To be interested in the changing seasons
is a happier state of mind than
to be hopelessly in love with spring.
George Santayana
Obama and Bushism 41
HT Gary North.
Reason Interviews the Best Columnist in America
Progressives Out To Regulate Dinner Parties
A New Libertarian Movie Official Music Video
Entertainment Potpourri
- The new judges are set for American Idol. Jennifer Lopez returns with last season's surviving judge Keith Urban, and Harry Connick, Jr., an American standards performer and jazz recording star who made appearances in at least 2 prior seasons of American Idol, will be the third judge. Randy Jackson, the departing legacy judge, will return in a contestant mentoring role. My first impression: I'm disappointed that they are all performers, once again no comparable successor to Cowell. I don't think, without other changes, this lineup will fix AI's slumping ratings. I do think you won't see the kind of judge soap opera during the past season, but they seem so mellow, I'm not sure you'll see disagreements like Cowell-like directness. To a certain extent, Cowell was a major reason I tuned in the early seasons--you never knew what he might say or do: "I don't mean to be rude...." I miss the train-wreck audition. The show has also done things to make it easier for contestants, e.g., to sing in a preferred style. I would like to see a little more spontaneity and challenge to vocal performances; drilling on 2 or 3 songs over a week is not that difficult.
Roberts, Hanson, Econtalk and the Truth
This is a dated podcast (from 2009); as familiar readers know, I subscribe to a number of podcasts and have been working through the backlog. I don't necessarily blog on each podcast. This one was fairly unusual in the sense Roberts begins the podcast with a monologue; Hanson was at the time a fellow George Mason colleague whom served as a sounding board. I was fascinated by the context in the monologue; he mentions having participated in a debate, defending a free market perspective against an economist promoting a buy-local viewpoint. Roberts argued from fundamental principles, while his opponent was well-versed in a number of unpublished empirical studies, no doubt with all sorts of statistical or methodological issues, inadequately defined model variables,etc. He doesn't want to be unduly dismissive of the work of other economists; is his own perspective creating its own tunnel vision? He hadn't come to the debate armed with dozens of peer-reviewed studies promoting a more orthodox perspective: does the dismal science become a relativistic pissing contest of poorly designed empirical studies reflecting a special interest perspective? How do we know one side's studies reflect the "truth"? Roberts gives the obvious example of the minimum wage debate where "progressives" conveniently ignore dozens of studies demonstrating the minimum wage is bad public policy in favor of primarily one ideologically confirmatory study (Card-Krueger).
First, I want to discuss the referenced debate. I would think buy-local is little more than a special case of protectionism. We know protectionism artificially restricts goods and services, which penalizes the consumer, leaving him with less resources to save, invest or purchase other goods and services. We have the law of supply and demand, comparative advantage, etc. A more general critique of buy-local would be a failure of an underlying theory to explain these findings in the context of commonly accepted economic truths, e.g., punitive tariffs are bad, etc. a convenience study that cherry-picks measures, observations, and variables without some theoretical context is not science--it's propaganda: garbage-in, garbage-out.
Second, I think a free market approach by design is not constrained by special interests.
Am I simply defining away the problem? After all, we don't have a true free market but a mixed economy with undue dominating government meddling... Personally, I am aware of the limitations of modeling, the limited explanatory power of salient factors, the nature of correlated factors, anomalous observations, questionable reliability and validity of measures, etc. Take, for example, the Card-Krueger study; the idea that price-fixing works with low-skilled labor but this effect somehow went undetected in the preponderance of prior studies and/or other price-fixing contexts should be regarded with skepticism by any competent researcher. I would say to Russ Roberts we need a healthy dose of Ockham's razor: simplicity or economy of model is a good thing. When so-called researchers start arguing that the world is complex and start spinning nuances, I am wary of their cooking their studies and/or data.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Eric Allie and Townhall |
Lionel Richie, "Hello"
