Portrait of a Boy
Will Baude interviewed Alex Tabarrok of the Marginal Revolution.#
6: Which American cities come closest to the ideal of the voluntary city?
Well, most of them are still a long way off from the ideal! Private governance is all around us, however. A condominium association, for example, is a mini-city with its own constitution. It's much easier to leave or move from one condominium to another than to leave a city and the founders of the condominium association have a much better incentive to write good political rules than do the founders of most nations so it's interesting to compare the political rules that govern condominiums and similar associations with the rules that govern cities and nations.
Dare I mention that many condominiums do not give one-person, one-vote but assign votes according to square footage or condo value?
Wizbang has doubts about evolution and a nice joke.#
That brings us smack dab into the great lie of the "We came from ooze" theory. If you believe the hype, there was this oooze on the ground when lighting hit and POOF there was single celled life. From there all life on the planet evolved from that glob of primordial ooze.
But there is a fatal flaw with that theory. If you consider the diversity of life on this planet and the fact that 90% of all the species that have ever lived are now extinct, it is obvious that there would have had to be trillions of cases when one species evolved into another. Yet with all of our study we can not document one time in history that it has happened. The scientific community has put all its stock in the fact that these trillions of events happened but we can not cite a single example.
Russell Roberts cuts through the cruft on NAFTA.#
They say politics makes strange bedfellows, but the Teamsters and Public Citizen? Bruce Yandle of Clemson explains it with a theory he calls Bootleggers and Baptists. The bootleggers like prohibition because it gets rid of competitors. But a politican who wants to listen to the bootleggers needs a more high-minded cause to sell to the public. The Baptists give the politicians cover with the argument that drink is from the devil—it leads to social unrest, unemployment, higher social costs and so on. Same with Mexican trucks. Who can justify keeping out lower cost Mexican trucks just to keep the wages of Teamsters high. Enter Public Citizen. This isn't about greed. It's about keeping American air clean.
Adam Smith Institute quotes The Idea Shop on how to keep the poor poor.#
Unfortunately, that's about average for most countries. At least that's according to a a World Bank survey of legal "entry costs" in 85 countries. On average, 10 procedures, 47 days, and half of annual per capita income is required to register a start-up.
Some places are beyond bad. It takes 152 days for a business license in Madagascar. In the Dominican Republic, license fees are five times annual income - plus 21 bureaucratic steps.
There's nothing like a good business regulation.
Julie Leung: "To think that 32 years from now the planets will be visible again. The same planets. But we parents won't be the same. We will be older. Perhaps even grandparents. And it may be our own children holding their children, pointing up to the night sky and saying "do you see it?""#
Alex Tabbarrok writes about Microsoft and bundling.#
The double monopoly problem, first explained by Augustin Cournot in 1838, suggests that Microsoft might be the better monopolist. The double monopoly argument says that if two products are going to be monopolized its better if they are monopolized by one firm than by two (or more). The reason is that the single monopolist will take into account complementarities between the two products. The better the brower, for example, the more operating systems Microsoft will sell and vice versa. Separate the two products and you lose this added incentive to lower price and/or improve quality. (If you know the tragedy of the commons argument, the double monopoly problem is the same thing with the customers serving as the common resource).
An unappreciated aspect of this argument is that the reason that Microsoft might make the better monopolist is the same reason it will likely win in any battle with a stand-alone competitor. Microsoft has more to lose from losing and more to win from winning than does the stand-alone and will therefore put more resources into winning. This explains why the European directive requiring Microsoft to sell two versions of its operating system, one with and one without the media player, is pointless. Microsoft will simply sell the two versions at the same price - then which one would you choose?
Joi Ito links to the very funny Ze Frank, talking about Friendster.#