(Halloween) Party Like It’s 1999

This is a story about ghosts. It’s a tense thriller involving murder, pregnancy, poisoning, an inept investigation, making out with pumpkins, and a man who exposes himself to Gumby. It’s harrowing and chilling, in the way that a brain freeze from eating ice cream too fast is harrowing and chilling.

Actually, it’s a ghost website that has been quietly taking up server space somewhere since 1999 and tells the story of a fictional Halloween party in fin de siècle America. Some friends and I put it together back during our senior year of high school (and by “put it together” I mean someone else did all the technical work, I just threw the party and took the pictures, which cost me $50 to develop in the days before ubiquitous digital cameras). For some reason, the website has remained up ever since (as far as we know, the webhosting company we used was bought out by some other company and we haven’t paid anyone a dime in eight years). See if you can spot the Mallrats and X-Files posters in the background. Also, I’m Obi-Wan in the story, but only because I bought my costume that day from a party store and it came with a lightsaber, which seemed like a cool enough deal. (Sigh) And this was in the days before I could blame my dumb behavior on alcohol.

With that, I give you The Party.

Annals of Bad Economic Contrarianism

The Economist sidesteps the supply-side debate:

THE RECENT jihad against supply-side fiscal thinking is, as far as I can tell, largely an attempt to distract people from the rather impressive distortionary effects of tax increases. Whether or not tax cuts “pay for themselves” in the short run, it remains that tax increases don’t raise as much revenue as one might hope, and, yes, may be completely self-defeating in the middle to long run. The main point of supply-side thinking is already part of conventional professional wisdom, so it really is quixotic to rail against it.

Beginning your argument with “whether or not tax cuts pay for themselves in the short run” ignores the costs of lost revenues altogether and does nothing more than avoid the debate.  Increasing deficits can lead to rising interest rates and lower capital investment (which is bad for economic growth).  Even assuming a given tax increases is a disincentive for economic growth, it still stacks up better than a revenue draining tax cut that also discourages economic growth.  At least such a tax increase (inefficient as it might be) would be revenue neutral at worst.  Additionally, calling attacks on the Laffer curve “quixotic” misses the entire reason for publicizing the power supply-siders have on the Republican party: to combat the conventional wisdom.

Asking how a tax-cut will affect government revenue isn’t an attempt to distract–its a negative argument .  One can believe the Laffer curve is more economic prestidigitation than tax policy without buying into an uncritical positive argument about the efficiency of tax increases.

Outsourcing My Pre-Debate Political Analysis

Garance Franke-Ruta has an excellent summary of the political opening Obama has given to his opponents:

This is what happens when campaigns are trying too hard to win news of the day stand-offs, and not enough about directing things long-term. There was never an opening for Obama on this issue. The campaign had started to go after her on Iran, and it should have just stuck with that. Instead, Obama has created an opening for others to now go after him.

Obama needs to make significant moves (e.g. a bold policy pronouncement to put some daylight between himself and the other Democratic candidates), and quickly if he doesn’t want to cede the remaining politcial ground to Hillary Clinton. Perhaps his campaign should think about hiring Garance Franke-Ruta as a communications or media consultant instead of outsourcing¹ their message strategy to opinion columns…

¹ My outsourcing is good because I get expertise for free. Obama’s is bad because paid experts are taking bad advise from unpaid experts.

So You Want to Continue a Stealth Argument and Be a Neoconservative Apologist?

The great thing about Robert Kagan is that not only can he hold fast to his own dwindling island of foreign policy respectability (Q: How long can the Kristol/Kagan doctrine last? A: Islamofacism¹!), but can also continue a sloppily argued secret war² with Fareed Zakaria at the same time. (Points to Matt Zeitlin for catching this first and nailing Kagan, but minus a few for accepting Kagan’s reductive summary of Zakaria’s position)

A quick recap: Kagan’s review of The Future of Freedom for The New Republic was an intellectual hit piece which tried to reduce the book’s thesis to “Hooray for liberal autocrats/I ♥ aristocracy” (NB: I’d link to the articles, but TNR’s online archives are inaccessible while the magazine is revamping it’s website. You’ll have to read it through LexisNexis).

Kagan’s central error is the same one made by Thomas Carothers (in a piece Kagan cites in his WaPo article to bolster his argument), reading Zakaria’s argument (and related critiques of representative government) as a case for “democratic sequentialism” (i.e. rule of law and free markets are the necessary conditions for a sustainable democracy). Zakaria’s book (which does lean heavily, perhaps too much at times, on the role of markets and wealth in creation of lasting democratic reform) is more cautionary tale than a form of Rostow’s stages of development for democratic theorists; there is no ideal democratic citizen who will resist corruption and inherently lead toward more liberal policies.  Liberalism is made up of freedoms encouraged and held fast by constitutional protections, civic institutions, free-markets, and cultural norms.  What combination of factors are needed to foster and maintain a democratic regime, political scientists can’t say.  But policy makers would do well to realize that instant democracy can often run counter to the development goals they’d like to see achieved.

¹ When you think about it, this makes as much sense as other contexts in which you see this term used.

² Stealthy and infringing Marvel Comics copyright. Booyah!

Why Oh Why Can’t We Have More Economically Literate English Majors?

I find myself scratching my head at this Kenyon Review blog post about the online presence of literary journals and the value of literary commodities. It starts out with a discussion on the end of Times Select:

Now let me say, I’ve never taken an economics class, but I get the principle here. As the New York Times recently found in the failure of their online subscription service, people will pay for a hard copy of a newspaper, but not its online equivalent. This partly reflects our sense of the internet as a free space, not only in the sense of the free-flow of ideas, but a place where everything is free. But it also reflects the fact that we live in a commodity culture: we value the object — the book — more than its contents.

The demise of the Times paywall is the wrong analogy. The problem wasn’t that people would pay for an actual paper in lieu of an online copy, but that future advertising revenue was likely to outstrip online subscriptions. The New York Times, and now the Financial Times (with the WSJ likely to follow) went full-access (mostly) because, as Felix Salmon noted, they were losing potential pageviews from Google because their content was behind a subscriber firewall. Attention is the big value on the internet (and in “old media,” if you can attract advertisers), thus, less attention meant less revenue. Everything isn’t “free,” it’s just that it’s being paid for in a different way: advertisers instead of subscribers.

Lobanov-Rostovsky is right when he suggests we often “value the object–the book–more than its content.” Books are a type of “symbolic good,” (PDF) which we as consumers buy because of the way it makes us feel about ourselves or as a way to signal to other people that we are educated and cultured. This is less true of writers and literature lovers, who are looking for the content inside the pages, but the basic observation that people will buy books less for what they contain then for their “cultural aura” is correct.

But then Lobanov-Rostovsky makes an argument I’ve read before, but still doesn’t make any sense:

Still, I find this concept surprising when we apply it to literature. I’ve always assumed that one thing we can all agree on is that a literary text can’t be reduced to a commodity. I’m thinking here of Lewis Hyde’s view of literature as a kind of gift economy, in which the intellectual and spiritual labor that goes into the making of a literary text far exceeds anything that the poet or novelist can expect to receive in return, except in the pleasure of reading other literary texts. In a sense, the value of a literary text far exceeds its cost, but only to those who already share a common set of cultural values.

I have no idea why a literary text can’t be reduced to a commodity. Perhaps one would argue it shouldn’t be, but that is a separate argument. A quick look inside the local Barnes and Nobles, Borders–even a college bookstore or small press–suggests that a text can definitely be a commodity. Books are discrete, excludable goods that you have to pay for and can carry around. And although no one can “own” ideas, creative works–while not physical commodities–are protected under intellectual property rights. We can’t quantify the “spiritual labor” that goes into a work, so we can’t compensate someone for that; we can only measure opportunity cost in the form of forgone productive labor. But that is irrelevant, because we can’t quantify the spiritual labor for anyone–doctors, lawyers, teachers, or poets.

I think this conceptual breakdown occurs because Lobanov-Rostovsky, like many others in the literary community, sees market value imputed by something like the “labor theory of value.” But as Brad DeLong put it, “[n]obody who ventured into the labor theory of value has ever emerged.” This is where the occasional economics class might help to clarify things–or at least make for more economically sensible blog posts.

I’ll Let the Structural Engineers Explain

Via Crooked Timber, a familiarly shaped building planned for the Dublin skyline, courtesy of U2.  I figure Quixote should be all over this like the MSM on an outed Republican member of Congress, so I’ll leave the expert analysis to him.

Imperfect Adherence

Both Matt Yglesias and Young MZ see Coulter’s comments about “perfecting Jews” as the unsurprising response of a Christian who sees her faith as the one true faith, and that expressing disdain misses the exclusionary nature of sincere religious adherence. In response, I’ll point to djw at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, who accurately sums up my thoughts on the matter:

I think this post exemplifies a problem analytic philosophy types discussing religion. The fact is, squishy liberal religious people, who exist in very large numbers, exhibit an set of beliefs and justifications that wouldn’t stand up in the seminar room. Their epistemology might be described as flabby, lazy, incoherent. But really, that’s ok. Ecumenicalism can be defended on political grounds quite well, but it harder to defend as a coherent and logical worldview.

And Another Thing: Sting Isn’t Even Spanish!

After taking a shot a Baby Boomers in my last post, I’d like to spread the criticism around and go after my own generation. This Blender list of the 40 worst lyricists in rock is a case study in intellectually lazy criticism, as practiced by Generation Y¹: snark and sneer, with a useless dash of contrarianism thrown in to annoy.

I understand that lists of “the best of” and “the worst of” are both inherently subjective and presented as the empty-calorie diversion of popular magazines, but something more than “assertion with attitude!” is called for here. You want to try and set up some sort of vague criteria or at least choose the most egregious and generally recognized offenders (e.g. something goofy like 50 Cent’s “I love you like a fat kid loves cake”). At least go for broke on the meaningless and viscously subjective, which, even when your readers don’t agree, can be pretty funny; arbitrariness alleviates the burden of having to legitimately defend your choices. If you’re going to be irreverent, you need to sell it.

But when Blender claims Sting is the worst lyricist ever, this is the best they can muster:

Surveying the Cold War, he found the West “conditioned to respond to all the threats/In the rhetorical speeches of the Soviets.” His rage at Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was so heated, he castigated the scoundrel in Spanish. Holy frijoles, was Sting mad!

Oh noes! He was “mad” and singing in another language! Oh, snap? If you’re going to assert Sting’s lyrics represent “[m]ountainous pomposity, cloying spirituality, ham-handed metaphors,” it would help if you cited examples, unless we’re to understand that mentioning Nabokov or referencing Shakespeare for an adult-contemporary audience as pomposity–in which case I’d like to thank Blender in advance for adding to creeping anti-intellectualism, or outright disdain for anything resembling the influence of poetry² on lyrics.

For more on my Generation’s critical follies, check out this Slate article categorizing this sort of criticism as a symptom of “poptimism”.

¹ Or whatever the hell we’re calling people born after 1980 but before 2000.

² Hahahahaha. “Poetry.”

Kyoto Sucks, But Malaria is Worse

By Alicia Feuillet

I don’t take issue with 99% of what Bjorn  Lomborg of the Copenhagen Consensus says about the economic realities of fighting global warming using the Kyoto Protocol (i.e. it sucks).  Although I am usually averse to anything that looks remotely like Bentham’s hedonic calculus when dealing with people lives, he does make several well made points.  However, for such an “innovative” thinking, I was disappointed by his thoughts on how to combat the 3 % up tick in new malaria infections (15 million people in just the first year) over the next century:

On the other hand, we could spend $3 billion annually — 2 percent of the protocol’s cost — on mosquito nets and medication and cut malaria incidence almost in half within a decade. Malaria death rates are rising in sub-Saharan Africa, but this has nothing to do with climate change and everything to do with poverty: Poor and corrupt governments find it hard to implement and fund the spraying and the provision of mosquito nets that would help eradicate the disease. Yet for every dollar we spend saving one person through policies like the Kyoto Protocol, we could save 36,000 through direct intervention.

Malaria is an incredibly devastating disease.  40% of the world’s population (2.5 billion people) lives in malaria endemic areas, it significantly lowers the quality of life (snarky economists read productivity), 1 million die each year including 1 child every 30 seconds.  Although vector control through the use of heavy insecticides is highly effective, it will not eradicate malaria. 

The problem that Bjorn conveniently ignores is that the overwhelming majority of malaria infections are concentrated in areas which are unable to pay for vector treatments, let alone R&D development of malaria treatments/vaccines.  Meaning, there is little to no incentive for major pharmaceutical companies to invest R&D dollars into “marginal diseases” when they can just tweak their Lipitor patent and make billions of dollars each year.  Government labs and places like the WHO do work on drug/vaccine development, but 95% of new drug treatments come from private pharmaceutical companies.  Unfortunately, any amount of pressure place on private firms will lead to marginal efforts and discovery, but if companies are “made aware” of the economic incentives for developing drugs then we just might be able to eradicate the burden of malaria altogether.  Yes, those vicious corporate executives at Merck will make lots of money from drug sales, but as a humanitarian I will certainly take advantage of their greed if it means that 500 million people every year can be spared from malaria.  Ah, the power of the free market.

Are You Experienced?

Alexander Dietz suggests it doesn’t matter as much as you might think, and has made a video demonstrating this point:

Two things:

1. The Obama campaign should send Dietz a complimentary T-shirt as thanks.
2. There’s a strong possibility that the Baby Boomers have always been what’s wrong with America.

Suddenly, All of those Castle Grayskull References in the Weekly Standard Make Sense

In the middle of a fairly incisive article examining why Bob Herbert is a boring columnist, T.A. Frank makes a brilliant observation:

By contrast, I could easily name ten other columnists who seem to make it their mission to find new, untested forms of destruction to bring upon us. If you told me that, say, Charles Krauthammer’s articles were ghostwritten by Skeletor, I doubt I’d blink.

Makes sense to me.

Reading the Signs

I’m not sure that what this means (if it means anything), but Dennis Ross is working as an adviser for the Obama campaign while his former Clinton administration colleague, Martin Indyk, has signed on with the Clinton camp. Although I believe there’s a good chance that’ll end up working together in a Democratic administration anyway, I think Ross is a good policy sign for Obama, and might suggest that some experts see a bigger role for themselves or their policies in a Obama administration.

Of course, if you’re an adherent of the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis, you’ll see this a continuation of Israel lobby influence throughout politics, as in this London Review of Books debate where John Mearsheimer tells Ross and Indyk that they are “at the core of the lobby.” But hey, if members of the lobby weren’t part of the presidential candidates’ policy teams, what would policy wonks and the blogosphere have to talk about¹?

¹ Probably regular things.

The Trouble With Politics and Poets

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the intersection between politics and poetry, after reading David Wojahn’s article on the condition of political poetry today in the summer issue of The Writer’s Chronicle. I’m working on addressing it in a longer piece, but in the meantime I wanted to point to a short and smart post about poetry and politics at Reginald Shepard’s blog. I think he captures the limits of poetry as a political tool:

George Oppen gave up writing poetry for several years in favor of political activism, because he believed neither that poetry could change society nor that it should be subordinated to an agenda. In Oppen’s words, “If you decide to do something politically, you do something with political efficacy. And if you write poetry, you write poetry, not something you hope, or deceive yourself into believing, can save people who are suffering.” Several years ago, I was asked by someone I had just met whether my poetry was Afrocentric. I told him that I didn’t know what he meant by that term, and he said, “You know, dedicated to the liberation of black people everywhere.” My only answer was, “I don’t think that poems can do that.”

I’m in general agreement that the sort of work poetry does isn’t the sort of work that is necessarily useful (or perhaps, most valuable) to politics or political action. If you want to change someone’s mind or rail against something, write a polemic. And as Shepard notes in the comments to his post, a work’s value is separate from the politics of it’s creator; good art can be the product of bad politics (and vice versa).

My point of departure, however, comes when Shepard discusses the value of poetry in response to a commenter:

While much visual art is deeply enmeshed in the market economy (even though its value as a commodity is based on its transcendence of commodity status), poems (which, in Levi-Strauss’s characterization of music, are virtual objects whose shadows alone are real) have neither use value nor exchange value. As my reference to Levi-Strauss indicates, they aren’t even really things at all. (Is “the poem” this printed copy or that handwritten copy or this oral performance or this mental representation? Etc. etc.)

It isn’t clear to me why poetry can’t be part of market exchanges; you can print books, and sell them in bookstores (or by yourself, on the street). And insofar as we can’t ever say which poem is the “true poem” (a handwritten poem or the one delivered during a reading), that’s why we have intellectual property rights like copyright protection; the market itself can’t make an idea exclusive, so we use the government to enforce a form of property rights held by creators. But we don’t even have to be as concerned with profit and property rights to argue that art has value in a capitalist economy; we carve out space for works that we find valuable, but that markets tends to underproduce by creating big grant agencies (like the NEA) and subsiding museums at the government level, and giving tax breaks for charitable donations to universities, non-profit art programs, and (again) museums at the private level.

The sort of economy Shepard is describing isn’t one I recognize, or one that appears in an economics class. I think Shepard (and other poets) would respond that this is the point, that this isn’t economic orthodoxy as practiced by economists, but I don’t think he’s describing the workings of a market economy in practice.

In Praise of Charitable Deductions

Perhaps I’m misreading what’s intended as a narrow critique of a sub-set of charitable giving, but I think Ezra Klein’s support for this Robert Reich article is mistaken, as Reich’s proposal goes too far in his desire to support “real” charitable donations, not to mention that it would result in Very Bad Things for arts funding in America. I’m also surprised that Megan McArdle didn’t highlight some of the consequences to universities and the arts if Reich’s proposal of limiting tax deductions for non-poverty related non-profits to 50% of the donation was implemented (I assume she’s read her friend Tyler Cowen’s Good and Plenty).

Klein and McArdle rightly focus on the spectacle of Manhattan charity galas, which give patrons a chance to throw back some vintage wine and imported champagne with artists and celebrities–and then write an expensive party off as a government endorsed contribution–but I think this is as far as the critique can be taken, for two reasons. The first is that deductions are an indirect subsidy to lots of people who aren’t rich, including the middle class, artists, and those that benefit from the research done by universities, which might end up including poor people. The second is that if we eliminate these indirect subsidies (or make them costlier), some of the slack is going to be picked up by demands for direct subsidies, which would be bad for the arts.

Although rich folks may donate to universities to get their C average son or daughter into an elite institution, that money also helps kids whose families earn less than $40,000 receive free tuition from Harvard (and reduced tuition for those earning between $40,000-$60,000), which means greater social mobility for talented but financially strapped students. Not all of the donations are of the “now name an arts building after me” variety (and if major enrollment is any indication, most alumni are likely to fork over money for a science building or simply contribute to a project the university or college has already proposed).

The greater problem is that in place of the funding supplied by private donations, people might start demanding that those funds be replaced by direct subsidies like the NEA or some other centralized entity (actually, the NEA doles out its funds in the form of institutional grants–having done away with direct grants–but I’m worried about a general trend) which would choose the artistic winners, making for a less diverse artistic market.  For all you poets out there¹, imagine asking your parents or non-poet friends to describe a poem for you.  It sounds like some terrible cross between 19th century Romantic verse and tortured love poems as read by a sentimental teenager at a coffee-house open mike, right? Okay, now imagine those same people have to vote for officials whose job is to determine the head of this centralized agency.  Result: Dr. Seuss becomes your Poet Laureate², and the local dandy/Victorian literature enthusiast gets a $20,000 grant to write poems about the “the love o’er which I swoon/ and moves the heart betwixt my ribs”. Yikes.

In short, you’d be eliminating a lot of good donations provided by people who know a thing or two about the field to which they’re donating (e.g. the arts or research for a particular disease) or things people might actually be interested in using (thus matching supply with demand).  Though only 10% of donations go directly to the poor, I’d bet the other 90% benefit the poor (in terms of education and scientific research) by subsidizing public goods.

¹ Hey Keith.

² Though much beloved, he is, unfortunately, dead.

Back to Blogging

I was busy this week with Fall for the Book, teaching, and a wedding in State College, PA, but blogging should resume its regular pace and lackluster quality (although I have lined up some people to guest blog on subjects they actually know about, so that should raise the quality level half a notch).