Wedding Hacker

While I cannot award a door prize for the 300,000th visitor to Offsetting, I can thank the visitor's referrer.

At The Wedding Hacker, two of my former students, who go by the monikers Mr. and Mrs. Cake, have begun chronicling their adventures in wedding optimization. They point to my old post on an alternative to wedding invitation A and B lists - assign probabilities to each guest's attendance and send out invitations such that the expected number of attendees matches venue capacity. We projected 125 expected attendees from 225 invitations; we got 124 attendees with a late cancellation due to illness. So long as you're comfortable with a bit of risk, this is much more fun than assigning friends and family to A and B lists.

Mrs. Cake provided me an excellent supply-and-demand themed cake after my Economics and Current Policy Issues course back in 2008. You can follow her adventures in baking here.

And you kids out there, remember that romance can bloom in the economics classroom.

Copyright updates

Paul Heald's excellent graph has brought commentary from all over the web; it's been fun watching where it's popped up since he gave the talk here at Canterbury. If I had to guess, a talk for 15 economists at Canterbury hit an audience, for that graph, in the hundreds of thousands.*

TechDirt usefully notes that things are even worse than pictured. While copyright protection extends back to the 1920s, that's only for works where the rights-holder has renewed his copyright. Rights to most works aren't renewed. But it isn't always easy to figure out whether or not the rights-holder has renewed the rights, and getting it wrong can be costly. Masnick writes:

This is something most copyright supporters ignore: entering the public domain can actually renew the value of art, and can (and does) stimulate the economy by allowing others to exploit additional commercial value from a work beyond what was possible under copyright. The commercial usefulness of a monopoly on a book has a shorter shelf-life than the monopoly actually granted by copyright law. Based on Patry's findings, that shelf life is somewhere under 28 years, otherwise more people would have renewed their registration—but copyright lasts much longer than 28 years. Thus you get the giant gulf on Heald's chart: in between the pre-1923 public domain books and the books that are new enough to still be actively sold, there are several decades of titles that are no longer worth anything to their rightsholders, but can't be offered by anyone else because they are still effectively under copyright.

Yes, just effectively—not actually. As you may have noticed, there seems to be a contradiction here: if the majority of copyright registrations went un-renewed, then the majority of books published between 1923 and 1963 have lapsed into the public domain alongside the books from 1922 and earlier, so the drop-off in Heald's chart should be much, much smaller. This is not a conflict in the data, it's a symptom another massive and entirely separate problem with copyright law which I discussed in a recent post: the difficulty of determining a work's status.

Copyright is a good thing. But not at its current duration or its current scope.

*An incomplete summary: Marginal Revolution, Matthew Yglesias, Kevin Drum, Rebecca Rosen [made the most popular on The Atlantic's front page on the Saturday after posting], Brian Doherty, Kevin Kelly, and FAIR. It's hit Memeorandum, Reddit, Hacker News, The Glittering Eye, the CEI's Open Economy Blog, Politikon, and LISNews. Topsy tracks the tweets; here are the +Ripples. And TechDirt and Information Liberation and Right to Read and Habr. At 15000 post views and counting, if the click-through rate to Offsetting from the other sources is maybe 5%, then multiply my views by 20 to get a ballpark audience of 300k.

Network effects - blogging edition

The Economist says America's number one in EconBlogging. Why? They have a blogosphere, where Europe only has blogs. It's the links and the discussion that makes the whole thing worthwhile. They point to Bruegel's assessment:

As Ronny Patz noted in a recent post (hat tip to the European blogs aggregator bloggingportal), European blogs are still very much “unconnected”. That is, they use hyperlinks far less than their American counterparts or do it and in a way that doesn’t create two-way debate. In brief, Europe has bloggers, but no blogosphere: it lacks a living ecosystem to exchange and debate. Of most leading European blogs, only 1 in 5 were linked to other online content. This is a pretty striking number but one that is somewhat consistent with the use that Europeans make of blogs (ie. just another media but not an interactive one).

How did America make it work? The Economist's R.A.:

How did America's economics blogosphere develop the necessary density? Early buy-in by important economists mattered, but the growth of the community has been more driven, in my opinion, by an aggressive horde of strivers. Economists, journalists, and would-be pundits with less access to traditional outlets (newspapers, conferences, and journals) were attracted by the low barriers to entry of the web. This ready group of writers created sufficient "liquidity" of opinion to drive an effective conversation, the value of which has subsequently pulled in other respected voices.

New Zealand's getting better. Paul Walker and the TVHE team drew me in, and together we dragged in Seamus (occasionally), Bill Kaye-Blake, and now Sam Richardson. Let's hope we can pull a few other folks into the conversation.

Dogmatism and memory constraints

Jeff Ely shows how dogmatism can be the consequence rather than the circumvention of rational thinking. We may process information rationally, arrive at a position, discard the workings that got us to the position to save memory space, then move on to the next area for rational deliberation.

So what you optimally, rationally, perfectly objectively do is allow yourself to forget everything you know about A including all the reasons that justify your strongly-held views on A and to just make an indelible mental note that “The right-wing position on A is the correct one no matter what anyone else says and no matter what evidence to the contrary should come along in the future.”

The reason this is the rational thing to do is that you have scarce memory space. By allowing those memories to fade away you free up storage space for information about issues B, C, and D which you are still carefully collecting information on, forming an objective opinion about, in preparation for eventually also adopting a well-informed dogmatic opinion about.

I do this all the time. It's actually one of the reasons I blog: to keep track, in easily searchable and keyword-indexed format, of the reasons that led me to hold positions. It's surprising how often I've found myself searching back through the archive to remind myself of what I'd concluded about something, and how often I curse myself for having arrived at some position before I started blogging.

But I do enjoy that rather a few of you come along for the ride.

HT: @Nonicoc

Stories need scarcity, and unrelated bits

Bill Kaye-Blake has migrated over to a new blog, Groping Towards Bethlehem. I'll comment on a few of his recent posts here; I'm sure his blog will be worth following in future for those watching Kiwi econ policy.

• Bill's bored by a SciFi story which effectively finds the end of scarcity - the protagonists do away with constraints on space, energy, time and mortality.
  
  I've not read The Number of the Beast, but Bill didn't mention whether knowledge remained limited - if the multiverse already has a thorough and completely accurate Encyclopaedia Gallacticus. Presumably the protagonists could find challenges in expanding the domain of knowledge. Or, finding ever more creative forms of hedonism. 



• Does welfare reform posit $20 bills lying around?
  
  My quick read of National's proposal was that it didn't seem to do a whole lot; the biggest change was that additional children had while on the DPB won't extend the duration of the benefit by as much as it would have ex ante [see also Lindsay Mitchell]. I'll agree with Bill about the multiple barriers to work issues, and he's very likely right on National's overselling the benefits.
  
  But most outrage about the proposals thus far seems centred on the immorality of forcing women back to work before their kids are 14. This falls entirely on deaf ears for me - both our kids have been in daycare since they were 3 months old, in part to keep our family net income sufficient for raising the two kids adequately; were we not paying to keep a few single mothers home with their 12 year olds, maybe we could afford to choose otherwise. I suspect that more than a few double income families with kids in daycare get just a bit angry when called on to solve the injustice of that folks might not be able to choose to stay at home with kids at others' expense. If I had a button to push, it would be for 1) more daycare funding; 2) making childcare benefits of limited duration; 3) requiring Norplant (or other equally-effective equivalents) as condition for receiving the childcare benefit. I can accept that there are cases where it's more efficient that the mother stay home with the kids rather than pay for daycare given the woman's earning potential; I'm happier eating the losses from subsidizing daycare than the losses from screwing up the incentives. 



• Externalities and risky buildings. Bill's thinking about things in the right way: buildings with unreinforced masonry impose a risk on passers-by in case of earthquake - a negative externality - while providing uncompensated amenity value - a positive externality.
  
  Optimal response, I think, will have to involve Councils' putting some budget [hopefully supplemented by private donation] into paying building owners for heritage amenities. Rather than listing thousands of buildings on heritage registers and making it hard to fix them up, list the couple hundred most important and pay their owners for the heritage amenity provided. Then either add into a building's property tax assessment a fee for risks imposed by unreinforced masonry or require holding adequate liability insurance for damage potentially done to passers by in an earthquake. Some older masonry buildings will be torn down, but if their heritage value isn't sufficient to make them worth the risk, that's optimal. But we won't know it until we start putting some real prices on heritage value and paying owners for it, and charging owners for risk imposed.

I'm pleased to see Bill striking out on his own! We now have a decent selection of economics blogs by NZ-based academic economists: Offsetting, Anti-Dismal, and Sam Richardson; we've also another economics blog by non-academics that capably tackles academic issues: the Visible Hand. If we're not careful, we'll soon have enough folks around for reasonable conversations.

Of Doomsday Machines and Blogs

If you have a Doomsday Machine - one that will destroy the whole world if anybody messes with you - it would be insane not to tell anybody about its existence. The whole point of the Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret!

Same for blogs. Why bother having a blog if you don't tell anybody about it?

And so I was surprised to find, in Seamus's post the other day, that the New Zealand Association of Economists has a blog. It isn't updated very often, but it's still there. And I'd thought that Offsetting, AntiDismal, and TVHE were the only non-defunct NZ econ blogs with an academic focus.

Here's Bill Kaye-Blake from back in March giving reasons why folks might blog. He suggests signalling. As signals need recipients, hit his RSS feed.

Ahem

A post meant for tomorrow managed to hit the RSS feed this morning; watch for it tomorrow!

World famous in New Zealand

Air New Zealand's Kia Ora in-flight magazine has a blogwatch feature. This month's issue features Wellingtonista and Offsetting:

Who knew economics could be so fun? Eric Crampton, senior lecturer of economics at the University of Canterbury, gives his take on all things current, with an economics twist. We've all read about price gouging in a disaster zone - where else can you learn the economic benefits of price gouging over rationing?
www.offsettingbehaviour.blogspot.com

For folks Stateside who've not tried AirNZ, it's generally worth it when heading this way. A rather better flight experience than Qantas, which feels a lot more like a US carrier for longhaul.

And now, Air NZ comes with more Richard Simmons.
I think I preferred the previous iteration...

Antipodean academic blogging

The Age covers the academic blogging scene in Australia. The Aussies enjoy a rather more vibrant academic blogging community than the Kiwis.

I read Core Economics - the team that blogs there is excellent. But I hadn't realised that Core's Stephen King is Dean of Economics at Monash. Here's King on the merits of Monash over Melbourne. I can't imagine Kiwi PVCs doing this; differences among programmes here seem more seen as a problem to be solved than an opportunity.

Once there's enough bloggers around, universities can start doing this sort of thing:

Most Victorian universities have created blogging sites on their home webpages for their opinionated academics and students. ... RMIT University created a site last month called "blog central" as a space for academics to blog, with 15 categories ranging from arts and community to social science and sustainability. Deakin Speaking is a blog page for that university's academics to publish opinions and comments.

I don't particularly like the format of either; they're dedicated platforms rather than syndicators of independently produced content. But it shows there's a critical mass within Aussie universities that doesn't exist in New Zealand. I don't think that any New Zealand university would have enough bloggers to make a go of it.

According to The Age, "thousands of Australian academics have personal blogs, including at least one vice-chancellor...". I don't believe the number's in the thousands unless you count grad students. But it's got to be more than in New Zealand. Here, we have the folks at SciBlogs and maybe a half dozen independents, of which I can only think of two off the top: Xavier Marquez and Bryce Edwards. I really don't know what accounts for the difference between NZ and Australia. Academics on both sides of the ditch face similar incentive structures. Maybe it's a combination of the more demure Kiwi personality and agglomeration effects.

Here's John Sides in PS on political science blogging.