The Evolution of Shylock Holmes on Democracy, Part 2

(...continued from Part 1)

The aftermath of the financial crisis saw the election of Obama, and the resulting stimulus bill was basically just the laundry list of every wasteful pork barrel project that was waiting for a crisis to ram it through. Predictably, this resulted in an increase in the size of government that was (as always) promised to be temporary, but which ended up being (as always) permanent. Obamacare saw the takeover of the US healthcare system with ever more regulation and deceptive hiding of costs (every ‘child’ insured until 26! ‘Free’ coverage of pre-existing conditions), resulting in something that was likely to be worse even than a fully socialised model. The ever-expanding bureaucracy of federal, state and local governments in the west was choking and relentless, showing no sign of stopping. The contraction of the private sector in the recession only served to highlight how the only expanding sector was government paper pushers, passing laws to burden private business.

Not only that, but the longer things went on, even the legislative achievements of Republicans became harder to see the benefit of. George Bush’s most impactful domestic policies were increasing seen to be another permanent expansion of the bloated entitlement state with Medicare Part D prescription drugs for seniors, the creation of the repulsive and loathsome TSA, and No Child Left Behind. The latter actually seemed like a good idea under standard conservative thought that the problem with bad schools was the teachers unions. The more you read, it seemed like the problem was really just bad students, and the whole idea was that standardized testing would make all students above average. Which, of course, didn’t happen. The 2012 Republican candidate had passed the same damn healthcare policy that conservatives were now complaining about. If this was the practical difference between the two parties, what was the point?

This was mostly just grumbling and disillusionment about domestic policy, but the view that Republicans probably wouldn't do much to reverse things was dispiriting  The election of Obama probably had a larger effect on the perception of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, which was perhaps more central to the question. Once the administration of the wars was no longer being carried out by “our guys” (as increasingly tenuous as that label was becoming), conservatives, myself included, were able to view the whole affair without nearly as much instinctive partisan support of the decisions made up to now. You started to hear well-reasoned paleo-conservative  voices on the right making sound and persuasive arguments about the folly of trying to turn these places into Switzerland – what the hell were we still doing there, almost a decade on? Sure, it was important to attack Al Qaeda and maybe even send a message to third world dictators to deter them from acquiring weapons of mass destruction (though opinions on the last one varied). But why did that involve trying to run the places in a really half-assed way for years on end, resulting only in the deaths of the most honorable and courageous soldiers the US was producing? If we wanted to kill terrorists, why not just blow up the place and leave?

The Arab spring managed to destroy the last of my faith that democracy might have even neutral effects on third world countries, let alone that it was going to foster economic development and liberty. The cathartic satisfaction of seeing the architect of the Lockerbie bombings getting his just desserts made way for social chaos and the attack on the Benghazi embassy. Meanwhile, Mubarak, who was not nearly as bad as Gaddafi, got the boot and it was quickly apparent that he wasn’t going to be replaced being a western-leaning liberal like the Sandmonkey, but instead by the Muslim brotherhood. That may be the last time I let my optimism about getting rid of the devil you know cloud my better judgment.

And then came along Moldbug, to put a lot of this stuff in a new perspective. With a longer time frame, reactionaries were seen to have been losing slowly but inevitably for the last several hundred years. Not only that, but it was only when one was willing to remove the sentimental attachment to the idea of suffrage did it seem obvious that the rise of democracy and the rise of socialism were unlikely to be a coincidence. Rather, they were viewed as one of the likely (if not the only) stable Nash equilibria of the voting game: 51% will always get together to expropriate the remaining 49%. I’d always known that this was a possibility. These days, I tend to think that it’s probably an near-inevitable result of democratic systems – sometimes you get there slower, sometimes you get there faster, but socialism is where it ends up. At last, you had a very parsimonious explanation of both why conservatives kept losing and why they kept being surprised about this fact – they were wedded to a romance about universal suffrage that blinded them to the fact that this was the likely cause of the ruin of the things they valued. To say that the 49% deserve to be eaten because they’re not the 51% tends to undermine the ‘getting the government you deserve’ argument.

To the extent that democracy is thus the means by which you empower the many to expropriate the few, it is no longer a moral neutral, it is in fact a moral bad. In this setup, the west works despite democracy. It doesn’t work without regard to democracy, and it certainly doesn’t work because of it. Even democratic boosters must occasionally look at the story of Greece in recent years and wonder about the ability of western democracies to correct course, particularly if there isn’t some superior not-really-democratic body like the EU to force their hand.

All this raised the larger question : what if the same thing was true in the West that you’d previously identified in the Arab spring and the third world? That in the long run you could either be free to vote, or free in the other aspects of your life, but not both?

I’m not certain of this conclusion. An awful lot hinges upon what you think about the relationship between democracy and the widespread technological improvement and associated economic growth of the 20^th century. If you think that this was tied to democratic systems of government, you’d very likely stick with it. But the evidence on this is hard to interpret. There’s a big time-series trend, for sure, and the US was probably the most innovative country of the 20^th century. But the Soviets had a space program too, and the Nazis weren’t short on good physicists either. It’s hard to know what to think on this one.

The small-c conservative in me, however, is still skeptical of grand schemes for change. This is not based so much on the idea of needing to preserve the world as it is, but rather on the imperfectability of human knowledge. Most elaborate theories of government, including appealing ideas like neocameralism, may suffer from the same problem as No Child Left Behind – they sound great in theory, but the seductiveness of a given theory as being intellectually consistent nonetheless fails for reasons that you hadn’t thought about in advance. In other words, part of the problem of the communists was that they had an unrealistic view of human nature. The other part, however, was that they had excessive hubris about their ability to remake the world into some alternative utopia. To somewhat correct the first but retain the second may lead to disaster almost as surely, if your understanding of human nature turns out to be better but still incomplete.

So Shylock of 2013 is skeptical about our current governing arrangements, but unclear of what to replace them with. At a minimum, I’m much less certain that government in the west is carried out in anything like an optimal fashion. It’s striking how little experimentation there actually is in different methods of government. This makes me suspicious of claims that we’re at some kind of global maximum. Frankly, I’m not even sure we’re at a local maximum. You may think there’s a lot unresolved questions about something like a sovereign corporation. But honestly, what makes you so confident that it would work worse than the State of California? How about just less suffrage? If voting isn’t a moral right, would government work better if voting were limited to net taxpayers or property owners?

Moldbug once wrote that to not believe in democracy in the 21^st century is a little like not believing in God in the 17^th century. In this regard, I guess I’m a democratic agnostic, leaning skeptical. I find myself uncertain where most people are sure.

We’ll see what I think in 5 years time. Not many who lose their faith tend to regain it, however.

The Evolution of Shylock Holmes on Democracy, Part 1

Shylock circa 2003 was mainly a neo-conservative. By this, I mean that I tended to view democracy as both a moral good and an instrumental good. In the moral category, I tended to think that democracy was important as the only legitimate measure of the consent of the governed, and hence replacing authoritarian regimes like Saddam with some expression of the average Iraqi’s opinion was inherently an important increase in their freedom.

In terms of the importance of the invasion though, I was perhaps more sold by the idea of democracy as an instrumental good –that democracy tended to have a civilizing effect that would cause Iraqis to be less interested in starting wars with their neighbours and trying to develop weapons of mass destruction. At a minimum, it seemed like a better bet for the Middle East than the apparent previous policy of mostly non-engagement, which had brought September 11.

The longer the Iraq war went on, of course, the more it became apparent that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan was turning into a functioning government at any rapid rate. The new states were incredibly weak and riddled with violence. At the same time, democratic elections in the Palestinian territories produced government by Hamas, which seemed, if any anything, slightly worse than the terminally corrupt Palestinian Authority. It all started to call into question the idea of democracy as an instrumental good, as it wasn’t producing anything like decent governance in all these places.

More reading about the history of government in Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea and Chile cast the previously observed correlation between prosperity and democracy in a new light. These places tended to start out with authoritarian capitalism, and once this created prosperity, they were then able to transition to democracy. From this point of view, democracy was better understood as the symptom of a functioning society, rather than the cause. It seemed more that once a society had a culture that respected property rights and generally allowed individual freedom (at least in non-political matters), they were more likely to transition to democratic suffrage.

In this view, democracy is like a luxury good – it may have some positive treatment effects in a society that’s already peaceful and rich, but if it’s tried in a society that’s tribalist and doesn’t respect private property, the result is likely to be something like the disaster in Zimbabwe. At best, it’s a practical neutral overall, being maybe welfare-improving in some cases and harmful in others.

In moral terms, democracy was still a weak moral good, but the argument was more tied to the idea that you got the government you deserved. If you as a society voted for Hamas, you deserved to be governed by Hamas, for better or worse (in this case, worse). But it was at least a just outcome – as long as the vote was respected, the only way you got Hamas was if the median person supported it. This was the overall perspective of Shylock circa 2007/8.

(...to be continued)

End the Engagment Ring Arms Race

As they said in Wargames, the only winning move is not to play.

Over at Priceonomics, they had an excellent piece recently with the arresting title 'Diamonds Are Bulls***'.

I challenge you to read through the whole thing and come to the end asserting that diamonds aren't in fact bulls***, but are actually worthy demonstrations of love and investments of money. The reasons for the Priceonomics headline include, but are not limited to, the fact that:
-The whole thing was started by a marketing campaign in 1938 by DeBeers to get people to buy more diamonds
-We could make flawless diamonds industrially for very little money
-They lose tons of value immediately after purchase, and
-Even experts barely know exactly how to value them.

The point the article doesn't answer, of course, is how this practice persists given that most men already know, either instinctively or by reading this stuff before, that this whole thing is an outrageous con. No man is genuinely, honest-to-god happy about spending thousands of dollars on an engagement ring. They might do it because they love the woman, and know she's excited about it. But they'd sure as hell wish that the woman would be equally excited to accept by way of a substitute a really nice restaurant meal, an expensive watch, or a trip to the Bahamas. All of which in combination you could probably buy for less than a mid-level engagement ring.

So we all agree this is an egregious scam perpetrated on us by DeBeers.  These monopolist turdbags have managed to convince women and men that this is something that you have to do, Serious You Guys, to show your love for a woman. The reason this works is that marrying someone is an important decision that many men are nervous about. DeBeers has found a way to capitalise on this by creating a perception that society all agrees that we need to buy diamonds to show our love. Just like in a strip club, when you don't quite know what you need to do and are afraid to ask, you'll spend money to make the problem go away.

This problem is particularly strong because proposing to someone is something that men don't generally talk about a great deal beforehand - not to their friends, and even less so to the future bride. So they don't really know what they should be spending, and are thus ripe targets to be scammed by salesmen and their own nervousness. And it's difficult to boycott, because at the point you're proposing to someone, you're meant to be declaring your love. Proposing, while simultaneously explaining why there's no ring because that's stupid, is likely to come across somewhat awkwardly, to say the least.

The other macabre genius of the plan is that it's difficult for couples to agree ahead of time not to do it, because to plan in advance 'Oh, when I propose to you, I'll do it in this way' ruins the surprise. As a consequence, even men who are 90% sure that their fiancee doesn't care much for an expensive ring will probably err on the safe side and spend the cash anyway, just to be sure. If they could have a conversation and confirm their hunch, they'd just skip it. But they can't. So DeBeers wins again.

Frankly, I find this immensely unsatisfactory. Not only is this wasteful, zero-sum arms race spending, but it's a scam perpetrated by the most successful cartel in the history of the world.

If there's one thing I hate, it's monopolists jacking up prices. Boy, do I hate monopolists. Nothing would please me more than to see those clowns reduced to being insurance salesmen or something actually productive.

So, how do we destroy DeBeers? How do we stop the arms race?

Here's the Shylock three step plan for how, as a society, we can stop flushing money down the toilet on worthless trinkets.

Step 1. Tell all future dates, well in advance of any proposal date, that you think expensive diamonds are a crock and a fraud, and that you won't be buying one, regardless of whom you marry.

Step 2. Follow through on it.

Step 3. There is no step 3.

Step 1 is the key part. What you need to do is make the conversation about the principle of the ring in the abstract, divorced from any implication about the girl in question. In other words, make it known that this isn't about the girl you're with, it isn't because this is on your mind since you're thinking of proposing soon. No, just as a moral stand, you're refusing to enrich a price-fixing cartel to satisfy an arbitrary demand about how romance should be.

The girl may object that she likes diamonds and finds them pretty. The immediate answer is that she likes them because the DeBeers corporation decided that she should like them. Why else would society just magically start liking them all of a sudden in 1938? And if you just like sparkly things, why not a cubic zirconium? Why not an artificial diamond? What on earth is the difference, other than burning money?

More to the point, the receptiveness of the girl to this argument is a great screening mechanism. Just like women who don't pine after massive weddings, the women who don't pine after expensive engagement rings are also, on average, the ones you actually want to be marrying. A girlfriend who agrees that this whole thing is a con and are happy with a cheap ring, a fake ring, or no ring at all is, paradoxically, the one worthy of the expensive ring. But thankfully, that's not even needed!

The real question is, do you go the hardcore route and insist on no ring at all, or do you just buy a small artificial diamond for a few hundred bucks, or a cubic zirconium for ten bucks?

The answer to that depends on how tolerant the other party is, and how much you feel like contributing positive externalities. Taking a stand to not buy any engagement ring (and just having the wedding ring) is risky, but decreases ever so slightly the societal expectation of having to spend money like this. It's providing a true public good. You won't be thanked by many people, but you'll always be an honorary member in exemplary standing around this humble corner of the internet.

Buying a fake ring will cost you not much more, but is implicitly acknowledges that you're catering to the societal demand by pretending you bought an expensive ring. And pretending is all it is, because it's unlikely anyone else will be able to tell the damn difference.

I can see the argument for the second one, if only to make the fiancee's life easier so that she doesn't have to explain to everyone why there's no ring at all. That's perhaps too big an ask in the short term. But even being willing to have a small ring is an improvement. Like all social attitudes, they change slowly.

One thing is for sure. If I decided to get married, DeBeers isn't getting a red cent out of me.

This may seem like an extreme position, but frankly if you've put up with the rest of the somewhat outrageous things I say, is this one really much worse?

A Call To Arms For Tax Accountants

Accountancy  always suffers the reputation for being boring and dreary. "We pore through arcane pages of tax law to find out how to slightly alter the deductions on some or other special purpose entity! What could be more thrilling?"

Okay, so the day-to-day business of accounting might not be fun. But the purpose of it can be made much more exciting - I help free citizens cheat the government out of ill-deserved tax revenues! Pro-tax-avoidance types are often fond of quoting Judge Learned Hand on this point:

"Anyone may arrange his affairs so that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which best pays the treasury. There is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes. Over and over again the Courts have said that there is nothing sinister in so arranging affairs as to keep taxes as low as possible. Everyone does it, rich and poor alike and all do right, for nobody owes any public duty to pay more than the law demands."

This is good, as far as it goes. It has some resemblance, although imprecise, to the standard defence of capitalism - sure, this whole greed thing is bad, but capitalism channels it towards socially beneficial purposes. Here, the equivalent is that everyone tries to pay less tax, and so you don't need to feel bad about that.

In other words, your desire to keep your own money is widespread, so obey the law, but otherwise feel free to keep your own cash. Sound advice, but not exactly uplifting. You wouldn't want to be trying to inspire people to man the barricades with that. The big missing piece is an explanation for why exactly 'all do right' by avoiding taxes. Judge Hand never really tells us why that is.

What you really want, rather, is the tax avoidance equivalent of the Ayn Rand argument for capitalism, which phrased it as a morally correct system, rather than as a morally fraught but practically effective system. Rand's argument, which is relevant here too, is essentially that all interactions between men either happen by voluntary contract, as epitomised by money, or at the point of a gun. Thus capitalism is in fact a morally uplifting system, rewarding men's ingenuity for satisfying the desires of other men, and providing value in exchange for value.

And to get the tax-avoidance version of that, you need the great Lysander Spooner:

All political power, so called, rests practically upon this matter of money. Any number of scoundrels, having money enough to start with, can establish themselves as a "government"; because, with money, they can hire soldiers, and with soldiers extort more money; and also compel general obedience to their will. It is with government, as Caesar said it was in war, that money and soldiers mutually supported each other; that with money he could hire soldiers, and with soldiers extort money. So these villains, who call themselves governments, well understand that their power rests primarily upon money. With money they can hire soldiers, and with soldiers extort money. And, when their authority is denied, the first use they always make of money, is to hire soldiers to kill or subdue all who refuse them more money.

For this reason, whoever desires liberty, should understand these vital facts, viz.: 1. That every man who puts money into the hands of a "government" (so called), puts into its hands a sword which will be used against him, to extort more money from him, and also to keep him in subjection to its arbitrary will. 2. That those who will take his money, without his consent, in the first place, will use it for his further robbery and enslavement, if he presumes to resist their demands in the future. 3. That it is a perfect absurdity to suppose that any body of men would ever take a man's money without his consent, for any such object as they profess to take it for, viz., that of protecting him; for why should they wish to protect him, if he does not wish them to do so? To suppose that they would do so, is just as absurd as it would be to suppose that they would take his money without his consent, for the purpose of buying food or clothing for him, when he did not want it. 4. If a man wants "protection," he is competent to make his own bargains for it; and nobody has any occasion to rob him, in order to "protect" him against his will. 5. That the only security men can have for their political liberty, consists in their keeping their money in their own pockets, until they have assurances, perfectly satisfactory to themselves, that it will be used as they wish it to be used, for their benefit, and not for their injury. 6. That no government, so called, can reasonably be trusted for a moment, or reasonably be supposed to have honest purposes in view, any longer than it depends wholly upon voluntary support.

Quite so.

Tomorrow, I'm off to my accountant to find out how to squeeze every possible deduction| out of my tax returns. Do your patriotic duty and take back every cent you can from the megatherion in Washington!

The Intrade End Game

The most useful source of information on US political events, Intrade, is shutting down:

With sincere regret we must inform you that due to circumstances recently discovered we must immediately cease trading activity on www.intrade.com.

These circumstances require immediate further investigation, and may include financial irregularities which in accordance with Irish law oblige the directors to take the following actions:

-Cease exchange trading on the website immediately.
-Settle all open positions and calculate the settled account value of all Member accounts immediately.
-Cease all banking transactions for all existing Company accounts immediately.During the upcoming weeks, we will investigate these circumstances further and determine the necessary course of action.

To mitigate any further risk to members’ accounts, we have closed and settled all open contracts at fair market value as of the close of business on March 10, 2013, in accordance with the Terms and Conditions of our customers’ use of the website. You may view your account details and settled account balances by logging into the website.

At this time and until further notice, it is not possible to make any payments to members in accordance with their settled account balance until the investigations have concluded.

Hmmm.

The outcome of shutting down was bound to happen eventually. But it's hard to know what to make of this press release in particular.

Part of the backstory is this disgraceful attempt by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission to sue them over the fact that US investors were using the markets. Imagine that! US citizens having a bet on the outcome of an election! How will the republic survive?

They did the same thing with the sports betting version, Tradesports a few years ago. Under the rubric of the standard 'Think of the Children!' argument, the US government had to work hard to stamp tradesports out for a much bigger sin - offering a better sports gambling product at a lower cost than Vegas was willing to offer. And hey presto! Out you go. Tradesports made the Superbowl actually fun (no mean feat), as you could watch each play and see how the price reacted, getting real-time information on the progress of the game.

Tradesports was taken out sooner, because Vegas makes decent money off sports betting. They were willing to let the political side linger a bit longer, because this is small potatoes. Seeing the writing on the wall, the company who originally ran both (Intrade and Tradesports) sensibly decided to split the two parts off into separate companies. This managed to stave off the crocodile a little longer. What they really needed to do was start bribing making donations to some US senators. That would have been more useful. The trouble with being incorporated in Ireland is that you're far enough away that you can't have political influence, but not so far away that you can escape prosecution. Then again Full Tilt Poker was incorporated in Ireland. Then again again, when the DOJ came looking for them, they ended up getting acquired by PokerStars, incorporated in The Isle of Man. I don't know how much the jurisdiction helps. If it were me, I'd try for Macau. You can bet the ChiComs wouldn't bother you. If you are going to do it, though, you need to learn the lesson that DeBeers executives figured out, but David Carruthers of BetOnSports.com didn't figure out - don't plan to set foot in the US.

As with all this stuff, the way they go after you is the Wikileaks trick - they make it illegal for credit card companies to transfer you money. He who controls Visa and Mastercard controls the world. At least until BitCoin gets big. Mencius Moldbug predicted that if BitCoin ever did look like it was getting big, the government would shut it down. Care to take the other side of that wager? I'll give you pretty good odds.

Whether the CFTC is motivated by the same considerations that make the government put the squeeze on Tradesports is unclear. Frankly, bureaucratic petty jealousy would be more than enough to motivate these pinheads. Look, someone somewhere is trading a financial product without our authority! Shut it down! Sue them into oblivion!

The real question is why Intrade decided to stop trading now. After all, the loathesome CFTC press release was from November. Why now?

As far as I can see, there seem to be two possibilities.

One is that the government is pulling a Conrad Black. This is where they charge you with a crime and then find some pretext to freeze your assets, thereby making it incredibly hard for you to raise the money to pay for decent lawyers. How freezing their members accounts will help them is unclear - I'd be quite surprised if under Irish law they're allowed to used member funds (which are likely in some kind of trust) to pay for legal bills.

The other is that they've figured out that the money simply isn't there. Corporate directors don't use the words 'financial irregularities' unless they really have to. In other words, the reason they can't pay out members is that they've figured out that someone has been skimming money off the top, and now there aren't enough funds there to pay out everyone in full. In which case, you can't pay out anyone until you find out what the hell is going on. This was the substance of the allegations against Full Tilt Poker. If you're skimming money off the top, you're effectively running a Ponzi scheme, although not one with explosive growth.

It's possible the two ideas actually interact. In other words, the member funds are held in trust, but the company has been forced to make some provision for losses under the CFTC action. If you think there's now a chance that you'll be insolvent when it's all finished, it's not clear exactly what steps you'd take as a company, but this may well be one of them. (Not remembering all of my trusts law so clearly, I tried getting some kind of answer for the US here, but it looked rather hard. Actual lawyers would probably know the answer). So even if there isn't anything untoward going on in the company accounts, it wouldn't surprise me if this had something to do with it.

So at last, the government gets their way! The prediction markets in the US get eviscerated, except for BetFair, which actually does make it hard for US investors to take part (which probably doesn't help the accuracy of US election predictions), and, more importantly, is large enough in the UK that they have political power and can't be pushed around so easily.

The government doesn't specifically want inaccurate predictions. It just doesn't want anyone other than Vegas  or Wall Street to make any money on contingent financial contracts, no matter how small the amount, no matter how trifling the event being predicted.

The real winner in all this is Nate Silver. If you want predictions for important events, don't look to markets to save you. The markets would be happy to oblige, of course, but too many important people stand to lose money if that happens. Nothing personal old chap, you know how it is.

Look upon my beauty, ye mighty, and despair!

From the New York Times magazine, a photo shoot of models with their mothers.

Japanese artwork often associates the female form with the motif of the cherry blossom. It captures not only the sense of idyllic natural beauty, but the fragile and fleeting nature of the springtime of one's life.

The modern ideal is that people should not be judged on anything as shallow as outward appearance. If you're beautiful on the inside, that's all that matters!

Of course, nobody acts like this in their own choices, neither men nor women. The modern world has not stopped fetishising beauty, of course - quite the contrary. It has simply stopped being honest about how much beauty is prized, and how brief it really is. Last season's supermodels are simply shuffled out of the limelight to make way for the new ones, and the old photos are all that anyone ever depicts.

What ends up being lost thereby is an understanding of the vanishingly small amount of time that one will be young and handsome, and the not much larger amount of time that one will be around at all.

As one much wiser put it:

“I inform you, great king, I announce to you, great king: aging and death are rolling in on you. When aging and death are rolling in on you, great king, what should be done?”

“As aging and death are rolling in on me, venerable sir, what else should be done but to live by the truth (Dhamma), to live righteously, and to do wholesome and meritorious deeds?”

Let's Eliminate Salmonella. No, wait, let's not.

Over at Hacker News, there was a link to this great Forbes article talking about the differences in regulation in the treatment of eggs. Apparently in the US, eggs are forced to be washed, while in the EU eggs are forced to not be washed. This also relates to the fact that US eggs are stored in the fridge, while EU eggs tend to be left at room temperature.

The whole thing is presented as a kind of 'duelling regulations' thing - in the end, it looks like there's odd biological reasons why being washed or not can impact how you choose to store them, and the chances of disease.

And then, buried at the end of page three, comes this gem:

Since the late 1990’s British farmers have been vaccinating hens against salmonella following a crisis that sickened thousands of people who had consumed infected eggs. Amazingly, this measure has virtually wiped out the health threat in Britain. In 1997, there were 14,771 reported cases of salmonella poisoning there, by 2009 this had dropped to just 581 cases. About 90 percent of British eggs now come from vaccinated hens – it’s required for producers who want to belong to the Lion scheme. The remaining 10 percent come from very small farmers who don’t sell to major retailers.

In contrast, there is no such requirement for commercial hens in the US. Consequently, according to FDA data, there are about 142,000 illnesses every year caused by consuming eggs contaminated by the most common strain of salmonella. Only about one-third of farmers here choose to inoculate their flocks. Farmers cite cost as the main reason not to opt for vaccination –FDA estimates say it would cost about 14 cents a bird. The average hen produces about 260 eggs over the course of her lifetime.

Wait, what? You mean that for 0.05 cents per egg, you can virtually eliminate salmonella poisoning? And this isn't being done in the US, because US farmers have correctly estimated that ignorant consumers aren't savvy enough to insist on this purchase?

Talk about burying the lead.

Wow. That sounds pretty outrageous. I read this piece, and my instinct was the think that the British policy of vaccinating hens sounds like a no-brainer.

But then again, we wouldn't be economists if we didn't shut up and multiply.

Let's assume that the entire reduction in salmonella comes from this policy:  14,771 - 581 = 14,190 cases of salmonella avoided by vaccinating hens.

The cost per egg as we noted is 0.05 cents (14 cents per hen, divided by 260 eggs per hen).

So how many eggs are consumed in Britain each year?

According to this estimate, almost 11 billion. That sounds ridiculously large, until you realise that with a population of 63.182 million, this amounts to a consumption of 174 eggs per person per year, or roughly one egg every two days.

Let's go with that number.

So the total cost of the policy each year is thus roughly 11,000,000,000 *$0.14/260 = $592 million.

This implies a shadow cost of each case of Salmonella equal to ($592 million / 14,190), or $41,741.

Put that way, it seems like more of an arguable proposition. Maybe we should cancel the policy?

Not so fast! Do you know how much weight I should place on your hunch about the value of salmonella? Zero! Shut up and keep multiplying!

According to this PubMed article there were 1316 salmonella-related deaths between 1990 and 2006. The paper abstract reports the mortality per person-year, but what we want to know is the mortality per salmonella case. According to the original article, there are about 142,000 salmonella cases per year in the US. Assuming a constant number of infections over the years, this gives us a probability of death conditional on salmonella poisoning of 1316/(142,000*17) = 0.000545. Using a statistical value of human life of about $7 million, this gives an expected mortality cost per salmonella case of $3816.

Do you value the pain and suffering of a non-fatal case of salmonella at $37,925? I sure don't. If you paid me 38 grand and guaranteed it wouldn't kill me, I'd be pretty keen to sign up for a case of salmonella.

Put differently, the implied cost of human life in the salmonella reduction program is ($41,741 / 0.000545) = $76.57 million, ignoring any value placed on pain and suffering for non-lethal cases.

In other words, despite the intuitive appeal of getting rid of salmonella just by vaccinating chickens, as a society we'd probably be better off spending the money on road safety, medical research, or something else with a lower cost of saving each life.

The interesting thing is that when I started out writing this blog post, my initial reaction was that it was amazing that the US wasn't requiring chicken vaccinations, and the hard numbers changed my mind.

Sometimes the best treatment is to do nothing. Long live NPV!

George Akerlof ain't got nothing on the Silk Road

There was this great piece on Hacker News a little while ago on the Silk Road. Apparently it's possible to buy drugs over the internet using BitCoins, and get them shipped to you in the mail.

No, really.

There are so many great aspects to this story.

It's hysterical that this guy is so confident in the completely shambolic level of drug enforcement that he's willing to post them to his own address in his own name. The standard defence is that you might be able to claim that the drugs were sent to you by some enemy or nasty ex-girlfriend.

I dunno. This strikes me as one of those cases where people confuse the statement 'I won't be able to be proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt' with 'I can come up with some bizarre cock and bull story about how my enemy wanted to punish me by sending me a hundred ecstasy tablets'. Yeah, that'll teach him! Eat ecstasy, loser!

The forgotten part in all this is that you've got to stand up in front of a jury of 12 ordinary men and women and convince them that this is actually a serious possibility. You got sent a pound of marijuana by an enemy, you say? Which one? Which girlfriend? Let's get her on the stand! What's that? She's now testifying that you guys broke up because she got tired of the fact that you were always smoking marijuana? And she decided to punish you by shipping you some marijuana, not tipping off the police or the post office, and just waiting for a random drug screening dog to sniff out the package?

Yeeeaah. If I were your lawyer, I'd advise you to take the plea bargain.

In addition, the guy is willing to buy adderall online, under the assumption that they don't bother screening for this stuff anyway, and then write about his experiences and post it on the internet. That takes some stones. Given they lock up doctors for prescribing too many painkillers, I can't say I'd share the author's insouciance about the reasonableness of drug enforcement policies.

More importantly, what a remarkable market has sprung up that despite all the enormous potential market for lemons problems, the guy actually reliably got the drugs shipped to his house multiple times. By anonymous strangers. Say what you will, that's some impressive market design right there. Read the whole thing and find out how it works.

Remember this next time someone tells you that the information asymmetry problems in a market are so severe that we absolutely must have yet more government regulation.

The Flight Risk verdict is in...

So if you haven't been following, Isabella herself graced us with her presence in the comments to my post on the blog 'She's a Flight Risk'. I feel perhaps a little like the atheists in Rowan Atkinson's great sketch on hell - "you must be feeling a right bunch of nitwits". If you didn't read 'She's a Flight Risk' in time, it's alas gone back into the ether - jwz took it down, as he explained.

Way back in the day, AL once observed that the idea that people crave privacy was not exactly right. Instead, quite the opposite is true - as he put it, 'give people a chance, and they can't wait to tell you everything about themselves.'

The urge to confess our secrets is quite a deep one. People are wary, of course, of whom they can trust. But if you give them the right circumstances and audience, nearly everyone wants to tell their story.

I think the reason people get so misled on this point is that they keep thinking of privacy in terms of the desire for physical privacy. If I'm taking a shower, my desire for privacy may be best expressed by Mr Franklin's formulation of the right to be left alone. But the main privacy question these days is that of informational privacy. And here, people want something quite different - the ability to shape the narrative about one's self that the world has, and control the flow of information.

Suppose, like Isabella, you were on the run in strange foreign countries fleeing from pursuing relatives. You knew nobody, you could trust nobody, and revealing any details about yourself, even inadvertently, would spell disaster.

Can you imagine what a crushing burden that would be? You have only two options, both terrible.

The first is a superhuman effort to construct an entire fake back-story, and stick with it every minute of every day, for ever. Every true fact about yourself has to be substituted with some false story, a false name, an entire false identity. This would require not only enormous feats of self-control, but memory too - you have to keep track of everything you've told people already about your previous life.

And even if you manage this, the cognitive dissonance of the whole thing would be overwhelming. As soon as you finally start to get to know somebody well enough that you consider them a friend, you'll feel increasingly guilty about the fact that everything they know about you is a lie. You would desperately want someone you feel you can trust, but the only way you can get there is by demonstrating through long periods of stone-faced lies that you yourself are unworthy of the trust being reciprocated.

So what's the other alternative?

Isolation. Keeping to yourself, bearing the whole burden alone, and feeling yourself slowly being submerged, drip by drip, with the loneliness of unsought solitude.

Reading back over my original post, one bit of the reasoning now stands out as clearly wrong. I previously claimed that if you were going to run away, it would seem unlikely that you would you start a blog to describe your experiences.

The mistake is to assume that the relevant question is "if you were writing down the optimal list of how to disappear, would this include starting a blog about your experiences?". To which, the answer is obviously no.

But from the perspective of human nature, if you were on the run, the urge to do something like start an anonymous blog to describe your experiences would be overwhelming.

In addition, doing it on a blog is likely safer than telling some local person - at least on the blog, even if they know who you are, they don't know where you are.

So consider instead a comparison that I can't believe it took me this long to realise. If one is writing on a pseudonymous blog  questioning why someone would write a story like 'She's a Flight Risk' that might come back to haunt them, on some level this shows an embarrassing lack of self-awareness. Why are you writing stories you clearly don't want attached to your name for all to know?

This blog, unlike 'She's a Flight Risk' is of course located at blogger, and not at a domain registered in Lichtenstein to a specially set-up shell company. This tells you most of the differences between the two of us.

Partly, I have less at stake that needs hiding. But also, unlike Isabella, I know that I would not have the self-control to run everything in the meticulous way needed to completely cover my tracks. This is of course highly related to the fact that I also would not have the nous to run away and cover my tracks physically. I take some precautions, I retain my risks with others, and I tread each day between the Scylla of saying something that might be taken out of context and used against me, and the Charybdis of limiting one's remarks to the banal, the uncontroversial, and the trivial, laced of course with a lingering sense of cowardice.

'She's a Flight Risk' was exciting to read, and the vicarious thrill of throwing away all of one's past and living in exotic parts of the third world has a definite allure.

But at heart, running away is almost always an unhappy story, especially when one is running from something, rather than running to something. Even if we readers never find out the end, I'm glad she's (presumably) no longer on the run. I hope the story turned out well.

Oscar Pistorius shoots gun, girlfriend and progressive delusions hardest hit

Quote of the day, from AL, referencing the case of Oscar Pistorius, the South African paralympian accused of shooting his girlfriend:

I'll bet South Africans love that celebrity gun violence has joined non-celebrity sex violence, non-celebrity gun violence and apartheid as the things for which that country is famous.

Ha! Quite.

The story is sad, no matter what happened that night, certainly for the family of Reeva Steenkamp, the victim.

It's also, however, a useful lens with which to examine how a certain mindset continues to view problems in South Africa. If you want to enjoy some schadenfreude, Hector Lopez points us to this breathless more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger ABC 7:30 report story on the subject

GINNY STEIN: Amidst the heartbreak, another round of soul searching has begun in a nation that despite its violent nature still believes in the miracle of Nelson Mandela.

LULU XINGWANA: We still have to deal with the consequences of the war of Apartheid and the brutality of Apartheid that has actually affected the psyche of our society.

Some possibly roided-up athlete, who apparently wasn't a saint simply because he lacked legs, killed his girlfriend, maybe intentionally, maybe because he thought she was an intruder, and the problem is ... wait for it ... Apartheid!

To paraphrase Menachem Begin: white guy kills white girl and they blame a long-dead racist government.

Amidst the heartbreak of deploying every threadbare cliche on the subject, yet another clueless progressive reporter fails to revise any of her hypotheses no matter what the evidence says.

We're coming up to, what, 20-odd years since the end of Apartheid? So how's the great universal suffrage experiment working?

Just swell!

Perplexingly, the effects of Apartheid just seem to get larger and larger the greater the time elapsed since the event. Odd, huh?

If you look at the overall trends, the good news is that they've apparently managed to reverse some of the large increase in crime that occurred in the first 8 years since the end of Apartheid:

The bad news?:

The good, but largely inexplicable news is the decrease in so‐called social fabric crimes; crimes that the police have little ability to affect. Murder, the most reliable of all police statistics, has reduced by 7.2% in the last year and by 15% over the past six years; attempted murder, common robbery and common assault have also reduced fairly dramatically since 2003/4. While this may represent a positive social change, it could also just reflect under‐recording of at least common robbery, assault and attempted murder.  

David Bruce of the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation argued in a SA Crime Quarterly article in March this year that the discrepancy between the rate of change in these social fabric crimes strongly suggests that the police are under‐recording the less serious interpersonal violent crimes as a way to improve the performance ratings of stations to meet the target to reduce violent contact crimes by between seven and ten percent per annum.

The idea that police may be underreporting crime in order to improve statistics isn't a big surprise. The more grimly ironic part is that crimes like 'common robbery, assault and attempted murder' are just part of the "social fabric", which police have little ability to affect. Come on! You want the police to try to prevent all sorts of nickel and dime stuff like attempted murder? Don't make me laugh.

On the other hand, some murders are more notable than others. Let's ask the impeccably left-wing Genocide Watch about the situation in South Africa:

On 15 September 2011, Genocide Watch placed South Africa at level 6, Preparation, saying "we have evidence of organized incitement to violence against White people".... Genocide Watch stated that by 2001 "2.2 percent of ethno-European (White) farmers had already been murdered and more than... 12 percent of these farmers had been attacked on their farms". As of December 2011 approximately 3,158 - 3,811 White farmers have been murdered in these attacks.

What's that, you say? There's a genocide going on in South Africa? Quick, send in the Marines!

Oh, you mean it's blacks killing white South African farmers? Never mind then, nothing to see here. I bet they had it coming, those racists! 

Surely this is just three-thousand-odd isolated incidents that have received widespread condemnation by the government?:

On 8 January 2012, after giving a speech at the ANC Centennial 2012 celebrations in Bloemfontein, South Africa, president Jacob Zuma sang the same "shoot the Boer" that had been the subject of Julius Malema's hate speech conviction.

So take your pick - either the South African government is implicitly supporting a genocide against white farmers, or it's simply unable to prevent the widespread murder of white farmers as part of a general murder epidemic! Either way, it's a win-win for South Africa.

Apartheid is the gift that just keeps on giving for progressive do-gooders trying to explain why the 'miracle of Nelson Mandela' has entirely failed to reduce the penury and misery in South Africa.

Apartheid, like most of the other undemocratic systems that were opposed by Western democracies, is so dead that its revival is not only inconceivable, but even the fact that the system existed in living memory seems hard to fathom. So be it - it's hard to think of any political viewpoint (mine included), no matter how outlandish, that would view apartheid as anybody's ideal system of anything. This holds no matter how much scorn you may have for the current governing arrangements. Lord Cromer didn't need apartheid in Egypt, and I doubt he would have needed it in South Africa either.

Which makes it all the more puzzling that the impeccably un-racist (against blacks at least) universal suffrage democracy that replaced it has been such a disaster. How can that be? The system it followed was such a corrupt and racist disgrace. Surely virtually anything else should be a clear improvement, no? And if you replace it with the democratic consent of the governed, in the best form of government that the world has ever known, surely prosperity and stability should follow.

And yet ... they don't.

Not in Libya, not in Egypt, not in South Africa, not in Zimbabwe, not in Iraq.

At some point, surely one must perhaps consider the possibility that democracy and universal suffrage in Africa are not in fact solving any of the problems that they were meant to cure, and may in fact be making them worse?

Let me pose the same question I ask of colonialism opponents when it's cited as the catch-all explanation for Africa's social ills - assuming things continue to stay wretched, at what point will you be willing to acknowledge that the fault is no longer that of Apartheid?

It's a joke question, of course - liberal opinion will never, ever stop blaming colonialism and apartheid for African problems. Not in 20 years, not ever. If in a thousand years humanity has colonised the stars and South Africa is still a hellhole, you can bet that liberal opinion will still be blaming apartheid.

The genuinely good news is that universal suffrage is taking somewhat longer to completely wreck South Africa than it took in Zimbabwe.

This means that you've got a bit more time to get out, should you have the misfortune to still be there.

The Marketing Genius of Bruno Mars

Like the tobacco industry, you need not want to purchase a product to respect a well-constructed business strategy.

Consider the example of singer Bruno Mars. If you need to understand him in a single picture, try this one:



(via)

He sings cliched romance songs aimed at a young female audience, selling the fantasy of himself as some kind of mix-race romantic icon. Look at him, cheesily holding the hand of some adoring fan and singing directly to her while someone, presumably her friend, takes a photo.

Again, I'm not the target demographic here, but his stuff is well designed.

In particular, here's his famous song 'Just the Way You Are':



First of all, it's marketed broadly at the only demographic still paying for music - impressionable teenage girls.

It begins with pure boilerplate about some hypothetical beautiful girl.

Oh, her eyes, her eyes
Make the stars look like they're not shinin'
Her hair, her hair
Falls perfectly without her trying
She's so beautiful
And I tell her everyday
Yeah

So far, so ordinary. The tune is catchy, the sentiment prosaic.

But then it gets interesting. No, not interesting the way the Iliad is interesting, or the way Yeats is interesting, but the way that a well-constructed ad-campaign is interesting.

I know, I know
When I compliment her she won't believe me
And it's so, it's so
Sad to think that she don't see what I see
But every time she asks me "Do I look okay? "
I say...

These lines flow on effortlessly from the previous ones, constructing a narrative of a pretty but insecure girl. Makes sense.

Then you stop and think, and realise it makes no sense at all. Think back to the really pretty girls you've met. How many of them were in the category of:

a) Being really pretty, but for some reason being really insecure about that fact, and thinking instead they were actually quite ugly

vs.

b) Having known by at least age 10, if not earlier, that they were really hot, as evidenced by being treated nicely by strangers, complimented by adults, having men of various ages stare at them, and all the boys want to kiss them.

Reader, it is a very strong rule that the attractive women of the world generally know that they're attractive. Look at the model in the film clip - do you really think it's credible that 'when he compliments her, she won't believe him'? Don't make me laugh.

So we can be quite sure that song isn't really aimed at girls who are actually pretty but think they aren't. Those girls are unicorns. Rather, it's just aimed at girls who think they aren't pretty. They are a much larger demographic, due to the sad reality of the bell curve - only 2.5% of the population will be two standard deviations above the mean.

Girls who think they're not pretty are, sadly, probably right. But don't worry, Bruno Mars, this hunky romantic guy is here to tell you that you're actually beautiful and just don't know it! Sure, you may not be able to get him directly, but buy his CD anyway! Plus some other Bruno Mars surrogate will surely come along in your life soon.

Then the chorus makes a great segue:

[Chorus:]
When I see your face
There's not a thing that I would change
'Cause you're amazing
Just the way you are
And when you smile
The whole world stops and stares for a while
'Cause girl you're amazing
Just the way you are
Yeah

Notice how effortlessly the song shifts from the third person (she is beautiful) to the second person (you are beautiful). The song is now unashamedly being sung to the audience, just like the first photo. You, listener, are perfect! You shouldn't change anything, just be yourself. 

Talk about mainlining an IV drip of the most saccharine form of feel-good self-esteem culture. There's no problem that can't be fixed by feeling good about yourself.

Admittedly, this sentiment is perhaps less toxic in the area of attractiveness, where a good chunk of the effect really is fixed at birth. (It's more problematic to encourage students to feel good about the fact that they just failed the maths test). Maybe it's just not fun to realise that you're not that attractive, and this is just a palliative.

Perhaps. But the risk is twofold. First, you might just end up with unreasonably high expectations, and end up with nobody, instead of someone who's actually in your league. And secondly, you might think that self-esteem excuses you from self-improvement, especially in the areas where you can make a difference. 

I leave it to the reader to decide the extent to which the phenomenon of excessive self-esteem is a problem among modern American youth of both sexes.

(Also, if you want to hear a really catchy cover of the song that will make you hate yourself as much as I do, check out here.)

The Odd Psychology of Strip Clubs

(Previous thoughts on the psychology of strip clubs here, and male self-deception in relationships here and here.)

The standard complaint about strip clubs is that you're paying to not get what you actually want. In other words, you hand over however much cash to get a lap dance, and you don't actually end up sexually satisfied. Having never attempted to negotiate the transaction, I can't vouch for this, but I'm pretty damn sure that short of offering literally thousands of dollars, you won't get laid. I don't even know if that would work, certainly for many strippers in the US who explicitly see their job as distinct from prostitution. The woman won't get you off (except accidentally), and you won't even be able to touch where you want to, except on their rather limited terms.

Every conversation I've had with guys who paid for a lap dance indicated, privately, that there was little risk of matters escalating to, say, the Bill Clinton level or above.

Strangely, this fact has to be elicited from them in hushed terms - they typically don't like admitting straight out that they didn't get any immediate relief for their however-many hundred dollars. Maintaining the mystique serves the interests of both the stripper and the potentially embarrassed client. As I've said before, this isn't an accident - ambiguous expectations are at the heart of the strip club experience.

So if you believe the standard complaint, men like strip clubs but end up frustrated that they don't actually get any action.

Why is this puzzling though?

The puzzle is that if you actually wanted to get some action for sure, you could have just gone to a brothel and gotten laid with probability 1. Or gone to a bar and gotten laid with probability less than 1.

Taken at face value, it indicates some sort of market failure. Surely there should be more demand for clubs that blurred the line between strip club and brothel?

One answer that I can't rule out is that this is a legality issue - strip clubs are mostly legal, brothels are mostly illegal. In the places where prostitution is legal (e.g. parts of Nevada), I don't know that there's substantial business model innovation along the lines I describe. Maybe there is.

It could also be a quality issue - maybe the type of women who are prostitutes are of a fundamentally different group than strippers, and the male preference is distinct. I dunno though - do you really think the average guy at a strip club is that picky with who he sleeps with, provided the girl is willing? It's possible, but it seems unlikely.

On the other hand, we can pretty conclusively say that it's not a cost issue. Courtesy of Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh, here's some real-world data on how much it costs to get laid in Chicago with a prostitute:

In other words, no matter who you are, the average cost for most things you want is no more than a hundred bucks. If the average lap dance customer is paying less than this, I'll be highly surprised.

So, on face we have a puzzle - many men apparently pay a lot of money for women to take off their clothes and not sleep with them, and then complain about this afterwards. They do this despite passing up the opportunity to pay less money to get laid with certainty.

If the stated preference doesn't seem to make sense, maybe we can get further by hypothesising revealed preference and see where it takes us. The standard price theory assumption here is that the market is satisfying actual customer demand.

In other words, the fact that it's very hard to get laid at the strip club is actually the feature, not the bug. Even if men won't admit it.

The most obvious explanation for this is that men go to strip clubs in groups of friends such as bachelor parties, and in any such group there's going to be a large fraction, if not a substantial majority, for whom their commitments to wives and girlfriends mean that they actually don't want to get laid that night. If this were a possibility, then they might be tempted by hyperbolic discounting to do something they'll regret the next day (or, more likely, 5 seconds after it's done). If you've got commitment problems (in both the relationship sense and the behavioral economics sense), you want to go to the place where it's very difficult to do anything beyond looking at a distance.

Not only that, but the strong prohibition serves a useful signalling mechanism to wives and girlfriends. Consider the problem of the man who actually has no intention of doing anything untoward with random ladies that night, but who may not be able to credibly signal this to his wife. If you go to the strip club, your claim to having not done anything is credible. At a brothel, you're only there if you want to get laid. Even in my hypothetical innovative strip-brothel, the expected level of misbehaviour for an external observer is larger simply because the range of bad actions has expanded. By being easier to explain to significant others (or even just to rationalise to yourself), it means that the whole group is likely to attend, rather than the group splintering off or going for some consensus alternative.

The more interesting possibility, and one that's less discussed, is that even the people getting lap dances themselves would rather be at the strip club than at the brothel. They're not dragged away from the hookers by their more conservative friends. They actually don't want that, at least in revealed preference terms.

The standard model of male desire says that what men want is some combination of a) hot chick and b) orgasm.

Far be it for me to suggest that this model has no explanatory power. It does.

But I submit that this model of the world has difficulty explaining why lots of men go to strip clubs but not many go to brothels.

A more nuanced alternative would say that men definitely want the above things, but what they also want is to be desired by hot women. They want to conquer hot women, and feel them submit to their will. They want to feel the achievement of seduction, of power, of control.

Going to a brothel will satisfy the 'penis in vagina' aspect. But it will quite definitively not satisfy any of the other parts. Quite the contrary, in fact - it will reveal, in painful relief, how far you are from all the other things you desire about the courtship process. It will reveal you as desperate. Not to the rest of the world, who probably won't know. But to yourself, which is much worse.

In his novel, God Knows, Joesph Heller describes the situation of an aging King David. He has his various courtesans, but can no longer get aroused by them. The only woman who still holds his sexual interest is his wife, Bathsheba. But Bathsheba no longer desires him - her only interest is to try to get David to make her own son, Solomon, the next king in place of his elder son, Adonijah, whom he had with another woman.

Heller describes very aptly the paradoxical situation of the absolute monarch who, due to the difficulty of male desire, cannot have what he really wants

Abishag showed him the door and petted my heaving chest until she felt my exasperation abate. Then she washed and dried herself, perfumed her wrists and armpits, and removed her robe to stand before me a moment in all her wonderful virginal nakedness before raising a leg gracefully to enter my bed on one of her biscuit-brown knees to lie down with me again. Naturally, it did no good. I got no heat then, either. I wanted my wife. I want my wife now. Bathsheba does not believe this and would not let it make a difference if she did.

“I don’t do things like that anymore,” Bathsheba responds firmly each time I ask, and, if out of sorts, adds, “I am sick of love.”

She lost her lust when she found her vocations. Her first was to be a queen. Too bad that we had no queens. The next was to be a queen mother, the first in our history, the widowed mother of a reigning sovereign. I refused to trade and I refused to grovel. I could order her into my bed with a single cursory command, of course, and she certainly would be here. But it would be begging, wouldn't it? I am David the king, and I must try not to beg. But God knows that, by one means or another, I am going to lie with her at least one more time before I give up the ghost and bring my fantastic story to an end.

Worldly absolute power does not, alas, extend to making other people actually want you on the terms that you would like.

Being the absolute monarch of the commercial transaction is no different. Paying is begging through the medium of money. The problem is otherwise the same. 

In Heller's tale, David never does get Bathsheba to sleep with him. All the courtesans of the world, no matter how beautiful, are hollow in the end.

Abishag my angel has risen from her chair and approaches without noise, wearing only a vivid scarf. Her eyes are dark as the tents of Kedar. I want my God back; and they send me a girl.

Or as the band Gomez put it:

The things that are given, not won, are the things that you want.

Gazing into the Abyss

"During the killings I no longer considered anything in particular in the Tutsi except that the person had to be done away with. I want to make clear that from the first gentleman I killed to the last, I was not sorry about a single one"

-Leopord Twagirayezu, in Machete Season

Miscellaneous Joy

-Mark Steyn gives a rousing defense of free speech following the scandalously underreported assassination attempt on Danish free speech advocate (and critic of Islam) Lars Hedegaard.

-A great model demonstration of herd immunity.

-Theodore Dalrymple talks about how breast cancer screening may end up killing more people than it saves, due to risky treatments being undertaken after false positives. At a minimum, the overall cost/benefit aspect is rather unclear. I'm always reminded of this when people insist that the current healthcare systems don't engage in enough preventative screening of disease. This is certainly possible, but it's usually just taken as given that more screening is always better. Proponents rarely seem to countenance the possibility that you can have too much testing, even just considered in terms of health effects, let alone costs.

-You know how you can tell that a band is awesome? When you go through odd songs from their back catalogue that you've never heard of, and they turn out to be totally sweet.

-The Last Psychiatrist is one of those bloggers with the rare distinction that they usually have something truly different to say about the world (other examples here). He doesn't post regularly, but his stuff is invariably interesting. He had a ripping sledge of people who ostentatiously insist on comforting mourners at funerals a few months back, and another post about a month ago ranging from why women wear makeup to why slaveowners were able to maintain control of such a large population of slaves. Read 'em both.

-I'm certainly no conspiracy theorist, but after both Waco and now Chris Dorner, it's a fair bet that if you find yourself in an extended siege situation with the police, the following might occur:
a) the cops will be throwing flash grenades into the building
b) these may set things on fire
c) when that happens, the police may well prevent the fire department from actually putting out the fire based on the claim (not unreasonable, but also self-serving) that it would be too dangerous to let them approach a building filled with madmen, and hence
d) you'll burn to death, and nobody will much care.

Update: Apparent vocal evidence of the police demanding to 'burn that f***ing house down'

As usual, Chris Rock's advice on "How to Not Get Your Ass Kicked By the Police" is apposite.

Assortative Mating of Celebrities

A fairly robust fact about celebrities is that they tend to date and/or marry other celebrities.

The most obvious explanation for this is that celebrities are the apex of the dating distribution, and hence this is simply a sorting on quality. In other words, everybody wants to marry Scarlett Johansson, but you have to be Ryan Reynolds to get a chance. This is the most depressing (but likely) possibility, and I imagine it explains most of the effect.

The more interesting hypothesis, albeit probably a smaller factor, is that celebrities might prefer to date other celebrities because these are the only people that they can be sure aren't dating them just for the novelty of their celebrity. People who are rich have a similar dilemma - if your husband or wife has much less money than you, can you be really sure that they aren't with you for the money? Sure, they'll hopefully like you as a person too, but you'll never really know the counterfactual. And the not knowing can become a nagging doubt in itself.

The other related factor is that the life of a celebrity almost certainly has its own peculiar problems and miseries, but these are likely difficult to explain to people who aren't themselves famous. Well, you can explain them, but you'll probably just sound like an ingrate - "boo hoo, unlucky me, I'm such a famous movie star that now I can't get a litre of milk without someone wanting a photo, if only I were a no-name janitor instead." Being rich is the same - sure, you have the enormous problem of how you're meant to stop your kids turning into spoiled brats (if you give them money) or resentful and bitter (if you don't give them money). But the average joe will just ask why you don't just give the money away if this is such a problem.

The most cynical answer, I think, is simply a marketing one - most celebrities have a tenuous grip on their status, and will go to huge lengths to stay in the spotlight. Dating or marrying other celebrities is a way to keep the tabloids interested, which is your very oxygen if you're some 'famous for being famous' talentless celebrity.

What these explanations have in common is that they provide very little avenue for you as Joe Public to ever actually date a famous person. So relax! You really aren't good enough for them, so you may as well just enjoy your life.

She's a Flight Risk

Jwz recently posted about this blog called 'She's a flight risk', which ran from 2003 to 2006 and is diary of sorts claiming to be written by a  twenty-something woman who is on the run from her family. The story is that her father is a very rich and well-connected member of a small European country, and he was trying to get her to marry some guy she didn't want to marry. Afraid of his power and influence, and with a fair amount of money stuffed away, she decided to go on the run.

It subsequently got taken down from the net, but jwz thankfully downloaded it and posted it.

It's definitely a great story - I read it all, and really liked it.

The question is, is it real?

Firstly, it's worth reading even if it's not. The author writes really well.

But on the substantive question, it's hard to say. The initial presumption is probably not - Occam's razor says that the more unusual a story is, the less likely it is to be true. Most people live rather boring lives, and some narratives are just too good to be true.

Beyond that, the two biggest points against it are the following. First, the idea that a rich daughter would escape pressure towards an arranged marriage by becoming a fugitive for several years, rather than just giving her father the middle finger. Sure, he'd cut off your money, but is this really better? Some people do crazy things, but this is pretty extreme without more explanation.

Second, if you were going to run away, would you start a blog to describe your experiences? It seems a bit unlikely. Then again, I can imagine that the need to connect to somebody would be pretty strong when you spent months on the run knowing nobody.

So that's the starting presumption against it being real, which seems fairly strong. But there's a reasonable amount of evidence in favor of it actually being true. At a minimum, if it's a hoax, it's clearly one that someone spent quite a bit of money and thought on, and one without a clear motivation.

First, she managed to convince a reporter from Esquire (linked at the jwz site), by at least having someone who matched her description and acted like her meet him in a very expensive hotel room with an armed guard. That on its own doesn't prove anything, but it's pretty serious commitment to a hoax. In addition, I presume that Esquire reporters are not entirely gullible, since the guy knows he'd look like a real fool if it turned out to be proven false.

There are other signs as well that are less visible. For instance, the Esquire article discusses some of the early investigations into the place where the domain was registered:

AeroBeta, Sociedad Anonima
Apartado Postal 0832-0387
World Trade Center
Panama, Republica de Panama WTC

As another commenter pointed out, the name 'AeroBeta, Sociedad Anonima' is comprised of 'Aero', meaning flight, and 'Beta', the measure of financial risk, with 'Sociedad Anonima' in companies being abbreviated 's.a.'. So hence you have 'FlightRisk, s(he's).a.'

That quite a bit of planning, no? Not only do you drop enough cash to set up a company in Panama to hide the domain registration, you give it a name that's a coded version of the website.

The other problem with the hoax theory is that there's no clear payoff. Not only was the author not angling for a book or movie deal, but she turned down a number of offers of such (reported in the Wired and Esquire articles at the time). The website wasn't selling any products, and ended up just drifting off without a clear end. This fact becomes even more stark in hindsight - we now know ex-post that there really was no obvious financial payoff to the whole thing.

For my own part, there's two other small aspects that also point to the 'genuine' side. First, there's an odd tendency for hoaxes that involve a female protagonist to be written by a man. E.g. here and here. Being male fantasy, they tend to eventually end up focusing on male fantasies of female sexuality, with the characters being lesbian, bisexual, or that kind of thing. She's a flight risk had virtually none of that, other than one or two very references that weren't particularly sexualised and instead focused on the charisma of the men in question. In that regard, at least, it suggests a female writer, or a male writer very committed to representing the protagonist as sounding more female.

Second, there's one detail in particular that seems plausible in hindsight that would have been harder to come up with at the time. Here's a line from the April 2003 entry on some of the people she encountered:

Also amongst the exiles was a fairly famous software magnate who had elected to leave the United States "not so much for the tax issue, though that played a part, but more for the everyday nonsense of regulation."

A software magnate, living in a sunny tax haven type country, back in 2003, who left due to "the tax issue" and "the everyday nonsense of regulation"? Tell me that doesn't sound an awful lot like John McAfee, who recently managed to get out of Guatemala and escape back to the US to avoid questioning by the Belize police over a murder. (Previously discussed by me here).

The point is that if I were to think of a name to add now about someone who might have been travelling in the Caribbean back in 2003, I'd pick a description of McAfee. But this one predated by many years the publicity that made him famous as a rich guy living in tax haven countries.

You add all this up, and you're left to choose between two scenarios, both of which would seem highly unlikely on their own, but one of which is very likely true. Odd, huh?

Hard to say. Overall, I'd give it about a 70% chance of being true. Then again, I'm rather gullible.

Lepanto

Apropos nothing, the great G. K. Chesterton, on Don John of Austria at the Battle of Lepanto:

Lepanto

White founts falling in the courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross,
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.

Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, risen from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young,
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain—hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.

Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri’s knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunset and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees,
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.

They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be;
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the ground,—
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, “Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done,
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces—four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not ‘Kismet’; it is he that knows not Fate ;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey in the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth.”
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still—hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.

St. Michael’s on his mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes
And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,
And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,
And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,
And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth ha!
Domino gloria!
Don John of Austria
Is shouting to the ships.

King Philip’s in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
The walls are hung with velvet that, is black and soft as sin,
And little dwarfs creep out of it and little dwarfs creep in.
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white and grey
Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day,
And death is in the phial, and the end of noble work,
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John’s hunting, and his hounds have bayed—
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah!
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.

The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in man’s house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
They veil the plumèd lions on the galleys of St. Mark;
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that swat, and in the skies of morning hung
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings’ horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign—
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate’s sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain,
Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the blade....
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)

(via John Derbyshire)

Update: If you want to hear a really awesome reading of the second stanza, listen to the last 1:30 of the broadcast here. Trust me, I've never heard a poetry reading anywhere near this radical.