Lately I’ve been reading Tim Harford’s The Logic of Life: The Rational Economics of an Irrational World. It’s a bit glib in places, and its reference style is abysmal (not only do you have to put up with endnotes rather than vastly-superior footnotes, but there’s no indication in the text of when a reference is being cited). Nevertheless, it’s an eminently readable and surprisingly entertaining introduction to rational choice theory applied to stuff other than (say) investment markets or games of poker. Turns out that H. sapiens sapiens are indeed fairly rational creatures, in aggregate if not in particular, and that common examples of endemic idiocy (politics, say) turn out to be well-explained when counterintuitive (and often, in retrospect, facepalmingly obvious) incentives are brought to light.
Incentives: I keep using that word. Harford uses it to define a rational agent:
Rational people respond to incentives: When it becomes more costly to do something, they will tend to do it less; when it becomes easier, cheaper, or more beneficial, they will tend to do it more.
(There’s more to his definition of rational agency, but it doesn’t involve incentives and doesn’t particularly affect my point.)
Some of the groups Harford uses as examples of rational agents (in the first chapter or two of his book) are lab rats, juvenile delinquents, and Mexican prostitutes. To this elite community I propose to add Greater Vancouverite secondary school students.
You might recall that, back in June, the British Columbian provincial government banned junk food sales in its schools. At the time, I suggested that:
Kids who want chips and Coke will buy chips and Coke elsewhere if they can’t get it in school.
and noted that:
I doubt that anyone will learn from this clusterfuck: the object isn’t to improve kids’ health, but rather to appear to be doing so for political and social gain.
Some secondary students in Burnaby are trying to make some money off the new ban on junk food.
They’re selling the hard to resist chips, pop and chocolate bars on site.
The candy bars and chips are no longer stocked in vending machines, so some students have been bringing them in and selling them to others.
The district is aware of the situation and is now attempting to “discourage the practice”.
Its unclear how many kids are trying to cash in on those junk food cravings.
Huh. So you’re telling me that when government bans something in high demand, “secondary markets” will step up and sell the banned thing in place of previously legitimate vendors? That when the incentive of higher profits outweighs the disincentive of getting caught, kids will start smuggling Twinkies and Cokes into schools?
Who would have thought? (That is, besides those of us who were paying attention?)
Update: Oh yes, this story has legs. Now we have some “OMGWTFBBQ” from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation:
You can imagine the appended “!!!!!!1!111oneoneeleven” carefully deleted by what passes for the CBC’s web editor, can’t you? You can’t? That’s because you haven’t seen this image yet:
Key riced all my tea.
But wait — it gets better.
The three Grade 11 students — who asked to be identified only as Weeman, The Fern and Goggles — told CBC News they made more than $200 in the first week of school by bulk-buying candy and chocolate bars, then selling them at a profit.
Pseudonyms. For candy dealers.
Y’know, greater Vancouver’s real gangs are throwing a real war over real drugs these days. I’m just sayin’.
Let’s not have anyone land on a carrier for a press conference just yet, but it’s starting to look like — despite the best efforts of everyone from Donald Rumsfeld to The New York Times to al-Quaeda — Iraq is turning into a relatively stable and passably democratic state comfortable enough with itself to ask American troops to leave:
BAGHDAD – Iraq and the U.S. have reached preliminary agreement to withdraw American forces from Iraqi cities by next June, six years into the increasingly unpopular war, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said Thursday after meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
That was nearly a month ago. Remember the celebrations? The spontaneous expressions of joy? The progressives (jubilant at the end to an unpopular and unjust war) dancing in the streets with the neocons (ecstatic at the honourable victory they feared they’d never live to see)?
Yeah, neither do I. There were more important things going on here on this continent — gas prices, the Democratic National Convention, and so on. Never mind that “the war” (seems that both teams, each of which professes to have the best interests of The Troops at heart, have forgotten about Afghanistan) essentially got the Democrats back into a Congressional majority and back up to parity in the Senate. I keep waiting for the people who loudly demanded timetables for withdrawal to celebrate now that they have one.
And — this may be expecting too much — it would be churlish for them not to acknowledge that the Iraq we’re leaving is at least mildly more free and more democratic than the one we invaded. (Whether that freedom and democracy is worth the thousands of lives and trillions of dollars expended will be, I suspect, a point of fiery rhetorical contention if and when anyone actually notices.) Good news for Iraq. (Kind of.)
It’s supposed to be good news for the rest of the Persian Gulf, though, isn’t it? When one country becomes more free, more democratic (even forcibly so), it’s supposed to spread freedom and democracy to its neighbours. That was, as I recall, the final agreed-upon justification for the Iraq War (take two): a Free and Democratic Iraq would shine as a gleaming beacon of hope in the Middle East and somehow solve all of (that part of) the world’s problems.
Most recently, some policymakers have pointed to the possibility of a democratic domino effect in the Middle East as a reason for America’s continued presence in Iraq. According to George W. Bush, for instance, “The establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.”
(Emphasis from the original.)
Does it work? Not so much:
We find that democratic dominoes do in fact exist, but they fall significantly “lighter” than foreign policy applications of this principle pretend.
Countries only “catch” about 11 percent of their geographic neighbors’ average changes in democracy; the modesty of this spread rate is consistent over time. Our analysis extends back to 1850, but 150-plus years ago, like today, changes in countries’ democracies were only mildly contagious.
Our study isn’t focused on the impact of U.S. intervention on democracy abroad. But if our estimates are in the ballpark, they have potentially sobering implications for attempts to democratize the world through intervention. Even if U.S. intervention succeeds in improving democracy in a key country it occupies, the democracy-enhancing “spillovers” of the intervention are likely to be minimal.
Democratic dominoes don’t have the “oomph” to democratize entire regions. Most of an intervention’s benefits for democracy, where there are any at all, are likely to remain local.
Well, okay. In our moments of lucidity (some of us have more of those moments than others) we’re well aware that if Bush 43’s messianic delusions had any hope of success, Israel probably would’ve done the trick by the mid-’60s. (Those of you with a working knowledge of world history will remember how well that turned out.) But even if the invasion of Iraq isn’t going to turn the whole of the Middle East into a democratic holy land to which modern-day de Tocquevilles will make pilgrimages, it at least demonstrates that “conscience-driven” military intervention does indeed work, and that Washington (yeah, that Washington) was being a churlish old bastard when he warned against “foreign entanglements”. Doesn’t it?
Again, not so much:
Bill Easterly and two of his colleagues have a provocative working paper that looks specifically at foreign intervention’s influence on democracy abroad. What they find is even more damning for domino-inspired interventions.
According to their work, which examines interventions in the cold war period, U.S. interventions decreased democracy by 33 percent in countries where America intervened (so did Soviet interventions). Christopher Coyne’s important book examines the reasons for this failure and provides evidence that foreign intervention’s democracy-reducing outcome isn’t limited to the cold war context.
If U.S. interventions fail to enhance democracy in the countries where they take place, pro-democracy spillovers obviously cannot spread throughout the greater regions these countries are part of. If the evidence from past attempts is any indicator, the prospect of using falling dominoes to democratize the globe looks pretty dim.
(Emphasis and links from the original.)
Funny how marching troops into a country and “fixing” its government can put a damper on freedom. Maybe we should just stay home.
Words mean things. I admit that this is a rather advanced linguistic concept, but it’s worth keeping in mind when you want to be precise.
For example, “envy” and “jealousy” mean different things. “Envy” is a pathological desire for someone else’s shit — probably a trait humans evolved ten thousand or more years ago; condemned in just about every religion; and preyed upon by just about every “modern” political philosophy. On the other hand, “jealousy” is a pathologically protective attitude towards one’s own shit — also probably a trait humans evolved decamillenia ago and often misattributed as a necessary prerequisite to libertarianism.
So if I covet the globe-spanning power, massive political influence, and jaw-droppingly ostentatious wealth of the head of the Catholic Church, I’m envious — and if the Pope’s right his all-loving god will condemn me to an eternity of unimaginable agony in Hell for it. If on the other hand the Pope is unduly worried that Communists will take shit from his cathedrals, or that growing global respect for the fruits of science and commerce will eat into his capacity to influence the courses of nations and cover up altar-boy ass-rape scandals, he’s jealous.
Now, if the fucking Pope of all people condemns the love of money and power, he’s just a hypocrite.
“Has not our modern world created its own idols?” the Roman Catholic leader said in a homily on his second day in the French capital.
“Has it not imitated, perhaps inadvertently, the pagans of antiquity, by diverting man from his true end, from the joy of living eternally with God?” he asked.
The pontiff also quoted the writings of St. Paul, saying “money is the root of all evil” and added in his own words: “Have not money, the thirst for possessions, for power and even for knowledge, diverted man from his true destiny?”
This week’s misanthropy is tempered by a great (and rather unusual) altruism. The good folk at CERN fired up the Large Hadron Collider today. If you want to see some physicists see some muons, you’re in luck:
It warms my heart to know that, despite the seemingly insurmountable levels of idiocy in the world at large, we as a species and as a society can pull off this sort of science and engineering on an epic scale.
So far, the LHC has very ungraciously failed to end the world. Its contribution to science won’t just be looking for the Higgs boson, but also showing once again that it doesn’t matter how hard you believe something (“something” in this case being “zOMG teh LHC is gonna kill us all!!1″) if reality disagrees. A lot of people have invested a lot of time, money, and self-image in the dubious edifice of LHC paranoia, and to their detriment they’ve neglected the actual physics behind their claims. I’d snark more, but Stingray of Atomic Nerds has penned a masterwork on the subject:
I’ve come across a few Brits with perhaps more enthusiasm for nationalism than for history who suggest that a return to the “times of Kipling” would cure what ails the Empire. On the face of it, it seems understandable: the Royal Navy wasn’t a sideshow yet, the colonies had yet fully to sever their effective (rather than merely symbolic) links with “home”; all in all, Britain was the world’s largest superpower.
But folks, if you tempt Fate like that, she’s going to get angry.
A hotel that refused a wounded soldier a room, forcing him to spend the night in his car, was backed into a “grovelling” apology yesterday after receiving a barrage of abusive phone calls.
[...]
The attack on the switchboards came after it emerged that Corporal Tomos Stringer, 24, had been told by hotel staff that it was company policy not to accept members of the Armed Forces as guests.
Disgusting.
Somehow, I don’t think the golden-agers mentioned above had this work of Kipling’s in mind:
I went into a public-’ouse to get a pint o’ beer,
The publican ‘e up an’ sez, “We serve no red-coats here.”
The girls be’ind the bar they laughed an’ giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an’ to myself sez I: O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, go away”;
But it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins”, when the band begins to play,
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins”, when the band begins to play.
I went into a theatre as sober as could be,
They gave a drunk civilian room, but ‘adn’t none for me;
They sent me to the gallery or round the music-’alls,
But when it comes to fightin’, Lord! they’ll shove me in the stalls! For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, wait outside”;
But it’s “Special train for Atkins” when the trooper’s on the tide,
The troopship’s on the tide, my boys, the troopship’s on the tide,
O it’s “Special train for Atkins” when the trooper’s on the tide.
Yes, makin’ mock o’ uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an’ they’re starvation cheap;
An’ hustlin’ drunken soldiers when they’re goin’ large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin’ in full kit. Then it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, ‘ow’s yer soul?”
But it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll,
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it’s “Thin red line of ‘eroes” when the drums begin to roll.
We aren’t no thin red ‘eroes, nor we aren’t no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An’ if sometimes our conduck isn’t all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints; While it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, fall be’ind”,
But it’s “Please to walk in front, sir”, when there’s trouble in the wind,
There’s trouble in the wind, my boys, there’s trouble in the wind,
O it’s “Please to walk in front, sir”, when there’s trouble in the wind.
You talk o’ better food for us, an’ schools, an’ fires, an’ all:
We’ll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don’t mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow’s Uniform is not the soldier-man’s disgrace. For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot;
An’ it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ anything you please;
An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool — you bet that Tommy sees!
——
Speaking of the Brits and their armed forces: it’s been a while since I’ve had the occasion to complain about data privacy matters, and one of Her Majesty’s civil servants has given me a chance to do so.
One is often told that the government, in many ways a store-house of sensitive and personal data, is also diligent at protecting that data from loss or theft and subsequent abuse. After all, they’re the government: bogeyman of thousands of bad novels and worse conspiracy theories, with legendary (and legendarily expensive) intelligence services. One may be told this with particular heat by the British government, which displays an enthusiasm for indiscriminate domestic espionage that puts the Stasi to shame.
One is of course being — shall I put this delicately? — misled.
The discovery at a Cornish nightclub of a computer memory stick with details of troop movements on it is being probed by the Ministry of Defence.
The USB stick, outlining training for 70 soldiers from the 3rd Battalion, Yorkshire Regiment, was found on the floor of The Beach in Newquay in May.
Times, locations and travel and accommodation details for the troops were included in files on the device.
Well, everyone fucks the dog once or twice, right? It’s not as if this is a routine thing for the MoD. Is it?
More than 120 USB memory sticks, some containing secret information, have been lost or stolen from the Ministry of Defence since 2004, it was reported earlier this year.
Some 26 of those disappeared this year – including three which contained information classified as “secret”, and 19 which were “restricted”.
Fuck.
——
Moving back across the pond: You might remember a Tory MP named Maxime Bernier. No? Too busy focusing on his hot at-the-time-girlfriend Julie Couillard? That might explain some of the Tories’ recent poll numbers.
Fortunately for you, this chunk of misanthropy is only indirectly about Bernier, and more directly about Couillard. Her autobiography will be released about a week before the federal election in October:
Julie Couillard is releasing her autobiography ahead of schedule, before the federal election, a decision that could embarrass the Conservatives with revelations about her affair with former cabinet minister Maxime Bernier.
The 320-page book was originally to be released on Oct. 14, Canada’s election day — but the English version will now be available in bookstores on Oct. 6.
It’s about damn time that we got some tawdry pillow-talk scandals going on again in federal Canadian politics. The best this election’s produced to date is an animated puffin shitting on Stephane Dion — and, dammit, I know we can do better than that.
——
And finally: BC’s provincial Liberals have decided that showing up to work for the next four months is kind of a hassle, and they’re not going to bother:
North Americans have a ridiculous hang-up about diesel. In the rest of the world, diesel engines’ reliability, fuel efficiency, and low-powerband torque make them perfect for the sort of small, cheap commuter cars that everyone professes to be into these days. Modern diesels run cleaner than comparable gasoline engines, and while corn ethanol is barely practical as a biofuel even with suffocating government subsidies biodiesel can be made from waste vegetable oil (or straight from soy or canola oil, if you don’t have a McDonalds handy).
On this continent, however, we see diesel as filthy, industrial-grade liquid cancer suitable only for farm vehicles, construction equipment, long-haul transports, or improbably large pickup trucks with pretensions of being one (or more) of the first three. Consequently, diesel is heavily taxed (“stick it to the corporations, man!”) and pretty much no-one wants to buy a diesel engine smaller than six litres.
If ever there was a car made for the times, this would seem to be it: a sporty subcompact that seats five, offers a navigation system, and gets a whopping 65 miles to the gallon. Oh yes, and the car is made by Ford Motor, known widely for lumbering gas hogs.
Ford’s 2009 Fiesta ECOnetic goes on sale in November. [...] “We know it’s an awesome vehicle,” says Ford America President Mark Fields. “But there are business reasons why we can’t sell it in the U.S.” The main one: The Fiesta ECOnetic runs on diesel.
That said, there are a few signs that things are beginning to change. From this article:
None of this is stopping European and Japanese automakers, which are betting they can jump-start the U.S. market with new diesel models. Mercedes-Benz by next year will have three cars it markets as “BlueTec.” Even Nissan and Honda, which long opposed building diesel cars in Europe, plan to introduce them in the U.S. in 2010.
[...]
California certified VW and Mercedes diesel cars earlier this year, after a four-year ban.
Gosh, it’s nice to know that certain governments in large car markets are allowing manufacturers to sell clean, high-mileage cars.
Believe it or not, but sports car racing (more particularly, its sanctioning bodies) has a long history of encouraging fuel-efficient engine development. After the ’70s gas crisis, the FIA reworked the top tier of sports car prototype racing into Group C, limiting the cars’ power by fuel consumption rather than engine displacement. Group C cars were arguably the most interesting prototypes ever built.
After Group C racing tanked (high development costs forced out most of the competitors), the top prototype category eventually stabilized into LMP1. And the LMP1 category is dominated by Audi, and recently the Audi R10 — with, of course, a diesel engine. Peugeot eventually got the hint and started campaigning their 908 HDi — also a diesel.
It surely can’t hurt that the fastest road-racing cars in America this year (no, you can’t has a 2008 USGP — not yours) run diesels.
It’s a good start. Of course, it’s intended to take the sting out of high fuel prices for the shipping and agriculture industries (er, excuse me: “farmers and truckers”) who will no doubt pass the savings on to a grateful consumer market. Ahem.
A newly elected Tory government would cut in half the excise tax on diesel fuel, a move that would “benefit consumers who buy virtually anything that moves by truck, train, ship or plane,” Conservative Leader Stephen Harper said on Tuesday.
[...]Harper’s proposed cut is also aimed at truckers, fishermen and the manufacturers who have expressed concern that Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion’s Green Shift carbon tax plan would lead to an increase in the already high cost of diesel.
Well, tax cuts are what the Conservatives do best.
So will a less restrictive government climate and very fast cars persuade North Americans to open our minds about diesel? Come the fuck on — most of us see changing our minds as an admission of defeat rather than a sign of learning (and thus self-improvement).
Harper, I hope your pecker rots off. You might not be satisfied with the government as it stands — understandable, as the other parties keep telling you “no” — but I’m fucking thrilled with it. All I want out of government is a basic social safety net, some enlightened-self-interest investment in research and education, maybe a few judicious and restrained taxes on externalized costs, and a whole fuck-ton of benign neglect. This last government is the closest I’ve ever seen Canada get to that ideal, and I wish you hadn’t fucked with it.
And of course, this being Canada, elections don’t come for free:
This is what passes for fiscal restraint here in the worker’s paradise.
The next question is whether anyone worth voting for will appear in my riding before the 14th of October. Those prospects are pretty slim, and coupled with my general antipathy towards this exercise in political masturbation bring to mind the objection that “if God wanted us to have an election, He’d have given us candidates.”
(Now, keep in mind that politics in Canada are dominated by party orthodoxy. It’s rare that Members of Parliament are given the opportunity — !!! — to vote their consciences, and party discipline is ruthlessly enforced. When Canadians vote for our MPs, we’re really voting for a quantum of political influence mostly allocated to that candidate’s party leader.)
Obviously, I’m not going to vote Conservative. Sure, I like the whole tax-cuts thing, but Harper’s wasting a goodly chunk of tax revenues even calling this election… which makes me skeptical about his priorities. Further, I can’t help but remember that most of the bills the Tories failed to pass were intrusive, offensive, and/or downright frightening. I won’t offer that agenda my implicit support.
The Liberals, at least, are their usual predictable selves: big-government nanny-state centrists full of populist rhetoric and sporting a half-hidden commitment to corporate welfare. I kind of liked the “green shift” carbon tax plan until they gutted it to appease the agriculture and shipping industries (oh, excuse me: “farmers and truckers”). But I grew up on over a decade of Liberal government, and the best I can say about them is that Jean Chretien had chutzpah.
I’d vote for the Bloc in a heartbeat — if you want to separate, Quebec, I’ll back that move to the hilt — but they’re not running a candidate in my riding and secession is apparently on the back burner these days anyway. As it is, they’ve reduced their role in the House of Commons to making the NDP look like a bunch of slackers.
Which brings me to the NDP. Jack Layton has throughly alienated me. It seems like every time he’s had the chance to do something decent, he’s stepped back and voted the political game instead. (For example: he killed the Liberal motion to cap Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan at 2009 because — as his form letter told me — “the Liberals aren’t really anti-war”, and he killed a BQ amendment to the last budget because it would reduce Federal governmental power… never mind that it would have done wonders for the rest of his purported platform.) Most of what’s fucked up about politics stems from the fact that voters are willing to forgive this kind of shit because they’re blinded by the ideological rhetoric put forth each election. I won’t play along any more.
Then there’s the Greens. They have an MP now, kind of. I guess that makes them a viable Federal party. And I do favour the principles of the environmentalist movement: “don’t shit where you eat” strikes me as some of the most fundamentally fucking obvious common sense I’ve ever heard. But proper environmentalism stems from hard science, and the Greens worship at the Church of Al Gore — their environmentalism is a belief system, which is anathema to me. (Also, Elizabeth May makes Jack Layton look like Milton Friedman. Thanks, but fuck no.)
I suppose I could vote for the inevitable Marijuana Party candidate. S/h/it is likely to be another shrill goddamn socialist hippy, but the War On Some Drugs has earned my wrath many times over and I think I can safely trust a stoner to not get much done. I might be able to find another regional party upon which to throw my vote away, but Out West they tend to be either hard-line Marxists or creepy secessionist-fundamentalist authoritarians.
Then again, I could always spoil my ballot. Odds are against a worthy candidate running, and the country would do just fine with one fewer MP in the House of Commons.
Careful (rather frighteningly so) readers might recall that, back in July, I wrote about the government of Ontario reorganizing its Ministry of Agriculture:
Figures show the Agriculture Ministry budget for public health and the environment is down 27 per cent this year over last, while spending for bio-products and rural communities is down 18.4 per cent.
However, the ministry’s spending on administration will jump 16.6 per cent this year.
Agriculture officials insist the $5.3-million increase in administration costs is not an actual increase in spending, but a reallocation of staff and resources.
Trimming the fat and all that, I suppose. Golly, what could possibly go wrong?
Only a nationwide outbreak of listeriosis stemming from a Maple Leaf Foods meat-packing plant in Toronto. I suppose things worked out for the best: with thirteen people dead and hundreds more ill, it’s a good thing the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture has extra administrative funding to process all the paperwork. Sure is fortunate that they reallocated those staff and resources away from, I dunno, facilities inspections and stuff.
Now, the Federal government wants you to know that they’re shocked, shocked by the outbreak, and they’re gonna do something about it right away:
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has promised an independent investigation will be launched into the deadly outbreak of listeriosis that sparked a nationwide recall of meat products.
[...]
“I’m also troubled as the head of a government that has made substantial investments in our food safety system,” [Harper said.]
Harper said that when the outbreak is over, the government will appoint an independent arm’s-length investigation.
He said the purpose will be to ensure “we get to the bottom on the government’s side, on the bureaucratic side, of exactly what transpired and to make sure that as we go forward and we make changes to our system, that this kind of thing can’t happen again.”
That sounds suspiciously like “we’re going to spend lots of money to make you feel better, generate a report that no-one will ever read, and hope you forget to ask us what we fixed” to me… but I’m a nasty cynical skeptical person. After all, Ontario’s cuts to its food safety system probably came from a similar report.
Ah. Speaking of those cuts, back in July the government of Ontario wanted us to know that they weren’t at fault, it was those damn Conservatives in Ottawa. From the first article:
They also say the $24-million cut in spending on public health and the environment was the result of an end to federally funded programs.
Well, perhaps they’re — to borrow a phrase from Portal — “enhancing the truth” to avoid responsibility and pass the blame. Or perhaps Harper’s the one “enhancing the truth” when he says:
“I’m also troubled as the head of a government that has made substantial investments in our food safety system.”
I’d put my money on “c) Both” — well, except for the money that Revenue Canada has appropriated and put on “d) Neither”.
