The One-Handed Economist

Every now and again I get somebody ostensibly interested in advertising on this website. As you may or may not be aware, I am what is called in this Web 2.0 world an “opinion leader” who drives the common knowledge on matters of great import, and as a result my advertising rates are steeper than some would like to pay. Below is the exchange I had with the most recent inquirer, unfortunately (for him) he was not interested in the opportunity to really get in on something so very important. Our exchange is below for your amusement.

To: Economist
From: Christian Michael

Hi,

I am writing to you again in case your spam filter ate my last email. I had written to you basically to offer a business deal. The deal namely is purchasing text-links on your site http://www.onehandedeconomist.com/. In case you have already thought over this, let me know of your views pronto.

Looking forward to your reply,
Regards,
Christan

To: Christian Michael
From: Economist

I will place one text link for $50,000 a month.

To: Economist
From: Christian Michael

Timothy,

Which planet are you from? Are we talking about a link on Amazon.com?

First deserve, then desire.

Christan

To: Christian Michael
From: Economist

Hey, I’ve named my price, you’re free to take it or leave it. Also, you have not indicated what exactly it is you would like to advertise. First deserve, then desire.

From: Christian Michael
To: Economist

I wonder you’re still thinking at that? It was initial email asking
whether or not the site accepts custom advertisement offers. I got my
answer in your first reply.

Thank you for your time.

Cheers,
Christan

To: Christian Michael
From: Economist

Well, obviously your product cannot be that profitable if such a meager sum causes you such consternation.

To: Economist
From: Christian Michael

Every worthwhile thing has a price tag over it but that price should
be somewhat equal to the value provided. Its simple rule of business.
It matters little on what product I have and how much profit do I
reap. I am not new to this and know how much a text-link will cost per
month at any website. Honestly, I wanted to email you the stats of
your website but I preferred to let you enjoy your ignorance .

Forget about it. I have many others to deal with and you’ll get many
other advertisers. The day you get an advertiser willing to pay
US$50,000 per month for a text-link, do let me know please. I hope
I’ll be alive by then. Have a good day.

To: Christian Michael
From: Economist

You obviously did not know what a text link costs per month at MY website. Therefore, sir, you cannot claim to know what a text link costs at any website. TOUCHE!

Further, please do not insult my intelligence by assuming I am unaware of the massive amount of traffic that sucks up my bandwidth capacity on a monthly basis.

To: Economist
From: Christian Michael

I’ll repeat, the day an advertiser agrees to pay you US$50,000 per
month for a text-link, do let me know and please do spare some amount
out of those $50K to purchase additional bandwidth for your website.

To: Christian Michael
From: Economist

I will certainly keep you abreast of any advertising developments in regards to the OHE. You will rue the day you declined my generous offer! RUE!

As of press time there has been no response from Mr. Michael.

On my morning and afternoon commutes today, I heard a somewhat befuddling radio advertisement. It was a recruitment spot for the Border Patrol, and the major selling point seemed to be that by simply passing an exam and undergoing a 30 day training seminar, anyone could start a REWARDING CAREER in the border patrol.

Firstly, I understand that like any employer the border patrol is going to recruit, sure, makes sense. I disagree with their policies and their objectives, but none-the-less, they’re going to try to get new employees. What confuses me is the selling point being ease: are people attracted to low entry requirements really the folks we want to go handing that kind of authority? I’d say not.

If you’ve driven along the border recently, or really, if you’ve driven along a major highway within a hundred miles of the border recently, you’ve likely been subject to the random (and I’m sure 4th amendment compliant…right) stop-and-search by these guys. They do the whole “are you a US Citizen?” thing and have a dog sniff around your car without so much as suspicion, let alone cause or a warrant. They routinely detain people, and treat everyone as a criminal. Do we really want to go recruiting law enforcement officers who are drawn in by the low requirements? Further, does anyone think that a month-long seminar is sufficient to train a bunch of people about the relevant legal considerations? It sure took me more than a month to become competent enough to do my job properly (four years of college, three years in a different job), so I’m pretty sure it’s going to take longer than 30 days to get a border patrol agent up to speed. Unless you just want him to tase random motorists and try to keep brown people from picking fruit…that’s probably pretty easy.

So today I received an email from some student in an intro economics class wanting me to, I think, complete a review sheet for him/her and return it. Either this is the laziest student in the world or VikingMoose is running some sort of experiment to see how I respond to such inquiries. The answer below the fold. The portions from the email are pasted without edits, so imagine how sad the questionable grammatical skill of the author makes me. I weep for the future.

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My friend Thoreau at Unqualified Offerings has started a list of facts about the world’s most consistently wrong political pundit. Remember: Bill Kristol doesn’t sleep, because sleep is bad for your health.

Via Drudge, there’s this news clip: about a cop deciding just to kill a family’s dog.

And people wonder why I, in general, believe that only people with a great propensity for evil become armed agents of the state. Honestly, fuck this cop and may he be mauled by a thousand dogs. And fuck anyone who would attempt to justify anything like this. And fuck his employers for allowing him to stay on duty.

If you need to feel a sense of righteous anger, read this. In short: Cop pulls gun on kid who has a TOY GUN, kid doesn’t drop toy gun, cop murders kid. Then the cop is cleared of all wrong doing and goes back to duty.

When it’s all reported in the media, a bunch of apologists show up to explain that the kid’s rights weren’t violated because “cops have a hard job” and “the kid should’ve known.” Yes, because the sensible thing to think is that a 12-year-old should know enough about a situation to listen to two random adults yelling at them to stop and that the burden of proof is on the kids rather than the adults. Not to mention that toy guns are required, by law, to have bright plastic tips. Furthermore, THE KID WAS TWELVE GODDAMN YEARS OLD! Read the comments, they’ll make you furious. I hope each one of those apologists is targeted in a wrong door raid, that would teach them. Assholes.

[Via The Agitator]

I don’t know exactly how one is supposed to sum up a life like that of Joe H. Foy Sr. I suppose that I could read off the list of accolades: partner at Bracewell & Patterson, negotiating with OPEC in the 70s, Carter asking him to be the first Secretary of Energy…that time he met Harry Truman, but anyone who knew him knows those things and they don’t really give a full, or even accurate, picture of the man. I suppose I’ll start with this: he was my grandfather, and I spent my whole life calling him potato.

You see, in Spanish papá, with the accent over the second a, means Father, but papa as pronounced by a small, monolingual child means potato and for my entire life that’s who he was: Papa. And he loved it. And he loved me, despite that when I was growing up his most common utterance was “Goddamn it, Timothy!” in that deep, resonating baritone. I was a bit of a rascal, I probably had it coming. My memories of him are a bit of a jumble, so many of them coming in that hazy early childhood few of us can recall, but I will do my best to dutifully recount a representative sample despite being neither a writer nor orator of any great skill.

When I was very young, probably two or three, I remember curling up next to him in my grandparents’ seemingly infinite bed and making him read me Rikki, Tikki, Tavi over and over and over again. Every time I would see him, I’d say “Papa, read to me” and he would, patiently, recounting every last syllable with grace. He never tired of it, although I secretly suspect that teaching me to read a couple of years later was a direct result of my insistence that he must read me that story at every opportunity. To this day I love that story, I love mongooses, I get a thrill out of the Rikki saving the lives of that family, and killing those nasty cobras. And when I read it, every time, I can hear Papa’s voice in my head.

Years later, but while I was still small because it was before we moved from Houston, Papa decided that he should take me to the ballet. The Nutcracker, to be precise, in order to help me learn to appreciate culture. It may have had something to do with his heavy involvement in the Houston Opera, but I don’t really know. In any case, I was having none of it. By the intermission I’d had enough: crying, wanting to leave, exhorting him that, “Papa, I don’t like cwassical music, I like wok and woll.” That quote was delivered in the manner he used when teasing me about the incident up until the very end. Last Christmas, I think, or maybe last spring, was the last time he gave me a hard time about that particular thing…that happened when I was five.

Long after we’d moved to Oregon, Papa and my grandmother came to visit, and we trekked up to Vancouver, BC for a few days. On the trip my sister was given a copy of There’s A Carrot In My Ear and Other Noodle Tales by Alvin Schwartz, and one day Papa decided to read it out loud for all of us. The punchline of the titular story is something like, “There’s a carrot in my ear, but I have no idea how it got there: I planted radishes!” I wish that I could describe the way in which he laughed at that, it was the kind of laugh that becomes legendary, almost a caricature of itself. He panted, he turned bright, bright red, he cried, he wheezed, and he carried on for what seemed like an eternity. I have never seen such joy at something so simple come from a person, I’ve known no one else with such levity and lightness of spirit.

I suppose that’s pretty emblematic, Papa loved puns and word games of all sorts. For as long as I can remember he complained that the NYT Sunday crossword was simply not a challenge, he ruthlessly completed every crossword book we could throw at him. In pen! I could never think of a clever enough riposte or claim victory in a contest of puns against him, never, not once, and I promise that I have him to thank for my skill in such things.

My most recent, truly vivid memory was at Christmas last year, I think. We were all milling about waiting on dinner to be ready and Papa, seated at the head of the table as if holding court (as always) looked at me and said, “So, Tim, did I ever tell you about the time I met Harry Truman?” He then proceeded to tell me the story, it involved his uncle Dorsey Hardeman and was really quite intriguing, but he told it in the most nonchalant, factual, way. In a way that made it obvious he wasn’t bragging because he kind of didn’t care but thought the story was interesting.

That’s the way it always was with Papa, for a man so admirable and accomplished, he didn’t particularly enjoy being the center of attention. He always made time to listen, to understand, to probe. He was deeply curious about the world, about the people in it, and about those around him. He always made time to listen, to advise, to read a story to an excited little boy or, better still, to teach that boy to read himself. He was a great man, and the closest thing I had to a hero. So goodbye, Papa, potato, but most of all, thank you.

Love always,
Tim

PS: Your dear friend Steve Clack got them to write a very nice obituary. I wish you could’ve seen it, you’d be so proud.

I’ve openly admitted before that my early and somewhat enthusiastic support for the Bush Administration’s post-9/11 terror policy was a mistake. I didn’t think PATRIOT was that big a deal, and I even got behind the Iraq thing, which was regrettable. To paint as charitable picture of myself as possible, I did think renewal of PATRIOT was wrong, and for the last few years I’ve despised basically everything Bush has done in office: ignoring FISA, prosecuting obscenity, doing his best to take away essential liberty, domestic spying, and the general climate of fear. Not that Bush is singularly responsible for this, even now Congress is willing to bend over backward to grant the Executive more authority, likely hoping their team will get to use it going forward. Essentially, there is nothing about the government to like at the moment.

And that brings me to this little gem from Glen Reynolds in which he writes about some bed-wetting book. A quote from the book, then:

It is unimaginable that Francis Biddle or Robert Jackson would have written Franklin Roosevelt a memorandum about how to avoid prosecution for his wartime decisions designed to maintain flexibility against a new and deadly foe. . . . Many people think the Bush administration has been indifferent to wartime legal constraints. But the opposite is true: the administration has been strangled by law, and since September 11, 2001 this war has been lawyered to death.

Wartime? Has Congress declared a war on anyone other than Iraq? Is there some sort of existential threat of which I am not aware? Please, feel free to edify me on the subject so long as you don’t simply make declarative statements and expect that I will believe them. The assurance that only bad men are being targeted and that we just have to trust the President to “Do The Right Thing” rings pretty hollow, and is antithetical to the very idea of an open, representative government. Furthermore, “Many people X, but Y is really the case” doesn’t exactly add up to evidence, or even really an argument. It’s the thesis of a terrible 100-level composition paper.

The rest of Reynold’s post quotes a few paragraphs that try to use the number of lawyers working on the War Against Funny-Hatted Cave Dwellers as proof that the Bush administration takes legal considerations very seriously. Frankly, it doesn’t surprise me that they have thousands of attorneys scouring the law looking for the easiest but technically legal way to violate over half of the Bill of Rights in one go.

I do, though, have to point out Reynold’s concluding statement:

In his book about the 9/11 aftermath, After, Steven Brill reports that John Ashcroft’s instructions to his subordinates — repeating President Bush’s instructions to Ashcroft — were not to ever let something like that happen again. It hasn’t, but that command certainly affected attitudes — and, now because nothing like that has happened again, we find ourself back in more of a 1990s mindset.

That’s special isn’t it? It’s a complete logical fallacy, post hoc ergo propter hoc to be specific. Reynold’s is assuming that Bush’s post-9/11 behavior is the reason that there have been no further attacks on the US. I think it’s far more likely that a bunch of semi-literate extremists living in caves just aren’t that damn scary.

Mark Thoma agrees with Brad DeLong that it is always a mistake to surf over to NRO, sighting a really bad piece about the Phillips Curve as reason. Largely, I have to agree with him, but I have to make a small exception for friend and former colleague Bret Jacobson as well as Commentator alumnus (and proud new papa) Mark Hemingway. Both are excellent writers, entertaining and informative. So, you know, maybe it’s only almost always a bad idea to surf over to NRO.

For the record, this paragraph may be the worst description of anything related to the Phillips Curve I’ve ever seen.

Even though inflation has been going down and probably will continue to fall, we’re going to starve the banks of cash because some long-dead central planner named A.W. Phillips said that growth is bad for prices.

That short paragraph basically embodies all that outlets like NRO and the Weekly Standard have done to discredit arguments against state intervention. That entire piece essentially amounts to standing in a room full of people shouting DEMAND KURVE! in that Matt Damon voice from Team America. Look, you’re not going to find a more pro-market sort of person than I am, but you’re also not going to find somebody who hates bad arguments more. So, if you’re going to argue that Bernanke shouldn’t have loosened in an attempt to smooth the transition, fine, go right ahead, and I’ll probably agree with your main point…but if you don’t have the sort of understanding you can glean from reading the output of millions of virginal nerds, it’s probably time to go home and let the adults talk about policy.

And this is a lesson a lot of people need to learn, disagreeing with somebody’s policy conclusions without calling him or her an idiot. It’s a lesson I’m still working on, which reminds me I need to update the “About” page and remove that calling Paul Krugman an idiot thing if I haven’t already. He’s a lot of things: bad columnist, weirdly obsessed with liquidity traps, suffering from a big hatred of Bush..but the man won the Clark medal and he teaches at Princeton. And he’s done a lot of really good an interesting economics over the years.

Via Megan McArdle’s shiny, new Atlantic blog, Brad DeLong has an absolutely brilliant post about early 20th century America. You really should read the whole thing, it’s pretty stunning. The thing that sticks out most is the absolute material poverty in which essentially everyone lived.

Few households in Homestead in 1900 had running water or a hot water heater. Water came in buckets from a faucet in the street into the house, and then heat it on the stove. In the–relatively prosperous for its time–factory steel town of Homestead, Pennsylvania at the start of the twentieth century, only one in six working class households had indoor bathrooms in 1910. Half of “Slav” and “Negro” families lived in one or two room houses. Most white families lived in four room houses. And most households in Homestead in their one or two or four-room houses had boarders: male, unrelated, single workers sleeping and eating in the house. The work of the housewife thus brought income directly into the household. Remember the three farmhands in the Wizard of Oz, set in 1890s Kansas? Odds are they slept in the house with Dorothy, her Uncle, and Auntie Em–or they slept in the barn.

A quarter of American households in 1900 had boarders or lodgers (compared to two percent today). Half of American households in 1900 had fewer rooms than persons (compared to five percent today). A quarter of American households in 1900 had running water (compared to ninety-nine percent today). An eighth of American households in 1900 had flush toilets (compared to ninety-eight percent today). Less than a fifth had refrigerators, less than one-twelfth had gas or electric lights, less than one-twentieth had telephones or washing machines, and of course there were no radios or televisions or vacuum cleaners or central heating, to list just those major appliances that have greater than ninety percent coverage today.

These paragraphs are in reference to mill workers in Homestead, PA. And remember, those jobs with US Steel: grueling 12-hour shifts, six days a week, with a large probability of injury or death were the sort of jobs people crossed oceans on cramped ships to get. Imagine sailing three weeks across the Atlantic, after an overland journey from the Ukraine or someplace, so that your family could have a shot at living in a two room house with some strangers while you worked 72 hours a week in a steel mill. Imagine you did this because that prospect was immeasurably better than the prospects you had in your native country, and because those mill jobs were some of the better ones you could get anywhere.

Compare that to any part of the Western, industrialized world today. In any major city in the US, I can easily find a job that will provide for my material needs, a home with running water and no boarders, I’ll work less than 40-50 hours a week, I’ll have virtually no chance of on-the-job injury, and I’ll even be able to maintain a balanced diet and do my own laundry without need for servants or for spending an entire day at it. In the past 100 years the absolute material well-being of pretty much everyone in the industrialized world has improved so greatly that the every day tribulations of persons working relatively good jobs for the time are completely unrecognizable to essentially anyone in the West today.

Unfortunately, those sorts of problems: high infant mortality, bad diet, long work hours in bad conditions, and crushing material poverty, are still a daily reality for much of the world’s population. And this ties directly into what I mentioned the other day about the moral case for trade.

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