Marginal Revolution

Does the simulation have an evil or indifferent designer?

On the plane I was reading Stanislaw Lem's famous essay on personoretics.  It occurred to me that if we are living in a simulation we can make Bayesian inferences about the intentions of the designer.  Let's say many designers are creating many simulations.  Will the good or the evil designers be more productive in terms of numbers of simulations created?  If we define "good" as subject to some ethical constraints, I believe the good designers work under a competitive disadvantage.  It's harder to produce cheap apples, for instance, if you pledge to do so only in a "green" way.  And so on.  Oddly the evil designers may be under a competitive disadvantage as well.  Intention has a cost and so in competitive settings it tends to fall out.  In our current world most things are made by indifferent machines.  I believe the rational inference about the simulation is that at least the demi-urge -- and possibly the Master Creator as well -- is indifferent to our plight.

Is it patronizing theft to buy natural resources?

Leif Wenar says yes:

You very likely own stolen goods. The gas in your car, the circuits in your cell phone, the diamond in your ring, the chemicals in your lipstick or shaving cream — even the plastic in your computer may be the product of theft. Americans buy huge quantities of goods every day that are literally stolen from some of the world’s poorest people.

...The very worst countries — the “sevens” — are places like Burma, Equatorial Guinea, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan and Zimbabwe. Taking these very worst countries as the places where the people could not possibly be authorizing the dictators and civil warriors to sell off their country’s resources, we can measure the amounts of stolen resources that enter America each year. By these official U.S. criteria over 600 million barrels of oil–more than one barrel in eight — have been taken illegitimately from their countries of origin. Stolen oil may be in your car’s gas tank right now. Stolen oil might have been used to make the computer mouse in your hand.

That's Leif Wenar, here is more.  He proposes suing Exxon to create a chain reaction, thereby lowering the value of dictatorial seizures of natural resources and perhaps preventing them.  I'm sure the Chinese are on board.  But no -- read further: we must sue them too.  After all, their cheap toys are made with stolen oil.

Claims about food prices

My story is about a world where...GDP growth yields fewer poor people who respond to higher wheat prices by purchasing less meat or wheat, i.e. we have less of a shock absorber. That generates a reduced elasticity of demand of wheat. So prices have to rise by more in order to clear a supply-demand imbalance than was required in the past when there were more poor people who would adjust.

Here is much more, interesting throughout.

The 100 best jazz albums?

Here is a list by David Remnick, via Jason Kottke.  It is good, albeit a bit mainstream for my tastes.  I'm glad to see he likes Ascension.  I would add more late Miles Davis (Live at Fillmore and In a Silent Way, among others), Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, more Cecil Taylor, the Blakey/Monk album, Solo Monk (my favorite jazz album?), and some Stan Kenton as well.  I'm due to cover a reader request for contemporary jazz soon, so I'll leave the moderns out of it for the time being.