Assorted Links

Links 2019-03-07

First links post in a while because I have some housekeeping. After trying to have comments just on reddit, I’ve realized it makes way more sense to just have comments right below the articles again. I really don’t like the WordPress default comment system so I’ve opted instead for Disqus. These have been implemented for a while, but I wanted to bring your attention to them.

I’ve also finally updated the site to default to https. Kind of an embarrassment for a site promoting encryption to not have https defaulted, but this blog is a volunteer project done for personal interest (and personal expense!).

I’ve removed Greg Mankiw’s blog from the sidebar because I realized I wasn’t reading it much anymore and it doesn’t talk about too much interesting econ stuff very often. I also removed Jeffrey Tucker’s blog beautiful anarchy, because I don’t think he posts there anymore now that he’s running aier.org.

I’ve added gwern.net because this past year I’ve realized how much more I’ve been going to his site even though I’ve known about it for a long time. Gwern is a rationalist independent researcher. He doesn’t really write blogs so much as essays on a topic. I recommend his site wholeheartedly. Seriously, his site is the first link on this post for a reason. If you are overwhelmed by the amount of content, see if anything in his “Most Popular” or “Notable” categories jump out at you and start there. I personally found “Embryo Selection For Intelligence” to be quite engrossing.

Slate Star Codex has had some good posts about the importance of OpenAI’s GPT-2. First some background on GPT-2. Next, GPT-2 seems to have learned things haphazardly, in almost a human-like way, to attain its goals of creating good responses to prompts. It connects things in a stream of consciousness reminiscent of a child’s thoughts. As Scott says, simply pattern matching at a high level is literally what humans do.

Also on AI, I found an amazing 2018 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison by LessWrong user Larks. It’s a very impressive in depth look at groups concerned about the AI alignment problem.

From Vox: “The case that AI threatens humanity, explained in 500 words”.

Noah Smith writes A Proposal for an Alternative Green New Deal. It makes vastly more sense than the vague, progressive wishlist discussed by current Democratic members of Congress. However, even Smith’s suggestions seem pretty poorly thought out to me; he endorses massive subsidies to green technology, on the order of $30 billion a year, without addressing how the state will know where to invest the money. As I recall, the government isn’t a great central planner. He also just kind of tosses in there universal health insurance, apparently paid for by the government, which sounds like Medicare for all. That seems to both massively politically complicate anything actually trying to fix climate change, and also destroy the entire federal budget, which I think is a national security problem.

Related, on a more nuanced note, John Cochrane discusses a letter signed by many economists endorsing a carbon tax, which seems much more precise and useful to people concerned about climate change. To make it politically palatable, they suggest making a carbon dividend paid to all taxpayers out of this tax. Noah Smith also endorsed this approach as just one piece of his Green New Deal. On brand, The Economist endorses carbon taxes as well.

Bitcoin Hivemind developer Paul Sztorc writes about Bitcoin’s future security budget. It’s a really good technical discussion of how Bitcoin can be funded in the future, and why we need sidechains to help pay for the cost of keeping Bitcoin secure.

Bruce Schneier writes about the need for Public Interest Cybersecurity, envisioning it as a parallel to public interest legal work. It’s an interesting take, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, he’s right that lawmakers know little about the technologies they are supposed to regulated, but that’s also true of literally every industry. Sure it would be great if we had more things like the EFF, but I’m have to ask 80,000 Hours if they thought people going into charity work should work for the EFF or AI Alignment research or other existential risk. I’m also not sure I agree that there aren’t enough incentives to invent new security protocols. Google is taking security very seriously on their own, but so are tons of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency developers who are constantly seeking ways to make their projects more secure and do more creative things with crypto.

The U.S. trade deficit hit a 10 year high. Here is the actual Bloomberg article. This is silly political bickering, so I won’t spend much time on it, but it reflects just how the president fails to grasp very simple economics. The trade deficit doesn’t mean anything by itself, it’s just a measure of the goods traded, and it’s not even very good at that (goods designed here but manufactured in another country see their whole value “subtracted” in the trade deficit despite American labor inputs). The drivers of the trade deficit are things like relative values of currencies and national savings rates, not the levels of tariffs. Meanwhile, Trump’s tax cuts have spurred U.S. growth while the rest of the world has been sluggish, leading to higher trade deficits because Americans are relatively more wealthy. This flurry of economic activity prompted the Fed to raise rates to stave off inflation, which also drives up the trade deficit, and so Trump has taken the horrible tact of trying to publicly attack the Fed to lower rates, which is terrible for any sort of responsible Fed policy. The whole thing is a ridiculous mess which could have been avoided if Trump had any semblance of economic knowledge.

The Fifth Column podcast is a highly entertaining libertarian politics podcast. Episode 132 is a little different as Michael Moynihan takes the opportunity to interview Mark Weisbrot, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-wing think tank, on the Maduro government in Venezuela. I have a lot of thoughts on this interview, but my foremost is whether Weisbrot counts as an actual representative voice of the Left. I think one of the worst things social media does is to hold up the most controversial person on one side because they generate the most clicks and buzz and force both sides to jump in and flame each other. In an hour long interview, Weisbrot takes, as far as I can tell, no opportunity to criticize the Maduro regime, nor offers any way in which they could have improved their policies. He accepts and touts statistics that support his view, and dismisses, minimizes, or ignores stats that counter him–even if they are all from the same source! Even though he’s a big deal at a left-wing think tank, I have to point out that most left-leaning academics don’t need to be in think tanks because most university politics skew left. This might explain how someone with this level of willful ignoranceg could hold such a key position. I think the interview is worth listening to if you would like to see the extent of what humans can do to put up mental barriers to seeing their own logical inconsistencies and motivated reasoning. Nonetheless, I feel bad about linking to this interview as I think it unfairly represents actual socialists who would like to nationalize all industries and seize the means of production.

Links 2018-07-09

My new series focusing on policy summaries made me realize that while the political world and Twittersphere may not discuss policy much, there are groups of people who research policy professionally and have probably covered some of what I want to do with my “Policies in 500 Words or Less” series. So after looking around, I found that the Cato Institute has an excellent page called the Cato Handbook for Policymakers. It contains a ridiculous 80 entries of policy discussions including a top agenda of important items, a focus on legal and government reforms, fiscal, health, entitlement, regulation, and foreign policies. I will definitely be pulling some ideas from that page for future policy summaries.

I recently found the YouTube channel of Isaac Arthur, who makes high quality, well researched, and lengthy videos on futurism topics, including space exploration. I’d like to take a moment to highlight the benefits of a free and decentralized market in the internet age. Adam Smith’s division of labor is incredibly specialized with the extent of our market. Arthur has a successful Patreon with weekly videos on bizarre and niche topics that regularly get hundreds of thousands of views (24 million total for his channel), and they are available completely free, no studio backing necessary. Such an informative career could not have existed even 10 years ago.

The 80000 Hours Podcast, which was recently mentioned in our top podcasts post, had Dr. Anders Sandberg on (broken into two episodes) to discuss a variety of related topics: existential risk, solutions to the Fermi Paradox, and how to colonize the galaxy. Sandberg is a very interesting person and I found the discussion enlightening, even if it didn’t focus much on how to change your career to have large impacts, like 80000 Hours usually does.

Reason magazine’s July issue is titled “Burn After Reading”. It contains various discussions and instructional articles on how to do things that are on the border between legal and illegal, such as how to build a handgun or how to make good pot brownies or how to hack your own DNA with CRISPR kits. It’s an impressive demonstration of the power of free speech, but also important to the cyberpunk ideal that information is powerful and can’t be contained.

George Will writes in support of Bill Weld’s apparent aim to become the 2020 Libertarian Party nominee. I admit I wasn’t hugely impressed with Weld’s libertarian bona fide’s when he was running in 2016, but I thought his campaigning and demeanor was easily better than Gary Johnson’s, who was already the LP’s best candidate in years, maybe ever. I think a better libertarian basis paired with Weld’s political skills would be an excellent presidential candidate for the LP.

Related: last week was the 2018 Libertarian Party National Convention. I don’t know if it’s worth discussing or whether it’s actually going to matter, but I have seen some good coverage from Matt Welch at Reason and Shawn Levasseur.

I read this very long piece by Democratic Senator (and likely Presidential hopeful) Cory Booker at Brookings. It was a pretty sad look at current issues of employment, worker treatment, and stagnant wages. There was a compelling case that firms are getting better at figuring out ways to force labor to compete through sub-contracting out labor to avoid paying employee benefits. This leads to monopsony labor purchasing by large firms, squeezing workers who don’t have the same amount of market bargaining power. He also mentions non-compete clauses and growing differences between CEO pay and average pay for workers. I don’t have good answers to these points, although his suggestion of a federal jobs guarantee seems very expensive and likely wasteful. His proposed rules about stock buybacks also seem to miss the point. Maybe stricter reviews of mergers would work, but perhaps larger firms are more efficient in today’s high tech economy, it’s hard to know. Definitely a solid piece from a source I disagree with, which is always valuable.

Somewhat related: Scott Alexander’s post from a couple months ago on why a jobs guarantee isn’t that great, especially compared to a basic income guarantee. Also worth reading, Scott’s fictional post on the Gattaca sequels.

Uber might have suspended testing of self driving automobiles, but Waymo is going full steam ahead. They recently ordered over 80,000 new cars to outfit with their autonomous driving equipment, in preparation for rolling out a taxi service in Phoenix. Timothy B. Lee at Ars Technica has a very interesting piece, arguing the setbacks for autonomous vehicles only exist if you ignore the strides Waymo has made.

Augur, a decentralized prediction market platform similar to Paul Sztorc’s Hivemind (which I’ve discussed before), is launching on the Ethereum mainnet today. Ethereum has its own scaling problems, although I’d hope at some point sharding will actually be a real thing. But for now, transactions on Augur may be pretty expensive, and complex prediction markets may remain illiquid. That may mean the only competitive advantage Augur will offer is the ability to create markets of questionable legality. Exactly what that will be remains to be seen, but this is an exciting development in the continuing development of prediction markets.

Links 2017-7-16

The Libertarian Web Directory has been updated with some more interesting people, notably Ben Shapiro and Kmele Foster.

At the end of June, the libertarian academic world was alight in condemnation of Duke Professor Nancy MacLean’s book, Democracy in Chains. The book tries to tie James Buchanan, the Nobel laureate economist who essentially founded Public Choice Theory (an important part of how I’ve defined postlibertarianism) to racist segregationists, the Koch brothers, and Donald Trump. It’s poorly researched, takes quotes out of context, and implies guilt by several degrees of separation. As it turns out, Duke University’s Political Science Department is perhaps the world’s best place to learn about Public Choice Theory with several presidents of the Public Choice Society teaching there, including James Buchanon’s frequent co-author Geoffrey Brennan. Professor MacLean decided against talking to any of them, favoring instead to try and fabricate a grand right-wing conspiracy. The reason I know this is because Duke Political Science Professor Michael Munger wrote a devastating response to MacLean’s book that I highly recommend reading. It’s not just great for inter-academic drama, but the piece does excellently summarizes and discusses the important parts of Public Choice Theory, and how James Buchanan created and utilized this model of government.

Speaking of defining postlibertarianism, I’ve amended my explanatory article to be version 2.0, since technically former blogger Joshua Hedlund defined postlibertarianism pretty well 6 years ago. We’ll call that 1.0.

The Economist has a nice short piece on the benefits and deficiencies of Medicaid, which apparently covers some 80 million Americans, and about 100 million people some time during each year. Republican efforts to target Medicaid back towards actual poor people now makes much more sense to me.

Towards the end of the month, developments will happen in Bitcoin. Either BIP 91 will be activated through the SegWit2x agreement, or SegWit2x will fail and BIP 148 will start to orphan blocks on August 1. Either way, it seems Segregated Witness has a high chance to be activated. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, this is a useful guide to the upcoming months. If you have no idea why Bitcoin would need activate anything, read my last post on Bitcoin here.

Google has collected a group of “classic papers”, which are papers that were highly cited in the subsequent 10 years. These papers are from a vast array of subjects and areas. Whatever area you are interested in is there.

I’m sure I’ve been one of the libertarians disappointed by Rand Paul’s support of many of President Trump’s initiatives and ideas. Matt Welch writes for Reason both acknowledging that politicians will always disappoint us, but also arguing that we should not give up on libertarian politicians when they drop a small bit of ideological purity.

This post at the blog Otium defending individualist culture was really long, but very good.

Scott Alexander discusses whether elections are decided by turning out your own base or by winning over voters from the other side. There isn’t a ton of good data on it, but he still makes a pretty compelling case that a small but important segment of the population are really “swing” voters that switch sides. One of the more interesting studies simulates RCTs by looking only at elections where a politician wins a primary by a very small percentage (like less than 0.1%). This means the chances of the more extreme candidate having won the primary are essentially random. In those cases, there is a significant difference between general election popular vote percentage depending on whether the moderate or more extreme candidate won the primary. Very cool.

The Fifth Column podcast from the week Donald Trump Jr.’s Russia emails came out is excellent. I recommend listening every week, but this episode is especially good. Besides my own blog about it, Politico has a nice summary by Jack Schafer, The LA Times had an interesting point about how Robert Mueller’s investigation pushed this information out in the open, and the Washington Post points out that the President approved of Trump Jr.’s Sunday statement which blatantly lied about the meeting last June.

Julia Galef has a good rundown of the most important disagreements between NIMBYs and YIMBYs, specifically on whether San Francisco should allow more housing to be built.

Links 2017-1-12

As we approach the time when free trade is the heretical advice rather than the obvious logical one, it’s time to brush up on our free trade arguments. Here’s an interesting one: would you ban new technology to save the jobs tied to the technology it replaces? Would you ban light bulbs to save candlemakers? Cars to save horsebreeders? It’s a ridiculous proposition to freeze the economy at a certain point in time. Well, there’s no economic difference between new technology and free trade. In fact, we can treat international trade as a fancy machine where we send corn away on a boat and the machine turns the corn into cars.

And speaking of free trade, this is the economic modeling for why a tariff is unequivocally inefficient. One of the impacts of a tariff, by the way, is an increase in the market price of a good. Anyone saying that a tariff won’t have negative effects on consumers is just plain wrong.

The excellent open source encrypted messaging app Signal is so useful, it has to avoid having its application servers blacklisted by oppressive regimes. It uses a workaround of having encrypted connections through content delivery network, in this case, Google itself. Moxie Marlinspike, the creater of Signal says “Eventually disabling Signal starts to resemble disabling the internet.”

One of the biggest problems with Trump I pointed out last year was the total unknown of his policies. He keeps changing his mind on almost every issue, and when he does speak, he wanders aimlessly, using simplified language that is more blunt and less precise. Fitting right into this pattern, Trump has taken to Twitter for much of his communication, even since winning the election. Twitter is a short and imprecise tool for communication, and this New York Times article shows just how much uncertainty Trump creates with his tweets.

Related: Bill Perry is terrified of increased nuclear proliferation. The article is a little alarmist, but it’s worth remembering that nuclear war was a real threat just 30 years ago. It should not be taken for granted that nuclear war will never occur, and Trump seems the most likely of the post-Soviet presidents to get involved in a confrontation with a major nuclear power.

Scott Alexander reveals his ideal cabinet (and top advisers) if he were president. It’s not only remarkably better than Trump’s, it’s probably better than any cabinet and appointees we’ve ever had (Bernie Sanders notwithstanding). Highlights include: Alex Tabarrok as head of the FDA, Scott Sumner as Chairman of the Fed, Charles Murray as welfar czar, Peter Thiel as Commerce Secretary, and Elon Musk as both Secretary of Transportation and Energy.

Speaking of cabinets, George Will details just how out of touch soon-to-be-Attorney General Jeff Sessions is, recounting his 2015 defense of unlimited civil asset forfeiture, a procedure by which the government takes cash and property from civilians who have been convicted of no crime and therefore have no recourse or due process protections. Don’t buy into the story that all of Trump’s appointees are horrific and terrifying; there is a gradient of his cabinet appointments depending on their authoritarian tendencies and the importance of their department, and unfortunately Jeff Sessions as Attorney General is by far the most concerning.

Missed this earlier last year, and worth keeping in mind as BuzzFeed gets hammered this week over their publishing of an unverified dossier: apparently the FBI already has daily aerial surveillance flights over American cities. These seem to be for general investigative use, not vital national security issues: “But most of these government planes took the weekends off. The BuzzFeed News analysis found that surveillance flight time dropped more than 70% on Saturdays, Sundays, and federal holidays.”

Speaking of BuzzFeed and the crisis of “fake news”, which itself may not even be anything compared the crisis of facts and truth itself, Nathan Robinson has an excellent take on the matter (very long read). With the lack of facts in the election, the media and Trump’s critics generally have to be twice as careful to rebuild trust in the very concept that objective truth exists and can be discussed in a political context.

Government regulations have hidden, unexpected costs. These regulations hurt people regardless of their political affiliations, as a Berkeley professor found out when trying to evict a tenant that refused to pay rent. California’s rather insane tenant laws mean that serial rent-cheaters can go from place to place staying rent free for months at a time.

I’ve often thought about the right ordering of presidents from best to worst, taking into account a libertarian, liberty-promoting approach. One difficulty is the non-comparability of presidents separated by centuries. However, this blog post from 2009 actually does a nice job of scoring the presidencies. I don’t agree with each one, but it’s a rough categorization that makes sense. It even gave me an additional appreciation for Ulysses Grant, who I figured was mostly president by the luck of being the general in charge when his army won the Civil War. Other highlights include William Henry Harrison scoring 11th, thus beating over three quarters of the competition despite only being in office for a month. I feel like I could have found more worse things on Andrew Jackson, and in general I feel like I agreed with the list more the closer I got the end.

Jeffrey Tucker at FEE has a nice article about the difference between spreading ideas and actual economic production of goods. His thesis is that we have much less control over the developing of ideas than we do of developing normal rivalrous goods. And since libertarians are pretty solid at grasping the idea that the production of goods cannot be controlled from the top down, we should also acknowledge that top-down approaches to developing ideas are even more preposterous, especially in the digital age of decentralized information. I’ve thought about this a fair amount considering I like I blogging but I’m well aware few people read this blog. The simplest way to restate Tucker’s point is that you have to have good ideas more than good distribution. I don’t know if that’s an accurate take, but certainly good ideas are the single most important part of spreading your ideas.

There’s a saying on the internet that “Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to eat for lunch”. The 2016 election is excellent demonstration of just how poorly democracy can fail, but what our all alternatives. How about Futarchy? This is Robin Hanson’s idea to improve public policy: “In futarchy, democracy would continue to say what we want, but betting markets would now say how to get it. That is, elected representatives would formally define and manage an after-the-fact measurement of national welfare, while market speculators would say which policies they expect to raise national welfare.” Let’s hold a referendum on it; those seem to work out.

Bitcoin has been on the rise in recent months. So have other cryptocurrencies. But rather than focus just the price of the cryptocurrency, why not look at the total market valuation of those currencies? Sure, you might have heard that Bitcoin was up to $1000 again recently, but did you know that its total market cap is ~$13 billion? At the very peak of the Bitcoin bubble in 2013, all Bitcoins together were valued around $13 billion, but only for a matter of days. This time Bitcoin has kept that valuation for over 3 weeks. With more markets and availability, Bitcoin is becoming a real alternative for people whose national currencies have failed them.

Postlibertarian throwback: When Capitalism and the Internet Make Food Better. A reminder that the despite the ongoing horrors of government we are witnessing, the market is still busy providing better products and cheaper prices.

Leave a comment on the official reddit discussion thread.

Links 2016-12-2

Added the awesome Conor Friedersdorf and Megan McArdle to the Libertarian Web Directory.

First, all the Trump-related links:

I’ve been saying this for a while, but Robby Soave at Reason articulates why the left bears a lot of the blame for Trump due to their aggressive pushing of political correctness.

Slate Star Codex talks about similar problem on crying wolf about Trump. Even mentioned in Episode 33 of The Fifth Column.

Tyler Cowen on why Trump’s plan to keep jobs in the US is pretty awful.

Nonetheless, also read why Bryan Caplan isn’t freaking out about Trump.

The Nerdwriter, on YouTube, makes the case that Trump is a magician, using the media to distract our attention from where it should be. Maybe I should stop reading about him so much.

Now, other related political posts not explicitly about Trump:

Megan McArdle had a good piece talking about bridging the gap between the “right-wing media” and the regular “media”. If you want to bring conservatives back into the mainstream, you have to stop politicizing everything and only hiring left-leaning news reporters who only want to cover the local food movement and how evil Walmart is.

Related: Bryan Caplan discusses that if you just talk about how great cohesion is and despair at the political divisions we see, you’ll never get outgroups to come back in, because to them you sound like you’re telling them to conform. You have to actually unilaterally reach out to them and show them respect despite how much you dislike them.

Philosopher Nick Land argues that contrary to the notion that fascism as a societal system has been largely dead since WWII, in fact almost all political philosophies in the world today are largely rooted in fascism, including the major political philosophies of the United States, progressivism and conservatism.

What is the most prominent social science debate happening at Peking University today? The most prestigious university in the still-technically-communist-party-controlled China isn’t about Maoism vs Stalinism, it’s a planned economy vs markets.

Scott Sumner has a hopeful take on fiscal policy and specifically reducing government budgets.

Here is a terrifying story about the unintended consequences of overcriminalization, and deference to state power. A woman with a previous arrest for prostitution, was picked up and charged with “loitering for the purposes of prostitution”. Loitering is not a criminal activity, but can be applied to anyone standing still. Loitering for the purpose of doing something else is quite speculative. Of course, prostitution itself is already a criminalization of a voluntary transaction, so now anyone who has been arrested for a voluntary interaction other people find distasteful cannot stand anywhere without being accused of a crime. In fact, if cops think women are dressed too lewdly, they can also be arrested for intent to prostitute themselves. Since this woman is relatively poor (thus the loitering for a ride outside of a trailer park), she’s forced to plead guilty to the charges and go to jail for 2 months.

Related: Adam Ruins Everything this week is about how important prostitution was to settling the American west, and, interestingly, empowering women in that region of the country far before they had similar rights in the east.

Why build higher? This video takes a look at the history of skyscrapers, but also delves into important areas of urbanization and how humanity will live in the future. Cities are more and more important to human civilization, and improving urban areas to exploit efficiencies of concentrated living is one of the most important challenges we face.

Crash Course has a 10 minute intro video for the philosophy of utilitarianism. Since that’s an important building block for many of the arguments on this blog, I would definitely recommend it.

Finally, to wrap up the short videos category, Learn Liberty has a great 5 minute video on one of the most fundamental economic concepts: Opportunity Costs. Every choice we make has a hidden cost of what could have been done with those resources and time. Ignoring those opportunity costs can lead to paradoxical ideas like the Broken Window Fallacy.

For the best coverage of the death of the dictator Fidel Castro, this long piece at the Miami Herald is the most comprehensive take available.

Postlibertarian throwback: read about the politics of outrage back in 2014. Unfortunately we have…not fixed our focus on outrage yet. 2017 and the age of Trump isn’t looking so great either.

Comment on the official reddit thread.

Links 2016-10-12

I’ve added Andrew Gelman’s blog to the blogroll. Really great blog on statistical analysis. I also moved the Cato Institute’s National Police Misconduct Reporting Project to the Libertarian Web Directory under Issue Organizations instead of in the blogroll.

Comment on Slate Star Codex about evolutionary complexity and politics. There’s a limit to how much useful information we can get from elections, and building more complex institutions on such little information may be dangerous.

John Cochrane on Basic Income and its benefits, along with its large political problems.

So the DEA has taken the massive failure of the War on Drugs and decided the lesson to draw was to add another drug to Schedule 1, the most prohibited category (and more tightly controlled than cocaine). Kratom, a drug used for opioid withdrawal treatment has been added to the list. The 15 deaths cited by the DEA over the last 2 years are sure to bump up as users’ legal alternative to illegal opioids is removed.

Classic example of regulation making it more difficult for simple economic transactions. This manifests in higher prices for compliance which ends up hurting the poor disproportionately. Seattle used to be the leading place for “micro-housing”, but it’s being regulated out of existence to the tune of hundreds of affordable dwellings a year.

The ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International are launching a campaign to pardon Edward Snowden. I’ve gone on the record predicting that the Obama administration will not pardon Snowden, but I hope I’m wrong. Also, watch this excellent Reason TV interview with the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Gary Johnson: WIRED should have endorsed me for president.

Related: Donald Trump has received no major newspaper endorsements, and many newspapers who have endorsed Republicans for decades, even centuries, are either endorsing Clinton, Johnson, or simply endorsing anyone but Trump. Some newspapers who don’t usually endorse anyone are doing so, such as the Atlantic, USA Today, and actually WIRED had never issued an endorsement. A redditor collected all the information into a nice post.

I’m not a Ross Douthat fan, but I do like this column. There’s a real sense of being surrounded that non-progressives feel. And when surrounded with no hope of making it out alive, soldiers fight to the death because they have nothing to lose. Not a great situation.

Heard through Alex Tabbarok at Marginal Revolution: apparently an author at the Telegraph isn’t happy about Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to eradicate all disease. She’s apparently afraid of the impacts of overpopulation. And she published it. In a real newspaper. So if you’re not optimizing for the “most good” in the world or most “human happiness”, what exactly are you optimizing for? If the author is so concerned about human population, does that mean she’s generally pro-war? Is she pro-Ebola? Anti-CDC? What are her feelings on ISIS? Does she have suicidal thoughts? I just have so many questions.

Seen through Slate Star Codex, the Brookings Institution has a report on charter schools in Massachusetts: “There is a deep well of rigorous, relevant research on the performance of charter schools in Massachusetts…This research shows that charter schools in the urban areas of Massachusetts have large, positive effects on educational outcomes. The effects are particularly large for disadvantaged students, English learners, special education students, and children who enter charters with low test scores. In marked contrast, we find that the effects of charters in the suburbs and rural areas of Massachusetts are not positive.” I’d guess this is because in the suburbs, the schools are already pretty good and must compete with expensive private schools anyway.

Forget moving to New Hampshire, the new mayor of Johannesburg is a self-proclaimed libertarian.

Why are American airports so crappy compared to international ones? Well it’s partially because most American airports cater to domestic flights and are not international travel hubs. Airports that focus on similar levels of domestic travel resemble LAX more than Dubai, LaGuardia more than Singapore.

Scott Sumner asks some interesting questions about a possible decline in materialism and how it relates to GDP growth and measurement. If everything you want to do can be done online, can you measure that economic improvement?

Jacob Levy at Bleeding Heart Libertarians writes that if you look at the polling numbers, Johnson doesn’t draw more from Clinton, and having him on the ticket actually helps her.

Obviously this election cycle has been particularly divisive and nasty. But did you know there are people working on fixing this? Check out the National Institute for Civil Discourse’s Standards of Conducts for Debates. Can you imagine if the political debates were actually like this? I might even want to watch them.

Megan McArdle on How to End the Death Penalty for Good. There’s an interesting point about how abortion laws were on the decline and probably would have quietly died except for the Supreme Court stepping in and making the decision themselves. This galvanized social conservatives into organizing themselves and mobilizing to protect their interests against perceived undemocratic justices. I’m not sure how accurate that is, but it’s certainly true that “judicial activism” has been reviled by the American Right for a while now.

A good rundown by Reason of their staffers and many prominent libertarians on who they will be voting for. Dave Barry’s response is by far my favorite.

There is a storm brewing in the Libertarian Party. Gary Johnson will likely meet the 5% threshold set by the FEC on who qualifies as a minor party. That means the LP will be eligible to get taxpayer provided funding for its candidate in 2020. There are two problem. One is that Libertarians are fundamentally opposed to this practice, and taking the money would make them look like hypocrites. The other is that neither party seems to take matching funds anymore as it also puts a cap on how much you can raise. That cap scales, so the cap itself may limit the LP in the 2020 election.

Postlibertaian throwback: World Wars Per Century. Only since 2014 have we been living in an age where only a single world war was started in the preceding 100 years.

Comment on Reddit.

Links 2016-9-7

Living in the Age of Outrage. Maybe we’ve surpassed the point at which additional connectivity and interaction will continue to benefit the human brain.

The NSA spying on us is now officially putting us all at risk. Written by Bruce Schneier whose blog you can find in the sidebar.

Cool post on taking back the word “neoliberal”. More from a British perspective than American, but same idea I think as this blog and neoclassical liberalism.

Duke Professor Michael Munger (blog linked in the sidebar) gave a short talk about different healthcare systems, and some of the problems in the American set up.

An interesting healthcare idea mentioned in the last link, and discussed at length in this Cato paper. An idea I had previously thought about what having insurance cover increasing progressive percentages of healthcare costs as your costs went up. This is essentially like a high deductible plan, but perhaps you pay for 100% of your first $1000 healthcare costs, 50% of your second $1000, 25% of the next $2000, and so on. However, high deductibles don’t really work for low income individuals. Instead, this paper proposes that for very expensive procedures, the insurance company would pay the patient an amount to forego the procedure. If it’s just something they are considering, they will just take the money. If it’s really required, they’ll go through with it. It’s true that more low income individuals will forego the procedure, but if we argue that shouldn’t be allowed, we are arguing they shouldn’t be allowed to get free money. Not very ethical.

Paid parental leave isn’t a free lunch. Author is a blogger at EconLog, linked in the sidebar.

Interesting point by Bryan Caplan on a “reverse Animal Farm” situation. In the Soviet Union, Pravda would talk about how much better things were while things were actually awful; today, the media focuses on how terrible things are despite us being in an unparalleled era of peace and prosperity. Weirder still, Pravda was a propaganda outlet, but our media is competitive meaning that they are spouting what we want to hear. Of course, that also explains lots of overly emotional happy stories of dogs being rescued or clickbait listicles, so it’s not all doom and gloom as Caplan says.

The reasonableness of radicalism. An good read from Libertarianism.org that makes you think about the historical context of various beliefs. By historical standards people today are radical democrats, radical egalitarians, and radical libertarians. Therefore, we can justify beliefs thought radical today by asserting future societies would find those beliefs obvious. Of course, the author largely ignores that we could guess the wrong direction the world moves in; many left-wing intellectuals (and others) in the early 20th century thought it was obvious that communism or at least socialism was the future. They believed their support of overthrowing the bourgeoisie was the right way to approach things. Communists today are a bit wacky. Perhaps it would be safer to just argue for incremental changes in the right direction.

When you change the world and no one notices. Apparently it took about five years for the anyone to notice the Wright Brothers had already invented fixed-wing flight. Someone even predicated flight was a long way off a year after the Wright Brothers had flown at Kitty Hawk.

Last week had an excellent episode of The Fifth Column (podcast website). I recommend skipping the first 20 minutes unless you’re really interested in the Colin Kaepernick debate. Michael Moynihan makes a great point which is that Donald Trump is a pussy. He did talk about the border wall with Mexico’s president, but when asked about it, he said they didn’t discuss it. Then later when he was safely back in Arizona, then he said Mexico would definitely pay for the wall. But when actually in Mexico, he chickened out and avoided the subject. It’s remarkably politician-like and unpresidential. The whole rest of the episode though is great.

In the quest to get more people to know about Gary Johnson, BalancedRebellion.com has an amazing video from “dead Abe Lincoln” to let people know they can use the website to find another voter who would otherwise vote for the “other candidate”, and together they can both vote for Gary Johnson like they want to without the risk of accidentally helping to elect the person they hate more.

Comment on Reddit.

Links 2016-5-30

Gary Johnson selected former Republican Massachusetts Governor William Weld to be his running mate. This was pretty surprising for Libertarians considering Weld isn’t really a well-known libertarian guy. Obviously, the Johnson campaign hoped not to repeat the failings of Jim Gray who was essentially unknown to the national media. During the Libertarian Party convention this weekend, the delegates selected both Gary Johnson and Bill Weld opting for pragmatism rather than party purity. This is some election year when the libertarians are more reasonable than the Republicans and Democrats.

With 2 former Republican governors on the ticket, the Libertarian Party is now poised to be a real third party alternative. This could be a huge year for them, even if they don’t win. Remember, from our archives, if you reach 5% of the popular vote in a presidential election, you are entitled to real money in the next cycle (the irony of Libertarians accepting Federal handouts not withstanding).

Nicholas Kristof has a follow up to his column “A Confession of Liberal Intolerance” where he condemned the intolerance of progressives especially in the university. Apparently, the left universally scoffed at the thought of tolerating conservatives…which essentially confirmed his point.

The EFF is shutting down their canary watch program after a year. I have previously discussed the importance and usefulness of warrant canaries. It seems the EFF has decided it isn’t worth the effort to keep track of all the notices because they seem to change too much from post to post. These aren’t bad reasons, but it is a little concerning. It seems likely that you’ll just have to stick to the default that any website you visit has received national security letters asking for information.

Jason Brennan at Bleeding Heart Libertarians on the difference between Ignorance, Misinformation, and Irrationality in democracies. Essentially ignorance isn’t exactly the problem in democracies, since if everyone is equally ignorant, then the non-ignorant people will be able to make rational decisions; there is no bias for the ignorant people since they have no opinion. Misinformation can be a problem though, if most people are misinformed, they will make poor decisions. But even if people are misinformed, having a deliberative discussion will help as rational logic should triumph. But irrationality is a serious problem, since even discussions would just spread more misinformation. This relates to the thesis of Bryan Caplan’s book The Myth of the Rational Voter (Wikipedia, full text for free). I look forward to reading Brennan’s new book, iconoclastically titled Against Democracy.

Tangentially related: John Oliver has a segment on the flaws of the primary system. Unfortunately, he sort of glosses over the assumption that they need to be more democratic, but do they? He says this time we “got lucky” in that the candidates with the most votes were the ones actually chosen, but we need to change things in the future. I disagree; the candidates we did choose are awful. If the system is working now, making it work better won’t help anything. Check out my previous post for more on this, and forward it to John Oliver if you get a chance. Better than reforming the primary system, let’s try making more parties more viable with some proportional representation in the House of Representatives!

Why Bernie doesn’t quit: Polisci 101 analysis of Bernie Sanders’ intentions. Basically, he wants to stop Hillary from turning towards the center, since he wants the Democratic party to be very a progressive Social Democrat party. This is also the reason that anyone who’s not a Social Democrat wants Bernie out of the race.

Ilya Shapiro at the Cato Institute, who knows his stuff pretty well, called Donald Trump’s list for replacing Justice Scalia’s SCOTUS seat “exceptional”. This is good news in that a Trump presidency would at least have this going for it. I don’t know if all this would make him a better choice than Clinton, but it is a big deal, at least to me. Doubtful if this alone would be enough to unite all Republicans around him.

Nick Gillespie has two solid blog posts. One is a great overview of a recent Foreign Relations Committee Hearing and the constrasting views of Marco Rubio and Rand Paul. Paul, we should note, won his primary to stand for reelection for his Kentucky Senate seat. This should largely guarantee his victory (PredictIt doesn’t have a market yet but PredictWise has it at 90% Republican). The other post discusses how Obama’s new overtime regulations are going to harm workers by reducing hours, workers, or both.

Meta-blog post. Do you need more economics blogs? Here is a giant list of them. They’re vaguely ordered by popularity, and you shouldn’t just dismiss it because Paul Krugman is first; there’s a lot of good blogs I didn’t know about.

Dylan Matthews at Vox makes the case for getting rid of the TSA. Doesn’t even mention the financial cost savings (their budget is $8 billion, and cost of time is at least that).

Scott Sumner on the problems with government policy responses to crises. Scott also did a much better job predicting the economy than the Fed. Takeaway: please, please institute prediction markets for the basic macroeconomic indicators.

Cool YouTube video on computational complexity and the P vs NP problem.

Short summary of one of the best essays on markets: Hayek’s “The Use of Knowledge in Society”.

What are the components of airline ticket prices? Great YouTube video explanation.

All the Scott Alexander: Apparently good kindergarden teachers have massive effects on income decades later, but no lasting effect on test scores. There really bizarre studies and all I can tell is that education research is hard.

As part of his ongoing philosophy of niceness and tolerance in society, and relating to my post on tolerance, Scott discusses more on tolerance and coordinated vs uncoordinated meanness.

Scott also has a great post on his experience in the Irish health system, related to the UK junior doctors’ strike. There are serious barriers to entry to the US medical system because the benefits are so high if you become a doctor. In UK, this is not true, since the state regulates how much doctors can make, so of course many doctors are leaving the UK and Ireland for places where the pay is less regulated. Scott says he’s not sure how to solve labor disputes, but if you have a freer market in hiring and payment, you don’t end up having labor disputes. The American system has problems as well, and if the barriers to entry could be reduced

And finally: Scott Alexander’s review of Albion’s Seed, and his analysis of the importance of culture in determining beliefs.

Apparently non-technical people don’t know this, but Craig Wright isn’t Satoshi Nakamoto. He had an “exclusive” interview with several media outlets discussing how he was really the inventor of Bitcoin. But if you read the story pretty quickly, you notice he doesn’t provide a signature with Satoshi’s private key (the reddit and Hacker News threads found he stole a signature from a transaction in one of the early blocks), and he doesn’t move any of Satoshi’s money to a publicly declared account. Those are very easy ways to prove he is Satoshi Nakamoto, and he didn’t do them, instead relying on some weird demonstration directly to a journalist. I would have guessed most people would have figured he was lying (he has a weird history as well), especially because Satoshi Nakamoto has gone to great lengths to protect his identity, and this guy is clearly trying to get attention. But several news outlets printed it as true. Gavin Andresen, the lead developer of Bitcoin, has declared that he has seen proof, but he hasn’t told us what the proof is. But you shouldn’t need a really famous person to vouch for someone’s identity, that’s the whole point of Bitcoin; decentralized proof is easy and clear.

From Ars Technica: Death by GPS.

Bryan Caplan on global warming cost-benefit analyses.

The Fourth Amendment apparently no longer applies to the federal government. The FBI can access any data gathered from general warrants issued under the FISA court to the NSA, which is only supposed to be targeting foreign nationals, but which we know just grabs all data a company has.

Marginal Revolution discusses the issue of public bathrooms in context on North Carolina’s recent law.

Links 2016-4-17

Counting past infinity is easy! It was the infinity raised to infinity and infinite number of times that I really got lost.

I’ve settled on the right way to show the date in these links posts: the international standard ISO-8601. It’s about time since that has been the standard since 1988.

Niskanen center names social justice aware libertarianism as “neoclassical libertarianism“. I like this idea, as it’s strictly superior to progressivism, and I’ve been trying to come up with a good name for it. Scott Alexander called it left-libertarianism-ist, which just isn’t as catchy. Of course, maybe pure libertarianism is better, but neoclassical liberalism is far more politically palatable. It is also more “conservative”, meaning that it is closer to the status quo.

Merrick Garland would not be a good SCOTUS justice. Randy Barnett discusses with Reason why he opposes Garland’s nomination: he’s completely deferential to executive and legislative authority and does not protect individual rights from the state. Does it make sense for the Senate to not give him a hearing? Maybe, maybe not. Did it make sense to declare prior to his announcement that any candidate wouldn’t get a hearing? Hard to say; if that hard line approach made Obama nominate an old white guy who endorses state power in the name of national security, that’s certainly a win for neoconservatives. I don’t think anyone should take an outrage stance on the Supreme Court opening because this really is a complicated game theory situation with nested layers of strategy. Even though I’m sure he is one of the most un-libertarian nominees ever, it’s impossible to say if he would be worse than a Hillary appointee or even a Trump appointee.

How to fight the War on Drugs: hit their wallets. Legal marijuana causes Mexican drug cartel revenues to plummet.

Heard through Slate Star Codex, anti-censorship blog Status 451 (linked in the sidebar) held a fund-raiser for LambdaConf, a functional programming conference I had no idea existed until a week ago. Apparently, after an anonymous analysis of submitted papers, the Lambdaconf organizers selected a paper to be presented at the conference by Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug, perhaps the most well known neo-reactionary. Certainly I think neo-reactionaries are a bit nuts, but Mr. Yarvin has also invented the intriguing functional programming language Urbit. We don’t agree with him politically, we can learn and grow our knowledge by understanding what he has to say, especially in technological areas he is an expert in! Alas, as Eric S. Raymond recounts, the social justice movement did not see it that way and pressured LambdaConf to remove Yarvin from the event. Lambdaconf refused and the activists moved to forcing sponsors to drop out. Incredibly, Status 451 started an indiegogo campaign to save LambdaConf, which was funded within the day. This is a big victory for anyone who wants to live in a tolerant, knowledgeable, and free society, but if you want to know their motivations firsthand, please read what they have to say. Status 451 are also true believers, calling out some on the right for their similarly censoring response.

Related in Not the Onion news: Emory vows to hunt down students who politically disagree with the Left.

Bryan Caplan on liberalizing expertise and the link with defending free speech from the attacks of economic licensing.

A great write up on derivatives, what they are, how they work, and why it’s misleading to suggest that the derivatives market has a quadrillion dollars in risk.

Another excellent reddit post, this one asking soldiers what things they don’t tell you about war. In short: the smell.

Apparently the music industry thinks the DMCA doesn’t do enough to stop copyright infringers (more on the RIAA at TorrentFreak). It seems they’d like to target the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA, the only parts of it that are useful. Techdirt has a great series of posts from the other side, detailing the many abuses of DMCA takedown notices. Right now, there is no legal check on whether a takedown request comes from someone who actually owns the copyright, or even if that copyrighted work is utilized fairly for criticism or commentary. This isn’t an easy problem to solve by any means, but we should remember that the point of copyright is to encourage production of new works, and if there’s anything that YouTube does right is making it easier to create new content. Moreover, it’s helpful to remember that YouTube is run at a loss of more than $150 million a year. Trying to force YouTube to pay for content policing is one of the dumber ideas they’ve ever had, which is saying something. So what should be done instead? A good start would be to make false copyright claims a criminal offense, and require you to prove you own the copyright in the claim. It would also be good if it turned out your copyright claim was wrong, the ad-money would not go to the claiming part, but would be held in escrow until the dispute is resolved. This would allow YouTube to better focus on actual infringers and stop the torrent of false claims. Of course, another big looming problem for the RIAA is Facebook video, which doesn’t even have the semi-transparent (though flawed) takedown-notice system of YouTube. Ultimately, given how little money YouTube makes after 10 years on the internet, if YouTube was allowed to be held liable for infringing uploads, YouTube would either go out of business, or cease becoming a free platform anyone could use. This would be a monumental failure of the copyright regime; yes, it might end up getting RIAA members more money, but that is not the purpose of copyright. Copyright exists to help make new content, not destroy content platforms.

California is raising its minimum wage, eventually to $15 an hour. FiveThirtyEight’s Ben Casselman is excited at least to get some data on large minimum wage hikes, although judging from the headlines, it seems like he thinks this is a good idea. I’m fairly confident it is not, and Matt Zwolinski makes one good point to support me: the minimum wage doesn’t fight poverty. There’s a lot of data surrounding the minimum wage. And it’s apparent that unemployment does not automatically rise when minimum wage increases occur. Nonetheless, longer term unemployment effects are essentially impossible to study, and it’s likely there are some effects on businesses. If businesses could absorb 20-40% increases in labor costs easily, then why aren’t businesses getting more out of their employees, or more firms entering the business due to excess profits? There is evidence of long term job growth being harmed, as well as higher prices (see last link). Ultimately, I predict there will be negative consequences for California, but it’s hard to find something that is worth predicting. I could predict that California’s employment and workforce participation rate will be lower than the country average by more than they are now (check this in the future). It’s also likely that low cost goods will see price increases, but I don’t have an easy way to check that over the next five years.

Robin Hanson has a good thought experiment to show that most people don’t vote to change the outcomes of elections. This would explain why anyone votes at all, given the uselessness of voting generally.

GiveWell tries a new tactic to persuade more people to fund their top researched causes: ” First of all. Just so you understand, this guy is a total loser. He begged me to be his peer reviewer, I said ‘NO THANKS.’ Pathetic!”

Daniel J. Bernstein taking over crypto is good.

Links 2016-03-24

Scott Alexander has a new post on happiness and economic growth. There must be a name for this paradox, because it’s blindingly obvious if you think about it: Right now, compare your life to the life of 100 years ago, given your current standing in society. Your life right now is way better, you have time to spend on internet learning and debating about ideas in ways you couldn’t dream of 100 years ago. You have better food choices, longer life expectancy, better pop culture, more stimulating interests, far easier communication with distant relatives, and so on. And yet, the exact same thing will be said about our lives compared to the lives of those who live 100 years in the future. Sure, those lives will be better, but I don’t know how much that bothers us today unless we really think about it. Most people are pretty excited to live today at the frontier of human knowledge, and we don’t see it as a loss that we don’t have cheap self-driving cars and instant delivery groceries for low cost.

But yet, when you do think about it, we hate sitting in traffic or having to go to the store to pick something up, and we wish we had technologies that could get rid of those inconveniences. Yet, I bet people in the future will just have other errands they hate doing just like we hate sitting in traffic. But they will be inconveniences for future people who are tolerating them so that they can do even more awesome things that we can’t imagine, just like people 100 years didn’t sit in traffic because they didn’t own cars at all.

It’s very confusing. On a personal scale, obviously it would be ridiculous to complain about your current standing, because future technologies haven’t been invented yet. So of course everyone is pretty satisfied with what technology level they live in. Yet, our lives are obviously better for having these technologies. How do we reconcile this?

In the last month, I’ve often thought that the closest president we’ve had to Donald Trump is Andrew Jackson; Trump is a loud-mouthed, populist who falls outside of the mainstream party system, yet has significant support from non-elites and were despised by the elites themselves. This is also the perfect description for Andrew Jackson, who was so successful in this movement, he founded the Democratic Party. David Friedman comes to the same conclusion via a different route.

That last link caused me to run into a real problem with Donald Trump and Andrew Jackson grammatically. One subject is dead and one is alive, so what is the proper verb tense to use? Stack Exchange suggested this, which is honestly kind of lame.

Scott Sumner discusses socialism and France. He makes a short argument that France sounds like a pretty good model country for modern socialism: high amount of skilled civil servants, broad support for socialist policies, a willing government to implement them, and a modern, developed economy. Yet, Bernie Sanders supporters often reach for the Nordic countries rather than France as the big-welfare state (“socialist”) ideal. Why is French socialist policy somewhat of a political flop, while Nordic countries are idealized? And would a Bernie-America look like Denmark or maybe better, or perhaps more like France, or even worse? Given the size and diversity of America’s population and economy, France seems closer than Denmark, although both are closer to each other than the US. The only socialistic countries of comparable size seem to be the China and the Soviet Union which have forms of socialism even Bernie Sanders would abhor. Mostly.

Do you have no friends? Never fear, it’s because really, really smart people are better off with few friends.

Bryan Caplan’s model of the Right and Left, and how it’s oddly doing well this election cycle.

Overcoming Bias discusses the cost and benefits of voting. How much would you pay to have your vote count more? His conclusion is that we don’t vote to change the outcome of the election.

Surprise! NSA data will soon be used for routine policing! Coverage from the New York Times, and the Massachusetts ACLU as well.

Bryan Caplan also has a good discussion of libertarian critiques of welfare. Matt Zwolinski has a good counter post. I like the idea of bleeding heart libertarianism, or market liberalism or whatever, so I think Caplan’s critiques are pointed at exactly what I believe, which is excellent! You always want to have your beliefs critiqued by smart people. I think Caplan is right on many of his points, but I feel like my views are more politically practical. Voters obviously want some form of welfare for the poor, and at least that part could be done more efficiently with my ideas.

This is a good write up on the decentralized crypto-currency-ish entity Ethereum; Reason also did a recent video on it. Very soon I’ll be able to explain to people what it actually does. Right after I’ve figured out how to install it. If you want to learn about it without me, here is Ethereum’s website.

Fact checking Trump on trade. Why do we talk about trade deficits? I have no idea why they matter. Is it a problem if I buy a phone from Apple and I live in New York instead of California? Is there now a trade deficit between New York and California since I sent money out of my local community? No, nobody cares. And for the US, it’s even less relevant, since those dollars that US citizens spent have to come back to the US to be redeemed for goods and services. It would be like if I paid for my iPhone in New York dollars that had to come back to New York. I’m a free trade proponent, but I’m not deaf to some concerns people might have about trade, but this is one of the worst anti-free trade arguments you could make.