Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived
Does anyone have any idea what might be done about the pointless blob of white space above this paragraph? It seems to be resistant to all my efforts. Update haha, it succumbed.
Friday, September 20, 2002
Get yer money for nuthin' and your risks for free1
Friday afternoon thorts ... as I've mentioned before, absolutely central to finance theory is the concept of the "risk free rate of return". This makes an appearance in Classical economics as "the price of waiting", "the intertemporal rate of substitution", the "rate of time-preference", etc. It's an absolutely indispensable analytical tool for any economics which deals with the concepts of time and uncertainty (or to put it another way; it's hardly used in mainstream economic thought at all).
In so far as mainstream Neoclassical economics gets to grips with time at all, it deals with it by assuming that (since markets are efficient), the rate of time-preference, or the premium one is willing to pay to have "Bread Today" rather than "Bread Monday", is taken to be equal to the rate of return on a risk-free asset. After all, since markets are efficient, the rate of return on a risk-free asset has to be the price of something, and since it can't be the reward to risk-taking, it has to be the reward to pure waiting, right?
Well ... maybe. In actual fact, I have big philosophical problems with the concept of "pure waiting". It seems more or less incoherent to use the normal economic tool of ceteris paribus in this context. If you hold everything else the same except that you allow time to change, then you're saying that nothing changes, but time passes. But is time without change really a sound concept? How could we tell it had passed? But that's not what I'm on about right now.
For the time being, let's accept that "the reward to pure waiting is the rate of return on a risk free asset". What is a risk free asset? Name one. Sorry, MBA students, you just gave the answer "ten year government bonds", you are the weakest link, goodbye. As I've noted before, it's perfectly easy to lose your shirt trading ten year government bonds; they fluctuate quite a lot. They give you a more or less risk free return in nominal terms and over a ten year horizon, but those two provisos include a whole load of items which we don't want to count as part of the pure reward of waiting. Probably best to make a list first of potential investments which can't possibly be risk free:
- Any investment in physical capital (return depends on the rate of profit, which is variable)
- Any investment promising a fixed return in nominal terms (doesn't guarantee the level of consumption you can afford with the returns)
- Any tangible item not directly consumable (what you can buy with it will depend on relative prices, which are variable) -- this includes gold and land.
The most promising candidate left would be index-linked government securities, which promise that, on some future date, you will be able to buy the basket of goods represented by the CPI index, in a quantity which grows at the yield on the index-linked security. But this brings us face to face with the problem indicated above; as a matter of empirical fact, you can get carried out trading TIPS. A ten year bond will let you postpone your consumption for ten years, but your money is locked up in the meantime, and all sorts of things might change over the next ten years. You could get a bit more clever and buy TIPS strips, effectively "locking in" today's entire forward curve of expected inflation, but you're still not really protecting yourself in this way; you're closer than anything else on this list to locking in a guaranteed stream of consumption goods, but that's not the same as postponing your consumption in a risk-free way. It doesn't get you round the fact that in carrying out any such financial transaction, you're exchanging certain consumption for claims on deliveries in the future, during which time anything could happen. Or to put it more bluntly, when I swap an apple today for an apple tomorrow, I'm always at least taking the risk that I might be run over by a bus this afternoon, in which case I'll never get to eat that apple. An asset can't be risk-free in the sense one would need for its return to be the "price of postponing consumption" if it's illiquid.
So what are we left with? Well, basically, that staple of the investment portfolios of millenarians and loonies, canned food. You can guarantee consumption at a future date by storing canned food (by the way, a quick tip to "child-free" whiners; this is the only way in which you can fund your retirement in a way which doesn't make your moaning about having to pay taxes for the education of "other people's children" utterly hypocritical), and you can open the cans and eat it any time you like. But what's the rated of return on canned food? Probably negative if you consider that the quality of what you end up eating is lower than if you'd spent the same cash on fresh food today.
So, I'm turning this one over to the collective wisdom of my readers. Do please feel free to post schemes for securing risk-free exchange of today's consumption for consumption at some future date, which deliver a positive implied rate of return, and I'll report back in a couple of weeks (on the other hand, as a sort of Dadaist joke on the theme of this comment, maybe I won't). The best I can do so far is buying an apple tree which is already bearing fruit, but I can't help thinking this is some sort of cheat .....
1As is apparently customary in what I refuse to refer to as the "blogosphere", I would like to point out that the titular phrase was conceived of entirely by me, in a single act of creativity with no input from any outside source ever. It is also copyright me for ever, as are its component words, which nobody can now use for any purpose at all.
posted by the management 9/20/2002 06:26:00 AM
Book Review corner
I've just finished reading a book by the Australian economist Steve Keen, which I liked very much. It's lumbered with what I'd call an unnecessarily combative title ("Debunking Economics", ye gods and bollock harnesses), but it's bloody good on a number of technical points relevant to those parts of this weblog which I like to think of as "the ludicrous incoherent rants on poorly understood minutiae of what Piero Sraffa said in 1928". If I'd read it before subscribing to the "Post-Keynesian Thought" mailing list, rather than after, I think I could have saved myself many weeks of mute incomprehension.
I've also been reading Straw Dogs by John Gray, my old university prof. Looking back on my undergraduate education, it's quite easy to understand how I ended up with a somewhat bizarre Weltanschaung ("world-view" for the Readers' Digest set, use it in a sentence three times today and it'll be yours forever). I was educated by three fine men of British letters: John Gray, Galen Strawson and Don Hay. Gray is now the Professor of European Thought at the LSE, biographer of Hayek and Isaiah Berlin and most famous for False Dawn, an anti-globalisation diatribe which has as good a claim as any to have pioneered the current Klein/Monbiot/Hertz industry in such things. Galen Strawson's most famous work at the time (he's probably written a lot since, but I haven't kept up) was Freedom and Belief, a systematic destruction of the philosophical concept of free will and a proof that there can be no such thing as moral responsibility. Don Hay's best known work was the thumpingly good but painfully rigorous industrial economics textbook known to its sufferers as "Hay and Morris, but he also was (and remains) the doyen of Christian economics. So basically, from Gray I learned that everything's going to hell and there's nothing anyone could do about it, from Strawson I learned that that everything's going to hell and there's nobody you can blame for it, and from Hay I learned that I, personally, was going to hell and that if I didn't show up for Industrial Economics lectures he'd send me there. Actually that joke is a horrible calumny on Hay, who was an utterly nice man and never threatened me with hellfire, even in the face of severe provocation.
But anyway, enough of this sickening nostalgia. "Straw Dogs" is a great book. It's rather like the film of the same name in its bleak view of the prospects for humanity, although anyone hoping to see Dustin Hoffman going apeshit with a shotgun in Cornwall will be disappointed. Basically, John Gray asks the interesting question; what if we take seriously the fact that humanity is just one more type of animal on the face of the planet. The answer is that, we end up being brought face to face with the fact that an awful lot of things which over the years we have seen fit to kill each other over, end up looking pretty freaking silly.
The really good news for me is that Gray has finally found a prose style that works. I've been a fairly loyal buyer of his books over the years, and have always marvelled at how someone who gave such interesting lectures could write such constricted prose. I have a copy of his "Liberalisms" that is basically mint apart from the first fifteen pages, because I've never been able to read any further without wanting to drill a hole in my head to release some of the pressure. But he's been reading (and apparently, hanging round with) JG Ballard of late, and it shows. He's now setting out his philosophical arguments in simple declarative English sentences (harder than you'd think) and using imagery that contributes to his unique and bleakly pessimistic view of the world, rather than parodying it. As a work of philosophical literature, I think it's right up there with Marshall Berman's "All That Is Solid Melts Into Air", and I think I've said that about precisely zero books before.
So, for people who give a floating shit what I think about anything, there's a couple for you. Thanks to the reader (you know who you are) who recommended the Keen book.
posted by the management 9/20/2002 05:29:00 AM
Thursday, September 19, 2002
Cheap shots at war-libertarians? We got 'em!
In re: "nation building" and the idea that the real problem with the Arab world is that it doesn't have enough US puppet states, I adapt an old libertarian joke:
Q: What's the most frightening sentence in the Arabic language?
A: " ��� �� ������� ���������� ��� ��� �������� "
("We're from the US Government. We're here to help")
Translation provided by Ajeeb.com
posted by the management 9/19/2002 11:53:00 PM
Bubba the Dread
I'd like to rephrase my argument in favour of war in Iraq (that it is the only politically possible way of ending the horrendously cruel blockade of Iraq) in terms which won't convince anybody any more, but which might hopefully spoil the dinner of most of the other members of the pro-war camp.
The main argument of the warbloggers at the moment is that inspections won't work, can't work, can't be made to work. Because there are a million and one things that Saddam Hussein could do to foil, harry or impede the work of the inspectors, there is no way in which we can countenance taking seriously Iraq's offer to allow "unconditional" inspections. The only thing we can possibly do is invade, and there's an end on't.
Fair enough. But note that this argument could have been made at any time in the last ten years. So it does rather raise the following question:
If we really think that there is no possible inspection regime which would be any use at all, why the fuck have we been starving people to death for ten years in the pretence that there is????
Corollaries:
1) As Jude Wanniski regularly points out, the answer to the question, frequently asked over the last ten years "Why doesn't that evil megalomanic just let the inspectors back in if he cares about his people so much?" is almost certainly "Because he knew that some lugnut like you would make exactly the argument you've just made now that he has offered to let them back in".
2) Starting from this premise, it is not easy to avoid the conclusion that the policy of the United States of America over the last ten years has not been to get inspectors back in, but rather to attempt to starve the Iraqi people into revolution against Hussein. Starvation, in my opinion, ought to be classed as a weapon of mass destruction.
3) It further degrades the already debased currency of UN resolutions that they have been, in this case, clearly used in an entirely disingenuous manner.
Of course, this isn't Bush-bashing. Although the "inspections, schminspections" wing of the warblogger community are probably guilty of pretty serious bad faith (it's not possible to both hold the view that no inspection regime is satisfactory and maintain that the deaths from malnutrition and want of medical treatment which I call "starvation" for polemic purposes above were the fault of Saddam Hussein rather than the fault of the USA acting through the UN), bad faith is a much lesser crime than mass murder, and at least, in a sort of bumbling and insanely worrying way, Bush is holding out some hope for the end of the suffering. Nope, the policy of maintaining the death-grip of the blockade in bad faith, in the face of copious information about its murderous nature, and in the hope that it would eventually result in "regime change" without a fight, was the work for the most part of William Jefferson Clinton. Would it not be better for the soul of the Left to admit that the policy of starvation took place for the most part during the Clinton years and represents the logical outcome of the "triangulation" strategy (neither invasion nor accomodation, but rather a "third way") which marked out most of what Clinton did?
I fundamentally like Bill Clinton. That's why I'm right there on his side on most issues; whatever he does, he isn't an arsehole about it. And most of his opponents are such horrendous arseholes that one's every instinct cries out to support him. But after thinking through the argument above, I find it very hard to look at pictures of his big red old face without getting the same mental picture of heaps of emaciated bodies which always lingers as a retinal ghost image in the portraits of all the worst villains of the twentieth century.
edit: Forestalling the argument that "the reason people are starving in Iraq is that Saddam does this, that, the other instead of spending the money on food". It isn't so. Under the terms of the blockade, Iraq sells around $4bn of oil a year. The UN keeps 40% of this for its expenses and for reparations, leaving $2.6bn. That leaves around 36 cents per Iraqi per day, which is nowhere near enough to live on. And Iraq has next to no other exports but oil, and agriculture is pretty difficult to establish when you aren't allowed to buy fertiliser because it might be used as chemical weapons precursors. Furthermore, any argument based on how much money Iraq spends on its army overlooks the tiny technicality that every nation tends to increase military expenditure when they are under immediate threat of bloody war!. There is simply no way off the moral hook by twisting the facts in this manner.
other edit: Just realised that, of course, all references to "USA" should be "USA and UK" above, but can't be bothered to change them individually. I'm part of the collective guilt on this one too. The French, bless 'em, aren't.
posted by the management 9/19/2002 10:38:00 AM
Wednesday, September 18, 2002
The Trouble With Oligarchs
An answer, finally, to a question which has been bugging me for ages. Conversations between me and Harvard Institute types about the disastrous "shock therapy" experiment in Russia where an attempt to build capitalism in one country ended up killing a fair chunk of the population have always tended to go like this:
Me: What the hell happened? How did you fuck up Russia so badly? People call Art Laffer a crap economist, but he never starved a million people to death! What were you guys smoking?
Harvard Institute type: Oh it was terribly sad. Our policy mix was about right, but, unfortunately, the whole thing was derailed by the botched privatisation program
Me: I'll say it was fucking botched! GDP fell by 42%! Life expectancy fell by seven years! I simply do not believe that a freaking privatisation program, a fairly mild supply-side reform, no matter how badly designed, could have that kind of immediate and catastrophic macroeconomic effect!
Usher: Excuse me sir, would you mind lowering your voice and minding your language? Professor Shleifer is about to make his speech
HI Type:Well the problem is that because the privatisation program was handled badly, the national assets ended up in the hands of a small group of oligarchs.
Me: So fucking what? They were in the hands of a small group of oligarchs before the privatisation! In any case, how does this affect output?! When people find out that their employer has been taken over, they might slack off a little, but they don't suddenly decide to down tools, go home and starve to fucking death! There's got to be more to it than that!
Somewhat more burly usher: Excuse me sir, would you mind stepping outside ...?
Which has always been the kernel of my argument. Terribly unfair and corrupt or not, handing over ownership of a factory from this bunch of gangsters to that bunch of gangsters doesn't stop the wheels turning. Surely to goodness, the Harvard Institute must have made some other criminally stupid mistake to do so much macro-level damage in such a short time?
The answer to which was, "yes and no". Fundamentally, what we have to realise that, at an economic rather than a political level, what's bad about oligarchs is a monetary perniciousness rather than a moral one. The fact that they're crooks is economically neutral. However, the fact that they know they're crooks, and they suspect that they're going to get found out soon, can have disastrous effects. Think about it this way:
A party apparatchik can be a pretty venial and horrible person. But there's only so much self-dealing he can do for himself under a communist system. He can get a bloody fine dacha, the best food and drink, good clothes and a couple of mistresses and that's it. Don't get me wrong; it was possible under the Soviet system to live a lifestyle not unlike that of a Western millionaire if you played the game right. Let's assume that the actual consumption of the oligarch class was unchanged post privatisation.
The trouble with a capitalist robber-baron as opposed to a corrupt commissar is that because he's a capitalist, he is concerned with accumulation as well as consumption. Specifically, his goal is not just to live like a king, but to take as much of the cash flow of his factories as he can, convert it into dollars and stash it somewhere outside Russia where the people he's meant to be answerable to can't find it. In the balance of payments, this shows up as a negative item on the capital account (ie, by depositing the money in a foreign account, he is increasing the claims of Russians on institutions outside Russia). When you have the entire productive industry of the country owned by people like this, then the capital outflows can be pretty massive.
Unfortunately, for a country in Russia's stage of development, you would normally want to see capital inflows, not outflows, which was rather the problem. Billions of dollars in aid and investment went into Russia between 1990 and 1998, but most of it just ended up providing the liquidity for capital flight. And of course, as one learns in the dull national accounts lecture in the first week of your macroeconomics course, a negative item on the capital account has to have as a counterpart a positive item on the current account; to accomodate the capital flight, Russia had to run a current account surplus. Which is pretty tricky; given that Russian exports to the outside world were more or less fixed in the short term, the only way to create the surplus was through import reduction or "domestic demand compression". Which is exactly what happened; Russia experienced a huge and horrendous depression precisely because an item which is usually small enough to be forgotten about (the drain on domestic liquidity brought about by capital flight on the part of criminals) became significant enough to be large relative to the domestic money supply. So the *really* stupid policy of the Harvard Institute was to impose the open foreign exchange and capital markets which made the capital flight possible.
Interestingly, there is a corollary to this "monetary theory of kleptocracy". Note that most of the bad effects of the kleptocrats took place because they converted their (local currency) profits of theft into dollars, draining the economy of hard currency. Because of this, we can credibly hypothesise that there is one case in which you could hand the entire economy over to robber barons and it wouldn't really matter at all. That would be the case in which the local currency is the global reserve currency, so that the kleptocrats are happy holding their wealth in local currency. In other words, the one country in the world which has literally nothing to fear from becoming a gangster state is the United States of America!
posted by the management 9/18/2002 01:08:00 PM
The Nukes of Yesteryear
I read in my evening newspaper that Saddam is definitely on the threshold of developing suitcase nukes, and that all he currently lacks is the necessary uranium ... takes me back to my own schooldays. Readers may be interested or reassured to know that, based on my own adolescent attempts to build a nuclear device in my parents' shed, the "getting hold of uranium" stage was the difficult bit for me too.
posted by the management 9/18/2002 12:22:00 PM
Foreign Policy Update
As mentioned in a previous post, I'm in favour of war with Iraq, simply because I didn't see any other politically possible way of stopping the humanitarian disaster of our current blockade of Iraq. But obviously, war is not something we should go into lightly, and the current offer from Saddam to allow the inspectors back in has to be taken seriously by anyone with the best interests of humanity at heart. If the UN inspectors can go in, and if they can get any way along the way toward certifying compliance with the resolutions, then there might be a political solution to the problem, allowing an end to our horrendously cruel blockade in a manner which saves face, doesn't require a whole load of military casualties and, importantly, doesn't put me at risk of sucking in an anthrax spore put in my breakfast cereal either by Saddam, or by some local nutter wanting to put the blame on him.
So, I propose that we abandon the war debate for the meantime and all throw our support behind the proposal that there should be a short hiatus in our war preparations. For the peace side; hey, jaw-jaw is better than war-war. For the War Party; hey we're only proposing a short break, during which time we can start tightening domestic security. It doesn't have to be a long hiatus; not even two months. I'm proposing that we should continue negotiations on UN inspections for precisely seven weeks, starting today, and if there isn't material progress, we send the troops in on November 6th.
Who could possibly object to that?
posted by the management 9/18/2002 02:32:00 AM
Tuesday, September 17, 2002
Deregulation saves the nation ...
Lots of stuff in the blatts about the unique advantages of the "deregulated", "open" even, ye gods and bum pills, "free" financial markets of the USA, and how they represent a crucial advantage of that great nation in coping with trouble. I don't propose to get into arguments about whether American markets are better than anyone else's, because there's a fact of the matter; when it comes to markets, bigger is better, and American markets are the biggest, so they're the best. But if there's a big boat full of gravy out there for anyone with a free and deregulated financial sector, then speaking for my European brethren, I gotta get me some of that. With this in mind, D-Squared Digest would like to put forward the following urgent four-point Deregulatory Plan to bring us into line with the land of the free:
- In order to help us come into line with "US equity markets, the freest in the world", Europe should immediately impose numerous restrictions on short selling (such as the NYSE uptick rule), require that derivatives be traded on different exchanges from the underlying and introduce "circuit breakers" halting trading if the market falls too far.
- In order to reduce "European governments' use of the banking system to help promote social goals", Europe should immediately abandon its strategy of using state-owned subsidised banks, and should instead pass an equivalent of the Community Reinvestment Act, regulating and pre-empting private companies' decisions about who they want to lend to.
- In order to ensure that we no longer have to suffer "failing companies propped up because of their political importance", Europe should immediately fall into line with the USA by removing the State Aids directive which forbids government bailouts and change its bankruptcy code to make it as easy for insolvent debtors to continue trading as it is under Chapter 11.
- In order to reduce "the plethora of red tape which stifles innovation", all European states should immediately establish three different types of bank, each with a different regulator, along the lines of the OCC, Fed and the individual state banking commissions, and no very obvious way for anyone to tell which type of bank is which. Securities and derivatives regulators will have to be split in each country, and the Banking Co-ordination Directive which allows an institution chartered in one Member State to do business across the EU will need to be repealed. Foreign banks will obviously need to be subjected to yet a further entirely different system of regulation.
Only in this way can the backward, stagnant and sclerotic regulatory systems of Europe approach the model of clarity and nonintervention with which the US provides us. Perhaps one day, European financial institutions will be able to employ as few compliance officers and lawyers as their American counterparts!
posted by the management 9/17/2002 03:52:00 AM
Monday, September 16, 2002
Thort for the day
I was going to title this "Hello, Hello, It's Good to Be Back", but then I remembered ....
OK, a thought that struck me while on holiday, in the form of three questions;
- Hands up if you believe that Benjamin Franklin was talking sense when he said "They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety" ....
- Hands up if you believe that African governments are doing something wrong or stupid in rejecting genetically modified corn given as food aid.
- Now ... hands up again if you still think agree that "that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty or safety"
And the beauty of it is, that nobody will be able to argue with me 'cos comments still don't work.
More later ...
posted by the management 9/16/2002 07:23:00 AM
Thursday, September 05, 2002
Hurray, hurray, it's a holi-holiday!
Not that it's ever worth reading, but this weblog will be especially not worth reading until Monday 16th, as I'm on holiday. So the attack on evolutionary psych. will have to wait a week ....
posted by the management 9/05/2002 10:53:00 AM
Wednesday, September 04, 2002
Steal that post, not this one, the other one
Starting with the Mouse, obviously, because he's more interesting than computer programs. Lessig has a big thing about whether or not Mickey Mouse should be in the public domain or not, which is good politics because pretty much everyone can agree that Disney's purchase of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act was one of the more disgraceful legislative spectacles of recent years. So the slogan is, "Free The Mouse". Pretty cool huh?
Well not really. Because, through no fault of his own, Lessig is a lawyer. Don't blame him, he's a sufferer. For this reason, he thinks that everything that is good should be legal (a proposition I wholly disagree with), and, dare I say, he may possibly be missing the practical implications of putting Mickey Mouse into the public domain.
The major benefit to the world from Mickey's entry into the public domain would obviously be that we could all get cheap knock-off Mickey Mouse videos to show our kids. But of course, there are two significant problems here:
- We can get cheap knock-off Mickey Mouse videos anyway. The net is full of them. They flog them down my local market.
- Kids don't like Mickey fucking Mouse, because he's old, and boring and shit, and he talks in that stupid squeaky voice. Kids don't like anything that's older than about five years ago, and all of those things are still in copyright.
And in any case, this isn't the bee in Lessig's bonnet; not unnaturally, he isn't particularly concerned with the subject of whether a great big pile of cash is handed to this bunch of money-grubbing shills or that bunch of money-grubbing shills. What he's worried about is the production of "derivative works". Which in practice means, lots of stories about Mickey and Pluto having sex with each other. A noble cause, but not one for which I propose to die in a ditch.1
There is a serious point concealed here. Exactly what new works of creativity are we waiting upon? Beyond the obvious pornographic uses, what is going to be unleashed on us the minute that Mickey comes out of copyright? Lessig has one example, and it doesn't hold up:
Here's my favorite example, here: 1928, my hero, Walt Disney, created this extraordinary work, the birth of Mickey Mouse in the form of Steamboat Willie. But what you probably don't recognize about Steamboat Willie and his emergence into Mickey Mouse is that in 1928, Walt Disney, to use the language of the Disney Corporation today, "stole" Willie from Buster Keaton's "Steamboat Bill."It was a parody, a take-off; it was built upon Steamboat Bill. Steamboat Bill was produced in 1928, no [waiting] 14 years--just take it, rip, mix, and burn, as he did [laughter] to produce the Disney empire. [...] It was culture, which you didn't need the permission of someone else to take and build upon. That was the character of creativity at the birth of the last century. [...] The meaning is: No one can do to the Disney Corporation what Walt Disney did to the Brothers Grimm. That though we had a culture where people could take and build upon what went before, that's over.
So, there could be no Mickey Mouse today because the Disney people maintain a vice-like grip on their intellectual property, and you couldn't do to "Steamboat Willie" what Disney did to "Steamboat Bill". Right?
Wrong, and provably so. The makers of The Simpsons have done exactly that on a number of occasions with the "Itchy and Scratchy" characters. Here's a version of the sequence in question; see what you think. Should Disney be getting their lawyers?
Like hell they should. Steamboat Itchy is "fair use". If you want to produce a parody, or a substantial piece of work of your own which references similar themes to a copyrighted work, that's already allowed. If you want to rip off someone else's character to give spurious popularity to a piece of work which isn't strong enough to make it on its own, you're not. I don't see a problem here, other than for those people who can't really get off on a story about a random cartoon mouse having it off with a random cartoon dog unless they know it's Mickey and Goofy. The reduction of copyrights advocated by the "Free the Mouse" slogan would benefit the piracy industry, plus they would benefit the creators of "derivative works", in the worst and most pejorative sense of the word "derivative". Both these types are by and large enemies of humanity, so I say keep the mouse locked up forever.
Or to put it another way; Lessig thinks that copyright laws are stifling creativity. I'm with Flannery O' Connor:
"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think that the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
1I do not mean for one second to suggest that Professor Lessig is into furry fetishism, though I confess that now the thought has occurred to me, I can no longer read his weblog without chuckling every couple of minutes. On the other hand, I can see a future in which this weblog becomes number one entry in a google search for "stories about Mickey and Pluto having sex with each other", so I suppose I'm hardly in a position to comment.
posted by the management 9/04/2002 08:00:00 AM
Steal this post
Lots of people I like, have a lot of time for Professor Lawrence Lessig, the "cyber law guru". Which is a bit annoying for me, because I must confess that I really can't see it. Not only that, but it's doubly and triply annoying because I have to admit that my anti-Lessig rap sheet is really pretty thin. All I can convict him on are three relatively minor misdemeanours:
- Guilty of numerous acts of journalistic fellatio on people I can't stand. Eric Raymond is not "a founding father of the future"; he's a jumped-up code monkey with far more ill-thought out exercises in amateur sociology to his credit than actual inventions. The Cathedral and the Bazaar is not "a compelling essay about what makes the movement tick", it's a tendentious attempt to rewrite The Mythical Man Month which bears no relationship whatever to any actual software project, and certainly not to Linux.
- Frequent culprit in using "to code" as a transitive verb meaning "to write a computer program", a usage which dictionary.com tells me isn't exactly wrong, but which to me sounds like jargon and undeniably carries an air of the wannabe.
- He's a lawyer; I am, as I mentioned below, an antinomian
Actually, come to think of it, I can add a felony to the rap sheet; I strongly suspect that, if you were to trace it back, about seventy per cent of all the irritating windy bollocks about "net communities" and "the emerging cyber frontier" which you read about if you subscribe to a number of trendy journals, has its original source in Lessig. So perhaps I am on sounder ground than I thought.
In any case, Lessig's big thing is copyright; he's agin it. Blah blah blah, what a terrible strawman, I know. But basically, he wants to see things go into the public domain (which I also like) and he thinks it's terribly important and a horrendous restriction on our rights if they don't (which I think is ludicrous). He has a bee in his bonnet over two hot topics of intellectual property law; Mickey Mouse, plus Open Source software. Presumably he is all over Linux, which satisfies both of his concerns; it's both Open Source software and a Mickey Mouse operating system. I'll deal with both of these concerns in forthcoming posts. But I'll first set out my stall on the general issue of intellectual property law:
Basically, intellectual property is a hot potato for the libertarians; half of them think it's a free speech issue, and are in favour of no copyright laws, while the other half think it's a property rights issue and are in favour of really really strong copyright laws. Since I'm an Antinomian rather than a libertarian, this isn't a problem for me; it's in fact a perfect example of how my political philosophy cuts through such issues like a knife. Recall from the post linked above that the slogan of this weblog is "Strong Laws, Frequently Broken", and you'll see the obvious solution; we should have strong copyright protection, indefinitely extendible, and everyone should treat this copyright protection with approximately the same degree of respect that they did back in the heyday of Napster (don't expect that link to work for long, btw). In other words; if you don't like the law, break it already, and don't feel you have to tell me about how guilty you don't feel.
In fact, thinking about it, the whole Napster thing is massively positive for a variety of reasons. As you might recall, D-Squared Digest's main argument for keeping the current laws on cannabis is that it is entirely salutary for young people to be made into criminals for completely arbitary and harmless acts, because it teaches them the healthy disrespect for the law which is a cornerstone of a free society. The prohibition on swapping music files also achieves this, so we like that too. Making copyright a crime also has two big advantages as a way of teaching this lesson:
- Unlike the drug laws, the copyright laws are unlikely to fill our jails to breaking point, because nobody can be bothered to enforce them (largely because they don't form a useful pretext for harassing black people). In general, the worst you get even if you're the CEO of Napster, is a court order telling you to stop it.
- Unlike the drug laws, the file-swapping prohibition doesn't discriminate against the stupid. Before the netcomments comments got swept away, someone pointed out that criminalising drugs tends to mean that stupid people bear the brunt of the cost of the salutary social example, and given that the stupid tend to have a pretty tough time of it anyway, this seems a bit unfair. Well, the prohibition on file-swapping probably if anything singles out those of above-average intelligence (or at least, those who use computers a lot; there is probably some correlation). So it teaches us that even smart kids can end up on the wrong side of the law.
More on this later, I'm sure ... in the meantime, the author asserts his moral rights. His moral responsibilities, on the other hand ... are up for negotiation.
posted by the management 9/04/2002 05:53:00 AM
Tuesday, September 03, 2002
Quisling the night away ...
Because I am all over "giving succour to the enemy", I will give Mickey Kaus the tip, for nothing, that Paul Krugman is laying it on a bit thick when he says: . Fiscal policy is effectively off the table, partly because of long-run deficits worsened by Mr. Greenspan's own bad advice. Funny how he wasn't sure that Nasdaq 5,000 was a bubble, but believed that 10-year surplus projections were reliable enough to justify a huge tax cut.
That's a bit unfair. What Greenspan actually said was that the projections didn't justify any actions to loosen the fiscal stance, but that if loosening was a given, he would rather see it take place through tax cuts than through an increase in spending. Which, if you ask me, is pretty fucking idiotic in and of itself, but it's pretty clear that he was doing the old "Yes Minister bit of saying "If You Have To Do This Bloody Stupid Thing, Don't Do It In This Bloody Stupid Way, Minister"
So there you go, Mickey, have fun like a madman. Of course, this doesn't alter the fact that the main thrust of Krugman's article -- that Greenspan is being disingenuous over his actions during the bubble, and that his Fed appears to be falling into a dangerous pattern of failing to take prompt action because to do so would mean admitting past mistakes -- is absolutely right. Come to think of it, I'd appreciate it if anybody who wants to use my little Krugman-bash above also includes that caveat. After all, we're all about being accurate, professional and fair, here in the wacky world of weblogs ...
posted by the management 9/03/2002 09:44:00 AM
Reswitchin' the Night Away!
I see that Enetation lasted about as long as "NetComments", and have accordingly given up on comments forever. However, before comments bit the dust, I received a missive from someone about the week before last's article on the old Cambridge Capital Controversy. The thrust of the message went
"But isn't 'reswitching' a completely empirically irrelevant construct, of no relevance to the real world?"
I have two answers to this. Answer number one is that, as a quick inspection below will show, I didn't mention reswitching even once. An awful lot of the blood, beer and ink spilt during the CCC was indeed spilt over the concept of reswitching, but it's not central to the argument (or at least, not to the part I presented below, on the logical incoherence of "capital" as an aggregate quantity). You can't measure the quantity of capital unless you know the rate of profit, so trying to say anything about the "productivity of capital" is always conditional on an assumption about the equilibrium rate of profit, and is for that reason, logically circular. That's something which doesn't depend on reswitching.
Reswitching was a consequence of the joint determination of the rate of profit and the measure of the capital stock, which was considered important to the Sraffians. It's a dramatisation of the concept, because it makes a mockery of the concept of the rate of interest ... in the following way:
Let's consider two different investment projects. I'm going to call one project a "Sandwich Shop", because it has the standard business school cashflow profile; a big sunk investment up front (negative cashflow), followed by a series of positive cashflows. In fact, it has cashflows thus: Minus 70 in the first year, zero in the second year, 20 in the third, 70 in the fourth, 55 in the fifth and zero thereafter.
The other project is a more speculative venture in which you put down 20 in year one (a negative cashflow) in order to get 102 in year 8, with zero cashflow in between. I'll call this venture ... oh I dunno ... "Enetations".
The business school alumni present will be polishing their calculators at this point. Well, stop that immediately, wash your hands, and consider what happens to the valuations of these two projects as the discount rate changes. In fact, since I don't expect you to take me at my word, you'll probably have to do what I did and fire up Excel to see this in action.
At discount rates below 4%, Enetations has a higher value than the sandwich shop. This is fairly intuitive; if the cost of delaying consumption is low, then you don't mind waiting three years longer for a return.
At a discount rate of 10-15%, the sandwich shop is more valuable than Enetations. Again, no problem here; we could call Enetations a more "roundabout" method of production, or say that it has higher invested capital. If the discount rate were to rise from below 4% to around 10%, we would expect the owners of Enetations-like projects to switch production to sandwich shops. For all I know, that's what the bastards have actually done.
But what happens at a rate of 25%? Well, by that point, both projects are pretty marginal in net present value terms, but Enetations is actually worth more! If you stick the rate up to 26% it's even more dramatic; at this discount rate, the sandwich shop has a negative value, while Enetations is still positive!
The very astute indeed will notice that this isn't actually the reswitching example that was the focus of all the debate in the 70s; what I've done is to trick up the phenomenon of multiple internal rates of return into something resembling "reswitching". But the central economic phenomenon is there, I think, demonstrating that you don't need to take on board the whole Sraffian framework for the puzzle to exist; you can get into an awful tangle, of the sort where you can't say anything intelligent about "capital intensity" or "productivity", without leaving the confines of something as basic and uncontroversial as discounted cashflow analysis.
The link above is to a website dealing with the leasing industry, suggesting that the problem of multiple internal rates of return (and thus potential reswitchings) is a genuine, real-world phenomenon. Lots of people (Stiglitz, as a young man, was in the lead) made many debating points out of the fact that the Cambridge tradition tended to do what I've done above -- constructing artificial examples out of Excel rather than finding them in actual data. But I think that's a silly objection. There's an old proverb which I try to live my life by:
"If something's not worth doing, it's not worth doing properly".
And, as I hope folks have gathered by now, I don't think that measuring the capital stock is something that's worth doing at all.
Plans for the rest of this week; a few more silly ideas, to avoid alienating the readership entirely, then wrapping up this theme with my theory that "the equity premium puzzle" is the entire puzzle of capital theory, restated. Then on to the evolutionary psychology crowd ....
posted by the management 9/03/2002 08:48:00 AM
Friday, August 30, 2002
Democracy for the common man ...
This story is a couple of months old, but it's obsessing me. I can't get it off my mind. Unlike the majority of commentators, I don't really ever expect the government to do the right, or even the sane thing, plus I would certainly accept any bribes I was offered myself so I don't feel I have the moral standing to criticise others for doing so. So it's not concern for the British Steel Industry which keeps me awake at night, nor agonies over the corporate takeover of democracy, nor even nostalgic angst at the Labour Party's descent into Blairism. Here's a measure of how much I don't care about these things; I haven't even really fact-checked this story properly. No, what has me waking up screaming is the following thought:
"That guy managed to buy the intervention of the British Prime Minister for a �125,000 donation. Shit, I could afford that!"
I mean it seriously. I have that much equity in my house. Any one of our fine British banks would probably lend me 125 grand with only a short delay for the paperwork. If I teamed up with a few mates, I could probably put together a syndicate capable of donating a cool million, which is getting on for the sort of sum that Bernie Ecclestone paid for a special exemption for Formula One racing from the European ban on tobacco sponsorship of sports events. Lakshmi Mittal swung a hugely profitable privatisation deal for a Romanian steelworks for less than the price of a fully loaded Porsche Boxster. The return on investment on these political contributions is just fucking unbelievable, even by Internet standards. What's keeping me awake at night is that I can't think of any reasonably discreet ways in which the government could make me rich, because I know that if I had that idea, I could pay them to do it. It must have been like this to be a web developer without a business plan in the 1990s.
Somehow, I think that the Americans have it right on this one. Over there, you're laying out $20K just to sit at a table on the opposite side of a crowded dining hall from Al Gore, and he isn't even the President. Like investing in futures, bribing politicians is something which really should not be available in unit sizes which the average Joe punter can afford. It's just too high octane fuel.
posted by the management 8/30/2002 10:54:00 AM
Juvenophilia ...
I don't usually read The Economist, mainly because I once had to go through ten years' worth in a single sitting and that does funny things to your head. But I pick up a copy if I have a long or dull journey; although their economic analysis is usually at the level of a baby with a hammer discussing how the world is made of nails, the factual information is always on point, and I can always find a use for a new way to sneer at Europeans for living in Europe. So I bought it last week.
Irritatingly, I can't link to the article because the Economist keeps it on some weird Bizarro network which appears at first glance to be like the Internet, but which isn't free. But basically, it was about differences between the demographics of the USA and Europe. Now this is a pretty interesting and serious topic, which I will probably write more about in future, but the Economist's take on it was pretty bizarre. Basically, in their lead editorial, they kept going on about what they seemed to regard as the main problem for Europe; that an "aging population" will leave Europe "short of entrepreneurs". The idea being that only young people have ideas, and only young people can do anything new.
A quick glance at the NASDAQ might suggest that right now, the world needs more entrepreneurs about as much as Al Gore needs more anthrax. In fact, one could probably make a case that the USA is actively endangered by the toxic levels of entrepreneurial spirit and that it will be all it can do in the 21st century to keep up with the task of clearing up the messes its hyperactive young businessmen create. In other words, it's true that young people have a lot of ideas, but that's mainly because young people have a lot of stupid ideas.
Well, that would be an entertaining idea if I could spare the time and bitterness to set it out at length, but what interested me was how completely the Economist seems to have swallowed the idea that technology only progresses by the efforts of individual entrepreneurs. That's about as far as one can get from the old Schumpeterian theory of innovation. In actual fact, it's a matter of horses for courses. Some kinds of inventions are best suited to gifted entrepreneurial inventors, and some come about as the result of organised and structured research programs. And there's no particular way of knowing right now which kind of technical progress will dominate the next fifty years. (If I had to guess, I'd say that most of the smart money is on biotechnology, and biotechnology is the example sine qua non of an industry in which the main method of innovation is exhaustive programmatic search.)
After all, Japan is your classic example of the "aging population", and it's pretty hard to make a case that they haven't made any technological innovations ...
posted by the management 8/30/2002 06:11:00 AM
Thursday, August 29, 2002
Nobody the Dread
There's a very good article by Noam Chomsky which I dig out whenever the Great Man has said something stupid about Camobodia, or got caught in posession of a dodgy fact, to remind me that he is not entirely bad. It reminds us of two important points from Sen and Dreze's Hunger and Public Action, one of which is approaching a platitude and the other of which is an equally well-substantiated claim, but one which is incendiary enough to quite easily get you accused of the equivalent of Holocaust denial for mentioning it. The two facts are:- Mao's forcible "modernisation" of Chinese agriculture which caused between 25 million and 40 million deaths from famine in the period 1958-61, the so-called Great Leap Forward, could not possibly have taken place in a liberal capitalist democracy.
- The inequality of distribution of incomes, medical resources and food in India, which by Sen and Dreze's estimates resulted in an average "excess mortality" of 4 million deaths per year (compared with China, a country starting from an equivalent position at the beginning of India's "experiment" with democracy in 1947; the estimates were for the period 1947-79), exists as a direct consequence of India's liberal capitalist democracy.
We all know who to blame for the 40 million Chinese who died of famine and disease between 1958 and 1961; Chairman Mao, who is recorded as one of the great monsters of the twentieth century chiefly for this reason. But where should our righteous anger be directed on behalf of the 128 million Indians who died in a similar manner between 1947 and 1979? Whose face do we imagine looking out over this pyramid of corpses?
Perhaps the smiling countenance of Gandhi, the original author of the Indian state? Or perhaps Nehru and his family, who might have done more? Or the face of some British colonial administrator, who left the nascent state holding such a bad hand? Or the face of Adam Smith, who would still tell us that this inequality of resources is the only possible path to development? Or is this nobody's fault? Are we really so sure of the doctrine of acts and ommissions that we think 128 million people can be dead from entirely predictable consequences without it being a very terrible crime indeed?
Or maybe, we should grow up a bit and accept that History is just one Damned Thing after another; it is a horrendous engine that eats unrealised possibilities. We the living are the tiny, lucky tip of an enormous iceberg of disastrous outcomes and missed opportunities, and there is more or less nothing that anyone can do about it. To accuse a man of one murder is to say something concrete; to accuse him of twenty million is just to make a political statement of your own. If we want to condemn Stalin, Hitler or Mao, then we have ample material to do so, because we know what kind of people they were.
posted by the management 8/29/2002 02:34:00 AM
Tuesday, August 27, 2002
Like I care what you think ....
Hmmmm .... well a glance at the original NetComments comments link suggests that they've gone to a place where no amount of whining from me will get comments back, so it's "Bye Bye NetComments, and your bizarre generosity" but "Hello, E-Net-Ation comments, and your equally bizarre generosity". SInce the new comments company has both an "e", a "net" and a pun in its title, I'm guessing that they may be something of a "dot com" company, so don't post any 500 word essays without saving a copy. I'll try and find out what's happened to the old NetComments comments, but my guess is that they've gone forever.
You can't get the service for free, these days, I ask you .... still, I learned quite a lot in this quest; specifically, I learned that no matter how you tweak the code, it is not possible to fool other peoples' comments servers into hosting comments for me.
update: "enetation server busy". Some things speak volumes louder than comments, and the voice of God telling me not to have comments is one of them.
posted by the management 8/27/2002 12:59:00 PM
I fought the law and we all won
Well, I'll take the opportunity of comments being down to put up a pair of pretty unpopular opinions. Each of these opinions is unpopular separately with a different group; taken together, they annoy people all over the place. But hear me out, there is a certain internal logic to my position:- People should take cannabis if they want, without feeling guilty about doing so.
- The possession of cannabis should remain aginst the law, with harsh penalties.
Basically, this is me once more using issues I don't care about to push a political agenda. I don't really have any personal interest in dope at all, so I can take an objective view of the problem, and the objective view is this:
If it wasn't for the illegality of cannabis, middle class white people wouldn't care about prison conditions at all
and indeed
If it wasn't for the illegality of cannabis, many white people would never have any dealings at all with black people on anything approaching an equal basis
So I think we can be agreed that the ongoing War on Drugs is probably the only thing which maintains any degree of genuine respect (as opposed to the patronising and/or self serving kind) between the races at the moment. Obviously there is a degree of collateral damage, but who cares about that these days?
The official political philosophy of D-squared Digest, if you haven't guessed by now, is Atheistic Antinomianism, the belief that if you're an all right bloke and you're doing things in the right spirit, you probably shouldn't feel too guilty about breaking the law (this is how we stayed onside for Clinton, for example). It's an entirely salutary thing in our view to have something like the War On Drugs, which makes criminals out of 75% of teenagers -- teenagers can be a bloody judgemental lot in our experience, and it's good to have them reminded from time to time that life is complicated, the world is a morally grey place and there isn't a fine moral dividing line between Us and Them.
So, kids, this is advice your ma and pa probably aren't going to give you, but cops are stupid, first-time offenders are treated leniently and prison rape is by no means as prevalent as the advertising industry might have you think. Strong Laws, Frequently Broken, is the campaign slogan by which we hope to ride to victory on an anarchist/conservative "broad church" ticket.
'Course, if I catch anyone near my kid with any of that shit, I'll tear their bloody arms off and hit 'em with the sticky end.
posted by the management 8/27/2002 07:04:00 AM
More more more, for me me me
As you can see below, comments on this weblog are "currently unavailable". I have no idea why this might be so, or what reason there might be why the strange Internet benefactors who make the comments possible might have had problems with their "servers" or whatnot, but I am almightily pissed off. Bastards! How dare they provide such a shoddy service! I want to look at my comments now NOW NOW! For Christ's sake! I am the Internet Age consumer. I want things Free, Perfect and Now. Anyone failing to provide me with the five-nines reliability and ease of use that I expect (nay demand), runs the risk of losing forever the five nanoseconds of my attention which I deign to pass their way, missing forever the chance to show me a small banner ad, which I will also complain about.
In retrospect, it's sort of easy to see why those 1999 stock valuations weren't sustainable.
update : They're still not working. Here's a short explanation of why I'm so angry:
This is clearly a violation of my rights. One might make an analogy between my creation of D-squared Digest and the development and settlement of the United States of America. I came along, and found a "virgin territory" (the servers of blogspot and netcomments.co.uk). There were some other people who might have been regarded as having a claim to them, but they weren't using them in any meaningful sense; they weren't adding any value to them and many might have seen their ownership as wasteful. I came along, and mixed my labour with the territory of the blogspot servers, thus creating a property right for myself under natural law. Now those bastards at netcomments are despoiling my territory by not running the comments thing properly, while those thieves at blogspot are polluting my land claim by putting that banner ad at the top of the page (which I don't personally care about, but it's de rigeur to complain about such things). I would, as far as I can see, be quite within my rights to retaliate with massive force in defence of this, my little "homestead" on the vast wasteland of the Internet.
Doesn't all the above suggest that there might be something just a little bit wrong with Locke's theory of the acquisition of property rights?
update: Still not working! damn to hell and back. In the meantime, I have a theory of why it's impossible to make money out of content on the Internet. In my entire life, I have "supported" precisely two internet things; Left Business Observer and Counterpunch. Both times, I've done so by taking out a subscription for their associated newsletters. There's a very simple reason for this.
My girlfriend reads my credit card bills. And while I am a cyber-aware, e-enabled character, who is in many ways the apotheosis of the information age, aware of "netizens" and "online communities" and such (I'm even thinking of buying a wireless telephone!), the dear girlf is more of what they call a "sensible person", always concentrating on "how we pay the rent and feed the baby", and such Old Economy worries. If she were to see on my credit card bill that I had donated a sum of money to a website, she would think either:- That I had started donating money for something that others were offering me for free (ie, that I had gone out of my tiny mind), or
- That it was in some way a pornographic site
Either of these would be likely to reduce her perception of my Darwinian fitness as a mate, and since I prefer sleeping in my house to sleeping with the winos, that would be a negative outcome for me.
Basically, the pornographers have poisoned the well for any other business model on the Internet. Any time anyone thinks of "paying for content", they think "pornography" and then they think "I don't want to pay for content". So, enjoy this weblog while its hosting providers still have the cash to maintain it; I'm buggered if I'm paying for it when the ballon goes up.
posted by the management 8/27/2002 05:22:00 AM
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