A compliment, I guess?

Not sure what to make of this, but it appears to be what would happen if you took this post of mine and ran it through google translate through a few languages back to English.

Targeting Automobiles

Here's a nice chart illustrating why automotive gasoline would be a good candidate for a deterrent tax:

Click to enlarge

Source: Goddard Institute for Space Studies at NASA!

Incidentally, I have now posted more in the first three months of 2010 than all of 2009.

I am a Grocery Bag

No reason not to cite this post in full (except perhaps creative integrity, etc):

PLASTIC BAG TAX IS INSANELY EFFECTIVE: THIS ONE IS FOR D.C. PEOPLE, as well as behavioral economists, who surely make up the rest of you: our beloved new five-cent plastic bag tax decreased plastic bag usage from 22.5 million to 3.3 million in the first month alone. Washington D.C. is now sparkly clean! We are so insane about taxes in this country. FIVE CENTS! Whatever. Some of us need to clean litter boxes and will continue to pollute like the dickens.

Washington Post via Wonkette.

It doesn't appear to be a major revenue stream, but that may not be the point. What should the total tax revenue represent? Perhaps the total cost of cleaning up littered grocery bags and housing D.C.'s share of grocery bags in landfills. When it's factored on a per-bag ratio, it should work out pretty well that any lost revenue from the deterrent effect should cancel out the cleanup costs that are no longer needed.

"Epistemal Arrogance"

Earthsharing Austrailia shares some of the sentiments of a student who is beginning a Finance/Economics program. He compares the worldview of a typical marketing course:

‘We don’t know what is going on in an individuals mind, or what makes them happy. We call it a “consumers black box”, that’s what we are trying to find out.’

With the far more conclusive theoretical framework in economics:

‘We assume people are rational utility maximisers (‘utility’ means happiness) and utility is a function of consumption, and consumption is a function of wealth. So the higher the GDP, the better... okay onto the science!’

I might propose something like the following for psychology (at least as it relates to these prior definitions): "We're beginning to discover what makes people happy, but it seems as though individuals aren't very good at predicting what that is for themselves. It seems that people are actually more alike in what makes them happy than our individualized culture tends to emphasize." I'd also argue that such a theoretical framework should be integrated with economic study to determine what policies maximize actual well-being rather than GDP-represented well-being.

"Productive Members of Society"

Quoth Nancy Pelosi:

Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance or that people could start a business and be entrepreneurial and take risk, but not job loss because of a child with asthma or someone in the family is bipolar—you name it, any condition—is job locking.

Mary Katherine Ham ignored the latter part of Pelosi's quote in her response in the Weekly Standard:

If liberal Boomers such as Nancy Pelosi insist on creating government incentives for a generation of people to be unemployed artists who nonetheless have their health care paid for by productive members of society, there will be fewer productive members of society.

But I do believe that even if her misinterpretation was reflective of Pelosi's actual sentiment, Ham's critique would still be unimpressive.

When Ham refers to "productive members of society," given the context, she is referring to people with traditional 9-5 jobs that offer a comprehensive benefits package. The problem is that, at the moment, our economy doesn't require as many "productive members" to produce all the requirements of a good life. This is thanks to technology, and this shouldn't be discouraged. However, capitalism's usual reaction is to force innovation, which could mean more labor-saving technology, but most often it means "convincing the general public to buy more, new crap."

When technology saves us labor costs so that we can thrive on fewer people working, shouldn't it be a good response to use the greater leisure time to create art and literature, instead of finding new work to do?

Religious Commons

On the Commons recently featured someone from my hometown in a post about "uncommon commoners," Rev. Tracey Lind:

Lind, who is also a city planner, is working to do just that in inner city Cleveland with Trinity Commons, the most ambitious new development for her neighborhood in decades. She has brought a coffee shop, independent bookstore, Ten Thousand Villages fair trade store, art gallery, labyrinth and public square to the grounds of Trinity Cathedral. Anyone can come to browse, relax with a cup of coffee, walk the labyrinth, pray, reflect, read, check their email on the cathedral’s wi-fi system, or take part in one of the many events – "religious and secular" – that go on at the church.

I admire this church's work in Cleveland, and many people whom I trust have a great deal of respect for Dean Lind and the inclusiveness of the church she heads (I believe she's been a guest at my home, actually, but I was not in attendance). However, I'm a little skeptical of how just it is to call this common space a "commons" in any legal sense. Though it is certainly charitable for the church property to be open to the public, it is also not under any public ownership, and, to my knowledge, there is no technical civic involvement.

Down the highway 20 minutes is a gross commercial complex called "Crocker Park," which I also admire for its intent: the goal was to bring dense living back, with mixed use buildings and a walkable main street. It, however, suffers from what I anticipate to be the same problem: it is still wholly owned by one private organization. When one enters Crocker Park, one is still acutely aware that they have entered someone's shopping mall. Likewise, the few times I've been in the common space at Trinity, I have still been aware that I've been visiting someone's church.

Oddly, from the introduction given, discussing the sacred places that are considered commons, I anticipated that the article would continue to discuss the contradictions in this belief. In fact, couldn't one argue that some of the major geopolitical problems of the past half century have been the result of the inability to treat sacred lands as common? It may be that legally enforcing the commonality in such a situation might provide a solution, such as in Fred Foldvary's prescription.

Debate and Respect

I hope that I'm self-conscious enough to identify when people with whose opinions I agree are expressing them in a disrespectful or unproductive manner.

At the very least, I'd like to demonstrate that I can recognize the inverse, when people are expressing opinions with which I might disagree, but doing so in an inclusive, charitable, and productive matter. This is obviously an easier thing to recognize, but I'd like to cite both Michael Kinsley and Greg Mankiw as illustrations of respectful and productive disagreement.

Quoth Mankiw:

Arthur Okun said the big tradeoff in economics is between equality and efficiency. The health reform bill offers more equality (expanded insurance, more redistribution) and less efficiency (higher marginal tax rates). Whether you think this is a good or bad choice to make, it should not be hard to see the other point of view.

I like to think of the big tradeoff as being between community and liberty. From this perspective, the health reform bill offers more community (all Americans get health insurance, regulated by a centralized authority) and less liberty (insurance mandates, higher taxes). Once again, regardless of whether you are more communitarian or libertarian, a reasonable person should be able to understand the opposite vantagepoint.