Marginal Revolution

Different rooftops

As the system gets gamed, the costs will be much, much higher than the CBO is estimating.

Arnold Kling explains his words in more detail.  Elsewhere:

If you think of the social cost of this bill it's well below $900 billion. If we could collect in tax revenues all the dollars in savings and new wages that people will get because of this bill, it would bring the cost well below $900 billion.

Jonathan Gruber explains his words in more detail.

Innumeracy can get you killed

"Statistically, it is very dangerous, but I have lived here a long time and I don't feel like I'm in any danger."

That is Justin Fenton, the Baltimore Sun's crime correspondent.

The quote comes from a longer article by a British reporter who switched places with his Baltimore counterpart because he wanted to see whether The Wire was accurate.  It is. 

Assorted links

1. Undercover economist eats with Naked Chef.

2. Genetics and success, from Atlantic Monthly.

3. List of hot people in Tokyo.

4. Terse answers from Uwe Tellkamp.  I guess he is tired from having written an almost 1000-page book.  I really liked this one.

5. Summary of recent inequality trends.

6. When do Power Laws hold?

Markets in everything: 8 year old child custody for two Damien Hirsts edition

Kapernekas, a 49-year-old New York art dealer filed a suit in federal court in Manhattan claiming an interest in the two Hirsts, which have been valued at an estimated $47.6 million, court documents show. The custody suit, involving their 8-year- old daughter, was being heard in New York County Family Court.

Kapernekas has agreed to drop the federal suit and claims on the Hirsts in exchange for: custody of their daughter (Brandhorst gets visitation and vacation rights); a one-time payment of $100,000; a $500,000 trust for the daughter’s education; a loft on Wooster Street in Manhattan’s Soho district valued at about $5 million to be held in the daughter’s name as sole owner; $5,000 a month in child support; and $640,000 to cover Kapernekas’s legal expenses, according to Kapernekas.

The full story is here and the pointer is from Felix Salmon.  Felix writes:

Need I add that one of the Hirsts is entitled “In this terrible moment we are victims clinging helplessly to an environment that refuses to acknowledge the soul”?

Range voting

A few readers asked me to discuss range voting.  Wikipedia defines it as following:

Range voting (also called ratings summation, average voting, cardinal ratings, score voting, 0–99 voting, or the score system or point system) is a voting system for one-seat elections under which voters score each candidate, the scores are added up, and the candidate with the highest score wins. Range voting was used in all public elections in Ancient Sparta in the form of measuring how loud the crowd shouted for different candidates.^[1] Approval voting can be considered to be range voting with only 2 levels (approved (1) and disapproved (0)).

The main question to get out of your head is whether or not range voting satisfies Arrow's Impossibility Theorem.  (In fact it doesn't, most forms of range voting violate the independence of irrelevant alternatives, but don't worry about that!).  There's no major reason why a democratic system should follow all of Arrow's axioms as defined across universal domain, which means you have to rule out the very possibility of paradoxes.  Can anyone do that?  No, not even when you're deciding which book to read next.  (But should you stop reading?  No.)  We do, however, care if the system can:

1. Deliver decent economic growth and an acceptable level of civil liberties.

2. Build consensus and legitimacy going forward, and

3. Toss out the truly bad politicians.

Ideally, we'd even like:

4. The democratic process itself educates people, raises the level of discourse, and makes for a better society.

On those counts, it is not clear what advantage range voting brings over either a two-party winner-take-all system or some form of proportional representation.  Do we really need to count the preference intensity of voters?  That could sooner be harmful in extreme situations.  Do we really need to teach voters complicated aggregation systems?  The relatively well-educated Germans used a "vote twice but ultimately only the party vote counts" form of PR and for decades most of them never understood it and now they are changing it, finally.

Most countries don't use range voting.  Ireland and Tasmania have had some experience with the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system.  What happens is that a bunch of candidates run for each post, party identification is weak, and reps emphasize constituency service.  That's probably the major dominant effect, namely that most systems of range voting weaken political parties.

The bottom line: Range voting is a solution in search of a problem.  The main problems with democracy include poorly informed, irrational, and short-term voters and politicians.  Range voting doesn't cure any of those and arguably by weakening party affiliation it makes some of them worse.

What I've been reading

1. Momofuku, by David Chang and Peter Meehan.  This Nelson/Winter treatise on industrial organization teaches you the evolution of recipes and restaurants and (most of all) the mistakes made along the way.  Smokiness is an important concept in Japanese food, pickling and fermentation are underrated cooking techniques, a cook can learn from a heart surgeon, people will pay $80 for a ribeye steak without fancy decor, and you can cook semi-safe sous vide at home (suck the air out with a straw).  Recommended.

2. Appetite City: A Culinary History of New York, by William Grimes.  A book like this has to have something interesting and indeed this one does.  There is an excellent chapter on how oysters once were "New York City food," akin to lobster in Maine or crab in Maryland.  No more.  The rest of the book remains oddly distant from the eating experiences of real people and overall I was disappointed.

3. Googled: The End of the World as We Know It, by Ken Auletta.  In the abstract this is quite a good book and if someone woke up from a time capsule from 1969 you would start him with this.  Too much of it was familiar to me, though.

4. Timothy Egan, Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America.  Impeccably written and well-researched, but it bored me.  Spellbinding portraits of characters, etc. Not enough of a point and of course the fire was not what saved America.  Many people like it, though, so don't let me put you off.

5. The Lives of the Brain: Human Evolution and the Organ of Mind, by John S. Allen.  A very good Belknap Press introduction to recent research on cognition, especially cognition and language.  An antidote to many things you have read in Pinker.  It's a bit of a "tweener" book: it doesn't take you "by the hand" through the results but it also doesn't assume that you are a research scientist.  It was written at a good level for me, but some readers may wish for more explanation of the results.