This is maybe the worst article I've read on the internet in a month. The article's argument goes something like this: the supreme court overturned some recent limits on campaign spending, and American campaigns might get more expensive as a result. The Roman Republic also had expensive campaigns during the first century BC. Therefor, campaign spending might destroy our republic, as it did Rome.
Lots of problems with that, but the biggest is that campaign spending had very little to do with the fall of the Roman Republic. The decades before the empire are largely a story of private armies fighting civil wars: First Marius raised a private army loyal to himself and dominated politics, than Sulla did, then Caesar and Pompey did, then they fought with their private armies and Caesar won, then Marc Antony and Augustus took Caesar's private army and killed the people who killed him, then they fought each other. Finis rei publicae. And those were just the big names, plenty of other people tried this "raise an army and take over" shtick. For example, the article mentions Cicero as a dude who hypocritically fought for less campaign spending. Which I guess he did? But his most important act as Consul was to put down the Catalinarian conspiracy, a plot to -- you guessed it -- raise a private army and take over Rome.
The Republic fell for a lot of reasons, and I don't want to oversimplify this. Roman politics at that time was an eddy of factionalism, ambition, and ideology as aristocrats fought demagogues (the optimates vs the populares) provincials fought citizens (the social wars), and patronage networks fought for dominance (see Cicero's entire legal career). But at the end of the day the Republic fell because individuals kept raising armies, starting civil wars, and seizing power. It's just not a story about messy political campaigns --Caesar and the senate didn't fall out over a super PAC-- it's a story about powerful generals with access to loyal veterans and large fortunes jockeying for power. Unless you have a much lower opinion of our officer corps than the average American, that is not going to be a problem here any time soon.
Pessimistic reasoning undermined by epistemic uncertainty.
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
Saturday, November 24, 2012
New Co-Blogger
A proud welcome to this blog's new co-blogger, Charlie Clarke. Charlie has a masters in economics and is currently working on a PhD in finance, both of which should allow him to contribute a fascinating new "knowing what the hell he's talking about" edge to things.
Pros and Propholactics Pt. 2 -- Health and Safety Regulation
This is a continuation of a series about LA county mandating condom usage in porn. Part I is here.
Advocates of the rule see it as an obviously correct workplace safety regulation: unprotected sex is dangerous, these people are having unprotected sex on the job, let's protect them.
Except that's not fully convincing. Some jobs are dangerous -- fishing off the coast of Alaska, building a house, repairing broadcast towers. People die doing this stuff. But we let them because our society is not all about maximizing safety.
In life there are risks and there are rewards, and generally we trust tort law and the free market to sort that out. If someone wants to pay you to do something dangerous, he'll have to pay you more. If someone is negligent or lies to you to put you in a dangerous situation you can sue them. When do we depart from that rule? Do any of those exceptions apply here? Let's find out!
Reasons for regulating health and safety:
1. Information overload: Consumers gotta consume, and in the modern economy they are faced with a lot of options. Of the thousands of restaurants in your city, which are safe? Which brand of toothpaste is safest? Is the escalator in this mall dangerous? Tough to say! In situations like that, where there are big information asymmetries some people think it makes sense to protect the ignorant party. Rather than being paralyzed having to research a hundred restaurants you can just show up and be pretty confident some official has inspected the kitchen. Score.
This doesn't really apply in this case. The porn stars aren't random people who wandered onto a set, this is their profession. They're aware of the safety precautions that have been taken (mandatory testing), the safety precautions that haven't been taken (no condoms), are comfortable with that mix.
2. Tough Bosses: The "let's just let the free market work it out" rule implies that employees and workers will negotiate the "correct" mix of safety and danger. A lot of people aren't comfortable with that, and think that employers have some coercive power over employees, maybe because of transactional costs (hard for employees to unite and negotiate as one), maybe because of the market just not being a magical cure-all, whatever. So the workers want a safety railing and the evil plutocrat says "no!" Society passes regulations to get them that railing.
This certainly doesn't apply in this case: it's for situations where management and labor are fighting, but teh porn stars oppose this regulation as heartily as the owners.
3. Human Rights: Some things are just wrong and people shouldn't be allowed to do them. Lots of people think you shouldn't be able to sell yourself into slavery, or work an 11 year old for 12 hours a day in a factory, or whatever.
I don't think this applies here. Lots of people think you shouldn't be able to sell sex, but no one thinks you shouldn't be able to have sex without wearing a condom. Condom-less sex is not the sort of act so insulting to human dignity that we want to ban it.
4. Externalities: Management and labor agree that they are causing the right amount of pollution, but maybe the dude downstream for where they are dumping the toxic waste disagrees. We impose regulations on things that could be seen from a worker-safety perspective -- handling toxic waste -- because we are actually worried about other people -- the civilians downstream.
I don't think this applies here. Yes, people who have condom-less sex risk contracting and spreading disease. But that's true of people who are doing it professionally and people who aren't. If this regulation isn't targeted at protecting porn starts, its protecting everyone, everyone should be willing to live by the same rule (IE, condom-less sex should be banned society wide).
***
So of all the traditional reasons I can think of for workplace safety regulation, none of them seem to apply here. This looks a lot more like "I know this is a risky job, but it's not crazy risky ("porn star" is not the most dangerous job in America, by a long shot), my boss is taking some reasonable precautions and I'm getting paid a premium for the danger. Let's do this." And in a free market society, that's pretty much how we apportion risk.
Did I miss something?
Advocates of the rule see it as an obviously correct workplace safety regulation: unprotected sex is dangerous, these people are having unprotected sex on the job, let's protect them.
Except that's not fully convincing. Some jobs are dangerous -- fishing off the coast of Alaska, building a house, repairing broadcast towers. People die doing this stuff. But we let them because our society is not all about maximizing safety.
In life there are risks and there are rewards, and generally we trust tort law and the free market to sort that out. If someone wants to pay you to do something dangerous, he'll have to pay you more. If someone is negligent or lies to you to put you in a dangerous situation you can sue them. When do we depart from that rule? Do any of those exceptions apply here? Let's find out!
Reasons for regulating health and safety:
1. Information overload: Consumers gotta consume, and in the modern economy they are faced with a lot of options. Of the thousands of restaurants in your city, which are safe? Which brand of toothpaste is safest? Is the escalator in this mall dangerous? Tough to say! In situations like that, where there are big information asymmetries some people think it makes sense to protect the ignorant party. Rather than being paralyzed having to research a hundred restaurants you can just show up and be pretty confident some official has inspected the kitchen. Score.
This doesn't really apply in this case. The porn stars aren't random people who wandered onto a set, this is their profession. They're aware of the safety precautions that have been taken (mandatory testing), the safety precautions that haven't been taken (no condoms), are comfortable with that mix.
2. Tough Bosses: The "let's just let the free market work it out" rule implies that employees and workers will negotiate the "correct" mix of safety and danger. A lot of people aren't comfortable with that, and think that employers have some coercive power over employees, maybe because of transactional costs (hard for employees to unite and negotiate as one), maybe because of the market just not being a magical cure-all, whatever. So the workers want a safety railing and the evil plutocrat says "no!" Society passes regulations to get them that railing.
This certainly doesn't apply in this case: it's for situations where management and labor are fighting, but teh porn stars oppose this regulation as heartily as the owners.
3. Human Rights: Some things are just wrong and people shouldn't be allowed to do them. Lots of people think you shouldn't be able to sell yourself into slavery, or work an 11 year old for 12 hours a day in a factory, or whatever.
I don't think this applies here. Lots of people think you shouldn't be able to sell sex, but no one thinks you shouldn't be able to have sex without wearing a condom. Condom-less sex is not the sort of act so insulting to human dignity that we want to ban it.
4. Externalities: Management and labor agree that they are causing the right amount of pollution, but maybe the dude downstream for where they are dumping the toxic waste disagrees. We impose regulations on things that could be seen from a worker-safety perspective -- handling toxic waste -- because we are actually worried about other people -- the civilians downstream.
I don't think this applies here. Yes, people who have condom-less sex risk contracting and spreading disease. But that's true of people who are doing it professionally and people who aren't. If this regulation isn't targeted at protecting porn starts, its protecting everyone, everyone should be willing to live by the same rule (IE, condom-less sex should be banned society wide).
***
So of all the traditional reasons I can think of for workplace safety regulation, none of them seem to apply here. This looks a lot more like "I know this is a risky job, but it's not crazy risky ("porn star" is not the most dangerous job in America, by a long shot), my boss is taking some reasonable precautions and I'm getting paid a premium for the danger. Let's do this." And in a free market society, that's pretty much how we apportion risk.
Did I miss something?
Pros and Prophylactics Pt. I -- Introductory Post
LA County recently mandated that actors uses condoms in hardcore porn shoots. So gross and who cares, except porn is a billion dollar industry in LA. So this matters.
Basically the dispute is safe sex advocates on one side and the porn industry (and, crucially, the porn stars themselves) on the other. It's a pretty simple argument: "This is basic workplace safety stuff, and promotes safe sex besides." vs "We already have a vigorous STI testing program that keeps performers safe. We don't want to go further since using condoms hurts profits, both because dudes are dumb and don't like watching condom-porn and because it increases production costs, since condoms chafe a bit, especially over the super-long sex sessions used on a shoot, and actors and actresses need to spend more time on a shoot resting when they are used." I strongly suspect the pornographers are right on this one, and I'm going to do a series of blogs explaining why. I am planning on three posts: why it's a bad idea as workplace safety regulation, why it's a bad idea from a first amendment point of view, and why it's a bad idea from a privacy rights point of view (there should be a better term for the kind of rights I am talking about, but the courts call them privacy rights so I will to).
Crucially, I won't be doing a close cost-benefits analysis of how much this will cost the industry vs. how many people it will save from STIs. I think that's the most relevant kind of way to figure out the right solution here, but that sort of thing is hard to do. Suffice to say there are real costs (Vivid pictures tried to go all condom and was losing so much money they had to stop) and real benefits (people won't get sick, duh) involved here.
Click here for part 2 of this series, IF YOU ARE MAN ENOUGH. Or woman enough. Or gender-is-a-spectrum enough.
Basically the dispute is safe sex advocates on one side and the porn industry (and, crucially, the porn stars themselves) on the other. It's a pretty simple argument: "This is basic workplace safety stuff, and promotes safe sex besides." vs "We already have a vigorous STI testing program that keeps performers safe. We don't want to go further since using condoms hurts profits, both because dudes are dumb and don't like watching condom-porn and because it increases production costs, since condoms chafe a bit, especially over the super-long sex sessions used on a shoot, and actors and actresses need to spend more time on a shoot resting when they are used." I strongly suspect the pornographers are right on this one, and I'm going to do a series of blogs explaining why. I am planning on three posts: why it's a bad idea as workplace safety regulation, why it's a bad idea from a first amendment point of view, and why it's a bad idea from a privacy rights point of view (there should be a better term for the kind of rights I am talking about, but the courts call them privacy rights so I will to).
Crucially, I won't be doing a close cost-benefits analysis of how much this will cost the industry vs. how many people it will save from STIs. I think that's the most relevant kind of way to figure out the right solution here, but that sort of thing is hard to do. Suffice to say there are real costs (Vivid pictures tried to go all condom and was losing so much money they had to stop) and real benefits (people won't get sick, duh) involved here.
Click here for part 2 of this series, IF YOU ARE MAN ENOUGH. Or woman enough. Or gender-is-a-spectrum enough.
Support the People who are Troops, not the "Troops"
Unicorn in Uniform has a great new post about "supporting the troops" that got me thinking. Her point is that we shouldn't take "supporting the troops" so far that it just becomes empty praise, a "thank you for your service" as automatic as sneezing, because what good does that do? She adds that we certainly shouldn't take it to so far that a moment's joke at the troops' expense is a life altering event, because actual servicemen and women don't want that kind of support-the-troops-or-else culture.
I'd take it one step further: we should support the individuals in the military because they are great, not because they are in the military. Most of the people I know in the military are smart and hard working and funny and thoughtful and conscientious. In most cases, I don't think that's because they are serving, it's just how they are (often I know this, because I knew them before they enlisted or got their commission). The military has been an important road out of poverty for a lot of people I know, but if we gave them a civilian road (better and less costly education options? More use of professional internships for high schoolers, along the German model?) I think they'd be just as well off.
I feel semi-comfortable generalizing my personal experiences, here. It's really hard to make a great person at the age of 18, so it makes sense that most soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines were probably pretty awesome from the get go (albeit needing a bit of maturing). Under this telling, it's more about great people being attracted to a life of service and sacrifice than it is great people being forged by a life of service and sacrifice and fighting lava monsters. So yes, the troops are impressive people doing a great thing and should be thanked and respected for it, but we should recognize that if this was pre-WWII and we didn't have a large standing military, most of them would still be impressive people doing something great and impressive and charitable for their fellow Americans. Or, you know, slaves. Things sucked back then.
Once you separate that, supporting the bad-ass people who are the troops from supporting the troops, two things happen. 1. You are a lot more prepared to encounter the (incredibly small) minority of people serving who suck. 2. The military, as opposed to the troops, looks less unambiguously good. The military isn't what made all these great troops we should support. They were already great. No, the military is what took all these great, hard working, smart, idealistic people out of the economy that builds things and put them in the economy that blows things up.
Maybe we are blowing up the right amount of things, and if we spent less on blowing things up we'd be less safe, less free, and less able to invest and trade. Maybe we are spending too much. But that calculation should be based on how much stuff we want and need to blow up, not on whether we support the troops. Once we start blowing up or preparing to blow up too much stuff, each extra servicewoman assigned to that task is a major waste, a transformation of one of our great creators into a great destroyer. And it doesn't do her many favors besides: giving the individuals in the military a robust economy and lots of alternative careers after military service is the single best way to support them, not wasting trillions on military spending.
So support the troops, they're great and we owe them. But don't let that support affect how you think about military spending. If we cut military spending and lose 5 combat brigades, that's not thousands of troops hurt; it's 1000s of great people who are going to get a chance to do great things for the civilian economy.
And yes, I realize that is a lot stronger argument at full employment than it is now, in an economy where laid of veterans risk unemployment. That's just reason 50000 to wait for the economy to improve before cutting spending, on the military or on anything else.
I'd take it one step further: we should support the individuals in the military because they are great, not because they are in the military. Most of the people I know in the military are smart and hard working and funny and thoughtful and conscientious. In most cases, I don't think that's because they are serving, it's just how they are (often I know this, because I knew them before they enlisted or got their commission). The military has been an important road out of poverty for a lot of people I know, but if we gave them a civilian road (better and less costly education options? More use of professional internships for high schoolers, along the German model?) I think they'd be just as well off.
I feel semi-comfortable generalizing my personal experiences, here. It's really hard to make a great person at the age of 18, so it makes sense that most soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines were probably pretty awesome from the get go (albeit needing a bit of maturing). Under this telling, it's more about great people being attracted to a life of service and sacrifice than it is great people being forged by a life of service and sacrifice and fighting lava monsters. So yes, the troops are impressive people doing a great thing and should be thanked and respected for it, but we should recognize that if this was pre-WWII and we didn't have a large standing military, most of them would still be impressive people doing something great and impressive and charitable for their fellow Americans. Or, you know, slaves. Things sucked back then.
Once you separate that, supporting the bad-ass people who are the troops from supporting the troops, two things happen. 1. You are a lot more prepared to encounter the (incredibly small) minority of people serving who suck. 2. The military, as opposed to the troops, looks less unambiguously good. The military isn't what made all these great troops we should support. They were already great. No, the military is what took all these great, hard working, smart, idealistic people out of the economy that builds things and put them in the economy that blows things up.
Maybe we are blowing up the right amount of things, and if we spent less on blowing things up we'd be less safe, less free, and less able to invest and trade. Maybe we are spending too much. But that calculation should be based on how much stuff we want and need to blow up, not on whether we support the troops. Once we start blowing up or preparing to blow up too much stuff, each extra servicewoman assigned to that task is a major waste, a transformation of one of our great creators into a great destroyer. And it doesn't do her many favors besides: giving the individuals in the military a robust economy and lots of alternative careers after military service is the single best way to support them, not wasting trillions on military spending.
So support the troops, they're great and we owe them. But don't let that support affect how you think about military spending. If we cut military spending and lose 5 combat brigades, that's not thousands of troops hurt; it's 1000s of great people who are going to get a chance to do great things for the civilian economy.
And yes, I realize that is a lot stronger argument at full employment than it is now, in an economy where laid of veterans risk unemployment. That's just reason 50000 to wait for the economy to improve before cutting spending, on the military or on anything else.
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
Posting
I am going to try to semi-frequently update this blog. If you have ideas on what you would like to see me write about, questions, or links you want shared, give me a heads up.
Currently the idea is to cover economic and legal policy. I have no economics training and my legal training ain't any more special than hundreds of thousands of other lawyers, but I can at least promise to keep the racial epithets to a minimum.
Currently the idea is to cover economic and legal policy. I have no economics training and my legal training ain't any more special than hundreds of thousands of other lawyers, but I can at least promise to keep the racial epithets to a minimum.
The Fish Call Cliff
Rule of thumb: anyone trying to simultaneously make you scared of both
1. the fiscal cliff and 2. not getting the deficit fixed in the next few years
has a bad underlying model of how the economy works. The "fiscal cliff" is a bunch of tax hikes and spending cuts that get rid of the deficit real fast. Since the "fiscal cliff" is just sharp deficit reduction, if going off the fiscal cliff is a bad idea right now, by definition sharp deficit reduction is a bad idea right now.
You should also be wary of people who oppose stimulus but support the fiscal cliff. If cutting a lot of government spending and raising taxes is a bad idea right now because it will hurt the economy, maybe lowing taxes and raising spending is a good idea because it will stimulate the economy? As near as I can tell, if the fiscal cliff is a bad idea it's a bad idea for pretty Keynesian reasons.
That said, it is possible to be worried about both the deficit and the fiscal cliff, but you should expect those people to talk about the deficit as a long term problem we have some time to fix. If we have to fix it now now now, then the fiscal cliff does that. If we have some time and if we want to keep spending up and taxes low now to stimulate the economy, then the fiscal cliff is too abrupt and should be avoided.
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