Marginal Revolution

Good quotations about India

This one comes from Borges:

India is larger than the world.

It's also cited in the new Paul Theroux book Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, which is occasionally entertaining but not up to his best material.

For ESEADE

Here is the post my favorite things Argentina, from two years ago.  Not much change since then.  Here is my post on B.A., arguably my favorite city.  Here are other Argentina posts.

Man on Wire

This movie is both a first-rate documentary and riveting social science.  It is excellent on how Frenchmen differ from Americans, how young men differ from old, what is art, why some people follow others, how we are led to folly by small steps, whether human behavior can be explained by signaling theory, and the motivations and roots of terrorism, among many other issues.  Here is one good review.

Regulation and Distrust

Brought to you by Aghion, Algan, Cahuc and Shleifer, this is one of the best papers so far this year.  It's so good I'll give you a longer than usual quotation from the opening pages:

In a cross-section of countries, government regulation is strongly negatively correlated with social capital. We document, and try to explain, this highly significant empirical correlation.  The correlation works for a range of measures of social capital, from trust in others to trust in corporations and political institutions, as well as for a range of measures of regulation, from product markets, to labor markets, to judicial procedures. 

We present a simple model explaining this correlation. The model turns on the idea that investment in social capital makes people both more productive and more civic (e.g., Coleman 1990). Compared to people who have invested in social capital, those who have not are both less productive and impose a negative externality on others when they produce (e.g., pollute).  The community (whether through voting or through some other political mechanism) regulates production when the expected negative externalities are large. But regulation itself must be implemented by government officials, who are corrupt if they have not invested in social capital. As a consequence, when production is restricted through regulation, investment in social capital may not pay off.  In this model, when people expect to live in a civil community, they expect low levels of regulation, and so invest in social capital. Their beliefs are justified, as lack of investment leads to incivility, high regulation, high corruption, and low production.  The model has two Pareto ranked equilibria.

...The model predicts, most immediately, that distrust influences not just regulation itself, but the demand for regulation...distrust fuels support for government control over the economy.  What is perhaps most interesting about this finding, and also consistent with the model's predictions, is that distrust generates demand for regulation even when people realize that the government is corrupt and ineffective; they prefer state control to unbridled production by uncivil firms.

...We take evidence on the demand for regulation as supportive of causality running from distrust to regulation.  To test the reverse causality, we look at the experiment of transition from socialism, which we interpret as a radical reduction in government regulation in low trust societies.  Our model predicts that such a reduction should lead to 1) a reduction in output, 2) an increase in corruption, 3) an increase in demand for government control at a given level of trust, and 4) a reduction of trust in the short run.

Markets in everything

Decorator bandages. 

To Mr. Brown, 24, who works at Esquire magazine in New York, the colorful strips are an important accessory, and he’s careful to coordinate them with his Kris Van Assche sweater or his Balenciaga bag. He generally wears one on his left hand or arm and balances it out with two or three on his right leg.

He doesn’t put them on his face because, he said, “I don’t want people thinking, ‘What happened?’ ”

Some call it creepy.

What's the opposite of antitrust policy?

Georgia is a transit country. Through our territory went the Great Silk Road. And we have confirmed our transit potential more than once. Through our territory go the BTC, the Baku-Tbilisi- Erzurum, and the Baku-Supsa pipelines. Not only liquid goods transit through Georgia, but also dry goods by railroad. However, apart from the existing oil and gas pipelines, there is a potential for new ones. But they will only be considered if the oil producing companies themselves become interested in them. With today’s price for crude oil, the attractiveness and profitability of the BTC and the Baku-Supsa are obvious. Therefore, with the growing production of hydrocarbons in Central Asia, and in the Caspian region, new oil pipelines will undoubtedly be profitable. Therefore I would like to emphasize that all of the proposed projects are viable and have prospects.

And the transit of fossil fuels through Georgia endangers the profit of which country?  You have three guesses.  If you don't know the word "Transneft" you will soon.  Here is more.  See also Marshall Goldman's new book Petrostate on the Georgia-Russia relationship and the economic factors involved.  In my view today's series of events is very, very bad news.  Not only are the events bad, but it is a bad signal of type about the new (is it new?) Russian government.

The Pledge of Allegiance

Barack Obama was heckled by a crazy bystander for not beginning a speech with the pledge of allegiance.  He handled the event gracefully (video here along with cogent commentary by Matt Welch.)  As I've written before, I think the pledge is creepy.

Cato's Gene Healy says it well:

From its inception, in 1892, the Pledge has been a slavish ritual of devotion to the state, wholly inappropriate for a free people. It was written by Francis Bellamy, a Christian Socialist pushed out of his post as a Baptist minister for delivering pulpit-pounding sermons on such topics as "Jesus the Socialist." Bellamy was devoted to the ideas of his more-famous cousin Edward Bellamy, author of the 1888 utopian novel Looking Backward. Looking Backward describes the future United States as a regimented worker's paradise where everyone has equal incomes, and men are drafted into the country's "industrial army" at the age of 21, serving in the jobs assigned them by the state...Bellamy's book inspired a movement of "Nationalist Clubs," whose members campaigned for a government takeover of the economy. A few years before he wrote the Pledge of Allegiance, Francis Bellamy became a founding member of Boston's first Nationalist Club....

Bellamy's ritual for honoring the flag was right in step with those other National Socialists.  Here's a picture illustrating the recommended salute (which later was to became politically incorrect).

The salute may be gone but the message remains.

Google Street View is not popular in Japan

According to the morals of urban area residents in Japan, the assumption that “it is scenery [viewable] from public roads and therefore it must be public” is in fact incorrect. Quite the contrary, [these morals state that] “people walking along public roads must avert their glance from the living spaces right before their eyes."

...With this culture [of privacy], if you were to walk along a residential street in an urban area of Tokyo, every 10 meters surveying all 360 degrees of your surroundings, there's no question that you would be reported to the police within 30 minutes. Even just filming the scenery from the street with camera in hand, there's no question that if you tried to shoot the area not covered by Street View, you would be asked, after initial questioning, to come to either the Ikegami Police Station or the Den-en-Chofu Police Station.

Here is the full story, interesting throughout.  Keep also in mind that Japanese urban residents are more likely to urinate in public or use a love hotel than are, I think, most Americans. 

I thank Riemannzeta for the pointer.

Celebrity and politics

Many of the supposed "heroes" of the past were liars, frauds, and butchers to varying degrees.  The association of fame with entertainers, for all its flaws, departs from earlier concepts of heroic brutality and martial virtue.  Most of today's famous people have had to persuade consumers to offer their allegiance and their dollars.  Nowadays fame is attained through a high-stakes game of pursuit and seduction, rather than a heroic contest or a show of force in battle.  The shift in fame to entertainers is a modern extension of the Enlightenment doux commerce thesis that the wealth of the market civilizes morals and manners and supports an ethic of bourgeois virtue.

...Modern politics emphasizes images, rumor, negative campaigning, and a circus-like, mass media atmosphere.  Leaders lose their stature and become another set of celebrities.  We talk about them and use them for entertainment.  Yet contrary to the views of many critics, these developments are by no means wholly negative.

Commercial society has brought the taming of fame to politics...

That is from my 2000 book What Price Fame?

Trade is good: settle your lawsuit

Note to victims of accidents, medical malpractice, broken contracts and the like: When you sue, make a deal.

That is the clear lesson of a soon-to-be-released study of civil lawsuits that has found that most of the plaintiffs who decided to pass up a settlement offer and went to trial ended up getting less money than if they had taken that offer.

...Defendants made the wrong decision by proceeding to trial far less often, in 24 percent of cases, according to the study; plaintiffs were wrong in 61 percent of cases. In just 15 percent of cases, both sides were right to go to trial — meaning that the defendant paid less than the plaintiff had wanted but the plaintiff got more than the defendant had offered.   

Here is the story.  The good news is that 80 to 92 percent of cases do in fact settle.  The bad news is that, over time, poor decisions to go to trial have become more rather than less frequent.

Why are some countries free and others not?

I am to speak on this topic in Buenos Aires (details here) and I was considering the following threads:

1. The Catholic capitalism of the Italian Renaissance and to what extent does it refute Max Weber?

2. Facundo and Martin Fierro, or where Domingo Sarmiento and Steve Sailer go wrong.

3. Why didn't either the gauchos or the conquest of Siberia lead to the Turner thesis?

4. Why the old buildings in Oamaru, New Zealand remind me of Chile and what that means for the current Latin economic pecking order.

5. What does the pre-war Japanese growth miracle tell us about the postwar Japanese growth miracle?

6. "Betting on refrigerated transport" as a theme in Argentine history.

Or maybe I'll do something else altogether.

They tell me that dress for the event is "elegant casual."  Yikes!  This, of course, leads to classic cycling in the sense outlined by William Riker.  Since I cannot be elegant (certainly not by B.A. standards), I cannot be casual either.

The talk should eventually show up in print, although possibly only in Spanish in Argentina.  I'll get you a link if there ever is one.

Assorted links

1. West Side Story: the truth

2. Discover your gender, using the web

3. Backyard nukes?  A scary joke, or is it?

4. Quantum mechanics gets even weirder

5. Business cycles: the current frontier

6. Measuring the value of NBA players

Pure signaling

Yesterday developer Armin Heinrich posted an iPhone app to the App Store called I Am Rich. The program displays a red gem, has no function but to display your wealth to others through ownership, and costs $1000. It has since been removed from the App Store, although no one knows whether Apple or Heinrich pulled it.

Here is more.

Feldstein on Fiscal Policy

Martin Feldstein, a proponent of the recent fiscal stimulus, said it didn't work.

Here are the facts. Tax rebates of $78 billion arrived in the second quarter of the year. The government's recent GDP figures show that the level of consumer outlays only rose by an extra $12 billion, or 15% of the lost revenue. The rest went into savings, including the paydown of debt....Although press stories emphasizing that the rebates induced additional consumer spending were technically correct, they missed the important point that the spending rise was very small in comparison to the size of the tax rebates.

It's a peculiar op-ed, however, as he then goes on to say:

The small rise in spending in response to these tax rebates is similar to what previous studies of one-time tax cuts found. It also corresponds to what both basic economic theory and common experience imply. Although someone who receives a permanent annual salary increase of $1,000 typically would increase his annual spending by an almost equally large amount, a $1,000 rise in wealth caused by a share price increase or a tax rebate would raise spending only gradually over a number of years.

Right.  But a short-term tax cut is exactly what Feldstein called for in an earlier op-ed.

The poor effects of the Bush tax rebate as fiscal stimulus, however, let Feldstein now attack the Obama plan for a $1000 tax rebate.  Nothing wrong with that - McCain has nothing better however - but what Feldstein doesn't say is that if you follow the logic of his two op-eds (and this is not something I would necessarily buy into) the conclusion should actually be that fiscal stimulus would work better if it ran through government spending.

Santiago bleg

For part of next week I will be in Santiago, Chile.  I haven't been there for nineteen years.  What should I do?

Addendum: Seth Roberts sends me this interesting link on travel.

The most obnoxious blogger in the world

I read many blogs but there is only one -- of the two or three hundred I have sampled -- which I find truly obnoxious.  I find the content obnoxious and I find the style obnoxious and I find the blogger obnoxious.  By the way, I don't think it is a blog which has ever said anything negative about me, at least not that I'm aware of.  And it's not a blog on the blogroll or a blog I have, as far as I can remember, linked to.   

I never read it regularly in the first place, but I don't think I can stand to read this blog any more ever again.  Even so, I try to spin theories of how one blog and one blog only can have achieved such a special place in my mind.  It's not a blog that covers special or unique topics, relative to the other blogs I read and link to.  Is the world not a continuum?

If you are a blogger you can know that the chance I find you obnoxious is very slim indeed.  But not zero.

Or maybe you all think that I just don't read enough blogs.

Are lead papers in a journal of higher quality?

Maybe not, maybe you just think they are:

Leading papers in a journal’s issue attract, on average, more citations than those that follow.  It is, however, difficult to assess whether they are of better quality (as is often suggested), or whether this happens just because they appear first in an issue. We make use of a natural experiment that was carried out by a journal in which papers are randomly ordered in some issues, while this order is not random in others. We show that leading papers in randomly ordered issues also attract more citations, which casts some doubt on whether, in general, leading papers are of higher quality.

Here is the full paper, courtesy of Pluralist Economics Review.

The best sentence I read this morning

The yogurt-based, covered-pot-baked Kazakh bread smells exactly like good dinner rolls from a Midwestern supper club, but the moist, absorbent texture seems closer to an underwater sea sponge.

The whole review is excellent; it covers a new Chinese regional cookbook Beyond the Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China.

Hillel's new MR-based song about publishing

Remember the guy who wrote the song about trying to survive in 1000 A.D.?  He has a new and excellent tune, based on your comments about books having so much chaff and extra material in them.  Here is the link to the MP3 (and other songs by him).  Here are the lyrics.

Trade-offs

Here's Atrios:

I Want A Big Yard In A Walkable Community

But you can't have it! Or, more specifically, if everyone has a big yard the community ceases to be especially walkable. That isn't to say that you can't have developments with yards relatively near to retail, so that there is stuff within walking distance. You can still have corner shops or similar, but having sufficient residential density to support significant neighborhood-serving retail isn't really compatible with everyone has a big yard.

Keep your yard!  Just understand the tradeoff.

The Street Porter and the Philosopher

That's the new book edited by David Levy and Sandra Peart; the subtitle is Conversations on Analytical Egalitarianism, an issue which arises frequently on this blog.  The book offers an excellent dialogue between Buchanan and Warren Samuels, the best essay on Adam Smith's theory of usury, Deirdre McCloskey on "Sacred Economics," my essay on "Is a Novel a Model?", Crampton and Farrant reinterpreting the socialist calculation debate, and the Rawls-Buchanan correspondence, among other treats.  If you live in the world of "interesting economics," this is definitely a book to pick up.

By the way, Larry Mason wrote a novel which he claims is a model; I haven't had time to read it yet.  Plus the new novel by Russ Roberts, which illustrates economic concepts, seems to be out now.

A reader's query about energy markets

DSN asks me:

With all the talk of a (misguided) windfall profits tax on petroleum producers, I have a related question...: 

Based on logic and observation of input cost and profit trends in various industries, when the cost of raw materials rise, companies in a competitive market are often not able to pass through these cost increases and, therefore, may see a decline in profitability. How then are oil companies able to make huge profits when oil prices rise significantly.  Is this not a competitive market?  What is the economic process in oil production, processing, and marketing that allows oil companies to make record profits when the price of their raw materials is at historically high levels?

Here's one source, I am not sure how reliable:

...about two-thirds of Exxon Mobil's profits come from oil and natural-gas production outside the United States, with rising production in Africa, the Middle East and Russia consistently offsetting declining output in the United States, Canada and Europe.

Exxon Mobil said it pumped 7 percent more oil and natural gas than it did during the same quarter a year earlier.

In other words, Exxon already has paid for a concession in Nigeria and when the oil price is high profits for the company go up.  In that simple model a windfall profits tax leads to less pumping in the short run and even less pumping if people view the tax as temporary.  The tax also means fewer oil concessions in the longer run.  It is also possible -- if you take the bargaining solution between Exxon and Nigeria as more or less given -- that in the long run the tax redistributes income from the government of Nigeria to the government of the United States.  The less Exxon earns on net, the less it will offer Nigeria for the concession in the first place.

Addendum: Lynne Kiesling comments, worth reading.

Assorted links

1. Arnold Kling on Shiller's new book.

2. What music shows about your teen; in my view you want your kid to like indie rock.

3. Do socially dominant males stay in the gene pool?  Maybe not.

4. How to test new search engines.

5. Go for it!: the Google test for any human choice.

Scream it from the rooftops: happiness inequality is declining

There is less happiness inequality today than in the 1970’s or 1980’s. And this has occurred despite large increases in income and consumption inequality. Betsey Stevenson and I spell out these facts in a lot more detail in a new paper, “Happiness Inequality in the United States,” forthcoming in the Journal of Legal Studies.

That's Justin Wolfers, here is much more.  This is one reason -- but not the only reason -- why so many moral arguments from the Left fall on deaf ears when it comes to most Americans.  Of course happiness inequality is more fundamental than either income or wealth inequality because we care about outputs, not inputs.

By the way, here is a roof access cage ladder.

How an Economist Thinks

Over the weekend a crew came round my neighborhood offering to paint house numbers on the curb.  Large bold curb numbers, they pointed out, make it easier for emergency service workers to find houses in the dark.  Good argument.  The price was good too.  Then I noticed my neighbors were having their numbers painted.  So of course, I declined.

The Power of Oprah to help Obama

Finally I have something new to report on Barack Obama:

Prior to the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary, Barack Obama was endorsed by Oprah Winfrey, a celebrity with a proven track record of influencing her fans’ commercial decisions. In this paper, we use geographic differences in subscriptions to O! – The Oprah Magazine and the sale of books Winfrey recommended as part of Oprah's Book Club to assess whether her endorsement affected the Primary outcomes. We find her endorsement had a positive effect on the votes Obama received, increased the overall voter participation rate, and increased the number of contributions received by Obama. No connection is found between the measures of Oprah's influence and Obama's success in previous elections, nor with underlying local political preferences. Our results suggest that Winfrey’s endorsement was responsible for approximately additional 1,000,000 votes for Obama.

That is work by Craig Garthwaite and Tim Moore and here is the full paper.

The nature of ability bias

Remember all those studies showing that people claim they are above-average drivers?  Or above-average at other things they do?  It may not just be self-deception.  Here is the latest:

...we find it easier to consider the favourable evidence for a single person than we do for a whole group. Consistent with this is the finding that people tend to be biased when comparing any single individual, not just themselves, against a group of others.

There's also the possibility that we're biased towards the "target" in any comparison. The "target" is the entity that is being measured up against some benchmark. Following this logic, if I asked you how good all other drivers are compared with you (thus making other drivers the "target" of the comparison and you the benchmark), then this ought to reduce the bias you'd show towards yourself.

...A new study has tried to get to the bottom of what causes the "above average effect" by pitching these three explanations against each other. Zlatan Krizan and Jerry Suls Dozens asked dozens of undergraduates to list a group of friends or acquaintances, to take one member of that group and then compare that individual with the rest of the group on some attribute - say, generosity.

Of the three factors, our difficulty in seeing the quality of a group, relative to the quality of an individual, seems to be the primary source of bias in the ranking. 

Fortunately, I am better at avoiding that bias than are my readers.

Will's theorem

(a) energy is not scarce; the historically most efficient sources (oil, coal, etc.) are;

(b) a well-functioning price system will shift energy consumption to (cleaner) alternative energy sources as prices for historical extracted sources of energy rise;

(c) the initial high price of alternative energy will temporarily slow growth, but competition and technological progress will eventually push prices below the historical trend and even asymptotically approach zero, increasing average rates of growth;

(d) environmental quality is a global public good, but;

(e) this is most likely to be secured as a consequence of growth — as a consequence of the technological innovation that both creates and is created by growth — together with the rising scarcity and prices of the most environmentally degrading energy sources.

So,

(f) there are no meaningful limits to growth from either the scarcity of energy, or from negative environmental externalities from economic production, since in the medium run, those externalities are positive.

Here is the link.  I'm willing to buy that theorem with reasonably high probability.  What worries me is that first sentence: "energy is not scarce" -- it also could have been written "destructive energy is not scarce."  A world where we solve our energy and environmental problems is also a world where small groups or lone individuals have great power to destroy.

In Cleveland I posed a variant of the following question: let's say that you can blow up the world if a) you can exceed 1550 on your two main SATs, b) you are willing to spend $50,000, and c) you sincerely wish for world destruction for one month straight.

How long would the world last?

We may someday envy the problems we have now.

Portrait of David Galenson

Ask David Galenson to name the single greatest work of art from the 20th century, and he unhesitatingly answers “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” a 1907 painting by Picasso.

He can then tell you with certainty Nos. 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on, as well.

...His statistical approach has led to what he says is a radically new interpretation of 20th-century art, one he is certain art historians will hate. It is based in part on how frequently an illustration of a work appears in textbooks.

Here is the full profile.  Here are previous MR posts on David Galenson.  Here is Galenson's home page.

Ramsey Rules

...the numbers reflect is a situation I've heard is fairly common: in the College of Business & Economics, the 26 full professors' listed salaries have a median of $86,155; the 15 assistant professors' listed salaries have a median of $86,802. One of the assistant professors has a reported salary higher than any of the full professors. Another assistant professor has a reported salary higher than all but one of the full professors.

That's for the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater; it's not true for the University of Michigan or for that matter Harvard.

The blind men and the elephant?

Calomiris, Longhofer, and Miles report:

We conclude that declines in house prices are highly likely to remain small. Our analysis reveals, unsurprisingly, that foreclosures and home prices have negative effects on each other over time, but this does not imply a vicious cycle of collapsing prices. Our models predict that as foreclosures continue to climb in many states, house prices will remain flat or decline in those states -- but will not collapse.

..the effect of foreclosure shocks on house prices is small. Furthermore, other fundamental factors (such as employment growth and a slowing of the growth of the housing supply over the past year and a half) will cushion the impact of foreclosures.

...Even under an extreme worst-case scenario for foreclosures...U.S. house prices just aren't going to fall by very much in the next two years. In our worst-case scenario, the average cumulative decline is about 5 percent, and only 12 states experience declines greater than 6 percent by the end of 2009.

There is more at the link, including a claim that the Case-Shiller index is unrepresentative.  Here's another report, which does not literally contradict the first:

The percentage of mortgages in arrears in the category of loans one rung above subprime, so-called alternative-A mortgages, quadrupled to 12 percent in April from a year earlier. Delinquencies among prime loans, which account for most of the $12 trillion market, doubled to 2.7 percent in that time.

In other words, you can be an optimist about agency bail-outs, and a pessimist about the financial pain that many Americans will suffer.

Cleveland

Joshua Hall asked me why the people who research economics of sports tend to be so free market in their orientation (do they love competition and measurement?  I still don't have a good answer; any takers?).  Sarah Skwire (a LibraryThing fan) and I debated who had geekier taste in popular culture; it remains a stand-off to be settled upon a future meeting.  Paul Cantor promoted his theory that Dante was a heretic and possibly a follower of Averroes; I wondered why Christ isn't prominent in Paradiso and why isn't Saladin of all people in the Inferno?  Medieval Sufi poetry, and the voyage of discovery toward God, is all over his work.  There was a contrast between commercial society in Deadwood vs. Mad Men (I prefer the latter).  The very charming Rachel Lomasky and I discussed which is more beautiful: natural logs or the fact that the square root of two is an irrational number?  I wondered whether a good conference could be organized on "Liberty and Computation."  And there is eugenics all over both Dreiser and Norris.  The buildings in downtown remain superb, as does the art museum.

That's what's so good about Liberty Fund conferences.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dies at 89

Here is one obituary.  He did not in every way favor liberty, but he did more for liberty than almost any other person of the late 20th century.  I find First Circle and Cancer Ward to be his best fiction, although they are not his most widely read works.

That said, I don't favor nationalizing his funeral, as that would give the impression that Russia is now a free country.

Here is a piece on the economics of Solzhenitsyn, by the excellent Cecil Bohanon; Cecil was at the Liberty Fund conference with me.

Addendum: Read Bryan Caplan: "But if any writer can make future generations of Russians look on the Soviet era with the horror it deserves, it's the man who stared down the Soviet Union at the height of its power - and outlived it by 17 years."

Sentence of the Day

And for someone so hostile to speculation, Phillips sure engages in a lot of it.

Daniel Gross reviewing Kevin Phillips' new book, Bad Money.

Sometimes I favor nationalization

There is talk of a state funeral for Margaret Thatcher, for when that sad day comes.

Not everyone agrees:

"Thatcher should only be allowed a state funeral if the contract is put out to compulsory competitive tender and awarded to the lowest bidder. Any offers?" was one of the more polite responses from readers.

Theory of Moral Sentiments, standing on one foot

Will Wilkinson cuts through the book's odd organization:

To be happy is to be loved and praised. Also, to be happy is stoic indifference to love and praise. The love of high relative standing is based on misery-making self-deception. And this self-deception turns the wheels of industry, which produces wealth, and leaves even those of low relative position in a good absolute position. Which is all you really need to be happy! That is, as long as you are stoically indifferent to love and praise, to relative position. Which, really, none of us are, because, OMG, we really really want other people to think highly of us. And, hey, again, that’s a pretty good thing when you think about it, otherwise none of us would be self-deceived enough to do all the crazy hard work that creates the wealth that leaves us all in a good absolute material position. So, you personally should probably worry about becoming actually praiseworthy, instead of just seeking to receive praise, because you’ll be happier if you deserve it, whether or not you get it. Unless everyone is doing this. In which case we’ll all just be poor, which isn’t good at all.

You'll find the other foot at the link.  The book is arguably a comic tragedy and you could write a third foot about the role of fortune in the argument.  Will is maybe reading a bit backwards from Wealth of Nations, but for a Platonist (I'm not saying Will is one) this should be allowed.