Scott Sumner

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 2016-5-30

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 2016-03-24

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.