This grassroots Anti-Obama ad is floating around the dreck of the far right-wing. It says Obama may be soft on terrorism because he opposed expanding the Death Penalty while a State Senator in Illinois. This comes after Huckabee's Romney Attack Ad that he made (but didn't air except for reporters) which included the bizarre bullet point that Romney had "No Executions."

So the Death Penalty is back as a macho proving ground. Between these items and Ed's post on the recent Death Penalty Supreme Court hearings got me wondering - why do we have the Death Penalty? There are a number of complaints against it - both that there are procedural problems with how it gets assigned to it is unjust for the government to take the life of one of its citizens. Why does the government keep it around?

Continue reading "Death Penalty & Efficiency" »

So there is a new meme going around the internet saying that McCain is in a lot of trouble. The Democrats are (according to the conventional wisdom) tearing themselves apart, McCain is being treated very favorably, and the topics of debate are flag pins and some geriatric radicals from the 60s - yet his national polling numbers aren't breaking any new ground.

I trade heavily in the political options markets. I was debating whether or not to change up my McCain positions, which I hadn't looked at since he won the primary, when I saw a video of Rush Limbaugh doing an impression of McCain as a doddering old fool fuming about his Vice President choices.

It's pretty funny ("with honor"), in a very mean way. With even Rush not afraid to pull "he's too old" jokes and play a bully in mind, I thought McCain may be in quite a bit of trouble. So I pull up McCain's intrade record and see the option on him winning the nomination. It's trading at 94.9 as I write this. That means that the political market thinks it is 94.9% likely he will be the GOP nominee, and 5.1% likely he will not. That's a huge margin considering he has already won it.

My immediate reaction was: "Oh. My. God. They are trading options on whether or not McCain lives to see the primary." Then I saw a special "(not expired until convention - see rules) " with a disclaimer "Clarification (20 March 2007): In the unlikely event of the untimely death of one of the named individuals all trades will be unwound and feess refunded", and then thought fees and transaction costs cover all that difference. I then did some quick back of the envelope calculations, and no, they are trading McCain lives options. Sadly we can't back out how likely it is that McCain makes it from market information.

Let's assume markets are rational - in so much as that if there appears to be a free money, it is attributable to how risky it is. Free money isn't left on the table. Free money - great song, doesn't exist in markets for very long. (There's a joke about economists finding a $20 bill on the sidewalk and saying "if it was real, someone would have taken it by now." That's what I mean.) Political markets may have poor predictive value in times of chaos, but they should be fine in equilibrium. Accounting for all the transaction costs and the opportunity costs - there's still 20cents of free money there.

What could cause it? McCain could not get the nomination or he could pass away (in which you should have put that money in your checking account). 2 unknowns and only 1 equation -
here (pdf) gives us the expentency of a 72 year old white male to pass away during the next 121 days is ~.9667%. Plugging that into an equation I made gives us a a market estimate that it is 2% likely that McCain will still lose the nomination somehow. Conservatives are that not excited about him, they are leaving leaving free money around hoping that they get another nominee.

Just when I've spent some time (and posts) thinking about the conditions of white collar work and how it interacts with current political regimes, something like this happens that just brings it all together (h/t theamericanscene). Neoliberalism, meet neoconservatism:

PROVO, Utah -- No one really disputes that Chad Hudgens was waterboarded outside a Provo office park last May 29, right before lunch, by his boss.

There is also general agreement that Hudgens volunteered for the "team-building exercise," that he lay on his back with his head downhill, and that co-workers knelt on either side of him, pinning the young sales rep down while their supervisor poured water from a gallon jug over his nose and mouth.

And it's widely acknowledged that the supervisor, Joshua Christopherson, then told the assembled sales team, whose numbers had been lagging: "You saw how hard Chad fought for air right there. I want you to go back inside and fight that hard to make sales."

That is not a joke - that really happened.

Keep an eye out for conservative ideology talking points that government regulation got us into the housing mess. For being FDIC insured, there is a government mandate for making loaning in one's community a priority. Many conservatives are saying that this is responsible for the massive amounts of defaults. This argument is ripped to shreds here (short answer, which is obvious to those connected - subprime loans were very popular among non-FDIC institutions. Everyone wanted a piece by the end).

This does get to a big policy issue quickly - what happened here? Where do the fixes need to take place? It's important for us to take the conservative ideology talking points that will characterize this argument and cut them off at the knees. First we need to see what didn't happen -that this isn't a matter of personal responsibility among borrowers.

Continue reading "Subprime: The Household's Problem, Responsibility" »

Right after a post on Thomas Frank we get a cultural Thomas Frank moment! People are saying Obama's gaffe is derived from the book "What's the Matter With Kansas?" I've thought through, and read a lot on, that book back in those awful post-2004 election days (remember those?) Now everyone is hashing out all those old arguments - luckily I happened to like those arguments. So now I'll give my 4 favorite problems with Thomas Frank's argument (and bring up the subtle points of what he argues):

Continue reading "What's the Matter With the White Working Class?" »

I'm reading a lot of Rick Perlstein lately. His book on Barry Goldwater, Before the Storm, reads the age of 1950s-1964 through the eyes of a new breed of ideological conservatism. Though of the left, he's obviously enamored with the no-compromise attitude among this new right, and hopes to use the Goldwater crew burning down the house of Eisenhower Consensus Politics as a blueprint for how the left can take on the age of triangulation (the book was written in 2001). His new book, Nixonland, is due out in May and the advanced readers of this history of 1966-74 say it is even better.

But in addition to just admiring the discussion spheres and execution of campaigns on the new Right, he, like his co-writer at the Baffler Thomas Frank ("What's the Matter With Kansas?", "One Market Under God") go pretty deep into the ideology on its own terms. Perlstein just worked to get Paul Cowan's "The Tribes of America" re-released - he also also contributed an intro - which is next on my reading list. It's about a Village Voice writer existing with creationists-textbook supporters, truckers, anti-busing activists and other Right warriors of the cultural wars and trying to learn what he doesn't see about their point of view. As someone who has listened to some conservative media in his day, I'm excited to visit the mindscape.

So while I'm getting ready for reading about the angry side of the conservative movement of the late 60s, I found this nugget from a Perlstein comment. In 1967 there was a hit song that broke into the Top 10 for a brief period called "An Open Letter to My Teenage Son” by a man named Victor Lundberg. You can, and I dare say, must, listen to this fantastic gem here. If one was ever to have a Dad Studies Seminar, this would be on the required reading list - there is so much to unpack.

What's that? You didn't listen to it? Here are some lyrics (full lyrics here) to get you to click on that song:

Only as a teenager if you will constantly remind yourself
that some of my generation judge people by their race, their belief or the color
of their skin and that this is no more right than
saying all teenagers are drunken dope addicts or glue sniffers

If you are having a bad Monday I implore you to hear Victor concede the point, while "Battle Hymn of the Republic" plays in the background, that it is unfair to think that all teenagers are glue sniffers. It is a difficult thing for him to admit. And this lyric, that pretty much takes the cake, and also ends the song:

And if you decide to burn your draft card
then burn your birth certificate at the same time
From that moment on, I have no son

Long post ahead. From Marginal Revolution, a graduate paper from Stanford:

“The Dynamics of Adverse Selection in the Market for Slaves,” (2007).

...I estimate the evolution of relative prices of observably identical slaves from the Old South and New South. In the 1810s, slaves from the Old South commanded prices 15 percent lower than identical slaves from the New South; by the 1850s, they commanded prices 14 percent higher. I combine these price data with data on slave populations, interregional sales, and other slave migration to infer the degree of adverse selection. I find the expected quality of a slave who was sold was just 61 percent of the quality of his unsold cousin.

"I find the expected quality of a slave who was sold was just 61 percent of the quality of his unsold cousin." I always find it interesting how economic tools can go from slavery to modern day and not really blink. I'm imagining the techniques (cousins as instrumental variables) in that paper are identical to the tools that are broken out to see how college education effects wages (the word "quality", which does all the heavy lifting there, also shows up in the same literature - in case you were wondering, it means profitability).

Continue reading "Human Capital and Slavery." »

For the Libertarian Party, the Ron Paul newsletters were such a big deal, both on the left, where it confirmed their darkest (and most gleeful) imaginations, as well as for the libertarians themselves, who were worried about what was being advertised as part of a Libertarian Agenda. For me, I enjoyed seeing the newsletters' engagement with the Michigan Militia mentality:

As early as December 1989, a section of his Investment Letter, titled "What To Expect for the 1990s," predicted that "Racial Violence Will Fill Our Cities" because "mostly black welfare recipients will feel justified in stealing from mostly white 'haves.'" Two months later, a newsletter warned of "The Coming Race War," and, in November 1990, an item advised readers, "If you live in a major city, and can leave, do so. If not, but you can have a rural retreat, for investment and refuge, buy it." In June 1991, an entry on racial disturbances in Washington, DC's Adams Morgan neighborhood was titled, "Animals Take Over the D.C. Zoo." "This is only the first skirmish in the race war of the 1990s," the newsletter predicted. In an October 1992 item about urban crime, the newsletter's author--presumably Paul--wrote, "I've urged everyone in my family to know how to use a gun in self defense. For the animals are coming."

Say what you will, but it is interesting how Anti-Welfare State rhetoric and racism compliment each other so well; this marriage wasn't a shotgun one. More to the point, if this sounds like Charles Manson, it should:

The murders perpetrated by Charles Manson and members of his Family were inspired in part by Manson's prediction of Helter Skelter, an apocalyptic war he believed would arise from tension over racial relations between blacks and whites. This "chimerical vision," as it was termed by the court that heard Manson's appeal from his conviction for the Tate-LaBianca killings, involved reference to music of The Beatles and to the New Testament's Book of Revelation.

Manson had been predicting racial war for some time before he used the term Helter Skelter His first use of the term was at a gathering of the Family on New Year's Eve 1968. This took place at the Family's base at Myers Ranch, near California's Death Valley...

On August 8, 1969, the day Manson instructed his followers to carry out the first of two sets of notorious murders, he told the Family, "Now is the time for Helter Skelter."

So the Libertarian Party had a bit of a Helter Skelter problem in 2008, one could say. So I can't tell if this is an elaborate inside joke - Mike Gravel is now running for the Libertarian Nomination, in case you didn't hear:

Maybe he wants race war cred? I only wish they could have gotten Lew Rockwell to sing it.