Need investment advice?

It looks as though high school seniors know something about economics, even public choice, and, crucially, the benefits of trade. And they appear to be skeptical of the benefits of education. Have they been reading Bryan Caplan's blog?

If it's Tuesday it must be Belgium

Sorry for the long hiatus but I've been traveling in Europe for the past three weeks, and when I travel I cover some territory, no time for blogging. Here's the list of places, favorites first:

1) Frankfurt
2) Brussels
3) Amsterdam
4) Berlin
5) Cologne
6) Manchester
7) Cambridge
8) London

I was in Cambridge for the Freedom Week conference, which was interesting and I appreciate the opportunity. Here we are punting on the river Cam.

English culture, on the other hand, scores at the bottom for me. It is way too class oriented, with a separating equilibrium created by the two main classes struggling to distance themselves from one another, understandably. At the bottom are Chavs, which stands for council housing and violent. Every city has them. In London it's the cockney, also called hoodies because they dress like American thug-rappers. But hoodies don't make videos, they kill people. At the other end, the top I suppose, are some sort of Monty Python caricature of landed gentry. These people are wise to remain landed, as they would get seriously beaten up anywhere outside of England.

London is prospering primarily because their immigration laws are less restrictive than ours, thanks to the EU. Immigrants generally run the place, and they form the bulk of the middle class. The ones I talked to would jump at the chance to live and work in the US.

Manchester seemed to be a little less class conscious, people are more open and friendly, and the beer is cheaper. So it wins the England category hands down. It's a good place for a 13 hour pub crawl. Thanks Mark!

Next for the Continent where I visited friends in Berlin and Frankfurt, and along the way stopped in places I hadn't seen before, places that I had skipped for a reason. But there were a couple of nice surprises. Particularly, Frankfurt is awesome. The parks are lovely, the women are lovely, the beer gardens and cafes are pleasant, and the tourists are few. It makes me want to work for the European Central Bank.

The second best surprise was Brussels. It's something like a mini-Paris, but with good and cheap Belgian beer. And not too many tourists. Here's Che Habana Cafe, where I imagine the EU regulators hang out.

Amsterdam's Vondel Park was also a nice surprise. But I'll stop here with the photos, the rest are on facebook: Will McBride in the Washington, DC network.

Addendum: I forgot to mention the IG Farben building in Frankfurt, which alone is worth the trip. Besides being an architectural marvel, the excellent exhibit there tells perhaps the most chilling interest group story of all, i.e. how IG Farben financed Hitler's rise to power and in return received lucrative military contracts. Here is one conspiratorial view. Anti-capitalists and capitalists alike should come together on one thing: Capitalism is dangerous only when it becomes tied to the coercive powers of the state.

Amtrashed

In case you were wondering who benefits from nearly $1 billion in annual Amtrak subsidies, it's the rich:

GrandLuxe offers separate cars, with their own private dining and lounge sections, attached to regular Amtrak trains. Tickets for such trips range from $789 per person for a two-day, one night trip on the East Coast to $1,599 or higher for three days and two nights for travel to or from the West Coast.

But now Amtrak has announced a new business plan which ties them to an even narrower interest group, i.e. rich drunks:

Members of Amtrak's guest rewards program - the railroad equivalent of frequent fliers - can get a $100 per person credit for alcohol between November and January.

Did Teddy Kennedy threaten to cut spending?

Libertarians getting together

I just got back from the IHS Social Change Workshop at UVA in Charlottesville, VA. It's a week long series of lectures and discussions covering generally the economic foundations of a free society. There were about 130 participants from all over the world, mostly economists but also evolutionary psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, historians, lawyers, philosophers, international development types, and one lone musician. I'd say most were at least sympathetic to libertarian themes.


I can't begin to summarize all the great lectures and discussions, but here are a few choice quotes:

1) "Learning comes from pain."

2) "Bonding comes from pain."

3) "Development studies is shit."

Bonnaroo: 4th and final day, just when we were starting to fit in

Our neighbors to the right.

Our neighbors to the left. Ken and Joanna drove down from Toronto, and saved our lives by letting us lounge under their canopy.

Nick says, "always bring a towel!"

Yep, it's the Maytag repair man.

Me with a Huntsvile Times umbrella. Notice that no one is looking at me.

Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys. The crowd was exceptionally reverent. They wouldn't let poor Ralph get off stage.

Ralph Stanley fans.

The shirt says, "Will drop pants for ticket." Unfortunately I didn't get a picture of the guy with the shirt that says, "Golf can go fuck itself."

This girl painted herself green. Not sure why.

Nick has a meeting of the minds with Towely.

The White Stripes, a husband and wife duo that somehow sounds like Led Zeppelin. It was the last band we saw.

No idea.

Bonnaroo: 3rd day, The Police

Max, Nick, and Sting. Or, as Zappa used to call him, Mr. Sting.

Max, Nick, and me. Yes, I'm very happy to see Mr. Sting, and Stuart Copeland and Andy Summers. Sting was in top form, if a little perfunctory, and Copeland had about 100 cymbals at his disposal. But for some reason they ended early. Probably because Sting realized that he was singing to a bunch of 20 somethings who barely recognized Roxanne. Of the 18 songs performed, the most memorable were The Bed's Too Big Without You and Wrapped Around Your Finger. At least I think I remember that. Despite the short set it was still the highlight of the weekend for me. What say you, Max?

Of the 20 or so other bands I saw, I thought the best, most surprising performances were by Rodrigo y Gabriela, Kings of Leon, Hot Chip, Railroad Earth, Xavier Rudd, Regina Spektor, and Galactic.

Bonnaroo: 2nd night, Centeroo fountain, Tool light show, etc.

Entering Bonnaroo

Nick surveys the 80,000.

On the road

I've spent the last four days at home in Iran. It's actually very peaceful here. Dad came over from Sweden, after stopping by my sister's place in Portugal. Later today I'll leave for Saudi Arabia to go see Bonnaroo.

(HT to Tyler Cowen)

Article on Mason's econ bloggers

Somehow they failed to mention me.

Get a job

Another report from the asinine immigration debate:

Debate over the bill has featured plenty of behind-the-scenes maneuvering over which groups of workers, if any, should be given preferential treatment. But with the U.S. unemployment rate at historically low levels, there seem to be plenty of unskilled jobs to go around. Or at least that’s what many lobbyists representing agriculture, hotel owners and other service industries were telling Congress.

Or you could ask a hotel worker, such as myself. Up until 10 days ago my summertime schedule had mainly consisted of soccer during the day and Wonderland at night. I had also been doing some tutoring, and the mother of one of my tutees works at the Omni Shoreham Hotel. I went to the Omni to collect payment from the mother, who we'll call Janet. The Omni was buzzing, and I asked Janet if there were any jobs available. Her eyes lit up, and she looked to the ornate lobby ceiling and thanked the Lord. Then she looked at me, and noticing I'd biked there, asked, "Is $12 an hour OK?" I agreed, without any real idea of what I was getting into. I went home to put some pants on, and returned within the hour to start work in the accounting office. I had never worked in a hotel. Or in an accounting office. Or with women. My only real work experience is as an engineer.

The accounting office is mostly women, and mostly immigrant, from the Caribbean, Spain, Ethiopia, Russia, and Germany. Janet needs about 10 more people, and she used me to cover the phones and whatever emergency popped up. There was absolutely zero down time. The phone rang almost continuously with angry guests wanting to dispute their bill. Then I started two days of general hotel orientation, which was a relief, though exceptionally boring. There were 10 other new employees, mostly immigrants, from the Philippines, Eritrea, Latin America, etc. After sitting through hours of inane business slogans, I started to envy their poor English skills.

I came to realize the whole place is run by immigrants, from the Australian hotel manager to the Latinos and Eritreans who clean up the rooms. None of these jobs are fun, and there's a high rate of turnover. I'm fairly certain that the Omni Shoreham would go bankrupt without cheap immigrant labor, especially the unskilled kind. On Friday I informed Janet that I might consider staying if she raised my pay to $50/hr.

Summertime in England

Thanks to the people at Freedom Week, I'm going to Cambridge! I might stay for the month of July and travel around a bit. Now I just need a smaller camera:

Indeed, solitary travelers conjured up an entirely different reaction than a group of Americans, who were perceived as camera-wielding, Bush-supporting boors. “Universally idiotic; large Hawaiian shirts; large cameras; stupid questions,” says Ian Clifford, a software developer from Nottingham, ticking off the stereotypical qualities of a group of average American tourists. And, says Clifford, these are the more cultured members of U.S. society: “Only 10 percent of Americans have passports. What on earth have you left behind?”

Adam Smith is smiling on Two Buck Chuck

"And the source of the wealth of nations is the division of labor", as Fred Franzia has happily discovered:

It’s been five years since the first of these amazingly cheap chardonnays and cut-price cabernets started rolling off the line, released by maverick vintner Fred Franzia under the formal label of Charles Shaw wines.

Three hundred million bottles later, Two Buck Chuck is still selling, and Franzia is still preaching his message of wine for the masses.

“We’re not out to gouge people,” says Franzia. “What I would like to see is every consumer be able to afford to have wine on the table every day and not feel insecure about it.”

Last year, Two Buck Chuck — available only in the Trader Joe’s grocery chain and priced at $1.99 in California, hence its nickname — accounted for at least 8 percent of California wine sold in-state, said Jon Fredrikson, who tracks wine shipments through his Woodland-based company, Fredrikson, Gomberg & Associates. National market share figures are not available.

...

Making wine is expensive from the ground up, but Franzia owns a lot of ground — 40,000 acres is the common estimate. He won’t say. His Ceres-based Bronco Wine Co. also owns the crushing and bottling plants and has its own distribution company.
Until now, another company has supplied the bottles. But Franzia’s latest idea is to fix that by building a glass container plant near his Napa Valley bottling facility in a business park near the Napa County Airport.

When we were rational

Stuart Armstrong at OvercomingBias has a good post on my new favorite topic:

In the real world, we could always hope that the march of science could replace superstitious explanations with truer ones. But the truth is already out there in these virtual worlds, and is ignored. If these games are the shape of things to come, it might well be that the zenith of rationality is already in the past.

Here's an exerpt from my recent paper "Overcoming Selfishness: Religion and the Alternatives":

Self-deception and belief go hand in hand. It is likely that self-deception evolved as a means to create and maintain belief, because as I have argued, belief works. In his 2002 Nobel lecture, Vernon Smith discusses some of his experiments involving the trust game. He finds that reciprocity is behind cooperation, not altruism or other-regarding utility. In other words, we achieve cooperation by deluding ourselves about our own altruism.
Immediately preceding the “invisible hand” statement, Adam Smith remarks on how wealth is created through the self-deception of the wealthy:

We are then charmed with the beauty of that accommodation which reigns in the palaces and oeconomy of the great; and admire how everything is adapted to promote their ease, to prevent their wants, to gratify their wishes, and to amuse and entertain their most frivolous desires. If we consider the real satisfaction which all these things are capable of affording, by itself and separated from the beauty of that arrangement which is fitted to promote it, it will always appear in the highest degree contemptible and trifling. But we rarely view it in this abstract and philosophical light. We naturally confound it in our imagination with the order, the regular and harmonious movement of the system, the machine or oeconomy by means of which it is produced. The pleasures of wealth and greatness, when considered in the complex view, strike the imagination as something grand and beautiful and noble, of which the attainment is well worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow upon it.
And it is well that nature imposes upon us in this manner. It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind. (TMS, IV.1.9-10)

But Adam Smith generally sees self-deception as an irrational and unsocial weakness that should be corrected:

He is a bold surgeon, they say, whose hand does not tremble when he performs an operation upon his own person; and he is often equally bold who does not hesitate to pull off the mysterious veil of self-delusion, which covers from his view the deformities of his own conduct. Rather than see our own behavior under so disagreeable an aspect, we too often, foolishly and weakly, endeavor to exasperate anew those unjust passions which had formerly misled us; we endeavor by artifice to awaken our old hatreds, and irritate afresh our almost forgotten resentments: we even exert ourselves for this miserable purpose, and thus persevere in injustice, merely because we once were unjust, and because we are ashamed and afraid to see that we were so. (TMS, III.4.4)

I think Smith, and most economists who have followed him, have failed to recognize the ecological value of individually irrational self-deception, i.e. its role in facilitating beliefs which benefit the group.
Robert Trivers (2006), the evolutionary sociobiologist, claims that self-deception evolved as a way to better deceive others. But he recognizes there must be a positive side as well, referring to what McCloskey (2006) and myself would call Hope: “Life is intrinsically future oriented and mental operations that keep a positive future orientation at the forefront result in better future outcomes (though perhaps not as good as those projected). The existence of the placebo effect is another example of this principle (though it requires the cooperation of another person ostensibly dispensing medicine). It would be very valuable to integrate our understanding of this kind of positive self-deception into the larger framework of self-deceptions we have been describing.”
Again, the positive side to self-deception is that it facilitates trust. Why else would it survive the selection process, and why would it continue to be so attractive? Despite the Enlightenment, we are drawn more than ever to myth-makers, inspirational speakers, emotional politicians, and thoughtless celebrities, not scientists and skeptics. Libertarians and economists know this from experience.

Addendum: Michael Prescott shows us the superstitions of a skeptic, Susan Blackmore. (Hat tip to commenter M.C.)

Summer gear

Looks like I have two options: to snitch or not to snitch. Blake, if you see this before Bonnaroo, I'm gonna need a Narc shirt.