chaircrusher: if you don't know what the fuck you're doing, don't bother voting.
optic: someone had a big rant yesterday about people who dont vote. i was tempted to point out what a waste of time voting is and suggest she give money instead, by why get into it
optic: giving money is the new voting imho
rich: voting matters in local politics
rich: imho
rich: and in tight races
optic: sure, the smaller the pool of voters the more likely your vote will count
optic: but even in a local race thats tight the probability that your 1 vote will make a difference is miniscule
optic: if you can magnify your vote by convincing others or getting them to turn out, a bit more. or magnify it by donating money for ads and gotv
optic: but 1 vote is pretty unlikely to matter
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I thought this story about how Starbucks actually helps many locally-owned coffee shops was fascinating. good ol law of unintended consequences. the best detail is the guy who starts going after Starbucks, opening his own places next door.

Alex Tabarrok kicks off an interesting discussion about federal taxes and progressivity with this post showing who pays how much by income quintile. The interesting stuff is really in the comments rather than the original post -- people dissect the table, add additional information, and argue the economics and the politics. One comment I especially, liked, from someone responding to the fact that the people at the low end of the economic scale account for very little of tax income, was this:

As a mild libertarian I have to ask what is the point of taxing the poor and middle class. Why not just start taxing income over 80 K at a flat 15 percent rate and leave it be. Why do we need to tax people making below 80 K when obviously their tax contributions are meaningless to the federal government?

keph, please read and tell me what you think.

Slate's Moneybox just finished a trip to Vietnam and Cambodia too, and has some comments on Vietnam's economy. Yes, I know I'm lagging in trip posts and photos (including a half-written one about... Vietnam's economy). Sometime soon.

Slate's Daniel Gross spells out in detail why switching from group (employer) health care to individual would be a disaster.

They want to replace a bunch of giant, sophisticated consumers possessing limited bargaining power with a mass of unsophisticated consumers possessing no bargaining power. For some reason, they think you and I can do a better job negotiating with Oxford and Aetna than Wal-Mart and Coca-Cola can. ... The overwhelming majority of individuals lack the resources, time, and fortitude to confront well-funded, profit-obsessed bureaucracies. Nor do they have human resource staffs or outside consultants that can act as advocates.

pretty compelling reason to buy insurance in groups, whether it's by employer or another way.

optic: that immigration bill sure seems to have gone down in flames
optic: hurray
** lens what what **
chaircrusher: i wonder what would be a sane thing to do about immigration
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Sherman Alexie was on KUOW being interviewed this morning. Apparently, he is strongly against the Sonics leaving town (though he admitted he's very skeptical of the way the question of a new arena is being handled). His main reason? Rather than saying that it's because he really likes basketball or something, he said (and I paraphrase): "I look around at all the major cities, all the important, culturally influential cities, and they all have teams in all the major sports. That's no accident." Yes Sherman, it's no accident. because maybe cities that are large and influential are the kinds that can support and attract sports teams, not the other way around. but hey yeah, maybe if we would just build the sonics a bigger arena we'd become a more world-class city! maybe we could get that finished up just about the same time we finish tearing down one of our major highways, the one that would, you know, serve this hypothetical arena, in order to improve traffic.

You probably have mostly heard the various economist arguments against gift-giving (which, to be fair, are usually made half jokingly and intended, I think, to make an economic point). the main argument is this: people generally know their own tastes better than those who buy them gifts, and so the most efficient gift is cash. studies have sort-of backed this up: when people are asked to estimate the value of presents they've received, we find on average that gifts are worth about 80% of what they cost, meaning that 20% of all the money spent on presents this time of year is "wasted".

But of course, it's not really wasted. One obvious reason is signalling: socially, gift-giving is as much about signalling to the recipient that you care about them (enough to brave holiday crowds at the mall!) and that you know them well. This is the fairly common response to the grinchy economist. Greg Mankiw makes the usual argument here.

But a couple people recently have made different arguments for gift-giving: that it indulges the "wild side" in a way that we often don't. People will often give gifts that the recipient wouldn't have chosen for himself (e.g., my parents wanted to give me a leather jacket for my last birthday), not because he doesn't like it, but because his buzzkilling prudent side wouldn't let him. and yet, one shouldn't always forgo a bit of fun. the prudent habit might be good, but it shouldn't be absolute. This is presumably why it's disappointing when people give us practical gifts like socks. Glen Whitman makes this (and several other) pro-gift arguments here.

I'll add one more that I haven't heard anyone make, though it seems obvious to me: sometimes the giver is in a position to come up with a gift that the recipient will enjoy but would have been unable to get himself (usually because he didn't know about it). a classic example is a well-read friend giving you a book he's pretty sure you'll love. of course, the giver has to know the recipient pretty well for that to work -- which also gets us back to signalling. I know that I really value anyone who can open my eyes to a good book, movie, or cd.

I've long had a sort of distant and vague admiration for the Cato Institute, which I generally knew to be a libertarian think tank and, as think tanks go, not excessively partisan or intellectually dishonest. But I never paid too much attention to them specifically until they recently acquired a blog and started their Cato unbound series of essay-discussions. I've found a lot of their stuff refreshingly straightforward. They seem to feel free to be critical of the current administration and state of the Republican party without wasting time trying to score points like most critics from the left would. The current unbound discussion about whether small-government types have any future in the Republican party includes a number of examples of people mentioning both Republican and Democrat policies of the past or present critically or with praise, with no real regard to trying to score points for one side of the other. It's such a pleasure to just read a discussion based more or less on straight facts, theories, and interpretations that I don't really care whether I agree and am just interested in reading more.

Lately, I really like economics (by which I mean the interesting insights and mathematical/game theoretical puzzles certain economists put in their blogs and magazine columns). Slate has long been doing occasional economics columns in this style, so when they added undercover economist Tim Harford as a columnist, I was happy. But whereas someone like Tyler Cowen or Steven Landsburg can explain and explore an idea just deeply enough to be interesting in a short post or article, Harford's columns all seem to end just as he is about to start saying anything.

His recent column on buying a used car is a perfect example. He introduces an intriguing economics puzzle: that a certain amount of economic insight seemed to suggest that the used car market should utterly fail. But, of course, the market thrives. Here, you would think, is an opportunity to explore further why it should fail and why it might actually succeed. Does Harford do this? no, he goes off on a tangent about how this same analysis can be applied to other things (e.g., the job market) but not far enough down that path to explain that one either. Aside from a hurried paragraph at the end, he makes no attempt at answering why people continue to buy used cars. Perhaps he's hoping people will buy his book to find out the rest, but if this is a sample of how he writes, I wouldn't bother.

Assigned to Keph: What is wrong with this argument? And this just after I finished writing an email to my senator telling her to get bent vis-a-vis her support for anti-gouging laws (yes, I know I'm like that guy that fought the windmills).

pardon my french.

Obsidian Wings has a bunch of data and some scary conclusions. My prediction: a lot of people get screwed, a lot of lenders don't get screwed because the government bails them out (i.e. the rest of us pay for it), and it just goes into the big pot known as the royal screwing of future (and by future I mean post baby-boomer) generations. Or house prices could just keep going up and everything will be fine!

A new study of group social dynamics finds that groups with a sanctioning body (i.e. someone with the power to punish people who break the rules) are initially less popular but ultimately win out over groups with no sanctions. I read this and immediately think of internet communities, especially ones where admins try to preserve a sense of what's "on-topic" and what's against the rules, as opposed to wide-open message boards. I'm already biased on the sides of having rules and punishments (I run my list that way), so this sounds right to me. One interesting thing about the study is the assertion that the rules are initially unpopular but ultimately preferred. And I've seen this in internet communities -- it often takes a while but most people eventually come around to the belief that rules and punishments are a good idea. Maybe they're just becoming more conservative and protective of their little world as they become more invested in it, but I think with time people see the pluses and minuses more clearly. Of course, in a lot of instances, on the internet anyway, this relies on a benevolent dictator. And we know how well that works out in the real world, in the long run.

Why progressives should support eliminating/replacing the mortgage interest deduction.

As Gene Steuerle and his co-authors at the Urban Institute have documented, more than 80 percent of the major tax incentives for housing go to the top 20 percent of Americans ...while less than 5 percent go to the bottom 60 percent. ... The commission proposes to scrap the mortgage-interest deduction and replace it with a "Home Credit" that allows families to reduce their taxes by 15 percent of mortgage interest on borrowing up to $227,000 to $412,000 (the limit is set at 125 percent of the median sales price for each county).

and so on.

Slate looks at the myth that urban sprawl is a modern, American disease. Some bits of trivia:

As long ago as the Ming dynasty in the 14th century, the Chinese gentry sang the praises of the exurban life, and the rustic villa suburbana was a common feature of ancient Rome. ... During the 17th and 18th centuries, while the poor moved increasingly eastward, affluent Londoners built suburban estates in the westerly direction of Westminster and Whitehall, commuting to town by carriage. ... suburbs now constitute the bulk of European metropolitan areas, just as they do in America. We marvel at the efficiency of European mass transit, but since 1950, transit ridership has remained flat, while the use of private automobiles has skyrocketed. ... Polls consistently confirm that most Europeans, like most Americans, and indeed most people worldwide, would prefer to live in single-family houses on their own piece of land rather than in apartment buildings ... Ireland and the United Kingdom now have higher single-family house occupancy rates than the United States, while others, such as Holland, Belgium, and Norway, are comparable.

And so to the punchline:

Most American anti-sprawl reformers today believe that sprawl is a recent and peculiarly American phenomenon caused by specific technological innovations like the automobile and by government policies like single-use zoning or the mortgage-interest deduction on the federal income tax. ... sprawl is not the anomalous result of American zoning laws, or mortgage interest tax deduction, or cheap gas, or subsidized highway construction, or cultural antipathy toward cities. Nor is it an aberration. ... Sprawl is and always has been inherent to urbanization. It is driven less by the regulations of legislators, the actions of developers, and the theories of city planners, than by the decisions of millions of individuals—Adam Smith's "invisible hand."

In other words, if you don't like sprawl.. well, good luck.

Taking a break from the Japan stuff (yes, there is plenty more to come, but a visit from J happily distracted me from editing photos)... Slate has an article today on GooglePrint , which discusses the tradeoff between authorial exposure and authorial control. It's a pretty clear explanation of what GooglePrint is (there's been a lot of confusion) and argument for why it is good.

Thinking about buying a house? Marginal Revolution points to a long-term index of house prices. The good news: over time, house prices are fairly stable, not rising incessantly (what's rising is the size and quality of the houses we buy). The bad news: except for the last few years, which show a huge and unprecedented spike. In other words: pop!

Ever wonder about that supremely useful Scrabble word QAT? It's a "green twig chewed for its amphetaminelike properties", and it's also making one town in Kenya really rich.