David D. Friedman's Blog, page 23
July 8, 2011
Chinese Sulfur and Global Warming
There have been a number of recent news stories reporting that global warming pretty much stopped for the past decade, due to the cooling effect of increased sulfur output in China roughly cancelling, at least in the short term, the warming effect due to CO2. Assuming that the account is correct, I think it has an interesting implication, not for climate science but for the controversy around it.
I don't watch that controversy very carefully, but one part of it is the question of what is actually happening to global temperature, with some skeptics arguing that the upward trend is for one reason or another either fictional or exaggerated. My question is whether, prior to this particular explanation surfacing, the other side had conceded that for some unknown reason temperatures were not rising as predicted, or whether they waited to admit that until they had an explanation. If the latter, then perhaps the wrong side is getting labeled "denialist."
Can readers who are involved with the controversy, on one side or the other, point to evidence, claims and counterclaims about what was actually happening to global temperatures over the past decade?
I don't watch that controversy very carefully, but one part of it is the question of what is actually happening to global temperature, with some skeptics arguing that the upward trend is for one reason or another either fictional or exaggerated. My question is whether, prior to this particular explanation surfacing, the other side had conceded that for some unknown reason temperatures were not rising as predicted, or whether they waited to admit that until they had an explanation. If the latter, then perhaps the wrong side is getting labeled "denialist."
Can readers who are involved with the controversy, on one side or the other, point to evidence, claims and counterclaims about what was actually happening to global temperatures over the past decade?
July 6, 2011
The Death of Copyright: One Observed Solution
Intellectual property in digital form is easy to copy, easy to transmit, making the enforcement of copyright law more difficult. As an increasing fraction of I.P. takes that form, we face the problem I like to describe as the death of copyright. If creators cannot control the use of what they create, how are they to get a sufficient reward to make it worth creating? It's an issue I have discussed here in the past, and also discuss at some length in the relevant chapter of Future Imperfect—available for purchase, but also webbed for free.
I recently came across one interesting example of a solution to that problem, hence this post. As I've mentioned, I spent last weekend at Westercon, a local sf convention. Like most cons, it had an art show. Being a relatively small con, most of the art was of a not very pretentious sort—I did not, for instance, notice the originals of the cover art for published books. The price range for most of it was between about $20, mostly prints and very small pieces, and $100.
The guests of honor at the con included the Foglios, the couple who produce Girl Genius , a very popular steampunk webcomic, and there was at least a moderate steampunk (alternate history, Victorian high tech) theme to the convention. The art show included the uncolored drawings for a number of frames of the webcomic, as well as at least one piece of unrelated art by Phil Foglio.
They were priced between a thousand and two thousand dollars each.
Phil Foglio is obviously a skilled artist, and one would expect his work to sell for substantially more than the work of the average sf semi-pro. But I suspect that the size of the gap reflects less that difference than the desire of the fans of the webcomic to possess a genuine piece of art associated with it. Which means that the creators of that particular piece of intellectual property can give away their digital creation online while making a significant amount of money selling associated non-digital creations in realspace. And they can do it at essentially no cost to themselves, since the drawing has already been created in the process of producing the webcomic. That is one example of what I think of as the tie-in approach to dealing with the death of copyright—the same principle that lets me put books up on the web for free and make a significant amount from being paid to give public talks, an opportunity in part created by people reading my books.
How much of an income can the Foglios expect from that particular source? My younger son, a fan of Girl Genius, tells me that it updates three times a week. Suppose the Foglios sell two-thirds of the uncolored drawings—why uncolored I don't know, perhaps because the coloring is done in a later digital step, and once the drawing is being printed from a computer it loses its rarity value. Further suppose that after paying a commission to the con or other intermediary, they end up with a thousand dollars per drawing. That's an income of a hundred thousand dollars a year—not enough to make them rich, but enough to pay for a fair fraction of groceries, rent, and the like. And they have a variety of other tie-ins, including physical books based on the comic, to supplement that.
It's an interesting world.
I recently came across one interesting example of a solution to that problem, hence this post. As I've mentioned, I spent last weekend at Westercon, a local sf convention. Like most cons, it had an art show. Being a relatively small con, most of the art was of a not very pretentious sort—I did not, for instance, notice the originals of the cover art for published books. The price range for most of it was between about $20, mostly prints and very small pieces, and $100.
The guests of honor at the con included the Foglios, the couple who produce Girl Genius , a very popular steampunk webcomic, and there was at least a moderate steampunk (alternate history, Victorian high tech) theme to the convention. The art show included the uncolored drawings for a number of frames of the webcomic, as well as at least one piece of unrelated art by Phil Foglio.
They were priced between a thousand and two thousand dollars each.
Phil Foglio is obviously a skilled artist, and one would expect his work to sell for substantially more than the work of the average sf semi-pro. But I suspect that the size of the gap reflects less that difference than the desire of the fans of the webcomic to possess a genuine piece of art associated with it. Which means that the creators of that particular piece of intellectual property can give away their digital creation online while making a significant amount of money selling associated non-digital creations in realspace. And they can do it at essentially no cost to themselves, since the drawing has already been created in the process of producing the webcomic. That is one example of what I think of as the tie-in approach to dealing with the death of copyright—the same principle that lets me put books up on the web for free and make a significant amount from being paid to give public talks, an opportunity in part created by people reading my books.
How much of an income can the Foglios expect from that particular source? My younger son, a fan of Girl Genius, tells me that it updates three times a week. Suppose the Foglios sell two-thirds of the uncolored drawings—why uncolored I don't know, perhaps because the coloring is done in a later digital step, and once the drawing is being printed from a computer it loses its rarity value. Further suppose that after paying a commission to the con or other intermediary, they end up with a thousand dollars per drawing. That's an income of a hundred thousand dollars a year—not enough to make them rich, but enough to pay for a fair fraction of groceries, rent, and the like. And they have a variety of other tie-ins, including physical books based on the comic, to supplement that.
It's an interesting world.
July 5, 2011
Stranger in a Strange Land: Fifty Years After
An earlier post discussed the topic of one of the panels that I participated in at Westercon this weekend. Another was on the subject of the Heinlein best seller, in particular its affect on the present day world. It occurred to me that some readers of my blog might be interested in my view of the subject.
Stranger had a significant short term effect on the culture when it came out, but a negligible long term effect judged by the present. Its most radical message was the idea of group marriage, group marriage of a particular sort. The nests it described were high trust families formed with minimal search and courtship, yet stable. You looked in someone's eyes, recognized him or her as a water brother, and knew you could trust each other forever after. It was a naively romantic picture, possibly workable with the assistance of the protagonist's super powers, but distinctly risky in the real world. The picture fit well into the naively romantic hippy culture of the time, quite a lot of people seem to have tried to implement it, and no doubt for at least a few it worked. One member of the panel audience made it reasonably clear that she had joined a nest, was still in it, and was happy with the result.
Sexual mores did indeed change, but not in that direction. Living in southern California in the eighties, the view that seemed most common among young adults—many of those I associated with would have been met within the SCA, a subculture that had noticeable overlap with hippiedom—was very different. The ideal pattern was stable monogamy—but who could be so lucky. Insofar as it had been replaced, it was mostly by the increasing acceptability and practice of casual sex.
There has been some development since Stranger was published, in practice and theory, along the lines of group marriage, but of a very different sort. Polyamory is much more self-conscious and structured than what we see in Stranger—partners are classified as primary or secondary and a good deal of attention paid to just what those terms mean and what behavior they imply. The result is rather closer to the Oneida Commune of the 19th century—on a much smaller scale—than to the nest. Another and less visible development has been the gradual increase in acceptability of the BDSM subculture, although most of that, at least in realspace, is still pretty low profile.
I think this description fits not only what happened in the real world but what happened in Heinlein's fictional worlds. Consider another and much more sophisticated version of a group marriage, the line marriage in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It is highly organized, new members are brought in at the low age end on a regular pattern of alternating gender, there is extensive search/courtship. And the protagonist offers a plausible explanation of its social role, why these particular institutions developed as they did and what purpose they serve.
Finally, consider Friday. The protagonist, surprisingly naive given her profession, joins a group marriage, makes a substantial commitment to it, and is booted out, her share of the assets stolen, when it is discovered that she is an artificial person, the superior product of genetic engineering. Her much later commitment to a second group marriage is the result of somewhat more careful research.
———
And, for a tangent back to self-publishing, one of my reasons to attend sf cons and participate in panels is as an opportunity to get some publicity for my work. Being, like (I suspect) many authors, addicted to the frequent checking of Amazon ratings, I took the opportunity to monitor the effect on the rating of Salamander of my con participation last weekend. As best I can tell it drove the rating, which had been drifting up above (I think) 100,000, back down to something in the 20-30,000 range, which is about the best it has yet managed.
Of course, it's now drifting back up. But if I mention it often enough here ... . And we do seem to have sold a few more cookbooks.
Stranger had a significant short term effect on the culture when it came out, but a negligible long term effect judged by the present. Its most radical message was the idea of group marriage, group marriage of a particular sort. The nests it described were high trust families formed with minimal search and courtship, yet stable. You looked in someone's eyes, recognized him or her as a water brother, and knew you could trust each other forever after. It was a naively romantic picture, possibly workable with the assistance of the protagonist's super powers, but distinctly risky in the real world. The picture fit well into the naively romantic hippy culture of the time, quite a lot of people seem to have tried to implement it, and no doubt for at least a few it worked. One member of the panel audience made it reasonably clear that she had joined a nest, was still in it, and was happy with the result.
Sexual mores did indeed change, but not in that direction. Living in southern California in the eighties, the view that seemed most common among young adults—many of those I associated with would have been met within the SCA, a subculture that had noticeable overlap with hippiedom—was very different. The ideal pattern was stable monogamy—but who could be so lucky. Insofar as it had been replaced, it was mostly by the increasing acceptability and practice of casual sex.
There has been some development since Stranger was published, in practice and theory, along the lines of group marriage, but of a very different sort. Polyamory is much more self-conscious and structured than what we see in Stranger—partners are classified as primary or secondary and a good deal of attention paid to just what those terms mean and what behavior they imply. The result is rather closer to the Oneida Commune of the 19th century—on a much smaller scale—than to the nest. Another and less visible development has been the gradual increase in acceptability of the BDSM subculture, although most of that, at least in realspace, is still pretty low profile.
I think this description fits not only what happened in the real world but what happened in Heinlein's fictional worlds. Consider another and much more sophisticated version of a group marriage, the line marriage in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It is highly organized, new members are brought in at the low age end on a regular pattern of alternating gender, there is extensive search/courtship. And the protagonist offers a plausible explanation of its social role, why these particular institutions developed as they did and what purpose they serve.
Finally, consider Friday. The protagonist, surprisingly naive given her profession, joins a group marriage, makes a substantial commitment to it, and is booted out, her share of the assets stolen, when it is discovered that she is an artificial person, the superior product of genetic engineering. Her much later commitment to a second group marriage is the result of somewhat more careful research.
———
And, for a tangent back to self-publishing, one of my reasons to attend sf cons and participate in panels is as an opportunity to get some publicity for my work. Being, like (I suspect) many authors, addicted to the frequent checking of Amazon ratings, I took the opportunity to monitor the effect on the rating of Salamander of my con participation last weekend. As best I can tell it drove the rating, which had been drifting up above (I think) 100,000, back down to something in the 20-30,000 range, which is about the best it has yet managed.
Of course, it's now drifting back up. But if I mention it often enough here ... . And we do seem to have sold a few more cookbooks.
Asset Sales: A Third Option
Discussions of the current debt limit controversy mostly take it for granted that, if the limit is not raised, the federal government will either have to cut spending—often, it is implied, by defaulting on the interest obligations on the present debt—or raise taxes.
There is, however, a third option, one that has gotten quite a lot of attention in the Greek case: Asset sales. The U.S. government, like the Greek government, owns a lot of valuable stuff, most obviously land and buildings. I don't know what the total value is, but it is hard to believe that it isn't substantial. In the Greek case, I have seen it claimed that selling all such assets would come close to liquidating the national debt.
Of course, there might be technical problems to doing it quickly, if only because of legal restrictions on how such can be sold.
There is, however, a third option, one that has gotten quite a lot of attention in the Greek case: Asset sales. The U.S. government, like the Greek government, owns a lot of valuable stuff, most obviously land and buildings. I don't know what the total value is, but it is hard to believe that it isn't substantial. In the Greek case, I have seen it claimed that selling all such assets would come close to liquidating the national debt.
Of course, there might be technical problems to doing it quickly, if only because of legal restrictions on how such can be sold.
June 29, 2011
SF and Alternative Economies
This Sunday, I'm scheduled to be on a panel at Westercon, a local SF convention, with the title:
" Economics, SF's Weak Spot
So many SF worlds, only two main economic systems. What else might we come up with as theories of value and exchange?"
Presumably the two systems referred to are market exchange and centrally planned socialism. Even within those classifications there is quite a wide range of possibilities. The Yugoslav system, for example, was nominally socialist but looked rather more like a market economy in which the firms, instead of being sole proprietorships, partnerships, or joint stock companies, were worker co-ops. The market socialism proposed by Abba Lerner and Oskar Lange in the course of the calculation controversy of the early 20th century was a system in which the means of production belonged to the state, but the state instructed the managers to play the game of pretending to be profit maximizing capitalists in order to take advantage of the decentralized control mechanism of the market. And the system of institutions I sketched in my first book was not what most supporters of the market imagine such to be, since even what are traditionally seen as government functions, such as defining and enforcing law, were entirely private. And that one has showed up, occasionally, in other people's speculative fiction.
Suppose, however, we are willing to lump all of those into two piles. Are there other interesting alternatives, real or fictional, worth including in speculative fiction? What are they?
One that occurred to me is not only a real historical institution and one that appears in fiction, it is also one that plays a central role in science fiction fandom itself, as well as elsewhere in the modern world. I will be participating in three panels at Westercon, as well as giving a demonstration on how to make cuirboulli, hardened leather armor, an interesting period technology. My efforts will not be entirely unrewarded. I will probably get a free convention registration for myself, I may get one for my wife, I will almost certainly get access to the green room, the lounge that SF conventions traditionally provide for their panelists and speakers, which includes not only a certain amount of free food, something there is usually quite a lot of at cons, but also a chance to interact with some of the more interesting people present.
But none of that is really a market exchange, a payment for service in the ordinary sense of the terms. I get the same reward whether I am on one panel or six, whether I am the organizers' favorite panelist or deemed barely worth inviting. And, as suggested by the way I just described the rewards, I don't actually know what I'm getting, since the terms are determined by custom not contract. What I am participating in is not a system of explicit exchange but a gift economy.
Most summers, although not, as it happens, this summer, my family spends about a week at the Pennsic War, the largest event put on by the Society for Creative Anachronism, a historical recreation organization in which we are long term participants. Over the course of that week I teach eight or ten classes on topics relevant to the hobby. Teaching classes is one of the ways I make my living, but it would never occur to me to charge for these ones, or to the people running the Pennsic University to offer to pay me for them. I don't even charge for handouts, which under the rules I am entitled to do. Their cost isn't very large, and it simply feels more appropriate to give them away, to include them within the (medieval) virtue of generosity.
During the same period of time I will spend about six nights, from dark to midnight or so, running a bardic circle, designed to create the illusion of a group of medieval people sitting around a campfire entertaining each other. Hosting it involves being prepared to present period, or at least period feeling, poems and stories to fill in as much of the three hours or so of the circle as is not filled by pieces presented by other people present, as well as maintaining a conversation that supports the illusion, offering around period nibbles, being a host.
And one other element. If you present a piece that really impresses me, both as a good and entertaining story and as a good job of maintaining the illusion, you will leave with a silver arm ring of my construction. The silver is real and the rings reasonably heavy; the construction of new rings to replace the ones I have given away the previous years is one of the projects I engage in earlier in the summer. The pieces are modeled on the arm rings given away by Norse rulers to reward entertainers. Ideally I would like to average one a night, but I don't think I have ever been that lucky.
This again is a gift economy and was recognized as such, in that context and others, by its medieval participants. It is a pattern that has been observed in many other societies. The basic rule is that, instead of exchanging value for value on pre-agreed terms, you give something to someone in the expectation that, although he has no legal obligation to reciprocate, he has a social obligation to. If he doesn't, he will lose status, be seen as a skinflint, almost a cheat. The Elder Edda, a collection of Norse poetry probably dating from the 9th century, contains one poem, Havamal, that is a collection of verses of advice attributed to the god Odin. One of my favorite lines is:
They knew what they were doing.
They did. I'm not sure I do. Looking at the institution as an economist, it feels like a much clumsier way of coordinating human activity than an explicit market. Looking at it as a participant, on the other hand, it makes sense, feels right. A few days ago, wandering the web, I came across a comment by someone who at some point had received one of my arm rings. She referred to it as "one of my most treasured possessions."
She wouldn't have if she had bought it.
So that is one example of an economic system, a way of coordinating human activity, that doesn't fit neatly into either the socialist or market category, even though the transactions are entirely volunary. Other examples?
" Economics, SF's Weak Spot
So many SF worlds, only two main economic systems. What else might we come up with as theories of value and exchange?"
Presumably the two systems referred to are market exchange and centrally planned socialism. Even within those classifications there is quite a wide range of possibilities. The Yugoslav system, for example, was nominally socialist but looked rather more like a market economy in which the firms, instead of being sole proprietorships, partnerships, or joint stock companies, were worker co-ops. The market socialism proposed by Abba Lerner and Oskar Lange in the course of the calculation controversy of the early 20th century was a system in which the means of production belonged to the state, but the state instructed the managers to play the game of pretending to be profit maximizing capitalists in order to take advantage of the decentralized control mechanism of the market. And the system of institutions I sketched in my first book was not what most supporters of the market imagine such to be, since even what are traditionally seen as government functions, such as defining and enforcing law, were entirely private. And that one has showed up, occasionally, in other people's speculative fiction.
Suppose, however, we are willing to lump all of those into two piles. Are there other interesting alternatives, real or fictional, worth including in speculative fiction? What are they?
One that occurred to me is not only a real historical institution and one that appears in fiction, it is also one that plays a central role in science fiction fandom itself, as well as elsewhere in the modern world. I will be participating in three panels at Westercon, as well as giving a demonstration on how to make cuirboulli, hardened leather armor, an interesting period technology. My efforts will not be entirely unrewarded. I will probably get a free convention registration for myself, I may get one for my wife, I will almost certainly get access to the green room, the lounge that SF conventions traditionally provide for their panelists and speakers, which includes not only a certain amount of free food, something there is usually quite a lot of at cons, but also a chance to interact with some of the more interesting people present.
But none of that is really a market exchange, a payment for service in the ordinary sense of the terms. I get the same reward whether I am on one panel or six, whether I am the organizers' favorite panelist or deemed barely worth inviting. And, as suggested by the way I just described the rewards, I don't actually know what I'm getting, since the terms are determined by custom not contract. What I am participating in is not a system of explicit exchange but a gift economy.
Most summers, although not, as it happens, this summer, my family spends about a week at the Pennsic War, the largest event put on by the Society for Creative Anachronism, a historical recreation organization in which we are long term participants. Over the course of that week I teach eight or ten classes on topics relevant to the hobby. Teaching classes is one of the ways I make my living, but it would never occur to me to charge for these ones, or to the people running the Pennsic University to offer to pay me for them. I don't even charge for handouts, which under the rules I am entitled to do. Their cost isn't very large, and it simply feels more appropriate to give them away, to include them within the (medieval) virtue of generosity.
During the same period of time I will spend about six nights, from dark to midnight or so, running a bardic circle, designed to create the illusion of a group of medieval people sitting around a campfire entertaining each other. Hosting it involves being prepared to present period, or at least period feeling, poems and stories to fill in as much of the three hours or so of the circle as is not filled by pieces presented by other people present, as well as maintaining a conversation that supports the illusion, offering around period nibbles, being a host.
And one other element. If you present a piece that really impresses me, both as a good and entertaining story and as a good job of maintaining the illusion, you will leave with a silver arm ring of my construction. The silver is real and the rings reasonably heavy; the construction of new rings to replace the ones I have given away the previous years is one of the projects I engage in earlier in the summer. The pieces are modeled on the arm rings given away by Norse rulers to reward entertainers. Ideally I would like to average one a night, but I don't think I have ever been that lucky.
This again is a gift economy and was recognized as such, in that context and others, by its medieval participants. It is a pattern that has been observed in many other societies. The basic rule is that, instead of exchanging value for value on pre-agreed terms, you give something to someone in the expectation that, although he has no legal obligation to reciprocate, he has a social obligation to. If he doesn't, he will lose status, be seen as a skinflint, almost a cheat. The Elder Edda, a collection of Norse poetry probably dating from the 9th century, contains one poem, Havamal, that is a collection of verses of advice attributed to the god Odin. One of my favorite lines is:
"No man is so wealthy that he objects to receiving a gift in exchange for his gift."
They knew what they were doing.
They did. I'm not sure I do. Looking at the institution as an economist, it feels like a much clumsier way of coordinating human activity than an explicit market. Looking at it as a participant, on the other hand, it makes sense, feels right. A few days ago, wandering the web, I came across a comment by someone who at some point had received one of my arm rings. She referred to it as "one of my most treasured possessions."
She wouldn't have if she had bought it.
So that is one example of an economic system, a way of coordinating human activity, that doesn't fit neatly into either the socialist or market category, even though the transactions are entirely volunary. Other examples?
What is FaceBook Good For?: Part II
After a little more experience, it looks to me as though the main function of Facebook is to keep me updated on what various people are doing—roughly speaking what I currently do by following other people's blogs—and to keep them updated on what I am doing. While that is worth something to me, it isn't worth very much. I'm not really interested in what most people I know casually are doing, and I'm not even interested in most of what actual friends are doing. When I get a message that actual friend X has just friended stranger Y, my immediate reaction is complete disinterest.
From which my conclusion is that it probably makes sense to keep my total number of Facebook friends small. Hopefully those whose invitations get ignored will not interpret that negatively—one reason for this post.
What I have not figured out how to do is to use Facebook as a way of getting people to either read my webbed work, of which there is a lot up, including the full text of multiple books available for free, or buy my recent self-publishing projects. My guess is that the solution is a fan page for myself, which would feed information out to interested people without absorbing much of time with the reverse stream, but so far I haven't figured out quite how to set up and control such a thing. The closest I've come is to put up some material on the "wall" of my personal page pointing at the things I think people might want to look at, and I have no idea to what extent it is actually being read.
From which my conclusion is that it probably makes sense to keep my total number of Facebook friends small. Hopefully those whose invitations get ignored will not interpret that negatively—one reason for this post.
What I have not figured out how to do is to use Facebook as a way of getting people to either read my webbed work, of which there is a lot up, including the full text of multiple books available for free, or buy my recent self-publishing projects. My guess is that the solution is a fan page for myself, which would feed information out to interested people without absorbing much of time with the reverse stream, but so far I haven't figured out quite how to set up and control such a thing. The closest I've come is to put up some material on the "wall" of my personal page pointing at the things I think people might want to look at, and I have no idea to what extent it is actually being read.
June 28, 2011
Blog to Book, an Open Source Project
In a recent post I raised the possibility of producing a book based on the contents of a blog such as this. My initial feeling was that the project wasn't worth doing, since the material was already available to be searched and read in its present form. A number of comments offered persuasive arguments on the other side, suggesting that, for at least some blogs, the material could be made considerably more useful and accessible by the sort of selection and organization that would accompany the conversion into a book.
At which point it occurred to me that, while the project might indeed be useful, there was no particular reason why I—more generally, the blog author—had to be the one who did it, or even had to give permission for someone else to do it.
Initially I was imagining that what was being produced would be a physical book, a hardcopy, but that is arguably an obsolescent technology anyway. Suppose instead what is produced is a web page, a hyptertext table of contents to a blog, whose purpose is to select out and organize those parts of the blog of interest to the author of the page. Each entry links to the corresponding blog post; notes clarify what is where. It is not a full substitute for the original proposal, since the author of the web page, unlike the author of the blog, is not in a position to combine three posts into two, eliminating duplication, or revise the post that started a discussion to take account of what came later. But it could provide quite a lot of the additional value that would be provided by the earlier version. In particular, it could let someone interested in my political ideas follow that subset of the blog without being distracted by my search for the perfect pocket computer/internet device, and it would make it easier to see the connections between my views of how to organize the world and my views of how to bring up children.
At which point it also occurred to me that the project itself need not have a single author. It could be in the form of a Wiki targeted at the blog. There could be multiple such web pages, written by authors interested in different subsets of the blog content. There could be dueling versions, one by a fan of my political philosophy, one by a critic, each using his organization of and comments on my posts to support his view.
In at least one important way, this would be an easier project than my original version. A significant amount of the material on my blog was written by other people. That's obviously true of the comments. But I also had extended exchanges with two other professors, Robert Frank (who I managed to confuse with Robert Ellickson in my original post on this subject), and Robert Altemeyer, who came on the blog to defend his work against my criticism. Their contributions are, morally and I suspect legally, their intellectual property, not mine, so I could not legitimately include them in a book I authored without their permission. Very possibly they would give it, possibly not—and if we imagine stretching such a project far enough into the future, some of the people whose permission was required might no longer be around to give it. I could, of course, give my summary of their arguments, but that would be less informative and, I think, less convincing, than their version. But given that their contributions are already available online, no permission is required to link to them.
At which point this is becoming not so much an idea for my blog as a speculation about the ways in which exchanges of ideas and arguments might evolve over the next few decades, given the technologies now available.
At which point it occurred to me that, while the project might indeed be useful, there was no particular reason why I—more generally, the blog author—had to be the one who did it, or even had to give permission for someone else to do it.
Initially I was imagining that what was being produced would be a physical book, a hardcopy, but that is arguably an obsolescent technology anyway. Suppose instead what is produced is a web page, a hyptertext table of contents to a blog, whose purpose is to select out and organize those parts of the blog of interest to the author of the page. Each entry links to the corresponding blog post; notes clarify what is where. It is not a full substitute for the original proposal, since the author of the web page, unlike the author of the blog, is not in a position to combine three posts into two, eliminating duplication, or revise the post that started a discussion to take account of what came later. But it could provide quite a lot of the additional value that would be provided by the earlier version. In particular, it could let someone interested in my political ideas follow that subset of the blog without being distracted by my search for the perfect pocket computer/internet device, and it would make it easier to see the connections between my views of how to organize the world and my views of how to bring up children.
At which point it also occurred to me that the project itself need not have a single author. It could be in the form of a Wiki targeted at the blog. There could be multiple such web pages, written by authors interested in different subsets of the blog content. There could be dueling versions, one by a fan of my political philosophy, one by a critic, each using his organization of and comments on my posts to support his view.
In at least one important way, this would be an easier project than my original version. A significant amount of the material on my blog was written by other people. That's obviously true of the comments. But I also had extended exchanges with two other professors, Robert Frank (who I managed to confuse with Robert Ellickson in my original post on this subject), and Robert Altemeyer, who came on the blog to defend his work against my criticism. Their contributions are, morally and I suspect legally, their intellectual property, not mine, so I could not legitimately include them in a book I authored without their permission. Very possibly they would give it, possibly not—and if we imagine stretching such a project far enough into the future, some of the people whose permission was required might no longer be around to give it. I could, of course, give my summary of their arguments, but that would be less informative and, I think, less convincing, than their version. But given that their contributions are already available online, no permission is required to link to them.
At which point this is becoming not so much an idea for my blog as a speculation about the ways in which exchanges of ideas and arguments might evolve over the next few decades, given the technologies now available.
June 27, 2011
A Possible Budget Compromise
My first preference, of course, would be to balance the budget entirely by cutting expenditures; Reason has had past discussions on how that could be done. The basic problem, in my view, is not the deficit, troubling although it might be, but the amount of resources consumed and misallocated by government.
But if there is going to be a compromise involving increasing taxes and decreasing expenditure, I think the right way to do it would be to make the "tax increases" take the form of reductions in tax expenditures, the elimination of features of the tax code whose only purpose is to subsidize one or another activity, and which distort economic decision making in the same way as other subsidies do. The obvious big one is the deduction for home mortgage interest, which subsidize home ownership relative to renting and thus played some role in creating the recent financial crisis—although I suspect that is politically untouchable.
The Obama administration, in theory, seems to agree with that approach; a recent news story claimed they were proposing to eliminate a large tax expenditure associated with an accounting rule. Unfortunately, the news story I saw on the proposal got the substance of the rule (permitting a choice between LIFO and FIFO accounting) completely wrong, making the difference look both larger and less justified than it is. As I explained in my comment to the story.
But if there is going to be a compromise involving increasing taxes and decreasing expenditure, I think the right way to do it would be to make the "tax increases" take the form of reductions in tax expenditures, the elimination of features of the tax code whose only purpose is to subsidize one or another activity, and which distort economic decision making in the same way as other subsidies do. The obvious big one is the deduction for home mortgage interest, which subsidize home ownership relative to renting and thus played some role in creating the recent financial crisis—although I suspect that is politically untouchable.
The Obama administration, in theory, seems to agree with that approach; a recent news story claimed they were proposing to eliminate a large tax expenditure associated with an accounting rule. Unfortunately, the news story I saw on the proposal got the substance of the rule (permitting a choice between LIFO and FIFO accounting) completely wrong, making the difference look both larger and less justified than it is. As I explained in my comment to the story.
"He used the example of an oil company that bought oil when prices lower and sells it when the price is higher, declaring its profit based on the higher price. "We just don't think that's right," he said."
It isn't right--and it has nothing to do with the LIFO/FIFO issue. Either the spokesman is lying, he is incompetent, or your reporter got confused.
The difference has to do not with the price when sold but the prices at which two different batches of the same product, such as oil, are bought. A firm buys a thousand gallons of oil at $2/gallon, puts it in a tank. Six months later it buys another thousand at $3/gallon, adds it to the same tank. Six months after that it sells a thousand gallons out of the tank for $4/gallon.
Under LIFO ("Last In First Out") the oil sold is considered to be from the second batch bought, so cost is $3/gallon, revenue $4/gallon, profit $1/gallon. Under FIFO ("First In First Out") it is considered to be from the first batch, profit $4-$2=$2 gallon. Note that the ultimate effect is on the timing of the profit, not the amount, since the second thousand gallons will eventually get sold too, and the total expense for the whole two thousand is the same either way.
Under neither rule is the cost set to the sale price, which would make profit zero and is what your story seems to be claiming.
For what it's worth, I teach this as one bit of a course at the law school of Santa Clara University.
The Blog, Considered as Book
I don't have any accurate estimate of the total number of words I have posted to this blog over the years, and am not sure how I would get one, short of copying the whole thing to a word processor and having it count them. But my guess is that it would come to substantially more than the word count of one of my books.
Which suggests an interesting possibility. Select out a suitable subset of posts, polish them a little, organize them a little, and publish them as a book. Think of it as a low work way of producing my equivalent of the four volume Orwell collection that I have commented on here from time to time.
At which point the next question is, "why bother?" The blog is, after all, already here. Anyone curious as to my extended exchange with Robert Ellickson, or my coverage of the Texas FLDS mess, or my recent views on self-publishing, can use the blog's search engine to find them and read them. Failing that, with sufficient patience, he can page through past posts; they are all there.
Which suggests that perhaps this will become the new substitute for a book, at least for the sort of book that consists of an extended collection of essays.
Which suggests an interesting possibility. Select out a suitable subset of posts, polish them a little, organize them a little, and publish them as a book. Think of it as a low work way of producing my equivalent of the four volume Orwell collection that I have commented on here from time to time.
At which point the next question is, "why bother?" The blog is, after all, already here. Anyone curious as to my extended exchange with Robert Ellickson, or my coverage of the Texas FLDS mess, or my recent views on self-publishing, can use the blog's search engine to find them and read them. Failing that, with sufficient patience, he can page through past posts; they are all there.
Which suggests that perhaps this will become the new substitute for a book, at least for the sort of book that consists of an extended collection of essays.
June 26, 2011
"The Sorcerer" Considered as a Political Statement
I spent a good deal of this afternoon attending a performance (the last, so you don't get to go) of Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Sorcerer," a work I had never seen before. It was not entirely Gilbert and Sullivan's; the setting had been transferred to 1890's India, with a few minor changes in names and words to make it fit, and I gather that the costuming, setting and dance routines had been deliberately provided with a substantial dose of Bollywood aesthetics. I have some reservations about the general project of modifying classics; there is a reason why William Shakespeare or Gilbert and Sullivan are as famous as they are, so editing by a less distinguished artist may not be, on the odds, a good gamble. But this time it worked.
I had not realized the degree to which "The Sorcerer" could be seen as a political statement, an attack on paternalism. The central figure, for those unfamiliar with the plot (and willing to hear about it), is an irresponsible young idiot named Alexis with an ideological commitment to the principle that love solves all problems and is its own justification—it doesn't really matter who loves whom or why. Acting on that principle, he spikes the party teapot with a love potion provided by a professional sorcerer ("My name is John Wellington Wells/A Dealer in magic and spells/..." the only part of the play I had heard before), everyone in the village falls asleep, and when they wake up each falls in love with the first person of suitable gender he or she sees, not counting married people or those who have already seen and fallen in love with someone else.
Almost everyone ends up paired off, most of them unsuitably, although the plot does manage to free them at the end. It is clear from Alexis' conversation with the young woman he is in love with that he has devoted no serious thought either to the truth of the belief whose implications he is imposing on a large number of other people without their consent or to the likely consequences; indeed, it is not entirely clear that he is capable of thought at all. When a minor miscarriage of the plan on which he insisted results in his chosen maiden falling in love with someone else, he blames her.
It was a very entertaining performance, and my only complaint is that Gilbert got the ending wrong. Having Alexis carried off to Hell might have been a mildly excessive punishment, but he shouldn't have gotten the girl.
Now for dinner at our favorite Indian restaurant.
I had not realized the degree to which "The Sorcerer" could be seen as a political statement, an attack on paternalism. The central figure, for those unfamiliar with the plot (and willing to hear about it), is an irresponsible young idiot named Alexis with an ideological commitment to the principle that love solves all problems and is its own justification—it doesn't really matter who loves whom or why. Acting on that principle, he spikes the party teapot with a love potion provided by a professional sorcerer ("My name is John Wellington Wells/A Dealer in magic and spells/..." the only part of the play I had heard before), everyone in the village falls asleep, and when they wake up each falls in love with the first person of suitable gender he or she sees, not counting married people or those who have already seen and fallen in love with someone else.
Almost everyone ends up paired off, most of them unsuitably, although the plot does manage to free them at the end. It is clear from Alexis' conversation with the young woman he is in love with that he has devoted no serious thought either to the truth of the belief whose implications he is imposing on a large number of other people without their consent or to the likely consequences; indeed, it is not entirely clear that he is capable of thought at all. When a minor miscarriage of the plan on which he insisted results in his chosen maiden falling in love with someone else, he blames her.
It was a very entertaining performance, and my only complaint is that Gilbert got the ending wrong. Having Alexis carried off to Hell might have been a mildly excessive punishment, but he shouldn't have gotten the girl.
Now for dinner at our favorite Indian restaurant.
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