The Economic Way of Thinking

Is Osama bin Laden Dead? (And, Does bin Laden Matter?)

While surfing around InTrade to make sense out of when Tiger Woods will return to the PGA (odds are even that he'll return before April 30th of '10), I couldn't help but check on the Osama bin Laden "captured or neutralised" bet.  Here's the "captured by March '10" chart: 

A price of 5 is basically telling us there's a 5 percent chance of him being caught/neutralised.  When the range of time extends to June and September, the odds of him being caught/neutralized rise, which is no surprise.  The odds are not only higher when you go out in time, however, they are a lot higher!  The September '10 price, for instance, is around 15 (compared to 5 for March).

Assorted Links (Italy Travel Edition)

We're back from a wonderful trip abroad, and here are a few quick thoughts:

(1) Every minute in Rome was worth it; Venice was neat for what it was but not a place I feel the need to return to at any point soon.  I'd go back to Rome again and again. 

Though, the Guggenheim in Venice had a Prendergast exhibit well worth the price of admission.  The exhibit had information on the influence Whistler (one of my favorites) and Cezanne (one of my least favorites) had on Prendergast. 

(2) There's a little Italian mom-and-pop restaurant near Stacione Termini in Rome that has to be one of Italy's best kept secrets.  It was our first meal in Rome, and we found ourselves returning there several more times.  It's named Mergherita something or another (I can't find any receipts and have had little luck on Google), and it's just two blocks from the station.

(3) The Roman Forum blew me away, made me think too much about the brevity of life, and left me wanting to read so much more on the rise and fall of Rome. 

Then, when heading home, I read more of Africa: A Biography of the Continent and really got thinking about how short life is in the context of geological time. 

(4) On the topic of Africa: A Biography of the Continent, I just passed a section that compares centralized empires like Rome to decentralized, well-functioning city empires.  I will blog more about this in the future, but I'm thinking someone from our perspective needs to do some serious research into the Jenne-jeno tribe.  (Maybe it's already been done?)

The civilization lasted 1,600 years, and from what John Reader says, they were a voluntary association of people that flourished by specializing and trading in the Niger region.

(5) I travel a lot, and that's been true since well before 09/11.  In that time, I've never seen or experienced anything close to the invasion Anemone and I experienced trying to get home yesterday at Heathrow and then again in Atlanta.  3.5 hours of additional screening were added onto our trip (i.e., normal harassment would have got us out of Heathrow two hours sooner and through Atlanta 1.5 hours sooner). 

Far more disgusting than the TSA invasion and complete waste of time was the nonsense we heard from people around us all afternoon, such as, "Well, whatever it takes to keep anything bad from happening," and "It's really not that big a deal."  Best of all, at the end of our trip, people in front of us were eager to jump into the "whole body imaging technology" machine when we arrived in Atlanta! 

Who would have thought kissing your civil liberties good-bye could be so much fun, would be something people would literally run for, and would occur for many without even a momentary pause to consider the inconvenience and immorality of it all???

My International Christmas Wish: May Mugabe Jet Out of Office in 2010

 

Here's a story about Robert Mugabe "jetting into" the Copenhagen conference on climate change.  Here's Tyler Cowen talking about Zimbabwe's hyperinflation (via Jason Kottke) earlier this week.  According to an article that Kottke and Cowen point readers to, Zimbabwe's hyperinflation "was a quadrillion times worse than it was in Weimar Germany."

I bring this all up as a prelude to a disgusting and awful report that just came out about the 2008 elections sham that took place in Zimbabwe.

AIDS-Free World, an international NGO, recently released a report titled "Electing to Rape" (story here; full report accessible here).  Here's their main finding:

Our legal team took sworn statements from 70 victims, and documented 380 rapes committed by 241 perpetrators across Zimbabwe's 10 provinces. The report demonstrates without equivocation that Mugabe and his Zanu-PF followers were responsible for the rapes.

The report continues by saying that many of these rapes were committed by people with HIV/AIDS (and subsequently resulted in new HIV/AIDS cases in the victims).  Furthermore, there's no ambiguity about who sanctioned the rapes: Mugabe and the ZANU-PF.  

Since this is some of the worst news I've read about in all of 2009, my one international Christmas wish this holiday season is for Robert Mugabe to resign, be removed from office, or to die.

If you only had one international/foreign policy wish, one which had to be kept simple and specific (i.e., something other than "global peace" or "prosperity for all"), what would it be?  Sadly, there are many candidates to choose from...

Assorted Links

(1) So this is Christmas?  When everyone has a right to something...

(2) A very good interview by Jan Helfeld about health care.  (HT: Sam Sholander)

(3) Why you should watch Fox News.  I'm sympathetic to Jim's point, but I find Fox, MSNBC, and most other news programs to be doing too much yelling.  I'll stick with Stewart, Colbert, and a newspaper for most of my news.  Though Stewart's biased as heck, he still get's a huge free pass from me because of this memorable CNN moment. 

(4) Speaking of Colbert: congrats to my friend and Red State blogger, Erick Erickson, for landing an interview on Colbert!   

(5) Alex Tabarrok and Bryan Caplan discussing the future of higher education.     

How Do YOU Economize on News?

I have heard co-blogger, Pete, talk about the pleasure and quiet that comes with Sunday mornings (he has also blogged about Sundays here).  Sunday mornings are the one morning of the week where he's able to sip coffee on his back porch and read The New York Times as, some would say, it should be read--article by article with time (and coffee) to reflect.

For most of us (Pete included I'm sure), most of the days of the week are not like quiet Sunday mornings.  The hustle and bustle of a normal day leaves us with little time for careful reading. 

Assorted Links

(1) I'm not a fan of generalizations about generations (e.g., Gen X, Gen Y, Baby Boomers), but here's a story about the increased restlessness of Gen X (which I'm barely a member of!). 

(2) Holy schnikes water!  Here's Don Boudreaux's latest "cleaned by capitalism" post. 

(3) Here are Pete Boettke and I arguing for debt repudiation instead of the usual government "juggling tricks" in the East Valley Tribune.  We think it's ranked 100th in the US by circulation. 

(4) In praise of Belichick. 

(5) Gold prices keep rising. 

Polar Bears For Global Warming?

A controversy is, once again, heating up in Alaska over the federal government's effort to expand polar bear protection.  Like Sarah Palin before him, Alaska's new governor, Sean Parnell, intends to sue.  According to the Associated Press, his legal team will protest the science behind polar bears being listed as an Endangered Species:

Alaska's lawyers will argue that the research was flawed, that federal officials looked too far into the future and that modeling is uncertain. Especially troublesome, Alaska Attorney General Dan Sullivan says, is that for the first time, the federal government listed a species with high population numbers — 20,000 to 25,000 worldwide, up from 8,000 to 10,000 in the 1960s.

"Never before has a species been listed when the population of that species is at its highest, most robust," Sullivan said. "It's at all-time historical highs."

As the world has supposedly gotten warmer, here'e what appears to be happening to the polar bear population (the link with the relevant citations can be found here):

 

Of course, all of the disagreement surrounds the future direction of these lines. 

Portugal: Our New Amsterdam?

Amsterdam and America's Prohibition are the two "controlled experiments" I frequently invoke when talking about issues related to legalization and prohibition.  Perhaps it's time to add a third, as it was recently brought to my attention that Portugal's experiment with decriminilization of all drugs, which began in 2001, seems to be working. 

Here's what Johann Hari had to say about the Portugal experiment a couple days ago:

On July 1^st 2001, Portugal decriminalized the possession of all drugs,including heroin and cocaine. You can have and use as much as you like for your own needs, and if you are caught, the police might refer you to a rehab programme, but you will never get a criminal record. (Supplying and selling remains illegal.) The prohibitionists predicted a catastrophic rise in addiction, and even I – an instinctive legalizer – was nervous.

Now we know: overall drug use actually fell a little. As a major study by Glenn Greenwald for the Cato Institute found, among teenagers the fall was fastest: 13-year-olds are 4 percent less likely to use drugs, and 16-year-olds are 6 percent less likely. As the iron law of prohibition predicts, the use of hard drugs has fallen fastest: heroin use has crashed by nearly 50 percent among the young, who were not yet addicted.

HT: Matt

One More Hoop For Tenure

Inside Higher Ed has a story this morning about a new tenure policy introduced by the University of Toledo's president, Lloyd Jacobs:  Candidates up for tenure must meet with the president for a 30-minute chat.  While faculty are upset about the policy, the article makes it sound like the presidential visits are, for the most part, a formality. 

Let's think about some of the consequences of this policy.  On the one hand, the president has a bit more that he can stuff in his CYA file.  On the other hand, it opens the door for comments that could be used in a lawsuit. 

The policy can be thought to be introducing one last fail-safe before the university either cuts ties with a candidate denied or commits to an insanely long labor agreement with a candidate granted tenure. 

My biggest problem with the policy involves opportunity cost.  Presidential time seems like a tremendously scarce resource.  Time with tenure candidates is time not spent shaking hands, raising money, managing the university budget, etc.

Finally, if presidential chats ever become more than formalities and actually result in decisions being overturned, you can expect successful candidates to be, at the margin, tilted a bit more towards being more polished and able to explain their research and teaching interests succinctly. 

Assorted Links

(1) I often ask students in Public Choice what would happen to policy if the franchise were extended to those under age 18.  Here's an Economist magazine article discussing why the franchise should be extended to prisoners.

(2) Are you a lurker?  I've been posting more Facebook updates to avoid being considered that kind of Facebooker! (HT: Anemone)

(3) My dog is the Nomar Garciaparra of labs.  That is, she has ticks like you wouldn't believe.  We're seriously considering giving this new collar, which was discussed in the Wall Street Journal's "Personal Journal" section today, a try. 

(4) One way of measuring the return on publicly funded stadiums. 

(5) Frank Jacobs discusses the excellent site, "Strange Maps" over at the Freakonomics blog. 

Kenny & Charles Time

UPDATE: My radio appearance has been pushed to Monday at 6:35 am.  You can watch me here.   

For anyone interested in hearing my latest thoughts on the US economy, feel free to watch me on the Kenny B & Charles E show tomorrow morning at 6:35 am or tune into WPGA 100.9 FM locally.  

 

We Made Another Top 10 List!

Earlier this week, a local reporter tried to catch up with me for an interview regarding Macon being in the Top 10 for "Most Impoverished Cities in America" according to Forbes.com.  Most of the cities on the list are Southern cities and/or manufacturing cities in decline. 

I turned down the interview for three main reasons: (1) I was given 20 minutes notice from the time I was made aware of the Forbes story (!); (2) there are issues related to Macon's poverty that I don't know enough about to comment on off the cuff; and (3) race invariably comes up in these discussions, and I'm one for avoiding that topic altogether when being recorded.

Now that I've had a few days to think about the issue and look at the study, here are a few points I would have made:

(1) I'd much rather be poor in America than anywhere else;

(2) I'd much rather be poor and in a metropolitan area in America than be poor in rural America;

(3) The poverty line is a misleading benchmark to be using when talking about poverty.  In addition, the per capita income levels used in the study look low to me, and it'd be nice to see household income alongside the per capita figures;

(4) Demand curves slope downward and supply curves slope upward!  Clearly, this has something to do with 25% of people in Macon, under the age of 65, being on public health care.  Same story for our high food stamp dependence. 

(5) Our poverty problem cannot be separated from bad city-level policies.  The never-ending solution to every revenue challenge of raising taxes has left the downtown dilapidated and has resulted in further cuts in city services. 

As I look at the above points, what I'm saying about Macon's poverty problem can probably be said for most of the cities on the list. 

(For earlier posts on poverty, here are some answers I gave to our student newspaper about poverty many months ago.  Here's one of my earliest EWOT posts, which offers up my silver bullet recommendation for poverty alleviation in the US: privatize public housing).   

Let's Drink To The Salt Of The Earth

Or, if the salt of the earth isn't being reflected in this poll, let's drink to the large majority of folks in the poll who think Obama's economic stimulus efforts are on the wrong track. 

Reefer Madness

In a recent exchange (see the comments), Dave and Pete discuss the probability of marijuana being legalized.  Dave first said he put the probability at less than 0.5 of marijuana being legalized in the next six years, and he then raised the probability to an even 0.5 after this news broke. 

As I read their exchange, I was tempted to bet Dave a nickel that marijuana won't be legalized in that time frame.  Even though I'm generally an optimist (I'm a Cubs fan after all!), I have little faith in America's puritanical impulse coming around to tolerate weed being legally smoked, and I have a hard time imagining reform overcoming the entrenched police force lobbies, who generally oppose marijuana legalization.

If you believe the Gallup polls, though, perhaps I should give a little more credit to Americans on the issue of marijuana legalization.  According to the most recent Gallup poll, Americans are higher than they've ever been when it comes to supporting marijuana legalization.  Here's a chart that accompanies the above story:

The Bots-Zim Contrast Sharpens

Botswana held elections--their 10th round of elections since independence--without incident.  The widely popular ruling party, the Botswana Democratic Party (BDP), maintained control of the government; they have been in control of government since Seretse Khama's rein in the independence period.  More here.

Meanwhile, things are continuing to fall apart in Zimbabwe.  (HT: Bob Subrick). 

For those interested, here's an old paper of mine (the final version came out in Constitutional Political Economy) with Subrick that discusses the relationship between politics and development in Botswana.  The story we tell is that the BDP has remained legitimate by respecting traditional institutions, providing essential public goods, and avoiding excessive military spending in the early years of independence.