My Arguments on other People's Blogs

I've been arguing about the meaning of Adam Smith's invisible hand on one blog and about whether it is obviously wrong for people such as orthodox Jews or Amish to bring criminal charges to their own authorities before reporting them to the police on another. Some readers may find one or both argument of interest.

Great Comment on Public Schooling

" This is probably because they interact socially with a far less age-segregated set of people (our public school system is really quite unique, and profoundly unnatural that way, it is as if someone read Lord of the Flies and decided it was prescriptive rather than descriptive)."

(Jehu, on Robin Hanson's blog, commenting on why he finds home schooled children much more likable than public school children)

Eggs: An English Lesson

The recent egg recalls have raised the issue of whether the FDA should require farmers to vaccinate their hens against salmonella, something it has so far declined to do. Thus the NYT writes:

Faced with a crisis more than a decade ago in which thousands of people were sickened from salmonella in infected eggs, farmers in Britain began vaccinating their hens against the bacteria. That simple but decisive step virtually wiped out the health threat.

But when American regulators created new egg safety rules that went into effect last month, they declared that there was not enough evidence to conclude that vaccinating hens against salmonella would prevent people from getting sick. The Food and Drug Administration decided not to mandate vaccination of hens — a precaution that would cost less than a penny per a dozen eggs.

The obvious implication is that the U.S. ought to imitate a wise British decision and require vaccination. Further down in the article, however, we discover that:

There are no laws mandating vaccination in Britain. But it is required, along with other safety measures, if farmers want to place an industry-sponsored red lion stamp on their eggs, which shows they have met basic standards. The country’s major supermarkets buy only eggs with the lion seal, so vaccination is practiced by 90 percent of egg producers, ...

Or in other words, Britain's success in drastically reducing the number of salmonella case is due not to regulation but to voluntary private action driven by market pressure.

Economics of Language and Courtesy

Someone commenting on my previous post mentioned the Gricean maxim of relevance. Checking the Wikipedia article on the Gricean maxims, I find the interesting comment that:

“Although Grice presented them in the form of guidelines for how to communicate successfully, I think they are better construed as presumptions about utterances, presumptions that we as listeners rely on and as speakers exploit.” (Bach 2005).

The maxims can thus be seen as an application of the economic approach to understanding behavior—the assumption that individuals have objectives and tend to choose the best way of achieving them. The objective is communication, the maxims describe how best to do it, and a listener dealing with potential ambiguity in speech—for example ambiguity in the meaning of “most”—can sometimes resolve it by assuming that the speaker is using the word with a meaning that achieves that objective. Where what is relevant is which candidate won an election, “most” is likely to mean a majority or even a plurality: “The party that got most votes was …”. Where what is relevant is whether there is a substantial minority for whom a statement is not true, “most” is likely to mean an overwhelming majority: “Most of my students understand English, so there is no need to provide translations of the readings into other languages.”

For a second application of economics, consider a scenario offered by a friend in a recent conversation on courtesy. Someone cuts into the checkout line ahead of you. One possible response is to accuse him of cutting into line. An alternative is to point out to him where the end of the line is, with the implication that he merely made a mistake.

My objective is to get him to go back to the end of the line, getting me through a little faster, and to do it with a minimum of unpleasantness. By treating his act as a mistake I lower the cost to him of doing what I want, since doing so does not require him to implicitly confess a deliberate violation of local norms. Lowering the cost to him of doing what I want makes him more likely to do it. What my friend regarded as behavior due to courtesy appears to me as a simple application of economics.

One can carry the argument one step further. If, instead of offering the norm violator an easy out, I loudly upbraid him, he will be less likely to quietly concede his error . But, since I will have raised the cost to him of cutting into line, he may be less likely to do it again. If my objective were the general good rather than my own private good, that might be the sensible choice, deterring future offenses against other people at some cost in current unpleasantness. In my friend’s view, the reason to be courteous was the benevolent desire to maintain social harmony. But courtesy, at least in this case, causes me to sacrifice the general good for my private good—precisely the behavior that economics predicts.

What does "most" mean?

In online discussions, I have come across an interesting disagreement over the meaning of a common word. To my ear, "most" means a large majority. To at least some others, it means any majority. Checking online dictionary definitions, I was surprised to find that many supported their meaning for the word rather than mine. Looking at an old Merriam-Webster's unabridged this morning, I found that the first definition included both alternatives.

To take a simple example, which of these statements is true?

"Most inhabitants of the U.S. speak English."

"Most inhabitants of the U.S. are female."

To my ear, the first statement is true, the second false. By the alternative interpretation of "most," both are true.

The situation is complicated by the fact that "most," in a different context, can be used to mean a plurality. In a three way election, the candidate with the most votes might have only 40% of the total. This usage is sometimes, but not always, signaled by the form "the most."

Comments? How do other people use the word? Does anyone have a plausible explanation of why both meanings appear to be common?

Anarchy and Efficient Law

Earlier this year I gave a talk in Brazil based on an old book chapter. The central argument is that the producers of law in a system such as that I described in The Machinery of Freedom, unlike the producers of law in a conventional political system, have an incentive to generate economically efficient law—for reasons similar but not identical to the reasons why other producers in private markets have an incentive to produce the products that consumers most value. In the talk I also discuss the reasons why the law generated will fall short of being perfectly efficient, due to imperfections of that particular market.

It has now been webbed.

Maybe He Really Is a Liberal: Part II

In a recent post, I raised the possibility that the leader of the Liberal Democrats in the U.K., now deputy Prime Minister, might in fact be a liberal in the old sense of the word, or at least something close. A recent news story provides one more bit of evidence in favor of that optimistic conjecture.