Saturday, July 24, 2004
Lifers
Jonathan Clements at the WSJ publishes weekly personal finance information that often makes their most-downloaded list. So it was this week when he called attention to various useful web calculators. The one that has energized a lot of people is livingto100.com. Fill out a few questions and learn your life expectancy. Tweak the questions and see which lifestyle changes will give you even more.
It appears that everyone I know that took the quiz will be around for a long, long time.
Forecasting is a fool's errand but we all do it. Rethink carpe diem. Rethink Social Security's viability. Rethink investment plans. Rethink everything.
Thursday, July 22, 2004
35-Hour Stone Agers
Social engineering is very hard work. This is why it never works. Anyone with a whit of economic sense cringed when France went for the thirty-five hour workweek -- to increase (!) employment. It worked out as predicted and now the social engineers are backing off.
Many French workers and others could have been spared plenty of pain and misery if elites had spent just a little time entertaining a little economic common sense.
Paul H. Rubin looks to evolution to explain why economic common sense is so uncommon. zero-sum thinking, so it seems, worked pretty well all through Pleistocene millenia and is, therefore, still deeply embedded within most of us. Living in relatively small groups, Stone Agers had less reason to specialize and experience the joys of non-zero sum outcomes.
Brink Lindsey chronicles some of the pain that this history causes to this day -- in France as well as here, there, and everywhere.
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
The New Yorker's View of the World
When folks at the New Yorker write about "Social Mobility", they mean anything but. "One of the stranger sights in the city this summer is the bicycle taxi ... Heady and vaguely Edith Whartonish as it is to be pulled around town in an open carriage, it is, at the same time disconcerting to have someone else's physical labor quite so plainly, quite so clearly and publicly, quite so accusingly, visible as the source of your forward movement." I am just skimming through the highlights but the writer soon takes up "exploitation", Robert Reich and John Edwards on "the widening gap between the wealthy few and everyone else," American workers' "docility", and "American life is more feudal [than you-know-where]... a society run on the bargain of fear," and much more. Why not stick with the cute title of the piece? Most people choose jobs willingly and view first jobs as a first rung on an economic and social ladder. Most are rightly optimistic about where the ladder leads. That simple insight could have replaced all of the essay's tortured silliness.
But then it wouldn't be the New Yorker's view of the world.
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Good News
There is always a lot of "stuff" flying about re "globalization" and kindred topics. In contrast, a recent issue of the Journal of Economic Literature includes several articles that summarize what we know. Most of the news is much more positive than the gloom that we get from the left -- e.g., mainstream media, elites, etc.
Copeland and Taylor ("Trade Growth and the Environment") conclude that, "... there is a great deal of evidence supporting the view that rising incomes affect the environment in a positive way." Winters, McCulloch and McKay ("Trade Liberalization and Poverty") conclude that , "... trade reform may be one of the most cost-effective policies available to governments."
Two of the world's biggest problems are subject to the invisible hand. I always had a feeling that the guys who dress up as sea turtles had it all wrong.
Sunday, July 18, 2004
Taking Some Money Out of Politics
Here are two items from the same section of the same edition of the LA Times that really do go together. "Rail Project Will Not Go Before Voters ... O.C. transit officials say Center Line project from central Santa Ana to John Wayne Airport would have died if the electorate rejected it ... Miguel A. Pulido, a supporter of the rail line, led the opposition, arguing that a ballot measure would be an unwise gamble because voters would probably reject the project ... He suggested that voters who would not benefit from Center Line ... might not appreciate its value and vote against it."
And nearby: "'Gov. Criticizes Legislators as 'Girlie-Men' ... he urges voters to 'terminate' at the polls those lawmakers who refuse to approve his state budget plan."
Arnold Schwarzenegger has earned serious credibility when it comes to State ballot initiative and referendum measures. Just a few days ago he threatened to back a measure that would reduce legislators to part-timers.
Now that's real campaign finance reform that would go some way to "taking the money out of politics."
