Another sandpit, specifically open for anyone who wants to debate the East African famine, the usefulness of aid and so on. But feel free to talk about other things.
East Africa Famine Appeal
I’m in the US at present, visiting Johns Hopkins University. This kind of visit usually involves plenty of opportunities for eating and drinking, not so many for exercise. To push myself into activity, I’ve signed up for a half-marathon to be run in Philadelphia on 19 November.
That seems like a good occasion for a fundraiser. I know it’s not long since the last one, but I’ve picked a really good cause, namely relief efforts for the East Africa Famine. I’ve set up a fundraising page on Everyday Hero, with a convenient link to the left. The money goes to CARE, and I’ll write to them to ask them to put it towards their East Africa Appeal. But if you prefer to give to another charity engaged in the same effort, or even some other cause altogether.
I’ve put some thoughts about the famine over the fold. However, I’d prefer to keep the comments thread for posts regarding contributions to the appeal, other ways to help and so on. Negative comments will be deleted with prejudice. I’ll open a sandpit soon for people who want to argue about the issues hopefully as well as, and not instead of, contributing to the appeal.
Update As pointed out by commenter Peter Rickwood, the Australian government will match our contributions dollar for dollar. And all Australian donations are tax deductible. So, for someone lucky enough to be in the top tax bracket, you can give $4 worth of help for every $1 of post-tax income you forgo. A dollar a day is all it takes to feed a hungry child, so $100 of consumption forgone is enough to feed a child for a year. You don’t get an offer like that every day! It’s such a good deal, I’ve put some money in to start the ball rolling. End update
My adventures on Intrade
For those who don’t follow the economics and politics literature obsessively, Intrade is a market in bets on various kinds of predictions, set up to follow the conventions of a share market. As I’ve discussed quite a few times in the past, the efficient financial markets hypothesis in its strong forms, implies that markets like this should give a better (more precisely, at least as good a) prediction of things like election outcomes than could be obtained from studying polls, pundit predictions and so on. I’ve been sceptical of this, on the basis of casual empiricism and some concerns about whether the empirical tests I’ve seen are biased in favor of the claim being tested.
One thing I haven’t done until now is to enter the actual market to see how it works. I finally signed up, and discovered a few items of interest. First, thanks (I assume) to US laws against online gambling, it’s quite difficult for Americans to participate in the market, which is, at least for legal purposes, based in Ireland. You can’t use a US credit or debit card, and my attempts at a wire transfer from my US bank account failed. Australia has no such restrictions.
Second, and relatedly, the market is quite thin. If the managers of Presidential campaigns cared what Intrade said, they could shift the markets a long way for a very modest outlay. For example, shares in Ron Paul, with a $10.00 payoff if we wins the Repub nomination, are currently trading at 0.27, implying a 2.7 per cent chance. But a Paul fan who wanted to raise his estimated chances could push them up to 0.40 for an outlay of $1000 (there are about 3000 shares for sale at prices between 0.27 and 0.40).
Third, there’s no margin trading, which means in particular, that you need a lot of collateral to go short on a long-odds candidate (at least if I have worked out the system right). Selling short costs $10 a share, less the current price, so if I wanted to sell short $100 worth of Paul shares at the current price (that is about 400 shares), I’d have to put up nearly $4000. I had an elegant Dutch book worked out, betting against Paul and Huntsman (zero chance, in my view) to finance a bet against my preferred dark horse whose odds were equal to the sum of the first two. But that didn’t it work, so I had to just put down my money. Over the fold, my trackside tip ….
Occupied interview
A week or so ago I did an interview by Skype videolink with Taryn Hart of Occupied Media, talking about the issues raised by Occupy Wall Street. It’s now available online. I never watch myself on video, but I did listen to the whole thing and, allowing for a fair number of ums, ahs, and circumlocutions, I think the questions gave me the chance to state my ideas, and in some cases to work out on the spot what I thought about various issues.
Irresponsible bosses
I’m out of the country at the moment, and possibly missing some nuance. On the other hand, I’m old enough to remember the ill-will the unions built up in the 1970s, with snap stoppages designed to inflict maximum disruption on the public and thereby maximise pressure on employers to settle quickly and on the government to broker a solution. The announcement, without warning, of a lockout by Qantas seems to be straight out of the same disastrous playbook. Even if it works, it must surely kill off any political goodwill for Qantas in the future, or at least as long as the current management is in charge. That’s bound to be costly given the importance of political decisions on things like landing rights for airlines, and the favourable treatment Qantas has had in the past (partly a leftover of its days as a national flag carrier).
Can anyone make a case that Joyce’s action makes sense?
Keeping the state out of your bedroom
A standard theme in (propertarian) libertarian thinking is that personal freedom in matters such as choice of sexual partners goes naturally with economic freedom, defined as the lack of state interference with property rights. To summarise this in a slogan, “If you want to keep the state out of your bedroom, you should support keeping it out of your (and others) business as well”. But this is not only a false equivalence, it’s self-contradictory, as can be seen by example.
Suppose A rents a house from B, who requires, as a condition that no-one in class C (wrong race, religion, or gender) should share the bedroom with A. Suppose that A signs the lease, but decides that this contractual condition is an unreasonable violation of personal freedom, and decides to ignore it. B discovers this, and seeks the assistance (or at least the acquiesence) of the state in evicting A. On a propertarian/contractual view, B is in the right, and is entitle to call in the state into the bedroom in question.
And, this is the fundamental problem. Is it A’s bedroom or C’s? If we understand the phrase in its normal sense, no-one including a landlord, has the right to tell you what to do in your own bedroom. But, from a propertarian viewpoint, C’s ownership rights over the bedroom, derived from and ultimately enforced by, the state, trump all other considerations.
Of course, this example stands in for many others like this one
If you really want personal freedom, you can achieve it only by constraining property rights.
Wrong turn for the right
That’s the title of my column in Thursday’s Fin, over the fold
Expansionary austerity: some shoddy scholarship
I’ve just read ‘Tales of Fiscal Adjustment’ by Alesina and Ardagna, which appears to be the founding text for the idea of expansionary austerity. The level of scholarship, at least as it applies to Australia (which is their first illustration) is exceptionally poor, to the extent that it requires a rescuscitation of the ancient Internet tradition of Fisking. I’m going to quote excerpts from their text (about 50 per cent of the total), and intersperse them with my comments.
The 6-6-6 plan
Inspired by Michelle Bachmann, I’ve been thinking about what a 6-6-6 response to Herman Cain might look like. Being multiply disqualified from seeking election to the US Presidency, I decided to put in as much work as Cain and his team appear to have done, but no more. Hopefully, the magic of crowdsourcing will turn this into a comprehensive blueprint. So, here are the basic goals, and over the page, some of those devilish details.
The aim of the plan would be
(a) Reverse pro-rich and anti-worker policy changes of the past three decades to reduce, by 6 percentage points, the share of market income going to the top 1 per cent.
(b) Increase, by 6 percentage points of national income, the personal income tax revenue raised from the top 20 per cent of the income distribution
(c) Reallocate, or use more efficiently, current public expenditure equal to 6 per cent of national income
The aim would be to raise post-tax incomes for those in the bottom 80 per cent of the income distribution by around 20 per cent, while making around 10 per cent of national income available for new or better public expenditure.
For reference, US national income is currently around $13 trillion, so 1 per cent is $130 billion.
Has the US Defense Department killed a million Americans since 2001?
I’ve spent the day at a workshop on benefit-cost analysis where a lot of discussion is on valuing policies that reduce risks to life of various kinds. US policy, for better or worse, is focused on the idea of Value of a Statistical Life. Typically a policy that reduces risks of death will be approved if the cost per life saved is below $5million, and not otherwise. (There are similar numbers applied to publicly funded health care services, prescription drugs and so on, usually per year of life saved).
A striking thing I found out is that anti-terrorism policies of the Department of Homeland Security are subject to the same benefit-cost requirements as EPA and Transport. But Homeland Security is only one way the US government spends money with the aim of protecting Americans against attacks from terrorists and other enemies. Defense spending is far bigger and not subject to BCA, even though money spent on defense is money that can’t be spent on reducing terrorism risk through DHS or more reliably on reductions in environmental, health and transport risk
The numbers are quite striking. The ‘peacetime’ defense budget is around $500 billion a year, and the various wars of choice have cost around $250 billion a year for the last decade (very round numbers here). Allocated to domestic risk reduction, that money would save 150 000 American lives a year.
So, since 9/11, US defense spending has been chosen in preference to measures that would have saved 1.5 million American lives. That’s not a hypothetical number – it’s 1.5 million people who are now dead but who could have been saved. I think its fair to say that those people were killed by the Defense Department, or, more precisely, by the allocation of scarce life-saving resources to that Department.
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John Quiggin 