Justifiable Points of View

One thing I find quite frustrating and disappointing is how often people hold and cling to views that they can hardly justify. Consider:

I find that most people hold views in the bottom half of the grid with a disturbing fraction in the lower left (unwilling/strong). While they typically don't dispute the characterization of a view being strongly held, they adamantly defy the accusation they are unwilling to think hard about it. 

There are several biases at work here I'm sure. First, I think people are averse to saying their beliefs are weakly held. To many this is tantamount to admitting that they shouldn't be taken seriously. Second, admitting that one is unwilling to think hard sounds like admitting dumbness--rarely, though occasionally, a winning attribute.

Although I characterize the upper right position (willing/weak) as "completely justified", this does not imply that this is the optimal position. Rather I think people should strive for the upper left (willing/strong) but this striving should always be working to push them back towards the right as new information and arguments are revealed. 

Further, we simply don't have the opportunity to actually think hard about most things. Many are out of reach for our limited comprehension as well as our limited resources--namely time. Interestingly, this is one of the first places a lower left person will look for a defense. To wit: "While it would be great to sit around and reconsider what I have come to understand as true, who has time for that?" The second refuge is to dispute that thinking hard is necessary. To wit: "Those theoretical points are interesting, but here is what everyone knows to be true...". Both of these are simply argument from dismissiveness. "Pay no attention to the great arguments and evidence behind the curtain!"

Thinking like this is one reason I cannot take you seriously.

Consider also how this plays into the religion of voting. The moral duty to vote is a weakly justified concept. 

List of Ambivalence

 Partial list of things I am ambivalent about:

• Chick-fil-e’s Sunday Policy -- I am disappointed from the point of view as a customer; I am very much in support of their ability to choose to do this and I am impressed by the choice.
• The Trump Presidency -- not Trump himself, who I find quite objectionable. There are just some things to like and some things to very much dislike. I had the same appraisal of Obama, Bush, Clinton, . . . 
• Deplatforming by social media, other tech companies, and financial processing firms/networks -- It is certainly within their rights in almost all cases, but I am fairly sure it is not good ethically or pragmatically in all but the most isolated cases.
• Hunting -- I am not sure it is always morally objectionable, but it is often enough. 
• The National Anthem before sporting events -- Notice how we don’t see this practiced at high brow events like the philharmonic, etc.
• Separating activities, clubs, etc. by boys and girls and by men and women (e.g., Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Men’s Grill, Lady’s Auxillary, etc.) -- Is this socially healthy? Is it logical? I think in some cases it certainly is, but there is a slippery slope. 
• Roundabouts (aka, circle, traffic circle, road circle, rotary, rotunda, and island) -- These are unfairly criticized in many cases, but they are also irresponsibly used and often inappropriately built.

The Electoral College by Private Land Mass

One of the ways voting used to be limited was property ownership. Specifically, there were property qualifications where only property owners with sufficient holdings (along with other qualifiers like race and sex--i.e., white males) could vote. 

This got me thinking: what if the U.S. Constitution's provisions for the composition of the House of Representatives and thus that portion of the Electoral College had been designed around private land ownership rather than population?

Sooo.... I created a model for how that might look today given the amount of private land ownership by state. Now, this would have created the strong incentive to maximize private land ownership resulting in a much different picture than that below. But working with the lay of the land today, the crazy result would obviously be a huge boon to large western states and residents in them. Notice how Alaska doesn’t get a big lift and Nevada actually shrinks as a result of how much of each state is owned by the government. 

To further the thought experiment, I applied Eli Dourado's election model to see how the current Presidential election might be affected. Spoiler alert: This looks very good for Republicans.

This is a rough model—so I very well may have made mistakes. (Sources are in the linked spreadsheet.)

Tax Policy as Explained by DuckTales

 

It should be no surprise that in this presidential election we yet again hear nothing but nonsense regarding tax policy from those seeking office. Among the many principles being ignored are:

• You cannot tax wealth more than once--if you can even tax it the one time given tax avoidance and evasion opportunities and incentives.
• You cannot lower taxes and increase government spending--government spending is taxation (today through taxes or tomorrow through debt).
• You cannot tax without discouraging that which you tax--there is no tax free lunch.
• You cannot tax income--it may look like you are taxing income, but you are actually taxing consumption. On this point we have DuckTales and the hero Scrooge McDuck as the perfect illustration.

If you try to tax Scrooge McDuck, you will be unsuccessful. He is tax proof. You are ultimately taxing Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and they are not being taxed correctly in this scheme. You are taxing the wealth creator dissuading him from creating more wealth and at the same time not discouraging the wealth/resource destroyers.

Uncle Scrooge McDuck is the "wealthiest duck in the world". Hence, he is an obvious foil for those who despair at the thought of billionaires. But Scrooge McDuck should be considered a saint to those who truly wish the best for all the other ducks of the world. For he is the ultimate giver. 

He creates vast wealth through his many businesses, but he uses very little of it. In fact his number one entertainment is simply swimming through his money and treasure which he keeps in a giant money bin. So in exchange for creating wealth he takes basically only money (claims on resources) rather than resources himself. Outside of funding his adventures for more wealth, he lives a quite miserly life. Say what you will about that choice, it is consequentially a very good one for the rest of the ducks in his world. 

Who really pays taxes? 

Taxes are a method of the financing of government uses of resources. In order for a tax to be paid, it must be the case that someone, somewhere, sometime not use a resource so that government can use that resource. Therefore, the payer of a tax is ultimately the entity that must forego the use of a resource. It is decidedly not the creator of the resource, per se. 

Who should we want to pay taxes? What should we tax and why should we tax it? 

I always argue we should tax resource use rather than resource creation and do so as efficiently as possible. We should tax if the use of the taxed resource is better and necessarily done through government rather than private entities. If that seems like a high hurdle, it's because it is.

Attempts to tax Scrooge McDuck are bad faith and poor logic.

What Explains Country Variation in COVID Deaths?

I see a lot of vague or implied speculation on why there are such large differences in COVID-19 death rates (et al.) among various countries and regions. But many of these have internal tensions once we think a little deeply about the arguments being hinted at. Biases are leading to a lot of lies of omission if not just outright bad reasoning.

Why is Sweden different than Finland? What explains Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea versus France, Italy, and Spain? Germany versus Belgium? USA NE versus Texas versus Florida versus USA Midwest?

Here is a partial list of the usual and some unusual suspects:

• General health in the population
• Partial immunity including from prior coronavirus exposures
• Climate including ability to comfortably be outdoors and in open-air environments (definitely relative to when the virus struck)
• Prior and continued use of various drugs and treatments
• Proportion of at-risk people especially elderly
• Quality of procedures for protecting the vulnerable
• Quality of testing
• Quality of tracing
• Population density (within cities and otherwise relative to where people actually live; e.g., excluding most of Canada when measuring for Canada)
• Government NPIs including lockdowns and other policies but not test and/or trace
• Degree of movement within and among various communities (city to city, within a city, cross sociodemographic, in and out of country, et al.)
• Strain(s) of C-19 virus affecting country and timing of the infection

I suspect that the error term in any formal analysis might prove to contain all the variation. Remember, "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist."

The Forrest Gump Diet: A few simple rules for a better diet

Most dieting plans are nonsense. And most dieting is not about losing weight--it is about signaling that one would like to lose weight, is involved in a struggle, and would like sympathy. If people really wanted to lose weight, they would. 

Diets come in a thousand varieties, but it is clear that while each might work for a while for some people, they fail (or people fail them) as often as they work. That we know so very little about this highly desired realm of knowledge, it is a big economic paradox. My guess is that it is highly dependent on individual circumstances (extreme heterogeneity) and these are both governed by external environmental factors including cultural influences as well as genetic factors. As such, one size fits more than one might not be true. And yet I do think some guiding principles can be derived that can greatly help us on our journey:

1. Eat when you are hungry. (Note that this pushes back against intermittent fasting.) 
2. Eat slower. You are not in a speed contest. 
3. Eat less. You are not in a volume contest. This can most easily be achieved by simply not ever completely finishing what you have been served.
4. Eat less of the things that you want to eat. It is very likely that your desire is to eat more of the things that are not as good for you.
5. Eat more of the things that are not as desirable to you. This is the converse of the prior point.
6. Eat a greater variety. This likely helps with the gut microbiome, and it makes life more interesting. That said, some things may just not be right for your body, and that is fine.
7. Eat less processed foods and prepackaged foods. This one helps with #s 2, 3, and 4 by making food less convenient especially food that is generally nutritionally poorer for you.
8. Look to make good choices at the margin, but diet over weeks and months not hours and days. No one ever starved to death by missing a single meal, and no one ever became obese by indulging oneself one time. 
• The first key is to avoid temptation by avoiding bad situations. 
• The second key is to routinely seek to make a slightly better choice at each opportunity. 
• The final key is to be able to look back over weeks and months to see if you have generally been making good choices and improving choices. While this might entail the need to keep a journal, which is contrary to the spirit of this list of keeping things simple, evaluations over longer periods of time are essential to understanding if you’re making progress.

P.S. This is the diet that worked for me. I lost 20 pounds and it definitely improved some aspects of my health. Had I wanted to lose another 20 pounds, I would more devoutly follow it, but I want other things in life more. At least I'm honest with myself.

Oh, you left out a bunch of stuff.

The quick versus the dead. And a more complete review.

Imagine various conversations at a board of directors meeting of a major corporation. For example: Trying to save money by paying women less, trying to please customers by not hiring blacks, contemplating intellectual-property theft, discussing a new found way they can literally defraud customers, etc. These would all obviously be wrong and would not be within the scope of fiduciary duty or any reasonable ethical framework. I put cronyism in the same category. Contemplating how to get special favor and rent seeking from the government is unethical.

I've been thinking about this post for some time. It started five years ago reading this article.

Recently there have been several things that have me thinking on this again--making this as fine a time as ever to actually complete this post. 

Michael Munger has been thinking about this for some time. This EconTalk is a great discussion with him laying out the problem. And this more recent appearance on Free Thoughts is great as well. Still another discussion highlighting the nuances and difficulty of this topic is with Rebecca Henderson recently on EconTalk. 

The question that I think doesn't get asked enough is: At what point does activity like developing and utilizing business relationships, networking, and advocacy cross over to be cronyism? It is difficult to disentangle behavior and results between these two worlds. In fact people participating in the activity during or after the fact would find it quite challenging even if they could put their natural bias to the side--the bias to believe they were acting in good faith and to good ends using good information and sound logic. 

Use of other people's money is a big key, but it isn't necessarily a smoking gun. For example, Facebook uses cash (shareholder funds) to hire lobbyists to advocate for A) onerous regulations for social media companies or B) a continuation of the protections it enjoys under Section 230 of the CDA. The first case (A) is likely a blatant attempt to use the power of government to prevent startup competitors from challenging their market position. The second case (B) is likely a reasonably good protection of their shareholder's and other stakeholder's interests as well as actually a good protection of free speech and enabling force for social media in general. 

Other people's money can come not just from taxpayers and owners (shareholders in public companies most commonly but not exclusively) but from employees as well. Imagine employees of Facebook being asked to participate in a letter writing campaign to Congress. 

It is not so simple to assume that a company can or should endeavor to right the wrongs of society. Not everyone sees the problem the same way. And not everyone will agree on the means even when they agree on the side to take in the cause. I higher a business to do what they do best--make shoes, install tires, store my money, serve me food, etc. I will do my own charitable giving, thank you very much. This is one of many reasons why Friedman was right. 

How do we get out of this downward spiral? I don't believe it is easy. In fact it is quite challenging. Education and communication are likely keys. Transparency helps as well. But as long as government is both powerful and trusted, these problems will persist. 

Related: 

Just how captured is our economy?

Rent seeking: who is to blame?