Does official metion of "gouging" do harm or good?

In a competitive marketplace, such as that for gasoline and other motor fuels in the USA, outside of lifeboat situations (which are few), there is no such thing as "price gouging".

That having been said, the term seems to have lodged permanently in the popular consciousness as slang for "the price is higher than I'd like it to be and I don't understand why."

A conundrum: does use of the term by public officials such as President Bush, including reassurances that the practice--whatever it is--will be "investigated", do good by keeping demand for price controls and other harmful interventions in the marketplace low, or do harm by perpetuating the myth that there is such a thing as "gouging" and that increases in gasoline prices in the wake of a natural disaster may be it?

Scenes from a game of Settlers (2 of 2)

Last Saturday's Settlers of Catan was between four physicists, an astronomer, and a classical musician. MF is the astronomer, WF is one of the physicists; YHN is "your humble narrator":

MF: There should be a computer program to tell us the prices of the commodities.
YHN: But the value of each is subjective; why would you trust a computer program to value them for you?
MF: It's just supply and demand!
YHN: So you're going to assume the players are rational and devise a utility function for Settlers?
WF: By that point, you might as well let the computer play for you.

"It's supply and demand" is a slogan, not an answer. Should I take it as a good sign, though, that economics has injected something of that sort into the popular consciousness?

Scenes from a game of Settlers (1 of 2)

...and I'll trade you three sheep if you exchange two through your port for one bricks and then give me the bricks...

It looks obvious now, to trade for use of ports in Settlers of Catan, but last weekend's game was the first time I'd seen it. The rules make no mention of trading for services, but it appears to emerge naturally. The rules of Go don't mention deadly shapes or ko threats, either.

Quotation du jour

"Democratic politics, in the end, is not about rational deliberation. It is about coalitional signaling. It is about expressive solidarity. It is about identity and emotion. That’s why I have a deep mistrust of democratic politics."

That doesn't at all imply its context; it's from a Will Wilkinson post regarding Sarah Palin's speech at the Republican convention.

Career death penalty for police officers: a modest proposal.

A thought, as reports of the arrests of Alicia Forrest and Asa Eslocker (neatly summed up by CLS) and others come in.

Police officers who are found to have used unncessary force or made arrests without probable cause should be forbid to work in law enforcement in all jurisdictions, and made to register like sex offenders. Those who obstruct investigations of police misconduct ought be prosecuted a la RICO.

Simple as that: with special privileges should come not only responsibility but rigid accountability.

How many more times do we have to hear this narrative?

Repeating it over and over won't make it true, nor will it change that it is the product of intellectual laziness and a sign that the commentator is passing on opinions third-hand.

Consider anthropologist Marshall Sahlins's take on Milton Friedman and the "Chicago Boys", in this week's Chronicle of Higher Education:

Does the university expect us to "disappear" the memory of the Friedman-trained Chicago Boys, who supplied the economic programs for the draconian regimes of Augusto Pinochet in Chile and the generals in Argentina? The sacrificial reduction of social values to monetary calculations is the essence of Friedman economics, and helps explain its historic taint as the complement of state terror.

Let's put aside the silliness embodied in the noun "Friedman econcomics" and consider the following:

• Augusto Pinochet only became aware of "El Ladrillo", the Harberger- and Friedman-trained "Chicago Boys"' economic whitepaper, after the coup d'etat.
  
• "El Ladrillo" does not call for the repressive policies used by Pinochet and his allies in consolidating their overthrow of the socialist Allende government.
  
• Martinez de Hoz, Argintine Minister of Economy during most of the National Reorganization Process, was Cambridge-educated.
  
• de Hoz's disastrous monetary policy centered on a very tight control of exchange rates. Friedman was an advocate of either "automatic" gold standards or freely floating currencies and quite opposed to manipulation of exchange rates.
  

The idea that repressive practices of some of the regimes--why doesn't Sahlins mention China, the UK, or the United States under Carter and Reagan?--which received Chicago School advice or put such recommendations into practice have foundation in the thought of Milton Friedman is prima facie ludicrious, and Sahlins doesn't even implicitly reference, let alone make a case for, such a link. A reading of Capitalism and Freedom, a very "thin" book well-suited for airplane rides or the café, would reveal to Sahlins that Friedman was quite the advocate of free political institutions and an open society, and that he advocated liberal economic policy in part because it makes the first more likely and reneders the second possible.

Perhaps among left-wing academics, Milton Friedman is a mythical catch-all bogeyman, a folk demon. Can we get an anthropologist on the case?

Bad Netizenship

Rule number aleph-null: If you would like to unsubscribe from an e-mail list to which you have opted in, follow the instructions you were sent when you subscribed and which are mailed to you periodically, often at the bottom of each message. Do not click "This is spam" in a webmail client, especially if your e-mail service provider is Yahoo, Gmail, or some similar broadly-subscribed national service.

One too many boorish dummkopfs (yahoos?) using Yahoo mail told their client that Randy Cassingham's This Is True was spam instead of unsubscribing properly. As a result, tens of thousands of subscribers--many of them subscribers to the paid "premium" version--did not receive their newsletter for several weeks.

In the last newsletter, Cassingham reported that after a lot of back-and-forth with Yahoo support, his e-mails are now reaching subscribers and customers. However, there's no doubt that losing 15% of his subscribers for several weeks hurt Cassingham's business.

The lessons: Internet users should take spam reporting seriously, and service providers should ask "are you sure this isn't an opt-in list?" before accepting the user's click. This sort of thing has happened before. I was webmaster for an aquarium club, using the free Crosswinds service as host, when the site was blackholed because a spammer faked a Crosswinds origin for the e-mail, meaning members couldn't access the site for weeks. If the reporters had checked the headers, as is good practice, they'd have found that it was sent from an open relay elsewhere.