Marginal Revolution

When No Means Yes

... Having voted against the administration's climate change bill on the record means that at least some of these House Democrats will be able to vote for what emerges from a House-Senate conference later in the year. Therefore, the chances of a climate bill being enacted this year is now much greater than it was 24 hours ago.

That's the ever-perceptive Stan Collender on the politics of the climate change bill.

The Powerpoints of Emily Glassberg Sands

Find them here and they are excellent.  One thing we learn is that women playwrights are more likely to write stories about other women.  Women playwrights are also more likely to write plays with fewer major characters (slide 19).  Outside evaluators are most likely to perceive the story's characters are less likable, if they believe a given script was written by a woman (slide 31).  They also judge the economic prospects of a script to be poorer (slide 32).  It is female artistic directors who have the harshest judgments of scripts submitted under female names (slide 34).  Women writing plays about other women have the toughest time (slide 36).  On Broadway, female-written shows are 18 percent more profitable than male-written shows yet they do not have longer running times (slides 44 and 45).

The original paper is here.  She'll be on The Colbert Show on July 2.

Hat tip goes to the indispensable Literary Saloon blog.

Assorted links

1. China theory of the day: The Chinese save so much to compete for mates.  Should I believe it?

2. Paying interest on reserves, and why it should be easy to disarm future inflationary pressures.  Do I believe it?  (Brad DeLong comments.)

3. Markets in everything: pirate hunting cruises; should I believe it?

4. Stores are cutting back on variety; I believe it.

5. Farrah Fawcett and Ayn Rand.

Trolley problems and experimental ethics

A second experiment developed this idea and showed further that an action is most morally condemnable when personal force and intention co-occur. Students judged as most morally unacceptable a situation in which Joe deliberately pushed a victim off a bridge so that he could reach a switch to save five others. By contrast, if the victim was knocked off the bridge accidentally so Joe could reach the switch, or if Joe killed him by diverting a trolley with a switch, then the students' moral judgements were not so harsh.

"Put simply, something special happens when intention and personal force co-occur," the researchers said. This prompts many further questions, such as what counts as personal force. "Must it be continuous (as in pushing), or may it be ballistic (as in throwing)?" the researchers asked. "Is pulling the same as pushing?"

Here is more.

Interview with Kevin Murphy

Via Mark Thoma, here is an interview with the ever-impressive Kevin Murphy.  One excerpt, on the topic of medical R&D:

What really does matter is the cost of treatment. If treatment costs are $10 trillion, the project has a negative net present value even if the research is free. With $2 trillion in treatment costs, the net gain from success is $3 trillion, so that we would get a good return even if the probability of success was one in 30. So when you think about research, it’s not the dollars you spend that matter—what matters is the cost of implementing the treatment that might be discovered. The downside to research is not failure, but unaffordable success.

I think the following message comes out of that exercise: Cost containment and health progress are complementary. That is, if we can control costs, that makes research a much more attractive option. That’s the most important lesson I learned from doing this work.

When you go to Washington and talk to people at NIH, what are they excited about? They’re excited about that $5 trillion number. They’re excited that, boy, we could do something that could generate tremendous value for people. We can cure disease and lengthen lives, both of which make people much better off. The work that Bob and I did quantifies that number; it says it’s huge, $5 trillion for that 10 percent reduction in cancer.

You walk across the street and talk to the guys who have to pay for it, and they’re terrified that people are going to come up with more new medical treatments that they’re somehow going to have to finance.

Is there any man who thinks more like an economist than does Kevin Murphy?  Maybe one:

Region: Does Gary Becker ever stop working?

Murphy: No. He never stops working. He’s a machine. He outworks everybody half his age.

The Netflix prize has been won

Details of the competition are here.  The winning team is here.  Background on the prize is here.  Previous MR coverage is here.

Bravo!  I should note that current "recommender" systems don't much help me make further selections.

I thank Jüri Saar for the pointer.

Pre-order Gretchen Rubin's new book

She writes:

Blatant self-promotion alert: If you’re thinking about buying my book, please consider pre-ordering it. A book gets a big boost from pre-orders, because that early support shows that people really are enthusiastic. It’s early,..I’ve ordered my copy! And that made me very happy.

The new link to Gretchen's book is here.  Seth Roberts would say that her subtitle leaves out the notion of watching faces early in the morning.

Assorted links

1. Markets in everything: manage your multiple girlfriends.

2. How we will conquer Canada by stealth.

3. Why isn't the stimulus stimulating?

4. Michael Jackson was an important force for racial integration.

5. What Waxman-Markey does for farmers.

New markets at Intrade.com

Here is the home page.  As I post this, Bernanke's reappointment (a good idea) is running at 70, Waxman-Markey is running at 50, and health care reform at 35, c'mon people get the volume on those contracts up.

What is transhumanism?

Kyle Munkittrick writes to me and sets out what it would mean for transhumanism to arrive or succeed:

...Transhumanism is definitely more of a philosophy than an objective, though it is a political philosophy like feminism or libertarianism. There are specific goals, like extending life span, creating true A.I., and animal uplift, and then broad ethical goals, like ending suffering.

If I had to come up with specific criteria, however, I'd suggest the following three:

1. Medical modifications that permanently alter or replace a function of the human body become prolific. LAZIK eye surgery, internal defibrillators, and prosthetic limbs are all examples. The key difference is that these modifications would either result in a return to initial quality (as in LAZIK) or enhance/augment the original condition. Landmark moment: When a runner with prosthetic cheetah blades competes in the traditional Olympics and wins a medal.

2. Our social understanding of aging loses the "virtue of necessity" aspect and society begins to treat aging as a disease. Concepts like "aging well" and "golden years" would be as counter-intuitive as describing someone with cancer or MS as "diseasing well." I have no idea what the consequences would be socially, but you can bet things like "mid-life crises" and "adult learning" would take on entirely new meanings or become meaningless. When we have a generation of people expected to live to 150, that'll be a good sign this is on the way to happening.

3. The recognition of an individual with citizenship and/or personhood and the criteria for that recognition would change dramatically from the status quo. Rights discourse would shift from who we include (i.e. should homosexual have marriage rights?) to a system flexible enough to easily bring in sentient non-humans. A good litmus test for flexibility is: how would we incorporate an intelligent alien race into our rights/ethics system?

Those are the three landmarks I'd look for when trying to answer that question...I'm a big fan of MR, so it prides me to see transhumanism as a topic you've enough interest in to mention.

Advocates, is that a good account?

I'm not a Luddite (at all) but I've never been taken by transhumanism as a systematic philosophy.  I'm more worried that we will fail at "humanism," namely the simple requirement that we treat other people decently.  It's worth asking whether the promotion of transhumanism makes us more or less likely to meet basic canons of decency and consideration.  I would be more likely to favor a transhumanism that made us painfully aware of our personal vulnerability in a way that would expand our circle of benevolence.  I worry that transhumanism can be used to cloak that vulnerability, assert its contingency, and instill a false sense of personal control or denial.

Was Michael Jackson a transhumanist (cut to 3:54)?