Coming to the Party in the USA, then Dancing with the Stars on the Ceiling in the Streets

Hello friends. You might be wondering why I'm posting this here and not over at Euvoluntary Exchange, where I'm typically found. The short answer is that this is off-topic. The long answer is that this is off-topic and I can't think of an easy way to shoehorn it on-topic. So here we are. I'm putting a fold here because this post will be gigantic thanks to all the tables and graphs I'll be using.

Supply et Demand

Recently, there was a mongo power outage in India. 350 million+ people were sans electricity in a country not especially well known for having an especially reliable grid even under the best conditions. While this may not be a tragedy comparable to the Haiti quake or the Japanese tsunami, wholesale power loss threatens hospital patients and can compromise secure nuclear locations if recovery is sufficiently delayed.

Analysts blame the power losses on a lackluster monsoon season: farmers were running well pumps longer and harder than usual and there was insufficient river flow to crank the hydroelectric plants. That's interesting, but the reporting on it this morning on NPR was cringeworthy. Either the host or the guest (I have a short commute, so I wasn't listening long enough to nail down reliable identification) described it as a "problem with supply and demand; demand increased and the supply wasn't there."

That's actually paraphrased, so the quotes are inappropriate. Please accept my lazy editing for the purposes of making a broader point.

And that broader point is simply this: in economics, the terms "supply" and "demand" are elements of a story about prices and quantity. The problem with Indian power distribution isn't one of a spike in demand and a lag in a supply response, it's one of interference with price signals, unimpressive property rights, and more than all else, an insatiable leviathan who feeds on the entrepreneurial spirit. Starting even an ordinary retail business is tough enough in India. Improving the power generation and distribution network is next to impossible. Describing this as some kind of technical failure or blaming it solely on the weather is intellectually dishonest.

I understand the appeal of looking just at proximate causes and assigning blame. It's easy and it's a decent way to grind an ideological axe if that's your thing. It's poor reasoning though. You probably don't have to go back to the first protozoa crawling out of the primordial soup, but you can at least point to significant contributing factors, especially when they've got far-reaching consequences. In this case, the Indian regulatory apparatus is a tight throttle on the prosperity of the Indian people. Why not report on that?

In Quaerere Parentum

If Buchanan is right about parentalism, the implication for welfare reform is that social control will shift to non-pecuniary margins. The sort of warping of choice sets under these conditions could exacerbate sorting effects.

A negative income tax could imply social fractionalization the likes of which even Paul Atredies himself can scarcely imagine. Could the United States balkanize? Yes--this is my new most shocking prediction.

Euvoluntary Exchange: Heirs Eat Oats and Does Eat Oats

Euvoluntary Exchange: Heirs Eat Oats and Does Eat Oats

I like mocking the rich. If I could, I would punch them in their smug faces.

But I'd never condone taking their stuff. Mild assault (especially considering my weak, birdlike wrists) isn't remotely as awful as theft or taxation.

Get the lead out

You know what they say: the trouble with lead in your gas is the... um, well, there's no saying about that, but there is plenty of research to suggest that a drop in environmental lead may be a causative factor in declining violent crime rates.

Holy smokes! What if this is related to the Flynn Effect? Curious.

I am working on some slow-moving research pinning atmospheric lead to AFQT scores, with the hook that the National Guard may act as a sort of third option for intellectual eccentricity.

Need the data still. I asked someone who has already done some leg work, but I've not heard back. I think I may have to do my own FOIA request from the, well, I forget the acronym, but it's the good folks who monitor air quality on behalf of Congress.

A Dreddful Appetite

Those of us who have at one time or another, sheepishly or otherwise, have cracked open a D&D book know of the character alignment system. Two dimensions are plotted: a good vs evil dimension and a law vs chaos dimension. Neither dimension is especially well defined, not at least to my satisfaction. Ostensibly, a lawful good character will obey the law and serve his fellow man, but what happens if you find yourself living in a land ruled by a tyrant whose idea of law is to imprison dissidents and, I dunno, raise an army of ghouls to wage war on his neighbors? The same dude who might have been all law-abiding and junk in his home country is now at odds with the law, and becomes chaotic good. The Platonist in me tells me that this arrangement is smellier than a haversack that's been sitting under Smaug's dorsal vent for well nigh on a month.

I like to think of law as arising as that set (bundle if you will) of rights and protections that best serve the community from which they arise. A corrupt dictator no sooner makes law than a Vogon makes fine poetry (pardon the liquid universe borders). His decrees are arbitrary and serve only him. Obedience to spurious legislation is not necessarily lawful, and so say the Civil Rights Movement. However, just as the cleric of Tymora in Thay, so Martin Luther King in Alabama. The good Reverend was following natural law, divine law if you will, in that he righteously opposed the unjust rule of man. This was an inherently lawful act, even if it was illegal. MLK was LG.

Chaotic Good is arbitrary do-goodiness. You find this sort engaged in humanistic radicalism and optimistic social engineering. It's chaotic for the very reason that it's untested, whimsical social engineering. Anti-goblin discrimination legislation might be fine and dandy for homo-gobloid relations in the marble chambers of Waterdeep, but without the Hayekian emergent order, history has shown again and again how nature points out the folly of men.

Godzilla.

On the evil side, LE is tough to categorize. Traditionally, and according to Bryan Caplan's comment on my facebook page, LE types cherish obeying the letter of the law, especially if it means getting to smash a few faces in. These are the guys responsible for holocausts, purges, and the worst sort of organized violence that the imagination has to offer. Okay, I can buy that, but on the condition that "lawful" in this sense means "predictable", as if the cruelty and violence runs consonant with the emergent order of that particular society. In a world populated by multiple sentient races, it's utterly conceivable that one race will be completely inimical to another. Indeed, one can well imagine orcish bedtime stories where mama snoutface tells her wee little porker to go to sleep or the vicious dwarves will come and eat him in his sleep. Evil is relative, see? It then becomes a matter of identifying predictable vs unpredictable behavior. If I'm in a country with a known predilection for slaughtering those of my particular race, I can consider the inhabitants of that land to be lawful, so long as that sort of behavior results in some sort of evolutionary advantage for that race. Elves (some of them anyway) can be considered lawful in this sense because they rarely skip an opportunity to dispatch members of the so-called evil races without so much as a how-do-you-do.

I still haven't made up my mind about the conditionality of goodness. The right kind of political assassination can be considered a good act, though again, the view changes whether you're near or far, and an outsider or an insider.

Maybe there are other dimensions along which we could expand the character alignment space. Perhaps we could have attributes that illustrate political beliefs as well as beliefs about the size and scope of government, or about interracial tolerance.

Then again, it's just a game. I'm almost positive I'm fretting over nothing.

eXXXecutive pay

There's an old logical fallacy. It lives in a grubby tin hut in the middle of an Alabama swamp, tends bar on weekends, draws disability insurance, and chews homegrown tobacco. The name of this bucktoothed error in reasoning is Slippery Slope. Slippery Slope finished a year and a half of vocational school before retiring to the middle of the Alabama swamp to herd alligators and brew potent corn moonshine. Slippery Slope, bumpkin though he may be, nevertheless makes frequent stops all o'er this great wide world of ours, his shoeless, unwashed shanks parading through the halls of parliament as often as he is splashed across the opinion page of your local paper.

Slippery Slope tells us about giving an inch, then watching as they take a mile. Slippery Slope warns of razor-edge equilibria. He tells us that if we allow homosexuals to marry, the next thing you know, crazed citizens will be flocking to the courthouse, demanding nuptuals with barbecues, sheep, and vinyl hoop skirts (perhaps all three, and at once). Slippery Slope wants us to think that there is a think red line dividing Civilization from Chaos. You know what's funny? Sometimes, even though he's often dead wrong, Slippery Slope is, and this is just once in a while here folks, 100% correct.

Other times he's just a little right. I tend to think he's a little right in the case of offering authority figures additional authority. When it is in the power of people to usurp more power, we've often seen over the course of history that they do just that.

So it is to the dismay of at least a few economists and both big and little-L libertarians that Government has elected themselves the authority to cap pay. Yes, it's only for seven companies (for now), and only for firms that have accepted relief money, and one might even make an argument that it could pass a Constitutionality test (and with this SCOTUS, they might be right). Still, the clear fact remains that this farce (and it is a farce, as it's a hell of a lot like calling the fire brigade after the embers have cooled) could very easily spread.

I won't belabor the good observations already made, or even the predictions cast by those far smarter than me (see Alex Tabarrok's posts on MarginalRevolution.com). I'll just mention that in the event that executive compensation limitations do spread, as well they might (I'll give it a 2% chance), you can probably expect Wall Street to pull up stakes and move to the Grand Caymans. If automobile manufacturing can move Detroit to Seoul, you can be sure that investment banking can move Manhattan to George Town.

And then what? Barriers to foreign investment? Could be. Another 2% chance. The US could be a banana republic in the twinkling of an eye.

Boy, I sure hope ol' Slippery Slope is talking out his butt again, all drunk on his corn moonshine. The possibilities are terrifying if he isn't.