Pigou and the Anthropophagi

Why does the salmon here cost more than the chicken? There ought to be a tax on chicken.

Why?

On chicken and meat and eggs and dairy products.

Why?

Because farm animals are bad for the environment.

How?

They contribute to global warming.

How?

They produce methane, which gets in the atmosphere and adds to the greenhouse effect.

People produce methane, too, you know.

That's why I think there should be a tax on people also. Cannibals need more vegetables in their diet anyhow.

Definition

Sex worker:

(1) a prostitute

(2) anyone in a sex-related occupation, including a psychiatrist with a specialization in sexual disorders or a cashier in a convenience store that rents adult videos

(3) someone in an occupational category broader than (1) and narrower than (2), the precise specification of which is known only to the person using the term


Examples of (3):

(a) Anyone who acts in an adult video, is a sex worker, but someone who works in distribution of adult videos is not.

(b) Anyone who has, on camera, actual penetrative intercourse involving an actual male member, is a sex worker, but someone who engages, on camera, in Lesbian sex acts, including those that involve penetration, is not.

(c) Anyone who interacts sexually directly with a client, whether or not that interaction includes an actual sex act, and whether the interaction is in person or over some kind of telecommunication network, is a sex worker, but someone who performs sex acts on camera, for distribution as entertainment, is not.

Where is “Sex” in the NAICS?

This business with Eliot Spitzer is bringing up issues in labor economics for me. In particular, how should we refer to Ms. Dupré’s occupation? Some people insist that she was a “sex worker.”

I have a number of problems with this terminology. For one thing, is there any other occupation where the title includes “worker” and the hourly billing rate can be in the quadruple digits? I mean, there are a few cinematic production workers who make that kind of pay – but they’re known invariably by other titles (actors, directors, etc.) – and a few sports workers – but they’re known as athletes – and quite a few finance workers – known as investment bankers, fund managers, and such – and quite a few…I guess I’d have to call them generic workers, since they can be in any industry…but they’re known as corporate executives – and a few legal service workers known as attorneys, and a few professional service workers known as consultants, and maybe a few health care workers known as doctors and surgeons, and so on.

Which brings me to my second, related point, which is that we don’t normally identify an occupation by the industry to which it belongs. The exceptions are sort of residual categories: we do call some people “health care workers” if we can’t think of anything better to call them, but most people in health care occupations (nurses, for example) would probably find it insulting to have their occupation identified as “health care worker.”

According to Wikipedia, a sex worker is someone (anyone, apparently) who works in the “sex industry.” I have a feeling that many people who work in the “sex industry” would be insulted to be called “sex workers” (rather like nurses, if you call them “health care workers”). I mean, really, doesn’t everyone know that the phrase “sex worker” is a euphemism for “prostitute”? (I know, technically, that’s not the case, but in real life, other “sex workers” seem to use the phrase for themselves only when they’re trying to make a show of their solidarity with prostitutes.)

But here’s the real problem: What the hell is the “sex industry”? And more to the point, what kind of industry is it?

• An information industry? (The adult video industry, as best I can tell, is part of NAICS 512110, “Video production,” an information industry.)
  
  
• A personal service industry? (Officially, Miss Dupré was probably working in NAICS 812990, the “Social escort services” industry, a personal service industry. As to what she was actually doing, it seems to me that prostitution is clearly a service, and it’s about as personal as services get.)
  
  
• A food service industry? (I know that doesn’t make much sense, but where do strip clubs fit in the NAICS? As best I can tell, they are part of NAICS 722410, “Night clubs, alcoholic beverage,” a food service industry.)
  
  
• An entertainment industry? (It’s really tough to find a NAICS code that would actually apply here, but aren’t strippers entertainers? Of course strippers also give lap dances, which are really more of a personal service than a form of entertainment. In fact, in that respect I have to question whether strippers are really more like prostitutes than entertainers.)
  
  
• An amusement and recreation industry? (That’s pretty much just a wild guess. But where the hell do brothels fall in the NAICS? There are legal brothels in Nevada, so I assume they must have a NAICS code.)

As far as I can tell, the whole concept of a “sex industry” makes a mockery of the way we normally classify industries. I don’t have a problem with changing the occupational title of prostitutes to something that has less of a stigmatizing history. But “sex worker” just doesn’t do it for me. I’m going to try “personal sexual service provider” (PSSP for short) and see if it catches on. Otherwise I’ll just call them hookers – a term which doesn’t seem to offend people even though its etymology is rather scurrilous.

Now I like Eliot Spitzer

Eliot Spitzer has always struck me as a pompous, self-righteous, arrogant, heavy-handed, politically motivated ass. I find the publicly disgraced hypocrite to be a much more sympathetic character. Pretty much the bad things about Spitzer were things I already knew. I didn’t know the specifics of his being a john and a philanderer, but neither did I imagine that he could possibly achieve for himself the high moral standard that he seemed to require of everyone else. The main difference now is that he’s been caught. And being caught tends to neutralize the things I didn’t like about him: his political career is over; his hand is weak; and he is no longer in a position to be pompous, self-righteous, and arrogant. He’s still an ass, I guess, but nobody’s perfect.


UPDATE: Now that I read about what Spitzer has done to reduce human trafficking, I like him even more. Not quite as cool as keeping abortion legal, perhaps, but surely it's worth at least a hand job.

The Race Card

There’s a popular theory now (see for example Mark Kleiman here and here) that Clinton’s strategy is in South Carolina is essentially to lose and to blame the loss on near-universal black support for Obama, thus making Obama the black candidate – the one representing black people – and thereby making him unattractive to white voters in future primaries. I must say, the logic makes sense, but I just don’t understand the premise; it doesn’t ring true for me. Let me say that I am, as I avowed in an earlier post, an Obama supporter, certainly not an apologist for Clinton. And let me also say that I’m probably wrong: I’m no expert in political strategy, and when I say I don’t understand, I’m not trying to play Socrates; I’m genuinely curious. (Now that I think about it, if Socrates hadn’t actually been Socrates, he probably would have denied that he was trying to play Socrates too. But Socrates must have developed a reputation of being wise in philosophical matters, whereas I’m fairly safe from being considered wise in political matters.)

I just find it really hard to believe that the average Democrat – well, let’s say the average undecided Democrat – is enough of a racist to vote against a candidate just because that candidate is a black man with near-universal black support. I’m white, myself, and I don’t think I’m a racist, but I’m hardly the exemplar of politically correct non-racism, and I don’t have the sense that my attitude toward people of other races is much different from that of the average white Democrat. (I’m taking into account, of course, the way I imagine party alignments have changed, or in some cases even reversed, since 1965, but perhaps they haven’t changed as much as I thought?) Certainly, as much as the next white guy, I don’t want Willie Horton anywhere near me or my family. (For the record, though, I did vote for Dukakis.)

But I surely cannot imagine myself, assuming I were still on the fence, deciding to vote for Clinton because Obama looked too much like the representative of black people. If anything, for a perhaps slightly racist person like me who naturally doesn’t like to think of himself as being slightly racist, if I have other reasons to like a candidate, then the blacker he is, the better. After all, voting for Obama, the black candidate and the candidate of black people, shows that I’m not a racist, and gives the lie to all those bleedingheart liberals who might want to claim that I am. If Obama were just some candidate who technically happened to be black, there wouldn’t be nearly as much advantage in voting for him. And if I were the exemplar of politically correct non-racism, the advantage wouldn’t be there, because I would have no need to prove that I’m not a racist.

The comparison is made with Jesse Jackson, who was the black candidate when he ran and was not well-liked by white Democrats, particularly moderate white Democrats. But surely (am I being naïve here?) it was Jesse Jackson’s political opinions, not his race or his racial support, that turned off so many white voters. Clearly, Barrack Obama’s opinions are quite different from Jesse Jackson’s – if anything, to hear many of the liberal pundits tell it, the problem with Obama’s opinions is that they are too far from those of Jesse Jackson. Am I being naïve here? I knew some white people who supported Jesse Jackson, and I’m pretty sure it was because of his positions, not because of his race. And I knew some white people who opposed Jesse Jackson, and it sure seemed to me that they opposed him for the same reason that the others supported him.

Obama and Abortion

I’m a Democrat, and as of Saturday, I am no longer “leaning toward Obama”; I am an Obama supporter. (Unfortunately, I’ll be out of town on primary night.)

I’m also pro-abortion. Not pro-choice: I’m one of those people that Hilary Clinton hasn’t met, who is actually pro-abortion. (I don’t think I’ll try to explain this any further, because my opinions are probably extreme enough to offend even the feminists and civil libertarians with whom I find common cause.)

You might wonder, given that I’m pro-abortion, why I would support Obama. After all, as Clinton’s campaign informed New Hampshire voters,

Obama refuses to stand up for a woman's right to choose and repeatedly voted `present' on important legislation. As a State Senator, Obama voted `present' on seven abortion bills, including critical late term abortion procedure, two parental notification laws and three 'born alive' bills.

You may recall that Bill Clinton once “did not volunteer” certain relevant information with respect to an answer he gave in deposition. (Coincidentally, the information he did not volunteer also concerned something could be considered a form of birth control.) In this case, Hilary did not volunteer certain relevant information.

The information she (or her campaign) did not volunteer is that, in the Illinois legislature, voting “present” is equivalent to voting “no,” because a majority of “yes” votes are required for a measure to pass. Granted, “present” and “no” are not exactly the same, but the difference in this case is not a substantive one. The Clinton campaign said that it decided to put out the information in the quotation above because “as Senator Obama has said, ‘voting records matter.’” Of course, when Senator Obama said that voting records matter, his point was that, if you want to ascertain a candidate’s position on specific issues, you should watch what the candidate does rather than just listening to what he says. Apparently, the Clinton campaign’s response to Obama’s suggestion to look at substance rather than just rhetoric was to exploit a non-substantive aspect of Obama’s record in such a way as to blatantly mislead the reader as to its substance.

When politicians lie about something I don’t have strong opinions about (like with whom Bill Clinton did or did not have sexual relations) it doesn’t bother me that much. When they make blatantly misleading statements about something that I do have a strong opinion about, that pisses me off.

I wonder if it’s too late to get an absentee ballot.

Obama and the Progressives

I'm just wondering if Senator Obama is pursuing a calculated strategy of saying things that get pundits on the left pissed at him. It probably won't help him win the nomination, but when and if he does win, it could help in the general election, and it could help even more in the process of governing. What better way, for example, to get the 8 or so Republican votes he will need to close debate on his health care plan in the Senate than by saying, "Paul Krugman hated this idea."

Boobs

Perhaps tomorrow I’ll go back to writing about international trade imbalances, but what the heck, it’s Saturday. I should preface this whole entry by noting that you probably shouldn’t pay attention to what an economist has to say about evolutionary biology (unless that economist happens to be a biologist as well, which is certainly not the case with me). Nonetheless, it has been observed that, when the subject is boobs, people tend to pay attention no matter who’s talking.

Daniel Davies had an entry on Crooked Timber today entitled “Busty barmaids and other developments in science,” which reports the finding of a study (apparently a genuinely scholarly one, despite its subject matter) by the Cornell School of Hotel Administration: there is a linear relationship between the size of a barmaid’s breasts and the size of her tip. A linear relationship means that, no matter how big a barmaid’s breasts are, one with even bigger breasts will tend to get bigger tips. (I haven’t read the study, so I don’t know if they included a dummy variable for Shelley Long.) One might imagine that one of those BBW porn models with an alliterative pseudonym like “Henrietta Hugeones” would have an absolute advantage as a barmaid, even if her comparative advantage is in her field of choice. (Well, an absolute advantage as far as tipping goes; depending on the arrangement of the bar, she might be at a disadvantage in performing her service efficiently.)

Mr. Davies uses the study as an occasion to speculate on the topic of why men like big breasts (by which he apparently means, why they find women with big breasts sexually attractive). His theory seems to be that men have an unconscious facility that attempts to find good mothers for their children and that mistakenly “figures out” that big breasts are better for feeding infants. Then I suppose it unconsciously tells the men to pursue women with big breasts, even if the men aren’t consciously interested in having children. In order for this to work, the facility has to repeat its mistaken logic for each individual, because big breasts aren’t in fact better for feeding infants, so there is no selection pressure to prefer large breasts independently of that mistaken conclusion. It’s not a theory that I find compelling.

There is a related fact that one might also want to explain: the fact that women have distended breasts in the first place. It’s trivial to explain why lactating women have breasts, but in most species, the females don’t develop distended breasts until their first pregnancy. Among human beings, even virgins have boobs, which is a bit of an anomaly. You might say that women have breasts because men like them, but then you need an explanation for men’s preference that doesn’t get circular by depending on the fact that women have breasts. For example, one commenter suggests that men like big breasts because they are a sign of sexual maturity, which might be a fine explanation, except that it begs the question of why sexually mature virgins have breasts.

I would also note that the specific study discussed does not demonstrate that men find big breasts sexually attractive, only that men like to give gifts (in the form of larger than average tips) to women who have big breasts. That in itself is fairly easy to explain. Presumably in some proto-human species, big breasts (or any substantial breasts, for that matter) in a young woman were a reliable sign that she was pregnant or lactating. Giving gifts (which presumably would have taken the form of food) to pregnant and lactating women makes a lot of sense on the face of it (and also, as I will argue, had an evolutionary advantage). They are, after all, “eating for two,” and they presumably have a harder time foraging for their own food than most people do.

The following theory of breast evolution pulls it all together:

1. Among men who have surplus food (or surplus money to spend at bars), evolution favors the gene that predisposes them to give that food to women who look pregnant, because (in the evolutionary environment) such a woman had a disproportionate chance of carrying the man’s own offspring or that of a close relative, and because she needed food more (and would have a harder time getting food for herself) than a non-pregnant woman.
   
   
2. Among species that walk upright, so that their eyes don’t naturally look toward the belly, distended breasts are a particularly useful signal of pregnancy.
   
   
3. The genetic mutation causing virgins (and childless women in general) to have breasts was favored because it made them look pregnant, so that they would get goodies normally reserved for pregnant women. (Not consciously reserved, of course; it’s just that men like to give gifts to women who have this characteristic originally associated with pregnancy.)
   
   
4. A gene for sexual attraction to virgins with breasts (stronger the larger, and therefore more obvious, those breasts were) was favored because men who chose mates with a gene for virginal breasts would have daughters with virginal breasts, who would then get goodies normally reserved for pregnant women and be more likely to survive.
   
   
5. Then the whole sexual selection / positive feedback thing kicks in. There is an evolutionary advantage to a gene for attraction to a characteristic that others find attractive, since that gene makes your offspring more attractive, so that you’re more likely to have grandchildren. Then there is an evolutionary advantage to a gene that exaggerates such a characteristic in yourself because it makes you more attractive and therefore more likely to have children. Etc.

How to Solve the National Debt

Guess I’ll keep reading Barron’s and the Journal, Murdoch notwithstanding....

As we often do, my wife and I took the Boston Sunday Globe along to read during our late brunch at the Deluxe Town Diner. I figured, “I’ll read what they have to say about the credit crisis, market volatility, and what the Fed did this week.”

So what did they have to say? Basically nothing. I grabbed the business section first, assuming there would be a relevant article on the front page. Instead I found an article about the personal jet service business, an advice piece on how to negotiate with liars, and an article about a corrupt building contractor. Inside the business section? Still nothing. OK, how about the front section? Nothing. Umm…the real estate section? Nothing. Finally, in desperation, I picked up the “Ideas” section and found a commentary by Robert Kuttner on the roots of the mortgage crisis. Interesting, but only tangentially topical.

Does the Globe live in a completely different world than I do? I mean…Hello? The Fed cut the discount rate this week (!!) – the first explicit easing of Fed policy this business cycle, and an unprecedented mode of easing (cutting the discount rate spread over the federal funds target, increasing the maturity of discount window loans, and verbally encouraging banks to borrow from the discount window). To a macro geek like me, the very fact of a first easing makes it the biggest news story of the year. Considering the unprecedented methods, it should be the biggest story of the decade. (Although…OK…I do recall something about a big war in one of those “Ira” countries in the middle east…that might be important, too…and something about a huge hurricane a couple years back…had something to do with jazz musicians, I think…or was it a tidal wave??)

Granted, I don’t expect the Globe to cater to the interests of macro geeks, but…you’d think the business section at least would take some interest in gargantuan pieces of news from the financial markets. After all, Boston is home to one of the world’s largest mutual fund companies, among other important financial services businesses, and it sits a few short hours’ train ride away from the world’s financial center. Surely many of the Globe’s readers care about these things. Don’t they?

Idea for Blogger

For an ordinary blogger like me, the spam comments seems to come mostly with a delay of at least a few weeks (presumably after the spambots have decided which posts to spam), whereas most of the legitimate comments come within a few days. I’d rather not subject legitimate commenters to those annoying human-readable text tests if I don’t have to. Here’s my suggestion: Blogger should have a time delay (chosen by the blogger) before applying the test. So if you comment within, say, the first 3 days, your comment will go straight through, whereas if you comment a month later, you’ll be subject to a security check. (Or do they already have this feature, and I don’t know about it?)

Miscellaneous Political Thoughts

John Kerry’s “stuck in Iraq” gaffe probably helped the Democrats – by narrowing the field of 2008 contenders.

It’s appropriate that McCain is the perceived Republican front-runner, since he represents probably the only literally red state in the country. (Ever flown over Arizona?)

Obama’s stock has got to be rising now that the “charismatic black guy” formula tested so well in the Massachusetts governor’s race. (Deval Patrick shot way ahead in the primaries and then trounced the current lieutenant governor despite some significant negatives.) But…

Romney is positioning himself as the real conservative in the Presidential race? The current governor of Massachusetts? Yes, I said Massachusetts. Hello?

Targeted Advertising?

I just set up a MySpace account (unrelated to this blog, and I won’t identify it here). It states clearly in my profile that I’m married. So why does it keep feeding me ads for dating servies?

It’s clearly using some of the information in my profile to target the ads: it knows that I’m male; otherwise the dating service ads wouldn’t all contain pictures of women (to be specific, slutty-looking (and I mean that in a good sense) women in their early 20s, who all appear to be not just out of my league but probably out of the league of most MySpace users their own age). So why isn’t it noticing my marital status and thinking I might be interested in something other than dating services?

I can think of 3 possibilities:

1. Married men actually do patronize dating services in sufficiently large numbers to make these ads worthwhile.

2. Married men don’t actually patronize dating services much, but they do click on the ads, and MySpace gets paid by the click rather than by the actual business generated.

3. MySpace really hasn’t gotten its act together yet when it comes to targeting advertising.

Obscure Musical Thought

As Sheryl Crow’s “A Change Would Do You Good” is running through my head, it seems that a lot of the musical ideas were taken from the Beatles’ “You Can’t Do That”.

Sunset over Hyannis

Vacation

I will be on vacation from tomorrow (Nov. 3) until the following Friday (Nov. 10) and probably will not be posting. But just in case I get inspired (perhaps for a post about the economics of off-season retailing in resort areas) I'm testing out posting via email using my Blackberry (hence the tag at the bottom). If you're reading this, I guess that means the test was successful.
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

My Favorite YouTube Channel

OK, it’s my blog, and I can talk about whatever I want. This has nothing to do with economics (unless I think of a connection before I finish writing this). Today I’m going to practice embedding video. I haven’t come across any economics videos that are really worth watching (except maybe the occasional joke video like the “Every Breath You Take” parody addressed to Ben Bernanke, but that’s no longer current enough to be funny). So instead I’m going to promote my favorite YouTube channel, which is probably about as far from economics as you can get.

This video is from OhYeahShauna. I didn’t know which of Shauna’s videos to choose, so I picked the one with the highest user ratings. (Shauna also has videos up on ShaunaInWonderland, which she used before she accidentally converted it to a comedian account.) Frankly, Shauna’s videos are among only a few that I’ve seen on YouTube that didn’t seem like a waste of my time. She’s not a professional, and she’s still very young (just out of high school, and apparently not yet aware of the subtle orthographic difference between the adjective “cubical” and the noun “cubicle”), but she seems to have a real knack for video editing, and I like the music she chooses. Oh, and it helps that she’s gorgeous.

She works with certain limitations, such as a small memory card that frequently cuts her off, and sometimes needing to film in the bathroom to get adequate lighting at night. Somehow she seems to turn the limitations to her advantage. (A bit like Picasso’s blue period, perhaps, at least if you believe the rumor that he couldn’t afford a full palette.) One of the scenes from one of her videos seems to indicate that her boyfriend Max is also involved in some of her videos, but it’s not clear whether his involvement is creative or merely technical.



…and after you’ve finished watching all of Shauna’s videos, go rent the DVD of Kurosawa’s Ran.

Jane Galt is Right

I may disagree with Jane Galt about controversial topics like taxes and income distribution, but when it comes to basic issues like public whipping, we’re in full agreement:

…deterrence and retribution are legitimate questions of justice--but I also think that jail is lousy, immoral, and highly inefficient way to achieve them.

Lousy because jail makes the criminals cost us money. Yes, courts cost money . . . but what costs money is the troublesome process of sorting the innocent from the guilty. We're spending money on the blameless, not the perpetrators. Once they're convicted, we know (as well as frail humans can) that they're guilty. Why should we spend money to punish them, when they could be making money, or hey, just entertainment, for the society they've wronged? Fastow's skills may not be much, but stick an ankle bracelet on him and set him to painting overpasses or something.

Inefficient because criminals are very bad discounters of time, or they wouldn't be criminals. Expensive, long prison terms aren't very effective deterrants. Optimal punishments are short, extremely harsh, and immediate.

Immoral because the great tragedy of human life is the finiteness of time; I'm not sure we ever have a right to take away someone else's pitifully few moments simply to punish them. Locking people up because they are a danger to others is a necessary evil; locking them up because we can't think of anything else to do to them is not. Morally, I should think a public whipping post vastly preferable--and more effective--than a one-year jail term.

My readers, particularly my more sensitive liberal ones, are even now recoiling in horror at my barbaric suggestion. But we all know that in fact the real punishment offered by prison is that meted out by other prisoners--that for many or most people, a prison sentence is a long and barbaric series of beatings and rapes. We know that this is true; we do almost nothing to prevent it; and we send people there anyway. Indeed, this is the aspect of prison--not the incarceration away from families, friends, and good takeout--with which cops threaten suspects. I should think a clean, quick beating from a government official would be more to anyone's taste--except the of course the animals who rule the prison dominance hierarchy.

Tucking criminals off in prison simply allows us to pretend to ourselves that we are doing something not-so-bad, when what we really intend is full-blown evil. If jail really were merely a dull spell of menial service jobs and mediocre food, I suspect many Americans would think it wholly inadequate to the demands of justice.

Yes. I made the same suggestion about 20 years ago, for essentially the same reasons. Suffice it to say, the suggestion was not well received by my lunchmates. (“Wouldn’t the state be liable for welts?”)

But think about it. Our current system essentially outsources punishment the same way the CIA outsources torture. (“We’re not being inhumane. The inmates promised not to rape anybody.”) And the worst criminals end up getting the least punishment, because the worst criminals are exactly the ones to whom the punishment function is outsourced.

If I have come to have reservations about public whipping, it is only because I have become more of a fascist over the past 20 years. As a utilitarian, I tend not to buy into the whole concept of “justice.” The purpose of prisons, as I see it, is to prevent crime. The best way to prevent crime (so the empirical evidence indicates) is to put people in jail before they commit crimes. Unfortunately, the justice advocates generally object, because they say it’s unjust to punish people who haven’t yet committed crimes, and of course there is also the practical problem that we can’t predict with much accuracy who is going to commit a crime. But when someone does commit a crime, it provides both (1) a fairly good predictor of future criminality, and (2) a good excuse to get around these silly “justice” concerns. So there is a good case, it seems to me, for putting criminals in jail.

Nonetheless, whipping would be cheaper, and it might provide good entertainment for some people. We’d have to weigh the costs and benefits. And for white-collar criminals, who are unlikely to have criminal opportunities in the future, the case for whipping over prison time is pretty much a slam dunk. OK, Mr. Fastow!


UPDATE: Chris Dillow made the same suggestion in June (as he notes in the comments here). Interestingly, he doesn’t make the argument (our trump card, as I see it) that prison life is already at least as brutal as state-inflicted corporal punishment. Perhaps that’s not so true in the UK. If we have 3 bloggers on board already, perhaps we should start a club, analogous to Greg Mankiw’s “Pigou Club”. Call it “the Corporal Punishment Club”? But that sounds slightly perverted. How about “the Effective Deterrence Club”?

Inconvenient Weather

Now do you believe in global warming?

Manufacturing Cuteness

From Battlepanda:

I won’t comment on the economics for now, but I like the picture.