The Broken Window (or Side Mirror) Fallacy Explained

It is great when life presents you with a perfect opportunity to illustrate the abstract with examples ripped from the headlines.

In this case, to be specific, the thing being ripped was a side mirror on a car and I think it presents me with a perfect "teachable moment," as it were, for an old (but deceptive) economic fallacy. That fallacy is the "broken window fallacy."

The inspiration? Again, it is my girlfriend/muse, and it arises from something unfortunate that happened to her.

The Story

Unable to find parking near her place of employment, she found a parking space some blocks away. She parked her car and made her way to work. There was one nagging thought on her mind, it seems. She had suffered misfortune (or, rather, her car had) on this particular street before when a side mirror had been knocked off a few years ago.

When she returned to her car, guess what happened again? Yep, side mirror dangling by the electrical wires, along with other collateral scraping and denting. To add insult to (mechanical) injury, the offender didn't even leave a note. Such is the cruelly competitive world of parking in a large city.

When she told me this story, my first reaction was naturally one of sympathy and understanding. I mean, it is bad enough to have to deal with unexpected car repairs, worse when the offender will not do the right thing and just own up to it.

Then, as ever, I got to thinking. I focused in on the "do the right thing" part. If this person had left a note, and had been honest enough to pay for the repair, the parallel I am about to draw would not work (at least not directly). Because they didn't, it does.

I will come back to the "do the right thing" bit in a moment, but first, the theory.

The Broken Window Fallacy Applied

We now have my girlfriend with a broken side mirror on her car. She is obviously not happy about this and the money that it will cost to repair. This much is clear. What is not so clear here is if anyone benefits from this situation.

It might be said that someone indeed does. My girlfriend will have to pay to have the mirror replaced, making herself less well-off (by the amount she has to pay for the repair). Who IS made better off, or so the first part of the fallacy goes, is the mechanic who does the repair.

He is made richer by the same amount that my girlfriend was made poorer, all the while providing productive work for a mechanic and the whole supply chain that put that mirror in the mechanic's hands.

So, according to this view, the asshole who did the damage was a public benefactor, creating work and profit where none might have happened before. Sounds sensible, no?

Well, no, it doesn't, actually. In fact, if you think about the broader implications, it seems downright foolish.

What the above view fails to take into account is that the money my girlfriend had to spend to get the mirror fixed is no longer available to her to put to another use. Let's say (for sake of example and because she just bought one) she wanted to buy an espresso/cappuccino maker before the mirror was broken. Now that it has to be repaired, she will not buy the cappuccino maker. This makes her one mirror and one cappuccino maker poorer.

So, as it happens, that asshole was just that and nothing more. He did not cause benefits; he cost people money. He was just an asshole.

Differing Interpretations and the Bigger Picture

Let's keep the theoretical disagreements simple: Keynesians would say that the asshole was a public benefactor because he helped to boost aggregate demand and stimulate the economy in a small way. Austrian school economists, and Frederick Bastiat (who first articulated the "broken window" idea in this essay in 1850) would argue that my girlfriend was made poorer and their might be other motivation behind the actions of the asshole (what if he was in collusion with local mechanics to cause damage?)

As for larger implications, well, think about large-scale calamities: war, terrorist attacks, natural disasters. Keynesians, or supporters of the asshole, would say that these things raise aggregate demand and can stimulate the economy in times of recession or depression. This is where the oft-repeated (and ultimately wrong) notion that WWII got us out of the Great Depression comes from.

What this view fails to see is that things like war, terrorist attacks and natural disasters are REALLY COSTLY TO BEGIN WITH! Yes, these calamities do raise demand for certain goods and services, but the opportunity cost (trade-offs) are usually not worth it.

Seeing something like World War II, the 9/11 attacks or Hurricane Katrina as ultimately beneficial to the economy is just plain naive. It is almost like the idea of burning the village in order to save it.

Conclusions

• Causing damage and costing people money does not ultimately make people richer. It makes them poorer.
• Actions often have consequences that are unintentional, but real nonetheless.
• If you hit someone's car, be considerate of their property and just fess up. You are making people better off (mentally and economically) by doing so.
• Did I imply that Keynesians are assholes? Sort of. Paul Krugman certainly is.
• I again thank my girlfriend/muse for the inspiration. See the benefits of dating someone who lives the life of the mind? You never know what you'll inspire.

Link Exchange

• This American Life episodes in infographic form. These are good if, like me, you like the show but are occasionally annoyed by Ira Glass and his crew.
• Want the streets to be safer for motorists and pedestrians? Remove all the signs. Let the order emerge from below, not be imposed from above.
• Jodi Beggs searches for the elusive upward-sloping demand curve. The paradox of a Giffen good, a good that people consume more of when the price goes up, is an important implication of price theory.
• Create a map of Michigan using just your own two hands. I have personally seen at least two native Michiganders do this very thing. They must teach it in schools up there.
• Do unpaid internships violate minimum wage laws? Officials in California, Oregon, New York and elsewhere seem to think so. Don Boudreaux and John Stossel aren't so sure.
• Robin Hanson on Matt Yglesias on political ideology. I agree that, in political debates and ideology formation, who gets respect is more important than abstract points of doctrine.
• Want to pay more in taxes than you have to? Fine. Just don't force me to do the same.
• Will Wilkinson on the "liberaltarian drift." I guess I agree that, tempermentally, lots of libertarians are close to liberals. For me, though, it comes down to the fundamental problem of modern libertarianism in America (as stated by Penn Gilette): the problem is getting the gun guys to agree with the drug guys.
• When do professors get their politics, such as they are? Why are most professors and people in academia "liberal?" Read more here.

Two New Posts?

Yes, there are two new posts here at COTL:

• A Link Exchange that appears below. It involves breaking up banks, why the Post Office sucks, evolution and Victorians talking about sex (yes, they had it back then).
• A post answering the question: "what is fascism?" Since I started it, wrote way too much and revised it, it appears a few days back. Look under the posts for March 30th for that one

As always, commenting is encouraged. So are ideas for what you might like to see here.

For the Christian and observant, have a good Easter Weekend. For the rest of us, well, it is a weekend nonetheless. Means a bit less when one is unemployed, but whatever.

Link Exchange

• Excellent piece on the "mystery of capitalism." The author argues that capitalism faces a lot of deep-seeded acrimony, resists telling its own story and has no great heroes. It is counterintuitive and that is perhaps what makes it all work. I agree.
• Megan McArdle with further proof that the U.S. Postal Service, were it a private business, would go bust, like, yesterday.
• Break up the big banks and have real competition instead of crony capitalism? Arnold Kling thinks we should. His case is a persuasive one.
• John Maynard Keynes as "economic Impressionist," or if you like, the Seurat of economics? This, for me, raises the ever-wide gap between the elegance of a theory and the messy work of putting it into practice.
• Long before Alfred Kinsey and longer before Masters and Johnson, a researcher at Stanford University questioned women about their sexual behavior and their views on sex. Interesting stuff, given what we think we know about attitudes towards sex in the early twentieth century. Read it here.
• Reviews of three new important books about the Dreyfus Affair (click the link if you don't know what this is. No, it has nothing to do with this guy.) The Dreyfus affair raised questions of antisemitism, class, nationalism and whether the rule of law can be bent in times of crisis, real or imagined.
• Evolution and the historians. The notion of culture being an adaptation of nature rather than an attempt to change it is an interesting (if debatable) one.

Rastafarian to Economics in Six Steps

To quote that great American man of song Jack Black: "You can't manufacture Inspirado."

To put it another way, you never really know when the Owl of Minerva will swoop down and strafe your brain-banana.

Such a thing happened last night, and it all emerged from someone making fun of me. That someone was, as it happens, my girlfriend.

First, some background. This wonderful woman seems to take great joy at making fun of how nerdy I am. You know...all my maps and economic theory and historical ramblings. It seems to be one of her favorite indoor sports (though I get the sneaking suspicion that she actually likes it but would never admit it).

Anyway, I was going on about my post of a few days back, "Is Economics Dead?" She claimed that she was a loyal COTL reader and that she had read that post. I asked if there was anything in particular that she liked. She said some of the words were interesting.

When I asked which ones, she replied, "economics and Rastafarian." Now, I know that I didn't mention Rastafarianism in the post, so I know my chain was being yanked.

What did occur, though, was an interesting thought experiment: could I connect Rastafarianism and the academic study of economics in six steps? I told her this was great "blog fodder."

She asked if she was my muse. I answered that, in a way, I supposed she was.

So, without further ado, I attempt to connect...

Rastafarian to Economics in Six Steps

1. Rastafarianism is a monotheistic, new religious movement that emerged in a Christian culture (Jamaica) in the 1930's. Rastafarians believe in the Second Advent like Christians do, but they believe that it happened in the person of...

2. Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia, who denied that he was divine, but who did rule Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974. His reign was a long and eventful one, fighting a bloody, anti-colonial war against Benito Mussolini's Italy in 1935 and 1936. Domestically, though, Selassie's main problem was that of economic development. He knew that, to survive in the 20th century, his country would have to undergo...

3. Modernization, which is a contentious topic among historians, political scientists and other such eggheads. It basically studies the social factors and the ties an "underdeveloped" country has to "developed" countries and how these factors interact and can change to help a country modernize (whatever that might mean). These ideas about modernization have their roots in the Enlightenment with...

4. Marie Jean Antoine Nicholas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, who, in 1795, postulated that advances in technology and economic changes could change moral and cultural values. This notion, the Idea of Progress, became a cornerstone of Enlightenment thought and influenced liberal ideologies well into the twentieth century. These notions of progress were related, in Condorcet's mind, to democratic political institutions. Condorcet studied, in particular, voting in democratic systems and found a problem, known as Condorcet's paradox. This is basically the idea that majorities choices in any decision situation are intransitive and can conflict with each other. This paradox in decision making was further expanded upon and defined by...

5. Kenneth Arrow, who's "impossibility theorem" takes Condorcet's paradox to the next level. Arrow argued, in his Ph.D. thesis and later in his 1951 book Social Choice and Individual Values, that no voting system can translate the preferences of individuals into a group-wide preference without the system resorting to dictatorship. In other words, the rule of the majority can never really be achieved and not have a dictator. This work laid the foundation for social choice theory, which is an important theoretical framework in...

6. The Academic Study of Economics.

So, there we have it. From Jamaica in the 1930's, we went to Ethiopia, back to late eighteenth century France, forward to twentieth century America to arrive at our final destination, making several interesting discoveries along the way.

Oh, for my fellow documentary junkies, can you tell I was raised on a steady diet of James Burke?

I hope you found this thought experiment interesting, enlightening and further proof that everything is connected in one way or another.

Oh, and to my muse, a sincere thank you. I usually balk and get defensive when she pokes gentle fun at my preoccupations (I secretly like it, but I would never let on...)

The Chuckwagon: Shredded Beef Carnitas (Sort Of)

The slow cooker is really the great tease of the food world. You gather your ingredients, put them all in the stoneware vessel, turn a knob and, well, wait. Usually for hours.

Meanwhile, ever so slowly, the wonderous smells of your food start to emerge and waft around you. As you go about your daily tasks, you are tempted and seduced by the ever-stronger aroma of food that you cannot have. It is a good exercise in forebearance and discipline.

This is not a problem if you are gone all day while it is cooking, but be ready for the big barrage when you open that door and are confronted by a wall of deliciousness. Even if you are in and out of the house all day, when you return, the aroma gets stronger; while you are away, it is at the back of your mind.

This is one of my favorite slow cooker recipes for a lot of reasons. Since it is ideal as a filling for tacos and such, it goes a long way. It can be adapted and added to, depending on your tastes and heat tolerance. Lastly, it freezes well and can be a real frozen "ace-in-the-hole" when the food stores are running low.

Oh, why the "Sort Of" in the title? Well, I know how real carnitas are made and they are really easy. I also know they are not done in a slow cooker. For a great, easy and tasty recipe that is closer to traditional carnitas, try this one by Mexican cuisine Renaissance man Rick Bayless.

Shredded Beef Carnitas (Sort Of)

Ingredients

• 2.5-3 lb. boneless chuck or rump roast
• 1 10oz. can of diced tomatoes with green chiles
• 1 c. beef broth
• 4-6 cloves of garlic, peeled and smashed
• 2-3 chipotle peppers plus 1 tbs. of the sauce from the can*
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 1 tbs. ground cumin
• 1 tbs. dried oregano
• Salt and pepper to taste

* These particular chipotle peppers are sold in a can with an adobo sauce. They can be found with the Mexican foods in most grocery stores.

Method

• Put roast in slow cooker.
• Add (in this order) tomatoes/green chiles, broth, garlic, chipotles, sauce, onion, cumin, oregano, salt and pepper.
• Turn slow cooker to "LOW," cover and cook for 4-6 hours. When done, the meat should be tender and falling apart.
• Remove the beef from the liquid and reserve some of the liquid.
• Let cool briefly.
• Shred beef with two forks until, well, shredded enough for whatever you are using it for.
• Moisten beef with some of the liquid until it is damp but not sopping wet.

Serve this with any/all of your favorite trimmings. I particularly like guacamole and a little lime juice on the beef, all wrapped up in a warm tortilla. This, as I said, can be used as a taco filling, served along side rice and beans by itself or however you want to enjoy this succulent, tasty roast.

So, gird up your discipline, get it all together and let 'er rip. On second thought, maybe plan to be out of the house all day so you are not tempted. Even if you are around, the pay-off is well worth it.

What is Fascism?

(N.B. This post was going to be longer. A lot longer. It followed the upward and outward spiral a lot of my posts do. I have shortened it, plagiarized myself a lot and I think made it more acccessable. If anyone out there is interested in a more in-depth look at this, let me know.)

When groups of ideas are labelled, these labels can (and usually do) take on a life of their own. They change, mutate and often become so completely divorced from their original context that they are almost meaningless.

These labels, though seemingly meaningless, retain a great deal of rhetorical power, but rhetorical power of the "bash over the head" type, not the Oxford Debating Society type.

Such it is with fascism.

Fascism, or to call someone a fascist, has basically mutated into a term for anything or anybody that you hate or disagree with. It is a term that has such power while at the same time being so wildly understood as to be contradictory at best and laughable at worst.

I have personal experience with this. In teaching the history of Modern Europe, I lectured on the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1920's and 1930's. One of my express missions in doing so was to let the students know that this term refers to a specific group of political, economic and social policies that emerged from a specific place at a specific time.

I tried to impress upon them that fascism can be defined, but that these definitions are not, well, definite. To put it another way, it is hard to say which "fascist" regime in Europe was the archetype, the quintissential fascist polity and society.

The Rise of Fascism in Europe

Flip through the slides of this presentation, done for my History 120 class. I think it will provide definitions of fascism, examples of fascist regimes and some conclusions. This presentation on the rise of the Nazis in Germany might also be of interest.

Final Thoughts

• "Fascist" as an epithet has, as terms often do, become completely divorced from its original meaning. It simply means, "someone I don't agree with" now.
• There were several other regimes, like Franco's in Spain, that had the trappings of fascism, and were certainly authoritarian, but were not really fascist. Particularly notable here are Estado Novo in Portugal, the Fourth of August regime in Greece and the Iron Guard in Romania.
• What was the closest regime to a "purely" fascist one? I would say Mussolini's Italy. Feel free to debate me on this one.

Link Exchange

• Margaret Atwood's take on Twitter.
• Tyler Cowen explains the greatest flaw with the labor theory of value.
• Land smugglers? Indonesia has them.
• Apparently, the founders of the American Economic Association in the 1890's were progressive, scientifically minded and really into eugenics and race purity. In other words, they were absolutely typical of many intellectuals of their age.
• Baffled by the whole "militia movement?" Robert Churchill's recent book is a good start.
• Magnetic stimulation to certain parts of the brain can change moral judgements.
• Peter Boettke wonders, "why is economic common sense so hard to communicate?" I wonder if, "economic common sense" *might* just be an oxymoron.
• With talk of the 2010 Census in the air, check out this chart of the most populous US cities according to the first census in 1790. New York tops the list...with 33,131 people.
• The allure of glamour.

Moving Thoughts

(This whole post, in one way or another, is informed by George Carlin's classic routine, "A Place For My Stuff." Watch it here.)

I moved recently and, as those who have done this before know, it is never a cut-and-dried task. There are always things you forget, corners you forget to dust, boxes you didn't tape right, hitching a trailer in a blinding snow storm. That sort of thing.

I suppose as moves go, mine was relatively uneventful (apart from the fact that I did most of the work without my glasses, no mean feat). It went how most moves go, in stages:

1. Gather boxes, tape, labels, Sharpies, garbage bags and other vessels for stuff.
2. Let those things sit around for a week while you do absolutely nothing.
3. Realize the move date is coming up and frantically start to sift through your stuff.
4. Establish guidelines for what stays and what goes. The dusty, rarely-used, broken, stained, too-hard-to-clean, or about-to-collapse stuff goes.
5. Gather usable, but unwanted stuff, and donate it or give it away. Feel good about yourself and, as a reward, do absolutely nothing for another week.
6. Realize that the move is even closer now and start to jam stuff into aforementioned boxes, bags, pants with the legs tied off, whatever. This is the stuff, naturally, that made the cut and is not junk or potential home decor for some insufferable hipster.
7. Begin cleaning, realize the enormity of the task and then do absolutely nothing for a few more days.
8. Realize that you move in three days and turn into some hopped-up combination of a house-parlour maid and Bob Vila, cleaning and repairing (or masking) all your sins.
9. Realize that it is all done and then do nothing until the trailer is ready for pick-up.

That's about how it went.

The interesting thoughts, however, came about in Stage 9. There I was, clean apartment, everything packed and sitting neatly (?) in a pile in front of me.

First I thought, "sitting in front of me, in boxes saved by Yo La Tengo Shirt Guy at the corner store, is, well me. These are, as they say, all my earthly possessions. This is all I got. Everything I own in this world that is not my body is there in a pile. This thought depressed me, as you might imagine.

Can a life be reduced to this? Is this the sum-total of my estate? What does this pile of boxes and bags mean, exactly?

I then thought, "No. This is not me. I am me, and these are just material possessions. Why, I could get rid of all of this and still be me. I am not defined by my posessions anymore than I am defined by a job, nationality, religion, ethnicity or baseball team affiliation (well, maybe not so much that last one)."

Well, then, why do you keep any of it? Why not just hippie/Jesus out, dump it all and just live, man?

Like it or not, I then thought, I have grown attached to some of these things. Why?

Then, the real question hit me: why did you keep the particular things you did and get rid of the rest?

Some of it is personal, things that remind me of my past and the past of my family. These things are priceless (not in a literal sense, but you get my meaning). A lot of what I kept were books. As an academic, they are the tools of my trade and the medium through which I keep my mind active and discursive as ever. Movies and music also made it past the garbage/Goodwill stage. These things make me happy and give me perspective, so I kept those. Practical items, too, like clothes. Well, there are few who want to see a naked guy wandering around, and almost none who want to see a naked me, so I had better have those. Apart from my computer, that was about it.

What does any of this prove? I think it boils down to value. When asked to move, we take the path of least resistance. We want to move as little as possible as quick as possible. We must make some hard decisions about the material things around us. In the end, it shows what we really value most. I guess I value my memories, ideas and not being naked.

What I am perhaps getting at is that a move involves a certain value calculus, one that is different for everyone. This process of winnowing is different for everyone and I suppose the process says as much about the individual as the things processed. It is all signalling, to put it another way.

So, whether you are moving are not, take a look around your place, pick out a few things and ask yourself: "Why am I keeping this? What does this object mean to me? What does it say about me? What would I think if I never saw it again? Would I care?"

The answers might surprise you. I know they surprised me.

Link Exchange

• Annoying book review cliches. These are as plain as the nose on your face.
• Great interview with econ Nobel Laureate Gary Becker. Becker is a living legend, and he is optimistic about the economy in general. I tend to agree.
• Is curing dissociative identity disorder (multiple personalities) murder? Robin Hanson seems to suggest it is.
• The connection between U.S. drug policy and the gang wars in Mexico. The "War on Drugs" causes violence rather than preventing it. Time to sue for peace.
• Is it worth it for a city or country to host a large sporting event like the Olympics? Probably not.
• Women in countries with healthier populations prefer more feminine-looking men. I think this is in line with the main thrust of understanding in evolutionary psychology.
• David Cameron "rallies the base." Four months ago, the Tories had the election wrapped up. Now it will be a fight to the finish and (I think) a hung Parliament.

Is Economics Dead?

In its current form as an academic discipline, David Brooks thinks so.

First, a caveat about me and my opinion of David Brooks. Sometimes I think he is right on the money, other times I think he is on some other planet. On this score, I tend toward the former.

Economics is considered one of the "social sciences," basically disciplines that attempt to explain human behavior (in one way or another) using empirical methodologies. These disciplines usually include political science, psychology, sociology and economics.

Brooks does not take issue with the "social" part. It is the "science" that he has a problem with. He basically argues that economics will, in the future, be more like history or philosophy. It will be a powerful voice in a chorus of voices trying to explain the human condition as it is, was or will be.

What he thinks is at an end, though, is economics as a science in the sense that it is meant to render definitive answers about certain questions, follow a method of experimentation, value the quantitative over the qualitative and (perhaps most importantly) make predictions about how people might behave in the future. He posits, in fact, that economics will become more like art than science.

I do agree with Brooks that human behavior is a slippery thing that is not easily explained by any of the social sciences. What's more, I also agree that any pretense that any of these things are close to the "hard" sciences like chemistry or physics or biology. These sciences can explain how people work. The social sciences attempt to explain why people work, and this is a much harder thing to do.

I disagree with Brooks in that I don't think it was the recent economic crisis that was the "tipping point" for this supposed change in economics. I think of it in a more positive manner. Interdisciplinarity has been a force in academia for some time now and I think economists are finally coming out from behind their figures and charts to realize that they can learn from their colleagues. I think that this is a good thing, in the main.

The question, as a bit of an aside, arises: well, can any discipline keep its integrity in such an environment? Yes, because there are certain sorts of questions that one discipline answers better than others. Want to know about the causes of schizophrenia? A historian might be able to tell you how this disease and the perception of it changed over time, but for the direct answer, best to ask a psychologist. I could go on, but I think you get the point.

Greg Mankiw offers a different take on this, disagreeing pretty much in whole with Brooks. He says that journalists fundamentally misunderstand changes in academia and does not realize that professional economists are not really in the business of predicting the future anyway.

He goes on to admit that, while certain changes do need to be made to basic econ courses, the breadth and depth of them are good for now. He admits he might be biased on this score, and he is right to do so. He is the author of damn near the most popular text for Microeconomics 101 classes today.

In the end, though, I think Brooks is on to something here. He is calling economists to remember that their roots are not in the sciences. The earliest people you could call economists came from other, older disciplines that probed the human mind and condition.

To take but one example: if you were to meet Adam Smith and call him an "economist," he would have no idea what you were talking about. He was really a moral philosopher, interested in how people can achieve happiness and live, well, the right way.

It was in this spirit that he wrote his first (under-read, in my opinion) book The Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759. This book provides the moral and philosophical underpinnings for his later (more quoted, less read, even less understood) work The Wealth of Nations in 1776.

You would get the same quizzical looks from other early "economists" like David Ricardo, Francois Quesnay, Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot and others. In fact, the first person you might be able to call an economist as they developed to the present day might be Alfred Marshall, leader of the "marginal revolution."

So, back to my original question: is economics dead. I think not, but the way the discipline looks at its problems and itself will, and should, change. Economics can be a powerful voice in explaining human behavior, motivation and action.

One voice, however, does not a chorus make.

Link Exchange

• Interesting article and book about an often-forgotten investment bubble of recent years: baseball cards. In the 1980's, baseball cards became seen as a viable investment, people rushed in, prices rose and the bubble burst in 1994 with the baseball strike. I was part of this bursting (in a minor way), and I suppose it was an early education in boom and bust.
• Speaking of booms and busts, this is a super summary (in chart form) of US booms and busts (and other economic data) for the period 1775-1943. This, for me, is a real conversation starter.
• Interactive diagram showing why general equilibrium analysis is no easy task.
• I have seen this making the Internet rounds, an attempt to show that we depend heavily on that which is supplied by government. Here is the libertarian response. I guess it just goes to show that our society is really neither.
• Should airlines pay you to check your bags, in interest of effeciency? Felix Salmon thinks so. His argument is a compelling one.
• Engrossing discussion of positive vs. negative liberty at Cato Unbound. I, as you might imagine, come down on the negative liberty side.

Oh, No. Not Him Again.

Yes, I am back in the blogging saddle.

It has been a tough few months, and in many ways, I have been incommunicado.

I intend to change this.

My schedule has opened up somewhat (well, I am unemployed), and might have some more time to write here.

So, read the below two posts and expect more in the future. More recipes, more links, more history, more econ.

In short, more of everything that makes you like (?) me and this site.

Greeks Begging for Gifts

Greece is one of the worst governed countries in Europe, and certainly damn near the worst in the EU.

There. I said it.

Today, it was announced that the French and German governments have agreed, with help from the IMF, to bail out the Greek economy to prevent it from completely coming apart.

This move shows a few interesting things. To wit:

1. France and Germany "wear the pants" in the EU. Always have, always will.
2. Greece, as a country, was considered "too big to fail." Well, this is not literally true, but systemic risk is certainly an issue here.
3. This, for me, calls into question Europe as an optimum currency area (OCA). Now, I know that Europe is the first place this has really been tried, but I think, after the Euro conversion in 2002, something like this was bound to happen sooner or later.
4. The recent labor unrest in Greece is a reflection of the dire (to put it mildly) state of the Greek economy rather than its cause.
5. I think a lot of the blame for a lot of the current economic problems lie in the 1970's and former Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou and his Pan-Hellenic Socialist Party (PASOK). After the military junta was brought down in 1974, the right was discredited and the left took over in all levels of government. While this is not in and of itself bad, it did mean that there was no effective opposition and the PASOK and its allies proceeded to wreck the economy and create general malaise amongst the populace.
6. This might happen again. I am looking at you, Spain and Portugal.

Addendum: Will the US become the next Ireland, which supposedly serves as a model for recovery for the Greeks? Probably not.

Link Exchange

• Repeal the Sixteenth Amendment? It was passed in 1913 and gave the federal government the right to levy taxes. I like this idea.
• Could the new health care legislation lead to more uninsured people? Arnold Kling thinks so.
• Why Italian academia sucks. I think a lot of these criticisms can be applied to European academia more broadly. European academia, to my thinking, has a very perverse incentive scheme.
• Don Boudreaux nicely summarizes the natural rights view of the crucial idea of "the rule of law."
• Freakonomics Radio is now live! Go here for the podcast, RSS feed or to listen live. Russ Roberts is especially good. I would gladly live in a country run by that guy.
• A business model for aspiring pirates.
• There has always been a gulf between academia and the general public in the US. Is this changing (for better or worse)?
• Jodi Beggs muses on game theory and splitting the check at a restaurant.
• Corporate diversity training (apparently) does little good and makes people resentful.
• Libertarians in Israel.

Addendum: I realize that the Sixteenth Amendment deals directly with the income tax and that Article I, Section 8 (Enumerated Powers of Congress) gives Congress the right to levy taxes. I apologise for the confusion.

The Chuckwagon: Baked Potatoes

I know, I know, I know.

Who needs a recipe for a baked potato, right? Don't they serve those at Wendy's?

Well, I think there is a need. The perfect baked potato can be quite elusive, simple yet just out or reach.

I think of baked potatoes like I think about fries: so much potential, but so often overlooked.

Why care so much about potatoes? Is it because I (for better or worse) am of Irish extraction? Perhaps, but people the world over enjoy potatoes because they are cheap, filling and full of all the good stuff that we need. Why do you think that they became such a staple in the diets of people the world over?

Anyway, I have tinkered with a few methods for making baked potatoes, and this is my favorite:

Ingredients

• 2-4 medium to large Russet baking potatoes
• Oil (olive, vegetable, canola, peanut, corn...anything but motor)
• Salt (Kosher if you have it, table if you don't/don't care)

Method

• Wash potatoes in cold water with a stiff bristled brush. Scrub them good, but don't strip the skins.
• Take a fork and stab each potato deeply (really give those suckers a good jab) eight to twelve times, depending on the size of the spud. This helps steam to escape while cooking.
• Dry the potatoes off
• Coat each lightly in oil. The best way (but not the least messy) is to put some oil in your hand and rub them all over.
• When each is oiled, place on an ungreased baking sheet
• Salt the potatoes lightly
• Bake at 350 degrees for 1-1.5 hours (for two potatoes, 1 hour 15 minutes seems about perfect - alter with oven and number of potatoes.
• When done, they should be crispy on the outside, yet squeeze easily and be soft inside.
• To open, take a fork and stab a dotted line across half of the potato's top. Squeeze at both ends and it should pop open.

At this point, the world is your oyster. You have a perfectly baked potato with a crispy, delicious skin and a smooth, creamy interior.

Top with, well, basically anything. Sour cream, chives, butter, salt, pepper, HP sauce, chili, tuna, baked beans, ketchup, mayonnaise...basically anything edible will taste good on top of this perfectly baked potato.

Oh, and if anyone asks you, you can tell them (not exactly a lie) it is the method of an Irish cook who tried hundreds of ways before getting it just perfect.

Will Is a Twit(ter)

More substantial posting later (think baked potatoes and the Scottish Enlightenment).

I did want to mention here (if you didn't notice the box to the right under "Breaking News") that I have joined the world of Twitter.

Boy, I have gone from Luddite to aspiring social media whore in a comparatively short amount of time.

Anyway, to follow me on Twitter, just click my username to the right in the box thingy and go from there.

If you want the URL, it is here.

So, if my long boring musings here are not enough, maybe my short boring updates can fill the gaps.

Link Exchange

• Cabinet appointments and private sector experience, 1900-2008. It seems that Democrats hire less people with private sector experience than do Republicans. Wonder what that might mean?
• Asteroid deflection as a public good.
• Paul Samuelson, one of the most notable economists of the twentieth century, dies at 94. His textbook Economics was the standard for thirty years and he mentored no less than seven Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics Laureates (a prize he himself won in 1970).
• Here is Peter Boettke on Samuelson, presenting the contrary view. I agree with him.
• Robin Hanson on the dubious (in his estimation) link between smoking and death. I think he is right: the numbers, in many ways, just don't add up.
• Resources, their use and Notre Dame's new coach.
• John Perry Barlow (essayist, cyberlibertarian and lyricist for such Greatful Dead favorites as "Black-Throated Wind," "Mexicali Blues" and "Casssidy") in a 1994 classic about the internet and copyright protection. It is as relevant today as it was back then.
• Should the "shotgun wedding" that has been Belgium since 1815 head for divorce?
• Why the Bauhaus matters.

Television, History, Memory

It is always funny what can trigger memories to come rushing back.

For me, one recent incidence was looking for an old, local commercial from Chicago television.

I found it, and saw that the clip seemed to be part of a much larger project. Indeed, it was.

The Museum of Classic Chicago Television is a completely online museum dedicated to preserving television clips from the Chicago area. I think just the premise is great. It is everything that a museum should be: interactive, well-organized and completely open to anyone.

In looking through their "exhibits," I was surprised at the wide array of television clips that they had. It was not just commercials (although this is a large part of what is there). They had newscasts, sports clips and everything else that makes up what a television station does.

As I paged through the clips of ads for Schmerler Ford, Polk Brothers and Linn Burton "For Certain," newscasts with Fahey Flynn, Walter Jacobsen and Joel Daly and all of the WTTW clips for Wild Chicago, Image Union, Doctor Who promos and Marty Robinson, something happened.

A lost world started to remake itself in my mind.

Instantly, I was a kid again, sitting there on Saturday morning, waiting for cartoons to come back on as that guy in the Victory Auto Wreckers commercial pulls the door off the car again. I was also there, in the kitchen with my mom after school, her making dinner, me talking about school, Joel Daly reading the news. I was there, too, on a Saturday night, waiting impatiently for Marty Robinson to announce this week's Doctor Who adventure.

It was a real nostalgia trip. Then, when I came back from that lost world, the academic began to think about what just happened.

Is this what defines my past? Is it disjointed clips of local media and ads for products that can trigger personal memories? Isn't this a bit crass? Shouldn't it be something more profound? Am I just proof that we are an over-commercialized society that watches too much television?

Before I reached peace with this, the historian in my mind reminded that these are artifacts of a lost age of broadcasting, before cable was ubiquitous, when the local affiliate station held a lot more sway in any given media market. I thanked him for the insight, but was still troubled a bit.

Then it hit me. It is not these flashes of Chicago's media past themselves that form my past. They merely serve as triggers.

They are not the lost world. My memories are.

These glimpses into the televised past of my hometown were merely the background noise to everything else that was going on, part of the soundtrack to what really was meaningful - growing up, sharing bonds with family, becoming who I am today.

I thought, furthermore, what does it matter if it was these things going on in the background and not the music of Brahams or Mozart, not the poetry of Keats or Tennyson? Those artifacts of "high culture" are as much a part of my memories as the "low culture" of Celozzi-Ettelson Chevrolet or Carson's Ribs.

To put it another way, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" is as much a part of my mental landscape and past as, "...at York and Roosevelt Roads, where you always save more money!"

Does this make me a philistine who has flashes of "real" culture peppered in among the trash? Well, I think the high/low divide in culture is a false divide and has not really been meaningful for almost 200 years. So, no.

Does it bother me that my memories and personal past are made of such disparate elements? Not at all. It what helps make me (and everyone else) the unique and fascinating people that they are.

The whole is, as ever, more than the sum of its parts. So it is with me, I imagine.

Henry Kissinger was Right (About WWII, Anyway)

I know, I know.

Dr. K is not only one the most important diplomats in American history, he is also an incredibly divisive figure. Opinions of him range from praise for beginning the end of the Cold War to wanting him convicted as a war criminal.

As a historian, though, many of his assessments were well-considered and show a deep understanding of motivation and geopolitics in the past.

I may talk about his ideas about the Congress of Vienna at a later date, but in preparing my lecture for the end of World War II and the coming of the Cold War, I re-read part of his 1994 book Diplomacy. There is much to recommend his reading of the situation immediately after the Second World War, especially from the standpoint of the three Allied leaders (Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Josef Stalin).

First, I think he reads the diplomatic geneaology of FDR exactly right. He argues that FDR's vision of the world after WWII emerged from American exceptionalism, Wilsonian idealism and a unique understanding of the American psyche.

Great, what the hell does all that mean? Well, American exceptionalism is the idea that America is unique and has a singular role to play on the world stage. The US is special and has a special destiny because of its history and its ideas.

This is complimented by Wilsonian idealism, the vision of world politics that came from former President Woodrow Wilson at the close of the First World War. Wilson believed in the spread of democracy and national self-determination and that America had the central role to play in this.

Lastly, FDR understood the American proclivity to think in terms of universal ideas rather than the calculus of reward and punishment that seemed to govern diplomacy in years gone by.

I think this is right because it explains his actions in the waning months of the war. He believed Churchill and Britain could hold off the USSR while helping to rebuild Europe without American assistance. This belief is, knowing that Britain was economically destroyed and politically vulnerable, only explained by a deep ideological commitment to a certain vision of the world.

This was also helped by the fact that while FDR often distrusted Churchill's motives (especially where the British Empire was concerned), he believed Churchill's rhetoric that Britain was up to the task. This, incidentally, says as much about Churchill as it does about FDR.

Secondly, I think Kissinger was right in his assessment of Stalin as a blend of communist ideology and traditional Russian notions of statecraft. Stalin, according to Kissinger, distrusted fascism as much as he did capitalism. He hoped to use his alliances with Nazi Germany and then with the US and Great Britain to further territorial aims that could have come out of the old Russian imperial playbook.

Russia, for hundreds of years, has been concerned with gaining buffer territory along its vast borders. This, coupled with the centuries-old notion that Russia has to constantly allay its own feelings of inferiority, explains Stalin's policies during and after the war.

I think this is right, although I have a different take on the ideology bit and how it relates. While Stalin pursued communist policies at home, he had realized at least since the 1920's that the USSR must consolidate its position against possible rivals. This was a central factor in the disagreement between Stalin and Leon Trotsky.

So, in a way, I believe that Stalin saw communism and the Soviet system as means to an end, a way of establishing total control on a domestic level so that he could pursue fairly traditional foreign policy aims.

Expanding on Kissinger's arguments, I had to ask myself about why FDR and Churchill believed Stalin's overtures toward democracy and restraint. Also, why was it that Churchill portrayed Britain and its empire as equal to the task of rebuilding Europe and holding off the USSR when they were clearly in economic distress and the cracks in the empire were growing ever larger?

To the first question, I say that FDR believed Stalin because of his notions of international relations. If the postwar order was to look like a Wilsonian notion of perpetual peace based on harmony, FDR had to think that Stalin would be a willing participant in keeping the global peace after the war. Ideology stood in the way of reality and FDR really didn't plan for the eventuality (well, it's what happened) if Stalin didn't exactly play along.

To second, I say that Churchill knew exactly what he was doing. He was an ardent old imperialist, it's true. That's where the rhetoric comes from. He was not ignorant of the situation as it was, though. While Churchill believed that the Empire could be kept together (in one form or another), it was clear from the course of the war that Britain could no longer go it alone.

Churchill knew that Britain's only chance for survival was to cozy up to the US as much as possible so that the US would, in turn, see Britain as their main ally in Europe and also their main ally in forging the balance of power that would develop after the war. This balance of power was seen as natural by Churchill, but this is what FDR wanted to avoid.

So, it was basically Churchill's task to manuver between Stalin and FDR, usually giving into US demands while making it clear at every opportunity that Washington's strategic interests were also those of London. This was Churchill's great coup, and the birth of the so-called "special relationship," at least in any formal sense.

Why should we care about any of this? Well, it was in these notions of a postwar world that the world of the latter half of the twentieth century was born. The bipolar world of the US and its allies in NATO and elsewhere on one side and the USSR and the Warsaw Pact nations on the other were born in the minds and actions of FDR, Churchill and Stalin and their governments in the waning months of World War II.

It was these critical views and opinions that set the stage for the rest of the "short" twentieth century (1914-1992), and also presented the international situation that would persist until this bipolar world crumbled to the ground and the world we live in now was born.

So, Kissinger got it right (at least here), and I think the history of the period and the subsequent years bear him out. To what extent does his reading of history reflect his own actions as a diplomat?

That is a question for another time and another long, rambling post. Stay tuned.