Jens 'n' Frens


	Jens 'n' Frens Idle thoughts of a relatively libertarian Republican in Cambridge, MA, and whomever he invites. Mostly political. "A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many bad measures." -- Daniel Webster

Thursday, May 09, 2013 ::: This was fine in the 1970s, when the [stock] market just sort of lay there like a dying fish, occasionally flopping around, but mostly just gasping for air. ::: posted by dWj at 4:34 PM (0) comments Friday, April 12, 2013 ::: It seems that the most likely change in federal gun laws in this session of Congress (though my understanding is that it's still not very likely) is to expand the requirement for background checks around transfers of guns. According to Senator Cruz, as of yesterday the actual text of the bill was unavailable, but based on preliminary discussions, Dave Kopel described last week some of the (possibly unintended) consequences of the Senate bill. To sum up, what it describes as a "transfer" is not necessarily what you or I would consider a transfer - for example, leaving your guns at home with your spouse while you travel on business for a week or letting someone else shoot your gun on your property under your supervision. Labels: guns ::: posted by Steven at 11:26 AM (0) comments Thursday, April 11, 2013 ::: There were a couple of supreme court cases on same-sex marriage argued a couple of weeks ago. The main things I caught about the arguments were one argument from each side that seemed pretty weak to me, and each in response to a question that should have been expected. A lawyer arguing on behalf of same-sex marriage was asked to distinguish same-sex marriage from polygamy; he said there was a distinction between "behavior" and "status," by which I assume he meant that homosexuality is more innate than the drive for polygamy is. Maybe there was more of an argument - I just caught a snippet - but this struck me as unpersuasive. I might have argued that most of the legal incidents of marriage are changed less dramatically by expanding the types of pairs of people than by allowing an arbitrary number of people - for example, either the estate tax or its marital exemption would become hard to maintain; even worse, think of what the mob might do with the right not to incriminate one's spouse. On the other side, a lawyer was asked why, if the state's interest in opposite-sex marriage is in privileging procreative families, do we permit 55-year-olds to marry each other (the woman, at least, being presumably infertile)? The lawyer's response started by disputing the assumption that a 55-year-old woman would be infertile. Opponents of same-sex marriage occasionally rib its supporters for supporting the obviously untrue proposition that men and women are exactly the same, but this response rather twists that around. The lawyer could have pointed out that "one man and one woman" is a lot less arbitrary than picking an age beyond which women (but presumably not men) are prohibited to marry or requiring a fertility test. Such a response might also have mentioned something like this: Bad behavior is usually more visible than good. It’s what people talk about, it’s what the news media report on, it’s what experts focus on. Experts are always trying to change bad behavior by warning of how widespread it is, and they take any opportunity to label it a crisis. “The field loves talking about the problems because it generates political and economic support,” said Perkins. This strategy might feel effective, but it’s not — it simply communicates that bad behavior is the social norm. Telling people to go against their peer group never works. A better strategy is the reverse: give people credible evidence that among their peers, good behavior is the social norm. If we want to raise kids to aspire to be in committed procreative relationships, we want them to see committed procreative relationships as the norm. Even if an elderly heterosexual couple can't be procreative, they can still look like a procreative couple and contribute to a norm. The norm would obviously not persuade all homosexuals, asexuals, or those committed to not committing, but it would encourage kids who might otherwise be on the fence to seek a life-long mate. I consider myself a tentative supporter of same-sex marriage because I doubt it will do much harm, especially compared to allowing unilateral no-fault divorce, in part because opposite-sex marriage will still be far more widespread. But if there is a reason that privileging stable heterosexual relationships over stable homosexual relationships is important to a society, I would suspect that the crucial mechanism is along these lines. ::: posted by Steven at 12:33 AM (0) comments Saturday, April 06, 2013 ::: Things I've encountered around the web: There is a Texas dialect of German, though it is dying out How the tax code ended the era of swing (via Instapundit, who has a little more) Redividing the US into 50 states of equal population is a demented thing to actually propose, but an entertaining intellectual exercise. Also, I like maps. A Laffer curve for patent law A local college has digitized the publications of Frederick Douglass A diagram of where on the animal cuts of beef come from and how to cook them One way of visualizing the relative sizes of the various planets is to picture how the sky would look if they were as close as the moon actually is An effort to reanimate the passenger pigeon Labels: Wide World of Web ::: posted by Steven at 11:53 AM (0) comments Monday, March 11, 2013 ::: For what it's worth, this is the most comprehensive explanation of the logistics of the conclave. Which begins tomorrow - smoke is expected around 2pm and 7am, Eastern Daylight Time, with a possibility of white smoke about 75 minutes earlier (they burn two sets of unsuccessful ballots at a time). Labels: Roman Catholic Church ::: posted by Steven at 10:47 PM (0) comments Tuesday, March 05, 2013 ::: Better late than never. ::: posted by dWj at 6:57 PM (0) comments Wednesday, February 27, 2013 ::: New York Times magazine has a 10,000 word article on the packaged food industry based on a book that's coming out; I take from it the vague impression that the author wishes his facts conveyed something different from what they do, which is that it is largely in fact the case that companies making food that is more convenient than healthful are doing so because that is what the bulk of consumers, through their buying habits, demonstrate that they want. If disclosure laws aren't too onerous, there may be room for requiring somewhat better disclosure of nutritional information, though there are a number of incidents (including the posting of nutritional information in restaurants in New York City) in which this has not led to healthier choices by consumers. That said, at least such laws are limited in their ability to curtail genuinely free choices of consumers, and if they do have an impact, one's first-pass inference would be that it has improved that freedom: (The Finnish response worked. Every grocery item that was heavy in salt would come to be marked prominently with the warning “High Salt Content.” By 2007, Finland’s per capita consumption of salt had dropped by a third, and this shift — along with improved medical care — was accompanied by a 75 percent to 80 percent decline in the number of deaths from strokes and heart disease.) It is worth noting, however, that this may unduly increase the relative salience of that information relative to other information; there may be some neutral sense in which the consumers' decisions are being moved away from their "true" choices. The industry, though, doesn't seem to show evidence of attempting to pull the wool over anyone's eyes; they seem persistently to be moving away from products that consumers don't buy: Later, a low-fat version of the trays was developed, using meats and cheese and crackers that were formulated with less fat, but it tasted inferior, sold poorly and was quickly scrapped. The Frito-Lay executives also spoke of the company’s ongoing pursuit of a “designer sodium,” which they hoped, in the near future, would take their sodium loads down by 40 percent. No need to worry about lost sales there, the company’s C.E.O., Al Carey, assured their investors. The boomers would see less salt as the green light to snack like never before. Not only do the food companies experiment with more healthful options, they believe that, all things equal, the increased healthfulness makes their products more attractive to consumers, and gives them an advertising hook — which may be why you see items prominently marked "low sodium", "less sugar", etc., as you walk down the grocery store aisle. If such products "taste[] inferior", however, many consumers will prioritize their taste preferences over health preferences. Indeed, much of the article seems to barely conceal a desire to tell people that their preferences are "wrong", and that they should have elite preferences imposed on them.^* The diverse array of foods available means that even a smallish niche is catered to; even one third of possible voters gets no say in a purely democratic system, but one third of potential pasta sauce consumers (as mentioned in the article) is a huge market, illustrating how capitalism, when it functions even reasonably well, is so much more empowering of the little guy than democracy is. If what you want is physically possible — not, by and large, "healthier than that thing that exists, but just as cheap, tasty, and convenient, too" — then if it's not being provided, you are probably a tiny minority in your desires. Your attempt to overrule the market is, in this case, an attempt to force almost everyone else to make the same choices you want to make. Instead of blaming "the industry", then, it makes as much sense to blame "the consumer". Of course, "the consumer" is not a monolith — in a competitive marketplace, any individual consumer is effectively unable to sway the food options available. Indeed, so (to not quite the same extent) are the food companies; "the food industry" is not a monolith either: “Well, that’s what the consumer wants, and we’re not putting a gun to their head to eat it. That’s what they want. If we give them less, they’ll buy less, and the competitor will get our market. So you’re sort of trapped.” At least from a moral standpoint, this makes "holding the industry accountable" a nonsense phrase — the "industry", even more forcefully than a firm, is not a moral agent. On the other hand, if you do truly have good reason for imposing a change on the marketplace, creating laws or tax structures is the way to do it; you have to change the marketplace in some sense. If you do that, in fact, it won't necessarily even hurt individual food companies all that much; each firm loses fairly little from a change if all of its competitors have to make the same change. A diminution of freedom, if it is imposed, will mostly fall on the consumer. The article does end with a couple thousand words on marketing: The selling of food matters as much as the food itself. Sort of. If one item will require less effort to sell than the other, firms are certainly going to take that into account, and, as the rest of the article makes clear, firms don't believe that all items are equally easy to sell — they put a lot of effort into product development. Marketing certainly affects sales — most benignly, by letting consumers know what's out there — but something causes a firm to try to develop and sell one product instead of another. Frito-Lay's marketing department didn't simply happen to be temporarily incompetent when trying to sell a low-fat product with inferior taste; there was a lack of genuine latent consumer demand, unlike the situation with the other, more successful product innovations. ^* There is some extent to which other peoples' health decisions impacts the rest of us, by virtue of our paying for their healthcare. The obvious solution to this would be to insist that people bear the costs of their health decisions, but we seem to be moving even farther from this. ::: posted by dWj at 10:29 AM (0) comments