What I Wanted for Christmas

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=804

To the Right… to the Right…

For Lisa:

A Ec10 (Intro Ec) student asks Greg Mankiw, “Does Econ Make People More Conservative?”

The student asks:

My school offers two main elective history courses for seniors: Government and Economics. Due to scheduling limitations, not many kids are able to take both. I’ve noticed something interesting as the year has progressed. The students who are taking the government course are increasingly endorsing leftist ideologies while the economics students are becoming increasingly right wing. For instance, my school’s paper recently ran an editorial that ‘complained’ that too many of Lawrenceville’s finest were going into investment banking, and not into seemingly ‘socially beneficial’ careers. What is your view on government intervention on economic equality and the like? Do all economics students show republican (or right of center) tendencies?

To my surprise, Mankiw actually says “I believe the answer is, to some degree, yes.” (I thought he would reject it immediately and point to the fact that there are tons of economists who are left-leaning).

But, he does outline three reasons (which underscore my more conservative economic views):

First, in some cases, students start off with utopian views of public policy, where a benevolent government can fix all problems. One of the first lessons of economics is that life is full of tradeoffs. That insight, completely absorbed, makes many utopian visions less attractive. Once you recognize, for example, that there is a tradeoff between equality and efficiency, as economist Arthur Okun famously noted, many public policy decisions become harder.

Second, some of the striking insights of economics make one more respectful of the market as a mechanism for coordinating a society. Because market participants are motivated by self-interest, a person might naturally be suspect of market-based societies. But after learning about the gains from trade, the invisible hand, and the efficiency of market equilibrium, one starts to approach the market with a degree of admiration and, indeed, awe.

Third, the study of actual public policy makes students recognize that political reality often deviates from their idealistic hopes. Much income redistribution, for example, is aimed not toward the needy but toward those with political clout.

And of course:

Nonetheless, studying economics does not by itself determine one’s political ideology. I know good economists who are distinctly right of center and good economists who are distinctly left of center. In my department at Harvard, I would guess that Democrats outnumber Republicans among the faculty (although there is surely more political balance in the economics department than in most other departments at the university).

I also find it amusing that the Princeton editorial found it necessary to attack such careers as investment banking as not “socially beneficial” (the underline above). If investment bankers did not generate so much value for someone (and what is society but a bunch of someones?), they certainly would not be paid so much — and if their work-life balance was any better, they also certainly would not be paid so much.

How do Professor Grade Exams?

For those of us who have yet to have finals and to those of us who just had them, one professor explains how he arrives upon grades:

http://www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2006/12/a_guide_to_grad.html

Hmmm… :-/

Save Energy This Winter

Happy winter solstice everyone! Girls, go out and dance naked fairy style to celebrate … and invite me/send me pictures .

To celebrate, and because I still haven’t gotten used to how cold it is indoors at home, here’s how to stay warm AND be eco-conscious (saving money, resources, and energy) [from Cheap Ways to Stay Warm This Winter]:

• Let in some light. Open blinds on south-facing windows during the day to let in the sun. Close them in the evening to add a bit more insulation. This provides just enough mid-day warmth that we don’t need the heater.
• Use rugs on bare floors. We have hardwood floors above a poorly-insulated basement. These floors are cold in the morning and the late afternoon. An area rug does a fine job of keeping my feet warmer.
• Block drafts. This is best done with weather-stripping or other forms of insulation, but even a blanket in front of a door helps. Because our house is so old, nothing is level. This makes it difficult to install weather stripping. The bottom of our mudroom door, for example, has a one-inch gap on one end but is flush with the floor near the hinge. By laying a blanket in front of the door, we can mitigate some of the heat loss.
• Use space heaters. According to Michael Bluejay’s energy guide, this is the single best way to save money on electricity. As I learned from my tests with the Kill-a-Watt, a portable radiator-type oil heater uses a lot of power, but not nearly as much as a furnace. We have a couple of these heaters. They take a while to get warm, but once they’re going, the can heat a small space cheaply.
• Bundle up. I love cold-weather clothes: long underwear, sweaters, hats, scarves, gloves. Some days we simply bundle up and turn down the heat. It’s cozy. And don’t forget: house slippers go a long way to keeping you warm!
• Install a programmable thermostat. My sister-in-law just received her first big heating bill at her new home. “It was $100!” she said. (She had been leaving her thermostat at 68-degrees around the clock.) Her heating bill was more than she had budgeted, and made it easy to justify the cost of a new programmable thermostat. They’re easy to install and an excellent way to cut your heating costs. We set ours for 54 at night and when we’re gone during the day. (Reader Adam G. reviewed his programmable thermostat last August.)
• Use an electric blanket. There’s no need to heat the entire house when you’re asleep. There’s no need to even heat the bedroom. An electric blanket is cheaper and cozier. (A blanket with dual-controls is best.)
• Change the furnace filter. A dirty filter forces the furnace to work harder, decreasing its efficiency, increasing heating costs. We change the furnace filter at the start of the season, and once every month or two thereafter.
• Close unused rooms. Do not heat them. This winter, we closed off our guest room and shut the heater vent. That room is now separate from the rest of the house. It stays cold, but there’s no reason to keep it warm.

Irony of Ironies

Let’s say you’re responsible for building a fence across the US-Mexico border. Why do you do it? Well, there are the (what I consider) legitimate reasons of maintaining national security and demanding that all people within the borders obey the law. There are also the (what I consider) less legitimate reasons of maintaining “cultural purity”, trying to prevent “the jobs of hard-working Americans from going to illegals”, or of pandering politically to those who are swayed by the former two.

Regardless of your reasons, though, you’d assume that the fence-building operation is a strictly anti-immigrant one — the purpose is to keep those illegals on the other side.

Lo’ and behold, a Border Fence Firm Snared for Hiring Illegal Workers.

And what does the lawyer, have to say? NPR news quotes:

Golden State Fence’s attorney, Richard Hirsch, admits his client broke the law. But he says the case proves that construction companies need a guest-worker program.

Alan Moore Talks Porn

Alan Moore, who I swear looks like a hobo, the mastermind behind such famous graphical novels as Watchmen, Promothea, and V for Vendetta (but he has NOTHING to do with the movie) and classic comic stories as “For the Man Who Has Everything” and “The Killing Joke”, recently wrote an article in Arthur Magazine on Pornography. Clearly a liberal (as if anyone who watched V for Vendetta didn’t realize that), he decries the attack on pornography as justified by those who claim it is the creeping rise of moral decadence and the ensuing collapse of civilization. A little academic-y, but it’s full of wonderful tidbits.

On the cave-man pervert “archetype”:

The mighty Robert Crumb, back in his awesomely prolific Weirdodays, depicted the creator of the first Venus of Willendorf as Caveman Bob, a neurasthenic outcast with a strong resemblance to Crumb himself, perpetually horny, crouching in his cave and whacking off over the big-butt fetish woman he’d just made: Homo erectus.

On the anthropological rise of masturbation:

Humans, whether individually while in the womb or as a species newly climbed down from the treetops that we’d shared with kissing-cousin Bonobos, discover early on that sexual self-stimulation is a source of great gratification, practically unique in our experience as mammals in that it is easily achievable and, unlike almost every other primitive activity, can be accomplished without risk of being maimed or eaten. Also, it can be acquired completely free of charge, which may well be a factor in society’s subsequent attempts to regulate the sexual imagination, and which is a point to which we’ll be returning later.

On sexual openness’s correlation with civilization’s rise:

Sexual openness and cultural progress would seem pretty much to have walked hand in hand throughout the opening chapters of the human story in the West, and it wasn’t until the advent of Christianity, or more specifically of the apostle Paul, that anybody realized we should all be thoroughly ashamed of both our bodies and those processes relating to them.

And of course, Alan Moore’s conclusion:

So, to recap on what we have learned so far: sexually open and progressive cultures such as ancient Greece have given the West almost all of its civilizing aspects, whereas sexually repressive cultures like late Rome have given us the Dark Ages.

The Hi-tech Nerd Way to Screw with Currency Markets

This is absolutely amazing:

[Tencent is] a genuine concern for the Chinese government, which now fears that the QQ is deflating the official yuan. “QQ” is the virtual currency created by Tencent, China’s largest instant messaging platform based in Shenzen. Originally, Tencent sold QQ as a fun way for customers to purchase online games, greeting cards, and so on, but as the service became more popular, many started treating it as an alternative to the yuan, using it to, for example, bet in gambling games and (of course) purchase online sex. (For a wild time in Shenzen, you can now IM a “QQ girl”.) The expanding trade in QQ so worrisome to Chinese officials, they’re issuing warnings against its unauthorized use. “The QQ coin is challenging the status of the renminbi [yuan] as the only legitimate currency in China,” the Asia Times quotes public prosecutor Yang Tao.

Its somewhat shocking that people are willing to care so much about what is essentially virtual cash (although arguably, our own system of fiat money is just as “real” or “artificial”, in this case). It would be interesting to do macroeconomic studies on these virtual currencies [case in point: the first Second Life millionaire], as these virtual currencies would seem to be the most free market system that is currently in existence.

With the spread of internet technology and the ability of these new markets to arise in ways that governments are too slow to comprehend or adapt to, I think its quite clear that the days of the government being the dominant centerpiece in economic policy are coming to a close (although arguably, they never had that much control to begin with).

Blogger Beta

I’ve just updated my Blogger site to Blogger Beta which includes numerous new features such as dynamic loading of pages (it will generate pages on the fly as opposed to creating and pulling up static pages), integration with my other Google accounts, the conversion of the archives from a static list of months to a hierarchical setup, an easier and more versatile templating system, and the addition of a labeling system. As a result, I’ve changed the look of the blog slightly. The biggest changes will be the addition of the hierarchical archive system to the right-hand-side (quick and easy access to all 143 of my Blogger posts), and I’ve also set up a preliminary set of labels for all my posts:

• Comics: anything where I talk about comic books or comic-related movies is here
• Editorial: all the posts where I preach the Ben-gospel from my digital pulpit
• Links: all the posts (frankly, most of them) where I link to something that I find profound or interesting or humorous
• Personal: all the posts where I discuss things of a more personal nature
• Reversi: of course, the fan-favorite discussion of my epic rounds with Vrushali and her crushing, crushing defeat at my hands
• Tech: the posts where I discuss current technology, particularly with regards to what people can do to make their lives easier or go more smoothly