Capital Day?

Brandon Christensen History , ,

Co-blogger Warren Gibson e-mailed me a great quickmeme earlier this afternoon. The details are beneath the fold. Continue reading →

Property Rights in Africa: More Decentralization Please

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Law , , , , , , , , ,

From the economist Camilla Toulmin:

While land registration is often proposed as a means of resolving disputes, the introduction of central registration systems may actually exacerbate them. Elite groups may seek to assert claims over land which was not theirs under customary law, leaving local people to find that the land they thought was theirs has been registered to someone else. The high costs of registration, in money, time, and transport, make smallholders particularly vulnerable to this.

You can read the rest of her article here [ungated version can be found here]. It goes on to elaborate upon how more decentralization is needed, as well as the need for more incorporation of indigenous legal practices. Highly recommended, but grab a cup of coffee first.

Arguments to ponder:

  1. James Buchanan’s work on public choice (elite groups seeking to capture the rent)
  2. Friedrich Hayek’s work on tacit knowledge and the inability to plan societies from the top
  3. Elinor Ostrom’s work on governing the commons and how states muddle the intricate “rules of the game”

Any thoughts? Suggestions for further reading?

Practical Sex Advice For Dudes

Jacques Delacroix Liberty , ,

I am a frivolous man forced by the boringness of my intellectual betters to keep diving back into serious didactic conduct. I just spent a week and part of the weekend expostulating on serious ideological issues. I almost have a headache as a result. So, it’s time I pleased myself by doing what I do best. That’s giving sex advice to others, of course. This time, it’s to dudes. If you are female, you are required to stop reading here.

Guys, guys! Men who ask what women want are just not paying attention, they are slow-witted or, more likely, they are not using the abundant information around them. If you pick up women’s magazines at the barber, even if only to look at the titles and at the ads, if you keep an eye on women’s morning television shows at the gym, if you ask yourself who is buying all the cheap paperbacks with the lurid, salacious covers, you will soon find convergent answers to the question: What do women want? I am going to shortcut the study for you anyway. The answers below apply only to heterosexual women. (I tried to find out what lesbians want but they threatened to beat me up.)

First, as always, as from “forever,” almost all women want a man to their name. This astounding failure of thirty years of feminism is worth a whole scholarly essay on its own. I will do it some other time. I said “almost all” because I have come across a couple of women who learned from a bad marriage, or from a bad divorce, or more likely, from both, that their own man was more of a burden than they wanted to carry for occasional use. They are content to borrow one now and then, here and there.

Second, women want the man in their lives to declare sincerely how very, very sorry he is. It does not matter what he is sorry about, it’s the intensity of the emotion in the confession that matters. I urge you, brother-men, to not yield to this facile way to get points with your beloved. It’s habit forming; she will want more; there will be no end to it. And after a while, she will despise you for your weakness.

Third, all women want someone else’s breasts. Silly feminists will argue that this horrid patriarchal society has made women un-naturally chest-conscious. Nothing could be further from the truth. Breast envy is hard-wired. Cave women who lived in all-female herds and rarely saw a man used to sneak behind the bushes with a piece of torn mammoth pelt to fashion a Wonderbra of sorts. At any rate, the envy leads to surgery if it’s not checked in time. Don’t allow this barbarous practice; don’t show any tolerance of it, not even unconsciously. If you care at all for a woman, any woman, you don’t want her perfectly healthy flesh to be cut by a sharp knife and then delivered to an always hazardous healing process. Besides, I have seen on television that the results of breasts implant and breast modification are sometimes tragically grotesque. I mean uglier than any naturally shaped protuberances I have ever seen. And I have seen a lot of ugly breasts in my life. I say so without meaning to brag.

Fourth, all women like earrings. They never have enough. Earrings are not dangerous, immoral, or generally threatening to a woman’s reputation. There are nearly no ugly earrings. Almost any woman’s face is lit up by earrings, even mediocre earrings. I have known this for years but almost at a subliminal level. For a long time, I was clueless about earrings, like many men. I thought buying earrings for a woman was an expensive and time-consuming endeavor also fraught with mis-steps. Not so long ago, I began experimenting by giving earrings frequently to a young woman to whom I am close. Specifically, I experimented with price. Amazingly soon, I discovered that there was not floor, no earrings so cheap that they would fail to put the woman in a good mood, at least for a while. I stopped the experiment at the rather shameful but astounding price of two dollars ($2). I stopped mostly because I had trouble finding cheaper earrings. Something else happened during the experiment: I became progressively and palpably better at choosing earrings. I am now so good at it I might just as well be gay.

Here is a good rule of thumb applying to just about everything: If you are sufficiently bad at something, you will improve quickly through practice. This goes for buying earrings the same as it goes for sex, the act.

Property Rights in the Post-Colonial World

Brandon Christensen Current Events , , , , , , ,

Land grabs and crony capitalism at its finest. From Reason magazine:

Politicians in the affected countries are key partners in operations that resemble the late-19th-century scramble for control of Africa. The land grabs aim at enriching privileged companies and their political allies, usually at the expense of those already on the land. States, companies, and their frequent close friend, the World Bank, see no reason to respect sitting owners and resource users, whatever their rights under customary law and (sometimes) postcolonial statutes. Pastoral nomads get even less respect. In Tanzania, for example, governments and safari capitalists have reduced the traditional grazing lands of the Maasai herdsmen to a fraction of what they were. And in Ethiopia, the government’s “villagization” policy, Pearce writes, resettles peasant farmers “in the manner of Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot,” clearing the way for deals with foreign capital.

You can read the rest here. I hope to have some more academic articles up as links soon.

Native American Property Rights and European Contact

Brandon Christensen History, Law, Liberty , , , ,

Despite the claim to rights based on discovery, British colonists often acquired land by contract. For example, almost all of Massachusetts was acquired by purchase from local tribes. The primary exceptions there, Salem and Boston, were uninhabited areas, having been depopulated earlier by the diseases the colonists unwittingly brought with them. Although the British crown claimed the sole right to negotiate transfer of land rights from the Native Americans, many colonists thought otherwise and regularly made individual arrangements with various tribes to secure land.

This is from Europe Meets America, a heavy post in the Freeman.

Property Rights: A Human Universal

Brandon Christensen History , ,

I have been reading a lot about property rights among the San (“Bushman”) in southern Africa for a little research project I am doing, so bear with me as most of my posts over the next little while will deal with property rights in the non-European world.

From the Freeman come this article by co-blogger Michael Adamson:

By any criterion, the economic and social standards of living are lower among Native Americans than among the balance of the U.S. population. Unemployment on or adjacent to reservations fluctuates around 40 per cent. Of some 750,000 Native Americans on reservations, 75 per cent earn less than the national average. Leading causes of death among Native Americans are accidents, heart disease, malignant neoplasms, and cirrhosis of the liver, all far above national averages and a significant proportion of these related to alcohol abuse. Drug abuse, mental illness, and obesity are major health problems. Tuberculosis cases are 4.5 times the national average and deaths from the illness are 9.5 times as frequent. Suicide is more than twice as likely among Native Americans. Their life expectancy is about five years below the average American’s and infant mortality rates are 25 per cent higher.

While such facts may illustrate the plight of the Native American, they do not explain why such conditions exist […]

The mission of the Bureau of Indian Affairs is to act as the principal agent in carrying out (1) the government-to-government relationship between the United States and Federally-recognized Indian tribes and (2) the responsibilities of the United States as trustee for the property it holds for tribal units.

Oops. You can probably guess where this is going. Do read the whole thing.

Bureaucracy: Yet Another View

Brandon Christensen History, Links ,

When I write now about my naval period, I feel almost forced to apply a bit of organizational analysis to my memories. It’s a slightly disturbing experience because being a small cog in a bureaucratic organization, a state organization at that, unexpectedly fails to evoke bad feelings.

It’s disturbing because life and work within a bureaucracy is at the antipodes of libertarian utopian imagery. It’s disturbing, additionally, because government routinely acts as the principal agent of routine state oppression in societies with a constitutional government such as the US. This malaise is also an opportunity. I believe that people who think of themselves as libertarians, even those with a mere libertarian bent, don’t spend enough time thinking about disconfirming evidence, about experiences that run counter to their main existential choices. Here is a brief analysis, one that may speak a little to the issue of why some people are attached to bureaucracies in spite of their libertarian leanings.

Thus write Jacques Delacroix in Liberty magazine. Do read the whole thing. Liberty, by the way, is where I first came across Dr. Delacroix’s writings. I was living in Santa Cruz and I have always had a weird obsession with foreign-sounding libertarians, so when I stumbled across Liberty‘s pages, Dr. Delacroix’s writings were some of the first that I read.

You can find more of Dr. Delacroix’s writings in Liberty‘s publication by checking out the newly-renovated ‘recommendations’ section here on the blog!

What Good Are Mathematical Models for the Science of Economics?

Brandon Christensen Economics, Links , , ,

This question comes from co-blogger Warren Gibson’s piece in Econ Journal Watch titled “The Mathematical Romance: An Engineer’s View of  Mathematical Economics”:

Mathematics can be very alluring. Professional mathematicians speak frequently of “beauty” and “elegance” in their work. Some say that the central mystery of our universe is its governance by universal mathematical laws. Practitioners of applied math likewise feel special satisfaction when a well-crafted simulation successfully predicts real-world physical behavior.

But while the mathematicians, some of them at least, are explicit about doing math for its own sake, engineers are hired to produce results and economists should be, too. It’s fine if a few specialists labor at the outer mathematical edge of these fields, but the real needs and real satisfactions are to be found in applications.

Western civilization has brought us an explosion of human welfare: prosperity, longevity, education, the arts, and so on. We very much need the wisdom that economists can offer us to help understand and sustain this remarkable record. What good are engineers’ accomplishments in crash simulations if the benefits are denied to the world by trade barriers, stifling regulation, congested highways, or bogus global warming restrictions? What can mathematical economics contribute to such vital issues?

You can read the whole thing here (it’s also in the newly-renovated ‘recommendations’ section). Highly, uh, recommended! Mathematics is an important aspect of economics, I think, but Dr. Gibson and other Austrian critiques are more focused on the models that economists create rather than all of the wonderful data that can be quantified for calculation purposes.

I may be wrong, and I hope that my co-bloggers or others will correct me if I am, but either way Dr. Gibson’s critique of the mathematical models employed in the economics profession needs another good look.

Ron Paul’s Legacy

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty, Politics , , ,

Ron Paul will not get to speak at the GOP convention, but his legacy will hard to miss over the next decade of American politics. His son is now a Senator in Kentucky, and his Audit the Fed bills have lots of bi-partisan support (in the House anyway; Senators, for some strange reason, seem to like the Federal Reserve an awful lot).

His foreign policy, which initially attracted me to libertarian ideas, is the most important legacy, however. I can tell because the GOP loathes it so much that they won’t give Congressman Paul the time of day they know they need for his support.

From Foreign Policy: Continue reading →

Life Under Fatwa

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History, Links , , , , , ,

I did once visit Iran when I was 21 years old, during the time of the shah. It was wonderful. I had just graduated from university, and such was the world at that time, 1968, that I was able to drive with a friend from London to South Asia across the world. I mean, try driving across Iran and Afghanistan now! I remember it being a very cosmopolitan, very cultured society. And it always seemed to me that the arrival of Islamic radicalism in that country, of all countries, was particularly tragic because it was so sophisticated a culture — which is not to defend the shah’s regime, which was appalling. But it was one of the tragedies of history that an appalling regime was replaced by a worse one.

From Salman Rushdie.

At first I found his praise for the Obama administration to be typical of Left-wing establishment figures, but then I remembered that Rushdie is an Indian and had probably had to deal with racist legislation in one form or another while growing up. While the period of colonialism (roughly coinciding with the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the beginning of World War I) did indeed open up more places to markets, the Jim Crow-like legal barriers that European states erected no doubt helped to foster part of the suspicious climate that now pervades most globalization skeptics worldwide.

This is a shame for two reasons: Continue reading →

One Sure Thing About Globalization – The American Motion Pictures Industry World Hegemony Part 4

Jacques Delacroix Economics, Liberty , , , , ,

[Editor’s note: this lecture was delivered to the Leavey Institute of Santa Clara University in 2003. You can find it reproduced in whole here]

Just another National Specialization

The massive asymmetry in films exports between the US and the rest of the world may be the result of any number of factors. The fact that foreign movies occasionally do well in the US market ( in recent years, “Life is Beautiful”, from Italy, “Amélie”, from France. The first, 1999, Pokemon cartoon from Japan grossed US$85.7 , million, according to WSJ 7/19/02:w11, and, as forecasted by same – “Read my Lips”, also from France, will do well) suggests that public preference, and possibly language barriers, are more likely to be issues than American distribution superiority, for example. Yet, language barriers may be less significant than one would guess. Luc Besson’s “Jeanne d’Arc” (“The Messenger”) released in 1999, purportedly produced in English to make it accessible to the polyglot EU markets and to the US market, registered 3.07 million admissions in the European Union in that year, against, 40 million for American-made “ Star Wars Episode 1”, 23 million for “Tarzan”, almost 21 million for “The Matrix” , and 7.4 million for “American Pie”. Even the obscure, American-made “Patch Adams” did better ( EAO 2001: 100). “The Messenger” flopped so badly in the American market that admissions and revenue figures are hard to find. For 1999 also, only one British production and two UK-US co-productions, all in English of course, figure among the top worldwide 50 admission getters. In Belgium where practically the whole population understands French , French-made movies obtain usually less than 10% market share, against an 80% share for American-made movies. (EAO 2001: 96). Finally, the foreign successes of Indian movies, almost all in languages understood hardly anywhere outside India and not everywhere in India, suggest again that language may be a small constraint. Continue reading →

Around the Web

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links , , , , , , ,

How savage has European austerity (spending cuts) been?

An Invisible Nation: the Gulf’s Stateless Communities

The Moral Limit of Markets Debunked

Keynesian Obstinate Ignorance

 

One Sure Thing About Globalization – The American Motion Pictures Industry World Hegemony Part 3

Jacques Delacroix Economics, History , , , , ,

[Editor’s note: this lecture was delivered to the Leavey Institute of Santa Clara University in 2003. You can find it reproduced in whole here]

Broken Promises

Harm to the poor on a considerable scale occurs when rich countries suddenly violate the principles of free trade they publicly support, on the main. The US government and those of other post-industrial countries will periodically make a show of vaunting the merits of free trade on stages (such as the World Trade Organization) that guarantee worldwide publicity. These actions must encourage at least some of the most enterprising poor in poor countries to produce for distant markets they are not in a position to understand.

When the governments of rich and large entities, such as the US, Japan and the European Union, suddenly inhibit the free movement of products, those enterprising poor people in poor countries suffer, and suffer disproportionately. Thus, the recent passing of new American farm subsidies legislation (in 2002) makes it difficult or impossible for small farmers in the Sahel area of Africa to compete on the world ‘s cotton markets with American growers (Thurow and Kilman, 2002)(6). The steel tariffs erected by the Bush administration – with the full complicity of Congress – must have similar effect on steelworkers in some of the Third World and Eastern European steel-producing countries.

Neither of these policies nor the broken promises they imply, can be easily defended on moral or rational grounds. Directly, it can probably be shown that the economic actors of poor countries who embraced free trade end up worse off than they would be if they had toed to a more parochial (“autarkic”) line. Indirectly, such breaches of faith by powerful rich countries contribute to the stagnation of the Third World by seeming to prove wrong those who adopted a stance leading most surely to economic development: embracers of production for worldwide markets. (In my experience, well-educated defenders of national economic ”self-sufficiency” rarely care to argue against free trade in principle; instead, they rely on evidence that there is no real free trade but a poisonous international game where the dice are loaded against the poor in poor countries. Sometimes, they have a point.)

The American Motion Pictures Industry’s Hegemony Continue reading →

From the Comments: the Unemployment Rate

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Economics , , , , , , , ,

Dr. Gibson has won the much-cherished gold star I had offered in a previous comment. My question had to do with the green dot in this graph, and Dr. Gibson explained it to perfection. He writes:

The widely followed U3 unemployment rate, as shown in the figure, is the number of unemployed divided by the labor force. The labor force excludes discouraged workers. The labor force participation rate is the labor force size (employed & unemployed) divided by the population. The green dot shows what the U3 rate would be if that ratio had stayed the same since Jan. 2009.

The U6 statistic counts discouraged workers as unemployed. That rate is currently around 15%.

See also: Unemployment: What It Is

From the article Dr. Gibson directs us towards comes some other important information:

Government policies contribute to unemployment above and beyond natural unemployment. The most notorious of these policies are minimum wage laws. These laws make it illegal, effectively, for low-skilled workers to accept employment. Anyone who cannot generate $8 worth of production per hour cannot expect to be paid more than $8. Such unfortunate people might be productive at $6 per hour but are forbidden to accept employment at this rate and are instead condemned to joblessness and all its attendant miseries. This burden falls most heavily on black teenagers, whose unemployment rate (based on those seeking work and excluding those who are in school) is well over 40 percent. The benefits accrue mainly to slightly higher-skilled workers, who have climbed onto the metaphorical ladder leading to better jobs and who are shielded from competition from those excluded by minimum-wage laws […]

Labor unions, as voluntary associations bargaining freely with employers, are unobjectionable. They did a lot of good in the past when working conditions in many places were pretty bad. But now they are granted special privileges by law—basically the privilege to engage in violent or coercive activities. The result is often wage agreements that are above market-clearing levels. Those left out are of course unemployed.

While labor unions can boost their members’ compensation at the expense of non-union workers, higher wages generally and higher living standards are due mainly to increased productivity, which in turn depends on high levels of capital investment. People are more willing to save and invest when they have confidence in the future, and that confidence comes from respect for property rights.

For more on minimum wage laws, see Bad Idea of the Year.

From the Comments: Keynesian Economics and the Stimulus Bill

Brandon Christensen Comments, Current Events, Economics, Politics , ,

A recent brouhaha has erupted in the comments thread of Dr. Delacroix’s post on Obama’s bad economic policies. Now, to be sure, the bad economy cannot be put on Obama’s shoulders alone. All he did was sign the stimulus act into law, after all, and I doubt John McCain would have vetoed it.

Let us also not forget about the two foreign wars that George W. Bush charged to the republic’s credit card, either. With that being said, I thought another economic chart would do readers of this blog a favor. From AEI’s blog comes this:

Ta-dah! Utter economic failure.

(h/t Steve Horwitz)