I want to go to there.

This past week the sitcom "30 Rock" aired its final episode. I believe I saw every one. I'd rank it on my favorite list in the top 50 but not the top 10. I was a fan. Some thoughts:

• Though I'm sorry to see it go, it had run its course. It is good to see a show end in stride rather than jump the shark. And of course some jump the shark, get up, and jump the shark again. Another show still on the air that comes to mind is "How I Met Your Mother". HIMYM is dangerously close to getting on a surfboard. It is also a show in my top 50 if not in my top 10. It definitely has had top 10 moments as did "30 Rock". Put in that same category "The Office". I still like it and watch it, but I believe the shark may have been jumped some time around the departure of Michael Scott.
• While most of the shows I like tend to have multiple very good characters that nearly stand on their own, I felt like this show was dominated by two: Liz Lemon played by Tina Fey and Jack Donaghy played by Alec Baldwin. These characters were brilliant. Their lines were consistently laugh-out-loud funny and clever and their delivery was tremendous--not surprising given the quality of those actors. Tracy Morgan's character Tracy Jordan, Jane Krakowski's character Jenna Maroney, and Jack McBrayer's character Kenneth Parcell were at a few times awesome but at most times only good. Probably the design of the show to have them and so many others as extreme caricatures limited their reach. 
• The extreme caricatures was fine for most characters, but I found it problematic in one respect. I thought that Jack Donaghy versus Liz Lemon was a bit of unequal caricatures. Jack was generally all knowing and a step ahead, but he was portrayed in a way that was less charitable to his supposed political group, rich Republicans, than Liz's supposed political group, progressive Democrats. Of course, Alec Baldwin and Tina Fey are both rich Democrats. Perhaps the unbalanced approach was intentional. If so, I think it was unwarranted. But my hypothesis is this treatment where a more disdainful side comes out in one character is what I would expect if I asked a person not well versed in opposing viewpoints to create a satirical portrayal of two politically opposed characters. For a more thoughtful approach, I point to "Parks and Recreation" where the libertarian Ron Swanson is equally shown against the progressive Leslie Knope. These characters are truer to their represented group and the comedy and satirical exaggeration does not show contempt for either's group.
• I was always impressed by how far they could go on the show toward satirizing if not denigrating GE and NBC. This was to the parent company and the network's extreme credit to allow such self-deprecating comedy. I believe FOX gets credit for breaking this barrier back in the early days of "The Simpsons".

Expect more on this topic of TV shows. It seems that many of my shows are ending and several are getting up there in age, but I have started very few in the past few seasons and none in the current season going back to the fall. Perhaps I will find more time to read . . . and blog.

Some crazy scheme in order to make a profit

I want to boost traffic on this site. I know incentives work. Here is the plan:

• I want all my readers to forward links to this blog.
• To incentivize you please, inform everyone you send a link that they owe you $1. 
• Also, inform them that they too are entitled to $1 for every link they send owed by the recipient of the link. 
• It does not matter if the recipient has already received a link. In fact, that is an important part of building this network and realizing the fringe benefits.

This should create a fairly efficient Ponzi-like scheme by taking out the middle man. Based on my cursory reading of Keynesian economics, it should also boost 2013 GDP by at least 10% and bring us full employment in short order. From my cursory reading of rational expectations, just by publishing this post all the benefits should arise. From my cursory reading of monetarism, all U.S. dollar-based economies will soon be the next Zimbabwe.

I say shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame, shame on you

A while back a Scott Sumner post titled American Shadows got me thinking about current practices, policies, and conditions in our society today that will horrify future generations. I have been planning on doing a post on it along with a sister post about current practices, policies, and conditions that will make future generations laugh, roll their eyes, and shake their heads. This week Sumner had another post along the same theme re-inspiring me. I have decided to combine the posts and will add to these lists as new items occur to me.

I grant that a case can be made for an item to be included on the opposing list or both lists. To the extent that this is a prediction (my primary goal), these are all arguable. To the extent that this is a personal commentary passing judgment on our society (a secondary goal), these are all again arguable, but for different reasons.

These are in no particular order, and I am concerned here with western society in general and the United States in particular. Considering the entire world would be a much, MUCH longer list.

Current practices, policies, and conditions in our society today that will horrify future generations:

• Immigration restrictions
• Trade policies
• Drug laws and enforcement tactics
• Treatment of homosexuals and homosexuality
• Methods of the FDA, et al. 
• Abortion as birth control
• Pain treatment and management intolerance and limitations
• Law and mores that have kept "amateur" athletes less than fully compensated (the case for this item being on this list is made when viewed in light of injuries and opportunity costs (two separate issues) that compound into life-long set backs). On this front there was a step toward justice today.
• Updated: Our tolerance for torture and other harsh treatments including prolonged, indefinite detention.

Current practices, policies, and conditions that will make future generations laugh, roll their eyes, and shake their heads:

• Government-monopolized postal delivery
• Government-run schooling
• Gambling restrictions
• Liquor laws
• Blue laws in general
• Tax policy (could easily warrant a spot on the first list)
• Regulations that aid existing businesses or other powerful interests
• Our views on many facets of science:
• Genetic alteration of plants and food
• Genetic testing and alterations in humans
• Cloning
• Stem cell research
• Our fears and understanding of climate change
• Updated: The silly ways in which we attempt to be good stewards of the environment such as obsessing about carbon footprints and shallow rationing devices to attain some mythical "sustainability" while ignoring the price system.
• Updated: Our fears of robots, machines, automation, AI, et al. This quote from a recent Econtalk with Kevin Kelly fits: "Your calculator is smarter than you right now in arithmetic. It doesn't freak you out just because it's a different kind of intelligence." 

Additions to come I'm sure . . .

I'll take Intellectual Reconciliation for $1000, Alex.

A reader sent me this screenshot of a Ron Paul Facebook post from today:

This is one of the few areas where Ron Paul and I part ways. I'm not sure relative to me if he is too pessimistic about the power of the market to overcome government failure or if I am too optimistic about the limits of government as a destructive force. Possibly some combination is the truth. We are both definitely believers in the market as a force of good and the government as a force of destruction (beyond extremely limited government). For the long-term, however, I would tend to agree with his take presuming no significant changes to the current trajectory of government growth and power. The unsustainability of the current path would imply downward corrections.

I am certainly reading between the lines on his post and perhaps making some errors when doing so.

Highly linkable

Bryan Caplan discusses Michael Huemer's new book, The Problem of Political Authority. I plan to read it soon.

Will the new drug Modafinil reduce wages if it succeeds in reducing the need for sleep? Garrett Jones has a good answer.

I'm a bit late on getting to this one, but it is tremendous. John Cochrane delivers a devastating critique of the New York Times' understanding of taxes--and perhaps this applies to progressives in general.

Alex Tabarrok shows how Big Cable is probably NOT cross subsidizing from non-sports fans to sports fans.

It's not easy being an economist. The public doesn't know what an economist can know/should know and what an economist can't know/shouldn't be expected to know.

Let's have a national garage sale this weekend and get rid of that pesky national debt. HT: MR.

Is a cooperative, capitalistic society a de facto partial realization of a socialistic ideal?

Other titles considered for this post:

• What's one man's treasure, is another man's rental.
• Something borrowed . . .

I've written about sharing before. I've also mentioned 3-D printing, which seems to have the promise of shifting cost curves down by several orders of magnitude. But we should consider an opposing force that rather than increasing the quantity of tools (capital goods) and toys (consumption goods) increases the productivity of existing tools and toys--the "share economy".

Megan McArdle writing in the Daily Beast points to a Forbes piece that reveals just prolific sharing may become with new technological advances. The company profiled is AirBnB, and it serves as a good proxy for the many companies and changes this sharing economy could bring. Like any paradigm shift this substantial, technology alone won't get us there; culture changes probably will need to play a role as well. Regardless, the potential implications seem tremendous.

For example, also writing in Forbes, Chunka Mui has a series on how Google's driverless car technology could have trillion dollar impacts relatively soon--creative destruction writ larger than we've seen it in some time. If he is even partially correct, this will be a change to the auto industry (and many other industries as well) very comparable to what the advent of the auto industry did to buggy whips (and horse-drawn carriages, of course). 

Now to relate this to the chosen title for this post. Part of the socialist ideal is a society where ownership does not preclude use or sharing. If my neighbor has a tool, I too can have a tool if I need one. Part of the problem for realizing the socialist ideal is that ownership is fairly essential for orderly allocation of resources. It is a practically necessary condition and definitely a sufficient condition for solving the Calculation Problem-assuming a price system evolves out of ownership. Capitalism, perhaps more appropriately free markets, has always been the best means of achieving the goals of more and more for everyone and continually optimizing resource allocation. Here again we see a major step toward realizing those goals. 

The debate between socialism and capitalism is very much mostly not an argument about desirable ends but rather an argument about practical (largely) and principled (less so) means. Capitalism has always been saying, "I have some, and you can have some too." Socialism on the other hand has always been saying, "I ain't got nothing, but you can always have half!"

If I Were a Rich Man . . .

Some estimates say that John D. Rockefeller was the richest American ever putting his wealth at the equivalent of ~$215 billion today*. There are a number of problems, though, with this simple process of taking a historic price and adjusting it forward by the inflation rate. Extrapolating a prior figure for inflation makes the extrapolation sensitive to the quality of the inflation estimate. That sensitivity grows and compounds as the time span grows. Additionally, other factors become very important in long spans while they are non-factors in small spans. Quality is one of these factors, and it matters a lot. This post will have a lot of lessons in how magnitude matters.  

I’ve been thinking about this post for a while since seeing a History Channel show about the wealthiest Americans in history. In yesterday's WSJ Don Boudreaux and Mark Perry have a great article on The Myth of Middle Class Stagnation, which inspired me to finalize this post. This is a must read piece that I can’t recommend enough. In it they give several examples of how problematic it is to simply take a historical price like average income and bring it up to the current through inflation adjustment for comparison to a similar figure today.

I would like to challenge the idea that John D. Rockefeller was the richest American ever. To do so I pose a question: Would I rather live today as I am, an upper-middle class father of three, or as Rockefeller in his day? Let’s think about this because it isn’t as easy as comparing my modest net worth (MUCH less than a small fraction of $1 billion) to his estimated at $215 billion today.

The most costly event in life is death. Let’s start with that. Life expectancy in the United States in the 1920s was about 55. At my birth it was about 72. Today it is about 78.

Perhaps the next most costly event for many of us is the potential of losing a child. Actually losing a child is the horrific realization of that cost. So let’s next look at infant and child mortality. For the U.S. in the 1920s & 30s both rates of death were about 6-8% (infant mortality covers children who die before one year of age; in this case child mortality covers children who die between age one and four inclusively). Today those mortality figures are about .6% for infants and about .1% for children aged 1-4. Those are remarkable reductions that are hard for us in this era to appreciate.

Another very costly event for a husband is maternal mortality (a mother’s death during childbirth). Here again we see stunning improvement. The rate was about .75% in 1920s & 30s. Today it is about .01% -- an improvement factor of 75 times.

Sources: 1, 2, 3.

Simply put when compared to today, living was more difficult and less likely in the early part of the 20^th century. All the kings horses and all the kings men could hardly nudge any improvement out of that harsh health reality. We may already have our answer, but let’s go on for good measure.

Let’s think about what I can do today as compared to what the wealthiest man of that era, Rockefeller, could do then including some of the inconveniences and limitations that he faced that I do not. Specifically consider:

• People I can communicate with. I can reach out to my family and friends virtually any time of day no matter where I am or where they are. I can connect and correspond with people I have never met but with whom I share some common interest. 
• Places I can go. I can travel at home and abroad generally more easily, more quickly, and in more ways. In fact, I can go places inaccessible even to him in his day. Even going to work, the car I ride in is better from seat warmers to safety.
• Conveniences I can expect at the places I can go. When I arrive at my destination, be it my office or a foreign tropical beach, I don't have to plan ahead nearly as much or spend nearly the resources to have many comforts and options to make my experience there quite enjoyable. 
• Food I can eat. My food options dwarf his. I eat in greater confidence about the safety and freshness while I enjoy cheap, abundant, and extremely various food and drink much of which is of a quality he would envy. 
• Entertainment I can enjoy. Music is incredibly better for me from the quality to the genre variety to accessibility. He could never see a television show or anything reasonably resembling a modern movie. His book options were quite limited relative to mine not to mention periodicals, research papers, blogs, and the like. I can see more theater in a few weeks than he could enjoy in years. Sports are other worldly today compared to what he could take in. 

I could go on and on from how I can engage in financial markets in ways he couldn't dream to how I can know things about the universe confusing and unknown in his day to how I can dress more comfortably than him to how . . . . In summary I can do most of what he could do even with his vast wealth, and my options tend to be deeper and richer. I take back what I said earlier--this is as easy as comparing my wealth to his. Mine is higher.

*To reach this figure I took the NY Times estimate from 2007 and similarly increased it by the recent CPI inflation rate bringing it up to 2013.

PS. I owe Billy Ray $1. He bet me that I couldn't get rich and put Rockefeller in the poor house at the same time.