EclectEcon

George Will Questions Schools of Social Work

and with good reason. See his latest column here. He concludes:

In the month since the NAS released its study, none of the schools covered by it has contested its findings. Because there might as well be signs on the doors of many schools of social work proclaiming "conservatives need not apply," two questions arise: Why are such schools of indoctrination permitted in institutions of higher education? And why are people of all political persuasions taxed to finance this propaganda?

I am convinced that the average and marginal social products of social workers are negative.

Custom Rings

As I mentioned a couple of months ago, Ms. Eclectic and I have been married 25 years. We recently picked up some matching rings we had designed and produced for us to celebrate.



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The rings were designed and made by Brenda Roy in Alliston, Ontario.

Two-Letter Words for Scrabble

I've never heard of most words that score big in Scrabble. Also, I rarely see good (i.e. long) words or neato combinations with other letters on the board. I.e., I'm not very good at the game, and I rarely play it.



But Ms. Eclectic and our older son, David Ricardo Palmer, both love the game, so I agreed to play with them last week. Ms. Eclectic scored two bingos in one game; David Ricardo and I each scored one in that same game. We had some amazingly high scores (thanks to their helping me!).



Afterward, David Ricardo sent us this list of two-letter words that are acceptable in Scrabble. I think he got it from Facebook, which has an on-line version of the game. As I said, I've never heard of lots of these "words":

The Economics of Tariffs

Former Student, Mike Moffatt, writes at About.com: Economics. In a recent piece, he explained the economics of tariffs. The article explains why countries impose tariffs, it goes through the costs and benefits of having tariffs (concluding that generally, from a theoretical perspective, the costs outweigh the benefits), and it reviews the empirical literature that confirms the theoretical results. Here is his conclusion:

The gains from tariff policies are a lot more visible than the losses. You can see the sawmills which would be closed down if the industry is not protected by tariffs. You can meet the workers whose jobs will be lost if tariffs are not enacted by the government. Since the costs of the policies are distributed far and wide, you cannot put a face on the cost of a poor economic policy. Although 8 workers might lose their job for every job saved by a softwood lumber tariff, you will never meet one of these workers, because it is impossible to pinpoint exactly which workers would have been able to keep their jobs if the tariff was not enacted. If a worker loses his job because the performance of the economy is poor, you cannot say if a reduction in lumber tariffs would have saved his job. The nightly news would never show a picture of a California farm worker and state that he lost his job because of tariffs designed to help the lumber industry in Maine. The link between the two is impossible to see. The link between lumber workers and lumber tariffs is much more visible and thus will garner much more attention.



The gains from a tariff are clearly visible but the costs are hidden, it will often appear that tariffs do not have a cost. By understanding this we can understand why so many government policies are enacted which harm the economy.

Gore Gored

Yesterday, Jack sent me this from the Financial Post. It is a scathing attack on "An Inconvenient Truth" and the British School System's attempts to indoctrinate children using Al Gore's film.

... The 11 inaccuracies that the court found are not quibbles. They represent the film's most spectacular claims about the dangers of global warming, and form the very basis of the film. Were the film to be edited to have these inaccuracies removed, in fact, vanishingly little would be left.



- The film claims that melting snows on Mount Kilimanjaro demonstrate global warming. The government's expert was forced to concede that this is not correct.

- The film suggests that evidence from ice cores proves that rising CO2 caused temperature increases over 650,000 years. The court found that the film was misleading: Over that period, the rises in CO2 lagged behind the temperature rises by 800 to 2,000 years.

- The film uses emotive images of Hurricane Katrina, which it suggests was caused by global warming. The government's expert had to accept that it was "not possible" to attribute one-off events to global warming.

- The film attributes the drying up of Lake Chad to global warming. The government's expert had to accept that this was not the case.

- The film claims that a study showed that polar bears had drowned due to disappearing Arctic ice. It turned out that Gore had misread the study: In fact, four polar bears drowned because of a particularly violent storm. - The film threatens that global warming could stop the Gulf Stream, throwing Europe into an ice age. The claimant's evidence was that this was a scientific impossibility.

- The film blames global warming for species losses, including coral reef bleaching. The government could not find any evidence to support this claim.

- The film suggests that the Greenland ice covering could melt, causing sea levels to rise dangerously. The evidence is that Greenland will not melt for millennia.

- The film suggests that the Antarctic ice covering is melting. The evidence was that it is in fact increasing.

- The film suggests that sea levels could rise by seven metres, causing the displacement of millions of people. In fact, the evidence is that sea levels are expected to rise by about 40 centimetres over the next 100 years, and that there is no such threat of massive migration.

- The film claims that rising sea levels have caused the evacuation of certain Pacific islands to New Zealand. The government was unable to substantiate this claim and the court observed that this appears to be a false claim.



The judge's final decision is expected within the week. It promises to change how and what students are taught, and to empower teachers and students alike who choose to think for themselves. In classrooms in Canada and elsewhere around the world, meanwhile, our children are not empowered to question the conventional wisdom on climate change, and teachers continue to show An Inconvenient Truth without any guidance to the children in their charge.

Update: That he won the Nobel Peace Prize only renews and deepens my disrespect for that committee and its processes. Fortunately, the economics Nobel is decided by different people. For more, see this from WaPo.

"Free" Public Policy Seminar in Toronto for Students

It's an annual event put on by the Fraser Institute; lunch is provided; all you have to do is register in advance and then show up.



I have participated in the seminar in previous years, and I highly recommend it. Here are the details.



"Free" is in quotation marks because from an opportunity cost perspective, there's no such thing as a free lunch.

A Clear Case for Limitations on Freedom of Speech

One of the clearest cases for limiting free speech is the famous phrase from Oliver Wendell Holmes about, "...falsely shouting 'fire' in a crowded theatre... " Another is the instigation to commit murder or other crimes. And a related case might involve urging genocide and supporting those who espouse it. From Melanie Phillips,

This is what happened on the streets of London yesterday. A demonstration organised by Iranian Islamists promoting the destruction of Israel, in which people called for the killing of Jews and waved Hezbollah flags. The police provide protection for such a demonstration on the basis that people are entitled to march provided they are not breaking the law. They ignore the fact that such incitement to murder is indeed against the law; they fail to grasp that a parade of Hezbollah flags is a recruiting device for Islamists; they refuse to acknowledge that such a demonstration is an flagrant act of intimidation by proxies for a terrorist regime which is currently blowing up our troops in Iraq, threatening genocide against Israel and intent on defeating the west in war. Welcome once again to Londonistan.

While this situation falls short of the "clear and imminent danger" criterion for abrogating free speech, I see no reason to permit the demonstrators to use public property while promoting their ideas. After all, freedom of speech does not require that all taxpayers provide scarce resources for the exercise of that free speech.

What Do China, Florida, and Hawaii Have in Common?

and most other places, for that matter. Mis-pricing of water. From the NYTimes (reg req'd), courtesy of Brian Ferguson,

For three decades, water has been indispensable in sustaining the rollicking economic expansion that has made China a world power. Now, China’s galloping, often wasteful style of economic growth is pushing the country toward a water crisis. Water pollution is rampant nationwide, while water scarcity has worsened severely in north China — even as demand keeps rising everywhere.

Florida and Hawaii (and many other places) have similar problems: water is priced too low, so people overuse it. And unless prices are adjusted upward, people will continue to overuse it. And that will only lead to a much more difficult adjustment the longer the overuse persists.



More from the article:

What happened? The list includes misguided policies, unintended consequences, a population explosion, climate change and, most of all, relentless economic growth. In 1963, a flood paralyzed the region, prompting Mao to construct a flood-control system of dams, reservoirs and concrete spillways. Flood control improved but the ecological balance was altered as the dams began choking off rivers that once flowed eastward into the North China Plain.



The new reservoirs gradually became major water suppliers for growing cities like Shijiazhuang. Farmers, the region’s biggest water users, began depending almost exclusively on wells. Rainfall steadily declined in what some scientists now believe is a consequence of climate change.

Don't you wish that just once people would recognize that setting the price of water equal to zero (or way too low) causes these problems?

Spiteful Egalitarianism

Spiteful Egalitarianism is the phrase Martin Feldstein uses to describe most current policy proposals from left-of-centre politicians [listen to his Oct. 5th interview at Bloomberg].



Feldstein's argument is that political positions today are not so much, "What can or should we do to help the poor and the disadvantaged?" Rather, they are spiteful positions that resent the wealth of others. They seem to be saying, "You have more than I do, and I want some." It doesn't matter whether you got more because you worked hard, because you saved and invested, because you acquired more education, or because you were lucky — if you have more, you're not entitled to it.



This is a tragic position, if Feldstein is correct. It encourages people to become rent-seekers, hand-out-seekers, and redistributionists; and it discourages people from working and saving to increase their future consumption. It fosters a society in which we base concepts of fairness not on whether the rules are fair but on whether the outcomes are equal. There's no quicker way to stall growth and make future generations much worse off than they would otherwise be. There is no quicker way to suffer the losses and degradation of England of the 1960s, Canada under Trudeau-type entitlements, or pre-1980s socialism and communism.



As I told some people earlier this week, "If you are going to redistribute wealth from those who value it less to those who value it more, let me tell you right now that no matter how you measure it, I value it more than you or anyone else, so give it all to me."

Words of Wisdom on Election Day in Ontario

If people stay home in droves today, it will be because they recognize the wisdom of these words by Schumpeter (from Cafe Hayek):

Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with keeping in the saddle that they can't bother about where they go.

That observation, sadly, captures the essence of both the Ontario PCs and Liberals.

The Prisoners' Dilemma a Useful Example from the World of Dating

Former student RA tells me he has a better example of the prisoners' dilemma game than the standard one that involves students selling drugs. His example involves two young men trying to outwait each other at a young woman's apartment. [reproduced here with his permission]

Two guys are pursuing the same girl, and after a long night, both find themselves the last ones at her place with her. Both guys want to spend time with her, and desire for the other guy to be gone from the situation, which can be represented by a simple payoff matrix.



If both guys decide to agree and leave right away, neither wins, but neither loses either, so they both get a payoff of 0 (cooperative solution).



If one guy leaves, regardless of what happens, he will feel as though in some ways he has "lost", giving him a negative payoff (call it negative 5) and his opponent a positive payoff (call it 10).



Now, if both guys try to wait each other out, both will likely end up leaving at the same time and not only fail in their desired goal of getting the girl alone, but also would have wasted a bunch of time in the process, giving them negative payoffs, but not as bad as if one had left (call it a payoff of negative one each).



The resulting equilibrium is that both men choose to stay, don't get their intended result, and waste a bunch of time they could have been doing something else productive. Thus, a non-cooperative solution is reached.

Some further wrinkles:

• Is this a single-play or a repeated game? If the two young men know each other (or even if they don't), they might have an expectation of playing this game against each other at some future date. If so, then the expected pay-off from trying to outwait the other player is much higher in that doing so can create a reputation effect — the next time they play the game, the opponent will know that you are willing to (try to) wait him out; as a result, he might resign and leave early.
• I see no benefit to playing tit-for-tat strategies with this version of the game — I wouldn't expect there to be very many repeat plays even if the game is not a single-play game.
• Surely in this game, unlike the prisoners' dilemma, the players would eventually find it to their advantage to communicate both during the game and ex ante .
• With ex ante and concurrent communication, can they not assign property rights between them and work out side payments, a la the Coase Theorem?
• And what does the young woman think while this game is being played? Is she flattered by the attention? Annoyed at being a target (or the object) of some economist's discussion of property rights and side payments)?
• If I agree in advance that I will be the one to leave early, what types of retaliation are feasible for you if I renege on the agreement and end up outwaiting you?

I Used to Teach Journalists;but now I are one

According to a proposed US Senate Bill, bloggers are journalists:

One of the biggest issues is just who is a journalist, or in the phrase the bill uses, a "covered person." Once that definition is clarified -- and even Judiciary members say it's not settled -- a journalist would under most circumstances not have to disclose to federal authorities or in civil lawsuits the identity of sources who have been promised confidentiality. Also protected will be records, communications, documents or other information that this "covered person" receives from confidential sources, as well as notes the journalist makes of conversations with these sources.



The Senate committee bill employs a broad definition: A "covered person" is someone "engaged in journalism," which itself is defined as "the regular gathering, preparing, collecting, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting or publishing of news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public." That would cover those working for major news organizations as well as individuals putting out their own blogs or newsletters.

Is the Canadian Unemployment Rate Too LOW?

Last week, Sadistics Canada reported that the unemployment rate in Canada dropped below six percent for the first time in a zillion years (at 5.9%, it "reached its lowest point since 1974").

Canada's jobless rate unexpectedly fell to its lowest level since November, 1974, as the economy created triple the jobs that economists expected last month.



Employers added 51,100 jobs September, sending the rate to 5.9 per cent, Statistics Canada said Friday. ...



Economists had forecast 17,500 new jobs and an unchanged unemployment rate of 6 per cent.

Why is the unemployment rate so low now, and why has it not been this low for 33 years?

• Beginning in the early 1970s, Canada dramatically raised the height of its social safety net. As a result, people searched longer for jobs and the unemployment rate rose to new, nearly permanent higher levels.
• Over the past decade, though, the height of Canada's social safety has drifted downward slowly, inducing unemployed persons to take jobs more quickly, thus lowering the unemployment rate.
• Also over the past decade or so, the echo from the post-war baby boom has matured in age a bit... the demographics of the labour market are such that as more people have more education and work experience, couple with more family responsibilities than they did before, they tend to be unemployed less and to remain unemployed for shorter durations.

In other words, although the natural unemployment rate might very well have been up over 7% back in the late 1980s, it is probably much lower now.



But do long-term forces provide the entire explanation for the 5.9% unemployment rate? Probably not [see here for what I wrote last March about Canada's natural unemployment rate; I seem to adjust with a lag...]. The Canadian economy is booming even though the rising US price of the Canadian dollar is reducing the demand for manufactured goods. Elsewhere in the economy, the resource sector, the oil patch, and personal services are all booming.

Construction, utilities, professional and accommodation and food services have created the most jobs this year while factories have cut the most, shedding 71,300 jobs.

If the natural unemployment rate is still greater than 6%, then the current unemployment rate is further evidence that the Canadian economy is experiencing excess aggregate demand. This possibility causes expectations in the financial markets that the Bank of Canada will maintain a sizable interest-rate spread vis-a-vis the US (see this), and that expectation has sparked an even greater demand for the Canuck Buck:

The report sent the Canadian dollar soaring against its U.S. counterpart, trading at $1.0135 (U.S.) from [its previous] close of $1.0026.

Digression: We can tell when the jobless rate has dropped and labour markets have tightened: a concurrent indicator is that service at Tim Horton's and other fast-food outlets tends, on average, to get slower as the labour turnover with such employers quickens and as they dig deeper into the unskilled labour pool for employees, coming up with increasing numbers of employees who are less skilled and/or less motivated to provide quick, efficient, and friendly service.

The Nobel Prize in Economics

As regular readers know, I think the next Nobel Prize in Economics should be given to Richard Posner. But his receiving it is a very long shot.



Mike Moffat thinks Eric Maskin deserves it. Greg Mankiw thinks it will go to Eugene Fama in finance (appropriate, since I'm teaching a finance course this term for the first time in quite awhile) or possibly Barro or Feldstein.



My guess, though, is that Jagdish Bhagwati will receive it.

Is the BBC Biased or Is It Just Being Objective?(you know my answer)

KT recently sent me this, from the Financial Times in which Philip Stephens points out that while the BBC purports to be objective it really isn't because in its moral equivocating equivalencies, it ignores and omits so much that is so wrong with the totalitarian regimes. Here is an excerpt:

The BBC’s omissions, the careful juxtaposition of alleged cause and effect, and the choice of language invite the conclusion that there is moral equivalence between a US presence in the Middle East and the random slaughter of innocents.



No mention is made of the totalitarian nature of al-Qaeda, of its stated plan to tear down every regime in the Arab world and replace them with a single theocratic state. There is not a hint of the jihadis’ proud anti-Semitism and their pledge to destroy Israel. Nor of their abomination of democracy. Instead, the suicide bombers – the BBC never calls them terrorists – are cast implicitly as freedom fighters. What Mr Bin Laden wants, we are invited to conclude, is a better deal for Muslims. If we stopped interfering, all would be well.

Let's face it: Islamic fundamentalist terrorists exist. To ignore that fact or to deny their existence is suicidal. Stephens makes the case really well. I recommend that you rtwt.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Today is Thanksgiving in Canada. Pumpkin pies, turkey, and lots of enjoyable wine and company.



Ahhhhh. Now I understand why class attendance was down on Thursday afternoon. Students start leaving for the Thanksgiving break on Thursday.

When I first started teaching in Canada, I taught a course that met at 2pm on MWF. On the Friday before Thanksgiving, only seven of the seventy students showed up for class. I never again held classes on the Friday afternoon before a long weekend.

Here is a good list of things to be thankful for.

Great Jack-o-Lanterns

Wouldn't it be fun to be this talented and this creative with pumpkin carving? (h/t to Judith) Some of these are really great, some are quite rude, and some are both:

I Worry a Lot More than Alan but still not a whole lot

Alan Adamson has a worry factor of only 12%. My results are three times as high!:

Your Worry Factor is 36%

You worry a little, but you usually don't go overboard. You know it's good to recognize your fears, as long as you let go of them. So whenever you start to worry too much, just take a deep breath and relax. You're not the worrying kind - and there's no reason to start.

Do You Worry Too Much?

Update: But Rondi is a borderline serious worrier.

Could Larry Summers Speak at Columbia?

Click on the cartoon to see a larger, more legible version.

Something Else for Brit Academics to Boycott: Vowels

It seems that until vowels were invented by the Hebrews, writers didn't have them. I thought this was from Onion, but it is from the Jerusalem Post (h/t to Brian Ferguson):

"Roughly 3,000 years ago, in and around the area we now call Israel, a group of people who may have called themselves ivri, and whom we call variously 'Hebrews,' 'Israelites,' or more colloquially but less accurately 'Jews,' began an experiment in writing that would change the world."



Almost all alphabetic writing the world today is the result of the 3,000-year-old Hebrew experiment....



As Jews pause in the calendrical cycle to celebrate the Torah, it seems particularly apt to take note of the fascinating story that lies behind this experiment, without which writing would never have become widespread, and without which the world would have no Torah scrolls, books, newspapers or e-mail.



The key is the vowels.

Is Dulse Dolce?

Dulse (Palmaria palmata) - is a red seaweed that grows attached to rocks by a "holdfast" in the North Atlantic and Northwest Pacific. It is commonly used in Ireland and Atlantic Canada both as food and medicinally and is now shipped around the globe. Dulse is found in many health food stores or fish markets or can be ordered directly from local distributors.

BenS tells me he eats this stuff all the time. My favourite drug dealer, JB, says it's "an acquired taste". From Wikipaedia,

Palmaria palmata is to be found growing from mid-tide of the intertidal zone (the area between the high tide and low tide) to a depths of 20 m or more in both sheltered and exposed shores.

Dulse is a good source of minerals and vitamins compared with other vegetables and it contains all trace elements needed for humans with a high protein content.

It is commonly found from June to September and can be collected by hand when the tide is out. When collected, small snails, shell pieces and other small particles can be washed or shaken off and the plant then spread to dry. Some collectors may turn it once and roll it into large bales to be packaged later. It is also used as fodder for animals in some countries.

Dulse is commonly used in Northern Ireland [4], Iceland and Atlantic Canada both as food and medicine. It can be found in many health food stores or fish markets and can be ordered directly from local distributors. In Ballycastle, Northern Ireland it is traditionally sold at the Ould Lammas Fair. A variety of dulse is cultivated in Nova Scotia and marketed as Sea Parsley, sold fresh in the produce section. Dulse is now shipped around the world. In Northern Ireland it is particularly popular along the Causeway Coast region. Although a fast dying tradition, there are many who still gather their own dulse although waste pipes have spoiled some sites.

BenS buys it dried and eats it plain from the bag or as an ingredient in various dishes. It doesn't sound very appealing to me. But we used to take kelp supplements all the time when we were kids, and they didn't much bother me, so maybe dulse is okay, too.

Here are some recipe sources:

• http://www.atlanticmariculture.com/recipes.html
• http://thefoody.com/baking/dulsesodascones.html
  
  BenS says,
  

  ... try buying Atlantic Dulse at Loblaw’s [a major supermarket in our area] and put it in your microwave for 10 or 12 seconds and eat it like potato chips. Even if it doesn’t cure dropfoot, it’s a quite nutritious food.

Western Standard Stops Publishing Its Print Edition

This is a huge tragedy. Although I fervently disagree with so many of the Western Standard's writers who are non-libertarian social conservatives, the journal as a whole provided an important voice for the political right.



I am sure other print voices will emerge. Some thoughts:

• If it will help, they can keep all the pay I get for blogging at their website (I receive no pay, and the website will likely continue for quite some time as a profit centre).
• Clearly there is a market failure here. The gubmnt should subsidize the magazine to keep it going.
• If the gubmnt really cared about jobs, it would subsidize the continued publication of The Western Standard to save their jobs.

Best regards to everyone there.

Minnesota Mother of Two Busted for File Sharing

It almost brings tears to one's eyes.... the thought that a midwestern mom might be sued by the big, evil recording companies for violating their copyrights by downloading files from the internet. See the story here. Here are some skeletal facts:

A jury has handed a victory to the music recording industry, which had claimed a Minnesota woman infringed song copyrights by using online media to illegally download and distribute music, according to court documents...



The recording companies sued Thomas in April 2006 after 1,702 music files were traced to a computer tied to her, according to court documents. Investigators on February 21, 2005 located an individual with the screen name "tereastarr@KaZaA" using the Kazaa file-sharing software program, according to the documents.



"This individual was downloading copyrighted sounds [sic] recordings from other users of the Kazaa network, and was distributing copyrighted sound recordings stored on her computer to other Kazaa users," the plaintiffs said.

This was a jury verdict. Also the woman had more than 1700 music files available for others to download.



There is considerable evidence that file-sharing caused considerable harm to the firms in the recording industry. Probably the best scholar in the field on this topic is Stan Liebowitz:

The weight of current evidence strongly supports a view that file-sharing diminishes the revenues of the recording industry. There are two forms to the evidence.



The first has to do with general factors: the timing between record sales declines and file-sharing is very close; the current decline is very large compared to previous declines; there are no other explanations for the decline in record sales that hold up upon analysis; economic theory implies that record sales will fall. ... [W]hat appears to be the best estimate of the number of audio files downloaded reports that files downloaded are generally less than one tenth the amounts of previous estimates. File-sharing appears to have hit record retailers less severely than it has hit record clubs, causing possible underestimates of harm by those looking at statistics from retailers. Finally, the claims that DVD sales have been responsible for the decline in CD sales (for those articles that provide any evidence at all) have been based on a statistic that provides a misleading picture of the DVD market. ...



The second form of evidence can be found in econometric studies of the industry. All the econometric studies, except one, find some degree of harm. I have written a recent paper (forthcoming in Management Science) that examines record sales and Internet uses in 99 US cities to measure the impact of file-sharing. ... The methodology avoids many empirical difficulties found in other papers. It concludes that file-sharing is responsible for the entire decline in record sales that has occurred, and that except for file-sharing there would have been an increase in sales since 1999 instead of the strong decline. It also examines which genres had the greatest impact from file-sharing, and they are consistent with intuition (genres appealing to older individuals have the smallest sales decline, and vice-versa).

Liebowitz's piece has numerous links to research that supports his views. It also carefully dissects the article in the JPE which purports to have found no link between file-sharing and CD sales. Liebowitz is a careful scholar. Sadly, as Craig Newmark notes, he has run up against a stone wall in trying to replicate the results of the JPE study. Steve Levitt, editor of the JPE, should be ashamed of himself for not jumping on this; clearly the resistance by the original authors to making their data available violates the journal's policies. But even without access to their database, Liebowitz has a careful, item-by-item critique of their results. See here, for example.



For more on the economics of file sharing, see the April, 2006, issue of the Journal of Law and Economics. Liebowitz has the lead article there.

The Abrogation of Markets in British Columbia

Jack is spending some time in British Columbia. He writes that the provincially operated auto insurance is,

... far pricier than the private Ontario system, in part because of subsidies to bad drivers who wouldn't be insurable there.

This is to be expected. If the risk pool includes people who impose high costs on the system, and if they cannot be charged premia to match those costs (probablistically), then everyone else will have to bear a share of those costs. It is inefficient because the system tends to encourage too many risky drivers to be on the roads; it also, because of the higher insurance premia, tends to discourage some very low risk drivers from driving.



Jack continues,

Privatized alcohol businesses compete with the Provincial outlets. Prices about 25% higher than Ontario though, flying in the face of the usual predictions.

This seems unlikely to me. I know from nothing about the BC retail liquor business, but here are my suspicions:

1. It is extremely unlikely that gubmnt and private retail liquor outlets compete head-to-head.
2. One way the gubmnt stores can survive is if they are subsidized, directly or indirectly.
3. More likely in this instance is that the prices are regulated and kept above the Ontario levels to guarantee the survival of the gubmnt stores. Otherwise the private outlets would compete the snot out of them.

An Observation on Perfection

My friend Lori writes,

Perfection is something that exists because there are examples of non-perfection out there, the NDP supporters being a text-book example…

Note: the NDP is a Canadian political party made up of redistributionists in league with elitist interventionists.

The Antarctic Ice Mass is Growing, Not Shrinking

We may hear news stories about the receding glaciers in some places, but we never hear in the MSM about how temperatures in Antarctica are falling and the ice pack is growing. From Icecap [h/t to Melanie Phillips],

While the news focus has been on the lowest ice extent since satellite monitoring began in 1979 for the Arctic, the Southern Hemisphere (Antarctica) has quietly set a new record for most ice extent since 1979.



This can be seen on this graphic from this University of Illinois site The Cryosphere Today, which updated snow and ice extent for both hemispheres daily. The Southern Hemispheric areal coverage is the highest in the satellite record, just beating out 1995, 2001, 2005 and 2006. Since 1979, the trend has been up for the total Antarctic ice extent...



While the Antarctic Peninsula area has warmed in recent years and ice near it diminished during the Southern Hemisphere summer, the interior of Antarctica has been colder and ice elsewhere has been more extensive and longer lasting, which explains the increase in total extent. This dichotomy was shown in this World Climate Report blog posted recently with a similar tale told in this paper by Ohio State Researcher David Bromwich, who agreed “It’s hard to see a global warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now”.



Indeed, according the NASA GISS data, the South Pole winter (June/July/August) has cooled about 1 degree F since 1957 and the coldest year was 2004....



This winter has been an especially harsh one in the Southern Hemisphere with cold and snow records set in Australia, South America and Africa.

Selective reporting in the MSM? I am so disappointed.

Why Bonds and Men are Different

Suddenly, as I was lecturing away in my finance course, it occurred to me, and I blurted it out: Bonds are different from men because bonds eventually mature.



(unless they are perpetuities, which, while they do exist in the real world, are mostly used to introduce present value concepts in the classroom)



btw, I deeply resemble this observation (as must be obvious to anyone who has read more than two three items on this blog). What is more, I am generally pleased about it.

People Respond to Incentives: just can't stop it

It is reported* that Immanual Kant enjoyed telling this story:

A wealthy man died, and his heir had difficulties conducting the funeral. Complained the heir,

The more money I give my mourners to look sad, the more pleased they look.

Sometimes the response is not the desired one, though, especially if one is not hiring trained actors.



Also, note that the mourners undoubtedly discovered that by not looking sad they induced the heir to give them more money. Talk about responding to incentives!



Update: After seeing this posting, Brian Ferguson sent me this from August 23, 2006 on the BBC:

Five people have been detained in China for running striptease send-offs at funerals, state media say.



The once-common events are held to boost the number of mourners, as large crowds are seen as a mark of honour.



But the arrests, in the eastern province of Jiangsu, could signal the end of the rural tradition.



Local officials have since ordered a halt to "obscene performances" and say funeral plans have to be submitted in advance, Xinhua news agency said.



The arrests, in Donghai county, followed striptease acts at a farmer's funeral, the agency said.



Two hundred people were said to have attended the event, which was held on 16 August.



The Beijing News said the event was later revealed by a Chinese TV station. The leaders of five striptease troupes were held, it said, including two involved in the farmer's funeral.



"Striptease used to be a common practice at funerals in Donghai's rural areas to allure viewers," Xinhua agency said.



"Local villagers believe that the more people who attend the funeral, the more the dead person is honoured."



As well as ordering an end to the practice, officials have also said residents can report "funeral misdeeds" on a hotline, earning a reward for information.

*from Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into History, a gift from my nephew several years ago [see here].

Owners? Hoodies?

Have you noticed that when they show the owners' boxes at major league sporting events, none of them is wearing a hoodie?

Rate My MD

Analogous to the (in)famous RateMyProf website, there is a site on which people rate their physicians. I love it. Here is the link for US doctors. Here is the link for Canuck Docs.



Some observations:

• With a few notable exceptions like this one, nearly all physicians get high marks for everything except punctuality.
• I would be surprised if the punctuality ratings in the U.S. were worse than the ones in Canada, where we have more shortages and more rationing due to our universal health queue insurance programme. (a testable hypothesis for someone in health economics).
• For the physicians I know, the ratings all seem just a tad high, but the comparative scores, or rankings, seem about right.
• Many of the ratings seem to be a measure of "bed-side manner" — as the old saying goes, "Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you've got it made."