Marginal Revolution

*Superfreakonomics*, chapter five

Here is a link to the chapter which is causing all the controversy.  Out here in Edmonton I haven't been following the blog debates, although at every meal I am asked about carbon taxes and tar sands.  (By the way, I believe the Alberta strategy is to pay any forthcoming tax and be profitable enough to keep on producing fossil fuel energy.)  My view is to be skeptical of geo-engineering as a solution, for reasons outlined here.  In any case it's a question I'll be thinking more about.  Among the questions I need to think through more are how bad is it to control global temperature but keep the CO2 in the air, how much acidification of the oceans matters, how geo-engineering affects the variance of global climate, and what the long run looks like if the world becomes "addicted" to the eighteen-mile hose or whatever is used.  For a start on the current brouhaha, here is a link to Krugman and Levitt.  Mark Thoma offers up other links.

Addendum: This post seems to imply the chapter reproduction is not authorized, so I've taken down the link to the link.

Assorted links

1. Larry Lessig: Against transparency.

2. "Moscow will blast clouds from the sky this winter to save money on snow removal"...

3. Problems with Arab education.

4. Which books are they burning in North Carolina?  (Hint: it includes the Bible, and they're serving barbecued chicken.)

5. The hardest logic puzzle ever?

Canada quotations markets in everything?

Canada was sarcastically known as "the Irishman's Prize", and there was talk in 1763 of swapping it for the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe.

That is from James Belich's Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo World, 1783-1939.

The Rationalizer

In an update of the mood ring from the 1970s Philips has produced an EmoBracelet and EmoBowl recommended--so they say--for online stock traders to monitor their own emotional responses.

The Rationalizer system consists of two components - the EmoBracelet and the EmoBowl. The bracelet measures the arousal component of the user’s emotion through a galvanic skin response sensor. This arousal level is rendered as a dynamic light pattern on either the EmoBracelet itself or on the EmoBowl. The higher the arousal level, the more intense the dynamic light pattern becomes: the number of elements increases, the speed increases and the color shifts from a soft yellow, via orange, to a deep red.

Philips says the product is for analyzing your own emotions but note that the bowl could be halfway around the world!  Thus, I can see employers requiring real-time monitoring of employees, people on a date might monitor the responses of their partners and perhaps we should require politicians to wear these bracelets before every vote.

Engadget has more. Hat tip to Knowing and Making.

Insurance industry update, continued

President Obama mounted a frontal assault on the insurance industry on Saturday, accusing it of airing “deceptive and dishonest ads” to derail his health care legislation and threatening to strip the industry of its longstanding exemption from federal anti-trust laws.

Here is the longer story.

Facts about airline water

Fact 1:

In the United States, drinking water safety on airlines is jointly regulated by the EPA, Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). EPA regulates the public water systems that supply water to the airports and the drinking water once it is onboard the aircraft. FDA has jurisdiction over culinary water (e.g., ice) and the points where aircraft obtain water (e.g., pipes or tankers) at the airport. In addition, air carriers must have FAA-accepted operation and maintenance programs for all aircraft, this includes the potable water system. (EPA)

Fact 2:

...the news carried stories that the US EPA had determined that 15% of water on a sample of 327 aircraft flunked the total coliform standards and inspections showed that all aircraft were out of compliance with the national drinking water standards.

Rest assured, the EPA has crafted new rules to address the problem.

Argentina fact of the day

Argentina had 145 psychologists per 100,000 residents in a 2008 study by researchers Modesto Alonso and Paula Gago. That's far more than second-place Denmark, with 85, or ninth-place U.S. with 31, in a 2005 study by the World Health Organization.

The article is here and I thank Daniel Lippman for the pointer.

Higgs on Leviathan

There are excellent writers and there are excellent economists and in that intersection there are none better than Bob Higgs:

Until more people come to a more realistic, fact-based understanding of the government and the economy, little hope exists of tearing them away from their quasi-religious attachment to a government they view with misplaced reverence and unrealistic hopes. Lacking a true religious faith yet craving one, many Americans have turned to the state as a substitute god, endowed with the divine omnipotence required to shower the public with something for nothing in every department – free health care, free retirement security, free protection from hazardous consumer products and workplace accidents, free protection from the Islamic maniacs the U.S. government stirs up with its misadventures in the Muslim world, and so forth. If you take the government to be Santa Claus, you naturally want every day to be Christmas; and the bigger the Santa, the bigger his sack of goodies.

Assorted links

1. Can complex financial assets be booby-trapped?

2. Jon Chait makes the case against prizes.

3. Bruce Bartlett opposes cutting the payroll tax.

4. Which countries produce the most beef? (put the cursor on the balloons)

5. Metaphors: people mostly describe their lives in terms of a "journey"; is this just our tendency to impose false or misleading narrative on events?  Poorer people, however, are more likely than richer people to describe their lives as a "battle."

6. John Nye on inequality and positional goods (read the whole symposium).

Obama's bribe for seniors

$250 for each senior or $13 billion in total.  It's bad precedent to go around a COLA calculation, even on a one-time basis, but you can construct a partial defense of the policy (here is Matt's semi-defense).  Think of it as a helicopter drop of money, a'la Scott Sumner.  If the helicopter drop substitutes for (part of) a second fiscal stimulus, that's a net gain.  The drop of money stimulates aggregate demand, limits deflationary pressures, and, by the way, you're giving it to a lot of people who are not stuck in a liquidity trap.  They'd love to buy more stuff in The Dollar Store.

How will the expenditure be financed?  Obama was vague on that, but as usual the Fed moves both first and last in the monetary policy game.  All Obama has to do is make the second stimulus $13 billion less than it otherwise would have been, wink and nod to Ben B., and it is all (or mostly) for the better.