and knowledge of government
officials leads many self-described libertarians to oppose government's
exercise of power W but approve of government's exercise of otherwise-illegitimate power R if government insists on simultaneously exercising illegitimate power W?

Obviously, you could try to make the case that the perverse interaction between the welfare state and immigration is more dire than the perverse interaction between the welfare state and drug use or college major selection.  But I've yet to see any except-for-immigration libertarian carefully construct such an argument.  Why not?  If you have an explanation for these missing arguments other than intellectual laziness, I'd like to hear it.

(11 COMMENTS)

Dear Reader Almost Passes the Ideological Turing Test, by Bryan Caplan

Michael Malice's Dear Reader: The Unauthorized Autobiography of Kim Jong Il is not what I expected.  I thought it was going to be a hilarious mockery of North Korean totalitarianism.  Instead, it's an almost pitch-perfect simulation of the autobiography Kim Jong Il would have written.  Except for the conclusion, Malice's book comes close to passing my Ideological Turing Test.  He writes North Korean propaganda like a true believer.  A typical passage:

Day and night, I read the Marshal's works on the Juche idea and made it the sole criterion for the rest of my thinking.  But in order to understand the origins of the Marshal's works, I studied the Marxism-Leninism that inspired him.  And in order to master Marxism-Leninism, I studied the bourgeois philosophers which the founders of Marxism-Leninism read so critically.  I enjoyed reading the classical German philosophy which culminated in Kant and Hegel - and I was put off by the many fallacies preached by the English economists and the French Utopian socialists.

[...]

After all my study, I concluded that, in fact, Marxism-Leninism was wholly correct.  It was an indictment of the inhuman nature of capitalism, and it put the worker class on the stage of history.  It was an inspiration, a call to drive bourgeois exploiters and plunderers to destruction.  Yes, Marxism-Leninism was wholly correct - but only under the historical conditions under which it had been founded.

I rejected dogmatism in learning and upheld creativity - and I deduced that Marxism-Leninism was not a dogma but a creative theory.  It had been necessary to creatively apply its principled to develop a new system meeting the new requirements of the new revolution.  And that was precisely what Prime Minister Kim Il Sung had done.

How good is Malice's mimicry?  Compare the text above to Kim Jong Il's Giving Priority to Ideological Work is Essential for Accomplishing Socialism .  Random passage:

To maintain socialism and lead it to victory, we must intensify ideological work.  Only when we have solidly armed the popular masses with socialist ideology and strengthened the ideological bulwark of socialism can we consolidate and develop socialism and firmly defend it from any storm.  This has been clearly proved by revolutionary experience.  If it secures ideology, socialism will triumph; it if loses ideology, socialism will go to ruin.  This is a truth that has been substantiated by history.

The downside of Malice's skill is that book isn't very fun to read.  You really feel like you're listening to a Communist dictator rambling on and on.  But if you want to learn how to accurately state views that any sensible person would reject, read Dear Reader!

(2 COMMENTS)

The Stockpile Solution, by Bryan Caplan

If I were convinced that the fate of mankind hinged on massive reductions in carbon emissions, I would still be pessimistic about unilateral taxes or cap-and-trade.  As I told Yoram:

National emissions regulations can have perverse global effects.  If
relatively clean countries switch to clean energy (via
command-and-control regulations, cap-and-trade, pollution taxes, or
green norms), fossil fuels don't vanish.  Instead, their world price
falls - encouraging further consumption in relatively dirty countries.  The net effect?  I was hoping Bauman would tell us, but he didn't even raise the issue.

International tax or cap-and-trade treaties seem almost equally flawed.  Some countries will sign; others won't.  In a world market, won't the fossil fuels the participants stop using just find their way into the hands of the non-participants?  On a homework problem, admittedly, you can solve this problem with punitive carbon tariffs on non-signatories.  In the real world, though, won't this lead recalcitrant countries to sign the treaty, then fail to domestically enforce it?

Yesterday, I hit upon an alternative policy that avoids all these problems: Stockpiling. Instead of taxing or capping pollution, a government could unilaterally buy lots of fossil fuels and sit on them forever.  This would raise the world price of fuel, spurring reduced consumption around the globe.  And since the government only pays for fossil fuels it actually receives, energy producers around the globe have no incentive to thwart the policy.  Indeed, industry has a strong incentive to participate and support the re-imagined war on carbon.

After I proposed this idea, GMU prodigy Nathan Bechhofer quickly showed me that I was reinventing the wheel.  Stockpiling is the heart of Bard Harstad's "Buy Coal! A Case for Supply-Side Environmental Policy" (Journal of Political Economy, 2012).  The original piece is math-heavy, but here's a readable write-up.  Highlights:

A fundamental problem with adopting a "demand-side mindset" that
implements policy to reduce fossil fuel consumption is that not everyone
takes part, Harstad argues. An international agreement between
coalition countries to curb oil consumption will initially have the
desired effect of reducing overall demand, but this will lower the price
of oil, giving a strong incentive to countries outside of the agreement
to buy and use more.

On the other hand, Harstad argues, if an international agreement
decides to limit oil extraction and supply, the price will go up, and
countries outside of the agreement are likely to churn out more for
export.

"Both on the demand-side and the supply-side the result is carbon
leakage, which is an increase in pollution abroad relative to the
emission-reduction at home," says Harstad, who is associate professor of
managerial economics & decision sciences at Northwestern
University's Kellogg School of Management. Carbon leakage describes the
process by which carbon-cutting measures in one location cause knock-on
emissions elsewhere.

The Harstad solution:

Harstad's solution is for coalition countries to buy up extraction
rights in countries outside of such agreements--"third countries," in his
terminology. And though this has the obvious benefit of preventing
emissions from those fossil fuels, there are rather more far-reaching
implications.

Coalition countries will naturally focus on marginal deposits least
profitable for host countries, because these can be had the most
cheaply. After a third country has sold off the rights to its marginal
deposits, Harstad argues that its supply is less sensitive to fluctuations
in global fuel price. Coalition countries are then able to limit their
own supplies without the undesirable effect that third countries will
increase theirs. The price of fuel is equalized universally. Harstad
goes so far as to assert that the equalized price is high enough that
even third countries would be compelled to pursue alternative energy
technology, and sign up to coalition agreements.

Notice that in Harstad's version of the proposal, the government stockpiles fossil fuel extraction rights rather than fossil fuels themselves.  Given monitoring and commitment costs, though, buying extraction rights is a recipe for corruption.  It's easy to inflate a geological report if the everyone knows the customer will never extract the resources he imagines he's buying.  And after the U.S. acquires and closes a Chinese coal mine, who keeps out the wildcatters - and why won't the watchmen just take bribes to look the other way?  Physical stockpiling preempts all of these problems. 

To repeat, I don't actually favor this policy.  But if a government wants to curb carbon emissions, stockpiling seems like the smart way to do it.  Am I wrong?

(17 COMMENTS)

Is the Social Security Tax Cap Disappearing?, by Bryan Caplan

How will the U.S. resolve its long-run budget crisis?  I've long predicted the abolition of the Social Security tax cap.  As I told my Public Choice undergrads back in 2011:

I think we've likely to
eliminate the Social Security payroll tax phase-out for high-income
voters.  The budgetary situation is
gradually becoming more desperate, so before too long the government will have
to choose between cutting expensive popular programs (SS, Medicare, defense) or
higher taxes.  Even people who don't
benefit from these programs see them as socially desirable, so higher taxes are
the path of least resistance.  Since
voters are largely sociotropic, they probably wouldn't be comfortable
explicitly making "the rich" pay the full burden.  But it's easy to frame the SS payroll tax
phase-out as the elimination of a loophole
rather than class warfare.  When you put
it that way, even rich voters are likely to admit that this change is the least
of available evils.

Only recently, though, did I take a look at what's been happening to the cap over the last quarter century.  In nominal terms, it almost tripled between 1989 and 2014.  In real terms, it's risen by over 25%.  Since I became a professor in 1997, the inflation-adjusted cap has grown over 20%.  Check it out:

Year

Nominal $ Cap

Real $ Cap

% Change

1989

48,000

48000

 

1990

51,300

48763

1.6

1991

53,400

48044

-1.5

1992

55,500

48668

1.3

1993

57,600

48916

0.5

1994

60,600

50196

2.6

1995

61,200

49310

-1.8

1996

62,700

49177

-0.3

1997

65,400

49780

1.2

1998

68,400

51258

3.0

1999

72,600

53511

4.4

2000

76,200

54667

2.2

2001

80,400

55605

1.7

2002

84,900

58054

4.4

2003

87,000

57984

-0.1

2004

87,900

57477

-0.9

2005

90,000

57153

-0.6

2006

94,200

57527

0.7

2007

97,500

58336

1.4

2008

102,000

58514

0.3

2009

106,800

61267

4.7

2010

106,800

59684

-2.6

2011

106,800

58735

-1.6

2012

110,100

58814

0.1

2013

113,700

59788

1.7

2014

117,000

60576

1.3

Claiming that events are already proving me right would nevertheless be foolish.  The real cap has barely risen since 2002.  What we've really seen is a massive increase from 1997-2002, with little change before or after.  This iron age of cap increases was bipartisan, spanning the late Clinton and early Bush years.

What should we conclude?  After a close look at the facts, I'm a little less confident in my long-run forecast.  If I'd been following the data closely in 2002, I would have expected rapid cap increases to continue.  Indeed, I probably would have given 1:2 odds that the cap would have been abolished by now.  As matters stand, I expect the cap to disappear around 2035.  As usual, I'm open to bets in the comments.

(6 COMMENTS)

Bauman Climate Bet, by Bryan Caplan

Yoram and I have digitally shaken on our global warming pause bet.  Via Twitter:

@bryan_caplan yes, once we clarify concerns of @wonkinakilt You're betting avg(2015-2029)-avg(2000-2014)

-- Yoram Bauman (@standupecon) June 10, 2014

(1 COMMENTS)

Bauman Climate Bet Bleg, by Bryan Caplan

The Economist confirms that global warming has paused over the last 15 years:

Between 1998 and 2013, the Earth's surface temperature rose at a rate of
0.04°C a decade, far slower than the 0.18°C increase in the 1990s.
Meanwhile, emissions of carbon dioxide (which would be expected to push
temperatures up) rose uninterruptedly. This pause in warming has raised
doubts in the public mind about climate change.

The rest of the piece discusses explanations for the pause:

A convincing explanation of the pause therefore matters both to a proper
understanding of the climate and to the credibility of climate
science--and papers published over the past few weeks do their best to
provide one. Indeed, they do almost too good a job. If all were correct,
the pause would now be explained twice over.

I'm not qualified to evaluate any of this research.  As a matter of general epistemic policy, though, I put very little stock in after-the-fact explanations.  And that seems to be all the latest research is. 

Indeed, for a long time, most specialists just downplayed the facts:

As evidence piled up that temperatures were not rising much, some
scientists dismissed it as a blip. The temperature, they pointed out,
had fallen for much longer periods twice in the past century or so, in
1880-1910 and again in 1945-75 (see chart), even though the general
trend was up. Variability is part of the climate system and a 15-year
hiatus, they suggested, was not worth getting excited about.

Or disputed the facts:

An alternative way of looking at the pause's significance was to say
that there had been a slowdown but not a big one. Most records,
including one of the best known (kept by Britain's Meteorological
Office), do not include measurements from the Arctic, which has been
warming faster than anywhere else in the world. Using satellite data to
fill in the missing Arctic numbers, Kevin Cowtan of the University of
York, in Britain, and Robert Way of the University of Ottawa, in Canada,
put the overall rate of global warming at 0.12°C a decade between 1998
and 2012--not far from the 1990s rate. A study by NASA puts the "Arctic
effect" over the same period somewhat lower, at 0.07°C a decade, but
that is still not negligible.

Or moved the goalposts:

It is also worth remembering that average warming is not the only
measure of climate change. According to a study just published by Sonia
Seneviratne of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, in
Zurich, the number of hot days, the number of extremely hot days and the
length of warm periods all increased during the pause (1998-2012).

To repeat, I'm not qualified to debate these experts.  But their reaction seems fishy to me, and I am more than qualified to bet against the consensus on the basis of that perceived fishiness.  Of course, since the experts are claiming knowledge, and I'm claiming ignorance, the odds should be in my favor.  Last week on Twitter, I publicly offered to bet at 2:1 odds that the global warming pause will continue for another 15 years. 

Yoram Bauman has nobly accepted my offer.  Indeed, he offers better terms than I requested: 3:1 odds, and I win if (according to according to ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series) the average global annual land + ocean temperature increase between 2014 and 2028 inclusive is less than or equal to +.05 C.

My main question: Do Bauman's terms raise any red flags?  In particular, does anyone have any problem with his suggested data source?

Otherwise, I propose only cosmetic changes:

1. Since we already have some data from 2014, the bet should run from 2015 to 2029.

2. Yoram proposed Wheat and Chessboard stakes, but I prefer to simply bet my nominal $333.33 against his nominal $1000.

3. If ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series stops publishing data during this period, we call the bet off.  Alternately, Yoram can propose back-up data sources, and we only call the bet off if they all stop publishing data.

My main reservation is the past reluctance of global warming skeptics to bet.  But after a 15-year pause that was not widely predicted in advance (also known as "predicted"), I'm ready to take my chances.

P.S. My Bettor's Oath states: "When I lose a bet, I will admit defeat, pay promptly, and hold my tongue
- never protesting that I was "really right."  If I have caveats or reservations, I will declare them when I make the bet - not after I lose it."  So let me state one caveat here and now: I expect to lose this bet.  I would not make it at even odds.  I am betting because I think climate experts know less than they think, not because I know future climate with any confidence.

(5 COMMENTS)

Data Challenge: "Full-Time, Year-Round Workers" Can Be Briefly Unemployed?, by Bryan Caplan

The answer to yesterday's data challenge: full-time, year-round workers can be unemployed, but only very briefly. 

You don't have to actually work full-time to be a full-time worker.  "Full-time" workers can be unemployed indefinitely as long as they "usually worked 35 hours or more in a week." 

Year-round employment status, in contrast, requires actually working year-round.  As this BLS release explains:

Year-round and part-year employment. Workers are classified as year round if they worked 50 to 52 weeks. Part-year employment refers to workers who worked fewer than 50 weeks.

In short, as soon as a year-round worker experiences more than two weeks of unemployment, he ceases to be a year-round worker.

(2 COMMENTS)

Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change: My Reservations Illustrated, by Bryan Caplan

While there's much to like in Yoram Bauman's Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change, this page nicely captures my reservations about his approach: He's tolerant of economically illiterate action, but intolerant of economically literate inaction.  (Click to enlarge).


[Excerpted
from The
Cartoon Introduction to Climate Change by Grady Klein and Yoram Bauman,
reprinted with permission from Island Press.]

Read the panels.  Instead of pointing out the standard economic (and public choice) arguments against populist approaches like "all-out mobilization," "government-funded clean energy research," and "low-carbon lifestyles," Yoram reassures readers that "It's okay if your dream is different." 

But the dreams of "wait and see if global warming is really going to be a big deal," "wait and see if geoengineering can solve global warming for a small fraction of the cost of conventional approaches," and "wait for developing countries to move along the environmental Kuznets curve" don't get the same sympathetic hearing.  They literally aren't in the picture.  (Some of the the latter arguably overlap with "planning and adaptation," but I doubt many readers will connect the dots).

What will Yoram's typical reader take away from his book?  Something like: "We definitely have to do something about global warming, and maybe environmental economics can help us get more bang for our buck."  A better takeaway, though, would have been: "Maybe we should do something about global warming, and environmental economics can definitely help us get more bang for our buck if we do."  For now, Yoram's got a monopoly on the non-fiction climate change/environmental economics graphic novel market.  I wish him success, but there's ample opportunity for an entrant to come along and improve the story.

(0 COMMENTS)