And In Disappointing Tech Nerd News...

That's not a misplaced modifier.

If you're like I am, you often look up words you don't know right after you read them on a web page. The fastest way most of us (Chrome users at least) know how to look up words is to highlight the word in question, click "Ctrl c", "Ctrl t", "Ctrl v", "Enter". A Google search comes up with the word's definition at the top. That's five steps in case you haven't been counting. 

However, on the Inductive, you can look up a word in ONE FUCKING STEP. Highlight the word. Go ahead. Highlight it: 

Antidisestablishmentarianism. 

(Moving your mouse over to "learn more" counts as less than half a step with one significant figure.) Despite this five-fold increase in productivity, Apture remains a fairly unpopular service. (I know because I get metrics sent to my email every week. Very few of you are using it. Idiots.) And so, whether due to its unpopularity or due to its potential popularity once idiots figure out it exists - if you're pickin' up what I'm puttin down - Apture has been acquired by Google.

This is perhaps, one of those rare instances of consumer preferences resulting in inferior products, that is, unless Google doesn't change anything at all about Apture, which, seeing as Apture eliminates the need for a search engine in the first place, seems highly unlikely. 

More Farms, Smaller Farms

Now made with real fruit!I'd like to respond to Josh's last post by modeling what I see as the obverse. Economies of scale in agriculture are desireable when the alternative is crippling poverty. Nevertheless, in developed economies where starvation remains of secondary concern to self-inflicted overeating, more food of less homogeneous nutritional composition and higher quality even at higher costs is sorely necessary for the public welfare. Looming over all of this, the Mathusian insight that gave birth to both modern agriculture and modern economics remains true - the human population will always increase at a greater rate than food production efficiency. (My theory is that the Mathusian condition is an emergent consequence of the tendency for humans to be unrealistically optimistic about the future.) 

For this reason, in developing economies, it remains prudent to hedge against economies of scale in agriculture and some of the evils born of placing ourselves too far from the source of our sustenance via extreme and unnatural occupational specialization. (Indeed, it's possible that all of culture comes from food. And "you are what you eat" is wise on several levels.) The Summer 2011 issue of Lapham's Quarterly does a good job of balancing and weighing all the complex considerations at the intersection of development, agriculture, poverty, and nutrition.

The short version of my counterpoint to Josh is that what we need in America is different than what we need for countries that can't feed themselves. It might even be that there's a natural developmental arch that all civilizations must follow, and the stage that a particular civilization is in determines what course of action that country should take to maximize welfare: first (1) there's a community wrought of nature based on equality and living harmoniously, where everyone is a subsistence farmer or hunter/gatherer and everyone lives and dies at the whims of the seasons; then (2) primitive accumulation goes down and a primitive capitalist society develops - whether this is a result of contact with other capitalist societies or natural forces, it's safe to say this is where Africa is; next (3) capitalism matures until it can mature no more - intra-industry national power emerges concentrated in few hands, and these hands - instead of toiling honestly to coordinate supply and demand for the well-being of all - begin to build walls and moats around their citadels (see regulatory capture, patent over-filing, health insurance tethered to corporate employment, credentialing and licensing, etc.); (4) diminishing returns compel a premium to be placed on solving social problems or coerced egalitarianism - this is the stage where the United States and other mature social democracies find themselves; Marx went on to speculate that societies after this stage advance to (5) perfect, blissful communism as the profit motive is grdually removed from aspects of socety where it is (deemed) detrimental to the general welfare. Many others (generally social democrats) think (4) is as far as we can and should go. I think these intellectual frameworks are dangerously naïve and/or cowardly; we can combine lessons learned from (3) and (4) in a self-similar federalist/libertarian/anarchist structure that allows for unfettered individual expression and positive-sum cooperation while minimizing the effects of individual recklessness and coercive association.

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Disney's Rent-Seeking: A Singularity of Suck

According to Alex Weprin at mediabistro.com, Disney has recently trademarked the phrase "Seal Team 6".  Seal Team 6 happens to be the name of the Navy Seal team that took down Osama bin Laden:

The trademark applications came on May 3rd, two days after the operation that killed Bin Laden… and two days after “Seal Team 6″  was included in thousands of news articles and TV programs focusing on the operation.

Disney’s trademark applications for “Seal Team 6″ cover clothing, footwear, headwear, toys, games and “entertainment and education services,” among other things...

...Of course, for all we know Disney has been working on an animated feature about a team of anthropomorphic seals in search of adventure, but given the timing of the application that seems… unlikely.

I'm not quite sure how to interpret this, but I know it needs interpreting.  The part of me that wants to be charitable doubts what this story implies - that Disney has bought the rights to the next FDNY hat in an effort to capitalize on and exploit suffering - as just too disgusting to possibly be real.  Another part of me is too shocked to be disgusted.  A third part of me sees this as affirming all the unsubstantiated horror stories I've heard about Disney from acquaintances who work in the film world.  A fourth part of me sees the burden as falling on the American people for creating a system that tolerates and even encourages this kind of (entirely predictable and inevitable) corporate behavior in the first place.  Finally, a last part of me perceives this as all of the major problems with modern America rolled into one event: the eponymous Singularity of Suck - an event that sucks so much that what kinds of things will suck in the future becomes qualitatively and fundamentally unpredictable.  

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Cutting the Gordian Knot Between Socialism and Libertarianism

Alexander cuts the Gordian Knot

It is popular within the libertarian blogosphere to label pejoratively any recommendation of the use of state power to achieve liberty as "statist", as if any policy suggesting the use of the state apparatus to solve problems of insufficient liberty is objectively evil and destined to lead us all down the road to totalitarianism.  Not only is this tantamount to mindless orthodox hackery, but it is also quite absurd.  

In a liberal regime, state power is best understood as what ultimately (I use this term in the sense of "finally" and not "fundamentally" as I generally support vigorous primary social restraint on undesirable behavior, i.e. shunning or boycotting) prevents the war of all against all.  Indeed, the present scope of state power can be best understood as the result of historical forces and individual aggregate self-interest operating within the liberal program.  In the words of Alexis de Tocqueville:

(In a democracy) no man is obliged to put his powers at the disposal of another, and no one has any claim of right to substantial support from his fellow man, each is both independent and weak. These two conditions, which must be neither seen quite separately nor confused, give the citizen of democracy extremely contradictory instincts. He is full of confidence and pride in his independence from his equals, but from time to time his weakness makes him feel the need for some outside help which he cannot expect from any of his fellows, for they are both impotent and cold. In this extremity he naturally turns his eyes toward that huge entity which alone stands out above the universal level of abasement. His needs, and even more his longings, continually put him in mind of that entity, and he ends by regarding it as the sole and necessary support for his individual weakness. 

Of course, state power has tended to excess, and it must be controlled by the collective balancing forces of a bottom-up, democratically-conscious populace (which explains why democracy-building seldom works) and liberal, private institutions, but there are elements of state power which all citizens can (and have) agreed are for the best at least in principle if not in practice: proscriptions against murder for instance, the national defense, the police, even anti-trust regulations to prevent private institutions from subtracting from the general aggregate welfare (or challenging the government power monopoly).

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Synthesis of Austrian and Distributist Economics via Information Science

From Timothy B. Lee's September Cato Unbound essay on Hayek:

Hayek’s point is not that the price system is superior to other decentralized social institutions. Rather, he’s pointing out that all successful large-scale cooperative efforts involve standardization, which necessarily means discarding some potentially relevant knowledge in the process of codifying other knowledge deemed more important. The important question is not whether to standardize in this way, it’s deciding how, and how much to standardize. Too little standardization means missing out on opportunities for economies of scale and the division of labor. Too much standardization means discarding information that consumers actually care about, leading to the infamous rubber tomatoes of standardized agriculture. And the wrong kind of standardization—discarding important information while preserving trivial information—is doomed regardless of the degree of standardization.

What makes decentralized economic institutions powerful isn’t standardization but the possibility for competition among alternative standardization schemes. Rubber tomatoes create an entrepreneurial opportunity for firms to establish a more exacting tomato standard and deliver tastier tomatoes to their customers. In real markets, you see competition not only among individual firms but among groups of firms using alternative standards. Markets gradually converge on the standards that are best at transmitting relevant information and discarding irrelevant information. In contrast, when standards are set by the state, or by private firms who have been granted de facto standard-setting authority by government regulations, there is no opportunity for this kind of decentralized experimentation. Then the market is likely to be permanently stunted by the use of a standard that does a poor job of transmitting the information consumers care about most. (emphasis mine)

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Peter Boettke's Economic Meta-analysis

Termite cathedral = spontaneous orderFrom Peter Boettke at the Coordination Problem blog:

I often use a 2 x 2 matrix to communicate to students the different schools of thought in economics.  The rows reflect the problem situation we are find ourselves in (simple or complex), the columns reflect the outcome of our interactions (order or disorder).  Neoclassical economics is found in the simple/order cell; Keynesian and market failure theory is found in the complex/disorder cell; Marxism and critics of economics are found in the simple/disorder cell.  What does that leave?  The complex/order cell and that is the intellectual home of the Classical economists such as Smith-Say, the Austrian school from Menger to Mises to Kirzner, and the New Institutional school of Alchian, Buchanan, Coase, Demsetz, North, Olson, Ostrom, Smith, Tullock and Williamson, etc.

The Austrians occupy a central place in this cell because they emphasize not only the cognitive limitations of man, but also the complications of uncertainty, time, and I think importantly modifications to our core understanding of money and capital.  Money is non-neutral, and the capital structure in an economy consists of combination of heterogeneous capital goods that multiple-specific uses.  Once these propositions are included in the analysis, along with other messy aspects of the real world, our understanding of market theory and the price system shifts drastically.  Nothing can be treated as given.  Everything must fall out of the analysis of exchange and production.  Economic analysis is about economic forces at work, not the analysis of situations after those forces have done their job.

The traditional perfect market versus market failure debate is stale --- the perfect market folks don't tell us how the story of the market unfolds, and the imperfect market folks stop the story short right when it is getting interesting.  Journalist can understand this simple characterization of economic ideas, but economists should know better.  Back in the late 1940s, Kenneth Boulding (John Bates Clark Medal winner in 1949) actually raised this issue in his review of Samuelson's Foundations in the JPE.  Boulding wondered if the flawless precision of mathematical economics would prove impotent in terms of dealing with the real world in comparison with the literary vagueness of classical economics and economic sociology.  Not many listened to Boulding, and instead of doing messynomics in the sense of complex/order cell, we got a stale debate between simple/order and complex/disorder. And it still is going on today.

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That E.D. Kain is So Hot Right Now

I've been reading E.D. Kain for quite some time now (aren't I such a great hipster?), and I've had the opportunity to witness his meteoric rise from twelve posts a day at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen to being profiled by Conor Friedersdorf for the Daily Dish during Andrew Sullivan's hibernation (Cause he's a bear, get it?).  I read Kain's posts on Capitalism, Anarchy & War today (I think that's the first time I've ever typed an ampersand.  Seriously, I had to look for it.) and was absolutely floored: it was as though Howard Beale had been crossed with Mikhail Bakunin, cloned by Norman Borlaug, and then grown by Dame Julie Andrews and John Valjean with Michel de Montaigne as a private tutor a la Aristotle.

Kain:

When our government wages a war overseas against terror or domestically against drugs (or overseas against drugs and domestically against terror) [extremely pithy, emphasis mine] or when they tell you that they’re trying only to stabilize Afghanistan or resolve the conflict in such a way as to make a graceful exit, etc. these are lies.

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On Marxist Interpretations of the Financial Crisis

Image from the Financial TimesI recently tweeted the RSA Animate of David Harvey's April lecture "The Crisis of Capitalism", the tagline of which is "Is it time to look beyond capitalism towards a new social order that would allow us to live within a system that could be just, responsible, and humane?"  As I noted in my tweet, I agree with Harvey's positive, specifically with his deconstruction of the various, often contradictory media analyses of the economic crisis and classification into five distinct genres, each with a degree of truth.  Here are Harvey's five genres of media narrative, with my commentary:

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Why Should I Have to Defend Libertarianism?

This symbol of libertarianism represents an entirely consequentialist morality.Blogging is the rock 'n' roll of the information generation, and Ezra Klein is its Bob Dylan.  In a May 21st post, Three types of arguments over policy, Klein soberly reins in and classifies the noise of a drunken and whirling Washington:

Washington is home to two -- actually, three -- different types of policy debates. The first one, the one that we're used to, asks whether a policy will work. That's the one where I say health-care reform is likely to achieve its goals and cut costs and David Brooks says it won't do either thing and we both try to marshal empirical evidence in service of our points. In theory, whoever's evidence is stronger wins.

Then there's the second one, which is the one that (Rand) Paul is giving voice to, which asks whether a policy is philosophically acceptable. Paul isn't arguing that the Civil Rights Act was ineffective at desegregating Woolworth lunch counters. He's arguing that government shouldn't tell private businesses what to do, and when they do, that's not legitimate even if it achieves its stated policy goals. Or, more prosaically, a Republican argues that we shouldn't have more government involvement in health care because government involvement is bad, and that's true whether or not it's proved efficient in other countries. In theory, whoever's philosophy is more appealing wins.

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The Sheer Awesomeness of Adventure Tourism

Yes, elephants are - and should be - a commodity. Photograph by Eric Isselee.Several years ago, before I traveled across the Pacific Ocean to explore Japan, I considered becoming an economics professor, wrote an article on space tourism which appeared in the Duke Journal of Economics, applied for a Fulbright Grant to study economics in the Tanzanian bush, was rejected, and realized a future as an economics professor wasn't meant to be.  But in the process I did almost a year's worth of research into the various forms of tourism and the capacity of tourism revenues to provide economic incentives for conservation in places like East Africa.  I'm still convinced that my project would have established tourism as both an environmental panacea and the key to East African development.

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