Harare on the Potomac

Books like Why Nations Fail make clear that many a third-world country stays poor not because its government is having difficulty thinking up policies that would help it get richer, but because the government's members or supporters would be inconvenienced if those policies were carried out.  The Harvard Business School asks companies why they prefer not to create jobs in the USA, and finds that the complexity of the tax code is an important factor (see figure 14 on page 19).  So why is the tax code so complex in the USA?  Wouldn't it be convenient for everyone, not just companies, if it were radically simplified?

Well, nearly everyone.  But it's hard to shake companies or people down for campaign contributions by threatening to take away their tax breaks, if they don't have any tax breaks for you to take away.  So now we know who is inconvenienced.

Making Corruption Work FOR The People

[from my Google+ stream]

I was going to write something about money in politics, but thought I'd better give credit to an earlier article that had provided the germ of my idea. Fortunately, I remembered enough words to search for it and find it. Turns out it contains all of what I had fondly thought to be my idea. It's even more relevant today than it was eleven years ago.

Crediting the Voters: A New Beginning for Campaign Finance

Change technology, change society?

Arthur Dobrin had this to say about Mitt Romney, well, ostensibly about him, but more about creative destruction.  The core of Dobrin's argument seems to me to be not very much about economic models, but about innovation. Selected quotes:

> Innovation is the way of capitalism.

> This is all to the good if the extent of the destruction is the replacement of one product with another (the TV for the radio).

> You cannot support both unleashed capitalism and a stable social order. Along with new products come new ways of doing things; along with new ways of doing things come new ideas.

It sounds as if Dobrin is saying that innovations in products can lead to changes in society, more profound than just exchanging one product for another or one employer for another. I suppose one obvious example is the Pill. Thus promoting innovative businesses is at odds with conserving society, and someone like Romney should not, with a straight face, claim to be a social conservative.

The question of what responsibility falls on an innovator as a result of the social changes his/her products bring about, or on the society that benefits from those products, does seem to me to be important. Gov. Romney is not the one on trial here; the whole idea of unrestrained innovation is being examined.

eating gamma rays

I would have rejected this as impossible until the day I read it in Science News. It reminds me of a ghastly blurb for one of Hal Clement's books asserting that "in science, nothing is impossible!" I still feel sure that plenty of things are impossible ... but not necessarily the things we thought were impossible.

In case you have trouble with the link, a quick summary is as follows: a fungus has been found that actually harvests energy from gamma rays, using the well-known pigment melanin. Do not try this at home.

Who cares about warming

Global warming is going to take a long time, but could be very costly if it happened the way some people expect, and yet, it's hard to estimate the probability that it will happen that way, given the evidence we have now.

So, logically, we should entrust our precautions against it to an organisation that knows how to plan for events that are uncertain, long-term, but very costly. Definitely not a political party ... we know how long-term they think ... much less an environmental pressure group, because they treat all propbabilities as either 1.0 (if it's something they want us to be frightened of) or 0.0 (if it's not frightening enough) ... but such organisations do exist, and have existed for a long time, and many of us know them, though few of us love them.

Have you guessed yet?

That's right: insurance companies. And they're making a difference.

Myths about heroin addiction

This one is simply wonderful. Read the first two or three paragraphs if you are short of time. One-line summary: bureaucracies usually perpetuate the problems they set out to solve. Well, there's a good deal more, and all of it good, talking about how people really become addicted and why they really stay that way (summary: they have nothing better to do or to be), but the beginning is the most widely applicable part. If I were writing the article, I might risk my skin by pointing out that the same applies to many other organisations who claim to be fighting one kind of evil or another.

I've found a fair amount of good stuff elsewhere in TheAustralian especially in the Books section.

health and housing

When I think of the difference between where I grew up (England) and where I live (the USA), I think of space. No, not SpaceShipOne. Lots of land, an acre per house at least, one one side of the Atlantic, and small gardens on the other side. Correspondingly, sprawling cities and long commutes along traffic-choked freeways, versus compact towns in which a walk or short bus ride would get me anywhere I wanted to go. (In compact towns, buses and the like are actually useful. In sprawling cities, they are a waste of time, money, fuel, or quite possibly all three.)

The huge cities of California are well known for their smog. And Americans are stereotyped for never walking if they can drive. And neither of these is believed to be healthy. And now there are numbers to prove it.