The Ambrosini Critique

As swong (get a blog!) points out, Republican politicians are also duplicitous, opportunistic, lying assholes.

… is this comment by John Thacker on this post:

Neoclassical economists argue that however people behave, they are expressing their true preferences. However people behave, they are right, according to the neoclassical economists. Any behavior that differs from stated assumptions of what is right is really showing some sort of revealed preference, demonstrating that the person herself has some different standard of what is best for herself than the supposed experts.

It is the paternalists and the behavioral economists who argue that people are “wrong” in their choices. It is the paternalist and the behavioral economists and the busybodies who “wish to depose of their people and choose a new one,” deciding for them because they are “irrational” and make the “wrong” choices. It is the paternalists and the behavioral economists and others who believe that people are irrational who think that people must be protected from their wrong decisions, who should have others decide.

(We need a new phrase that means the same thing as “in the news” but refers to links from high-profile blogs…)

Prof. Peri’s work is critiqued by his evil arch-nemesis George Borjas. (Hey, we have to make this fun some how…)

Borjas has doubts about Peri’s assumption that low-skill natives and low-skill immigrants are compliments. He goes on to say that employers must be big winners in the immigration game because they spend lots of money lobbying Congress to get pro-immigration legislation passed.

Commentator Sami B has this observation, “the mere fact that foreigners at the same skill levels are willing to work for lower wages suggests to me that the “native” labor at time t was merely accruing rents in the form of income beyond the marginal productivity of their labor.” The point: who’s exploiting who? If immigrants can come into the country and do the same jobs for less, then the natives who currently have the jobs are getting paid more than they’re worth.

Actually, this supports Peri’s “hey they’re compliments” theory. Before the immigrant comes, natives are doing two jobs in one. One requires skills (language or other technical skill) and is high paying. The other is manual labor and low paying. When the immigrants come, they take the manual labor job (at low pay) and the natives specialize in the high paid, high skill job.

Division of labor is loverly.

The above man sent emails to thousands of people attempting to scam them out of their money.

But Ron Rosenbaum in the Atlantic Monthly thinks this man and the other people caught in their scam by the “scam-baiting” community is being mistreated.

I feel something has gone a bit wrong with the evolution of the scam-baiting community. What started out as a good-natured form of rough justice has become, in some respects, a theater of cruelty

You see, most of the “victims” of anti-scamming are African blacks. They’re not African-Americans; not decedents of slaves, but Africans. Somehow this issue is conflated with racism and like whenever that happens things Stop Making Sense.

A “victim” explains:

Some body has to pay what we call retribution From what Africa went through during the Slave trade era… The west took all our resourses, Manpower…[sic]

This quote and the sympathy it inspires in Mr. Rosenbaum belie the history of the slave trade. Africans were more than complicit in the trade. In fact, the most profitable link in the slave “value” chain was run predominantly by African blacks. While competition between shipping companies drove down profits moving people from Africa to the Americas, tribal leaders (with a monopoly on the sale of their people) profited.

Then:

We had better pay attention to that detailed record [of President Bush Sr.] which provides a deeply disturbing look at a blatant disregard to brutal terrorism, a dangerous blindness of the ambitions of a murderous despot…

Now:

History will surely judge America’s decision to invade and occupy a fragile and unstable nation that did not attack us and posed no threat to us as a decision that was not only tragic but absurd. Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator, to be sure, but not one who posed an imminent danger to us.

(h/t hotair)

Dani Rodrik is a comedian:

Suppose you are a government that has some second-best policy instrument at your disposal (say tariffs) to correct a market failure which an industry is subject to. You recognize that the policy has some costs (rent-seeking, and so on), and you use your policies accordingly to maximize national welfare.

Hah! Hah!

Seriously. Why not just assume the distortion away by supposing firms and consumers have social welfare as their objectives? Do government buildings have magical selfishness-removing force fields surrounding them?

… the first time through I was distracted by the people. I like these comparative photo thingys (there should be more words!).

A couple years ago, someone did a thingy where people from around the world all took pictures at the same time. I wish I could find a link to it on the intertubes.

Why do Artists do things like this? How is it that I’ve watched this show for almost 2 years and never noticed this?

From 3 years ago:

‘Why’ is much more interesting than the ‘how’. The ‘why’ is the meaning behind why something is done or why a technology was created or why the clause in the constitution was added. Only understanding the process or the mechanics of the technology or just the text of the constitution gives you particular knowledge of the thing and no greater understanding. The ‘why’ requires a network of contextual knowledge. To truly know why something is, you have to know a lot about other things. On the other hand, the ‘how’ is an isolated fact about the particular thing.

Learning and thinking about the ‘why’ is much harder than the ‘how’. In Calculus, it’s much easier to memorize the steps required to calculate a integral along a closed curve using Green’s Theorem then it is to understand what Green’s Theorem is and when to apply it, nevertheless proving it. Elsewhere, this economist article demonstrates that without understanding the underlying reality, you can apply supply and demand analysis and get two contradictory results (prices may rise or fall depending on the shape of the curves and the extent of the supply/demand shocks).

The ‘why’ is knowing how to fish and the ‘how’ is just having one meal worth of fish. Knowing the ‘why’ informs your thoughts and actions in other, perhaps unrelated, areas. For example, in developing our platform at work, I try to keep API’s and syntax as loose as possible because I know that was the primary reason for HTML’s success. It succeeded because it was used in ways that its designers could never have imagined. PERL’s the same way.

In my experience, most folks spend their time performing the ‘how’. At work, I’m frustrated by people trying to understand how to apply a particular policy rather than just thinking about doing the ‘right thing’. It’s seems to me that if you know why a policy was put into place you can act appropriately without having to bother with the particular wording of that policy. What if the wording in the policy is wrong?

Is there a place for just putting your nose down and doing the work?