Adriana Kugler at DOL

I learned yesterday that the new chief economist at the US Department of Labor, replacing the outgoing Betsey Stevenson, is my friend Adriana Kugler.

Congratulations Adriana!

Alan Krueger as CEA chair

I think Alan is a very good choice. He is serious, thoughtful, empirically oriented and, as far as I know, didn't really want the job.

Nothing left to cut?

The Boston Public Health Commission runs a class for teens on how to manage social media when you break up.

Note also the public health imperialism. Though these behaviors have nothing direct to do with health, the teens were nonetheless trained to describe them in those terms rather than in terms of what is nice or thoughtful.

Even the New York Times struggles (and ultimately fails) to remain serious when describing the program.

Hat tip: Jessica Goldberg, back inside the beltway after six years in Ann Arbor

Our modern government ...

... helping to not only slow but actually reverse technological progress.

From the American Economic Association email to members today:

Job Openings for Economists has been published only electronically for the past decade. Starting with the August 2011 issue, the Association resumes publishing JOE in print format, in order to ensure compliance with Department of Labor regulations for obtaining work visas for non-citizen economists. Print issues will be distributed via the U.S. Postal System two to three weeks after they are published electronically. Annual subscriptions will run from August through the following June of each year, and are $50 each. To subscribe go to http://www.aeaweb.org/joe/subscribe/. Single issues are available for $45 each.

My AEA dues at waste. Thanks DOL. And it's not very green either.

Addendum: Alex at Marginal Revolution had the same reaction, about 20 minutes later.

Let there be (fewer) light (bulb choices)

Former reason editor Virginia Postrel dissects the light bulb "ban" in her Bloomberg column.

Bottom line:

The bulb ban makes sense only one of two ways: either as an expression of cultural sanctimony, with a little technophilia thrown in for added glamour, or as a roundabout way to transfer wealth from the general public to the few businesses with the know-how to produce the light bulbs consumers don’t really want to buy.

Or, of course, as both.

Of course, the simple, easy way to do energy policy is via a carbon tax, not via light bulb performance standards, mileage standards for cars and all the rest. This is ECON 101 stuff and shows, as do so many things, the fundamental non-seriousness of our legislature.

Canada Post on strike

It is probably a bad idea to go on strike if the result is to convince people that your services are not very important anymore.

The right course is the same in Canada and the US. End the monopoly, privatize the organization, and toss some public money in to help with some but not all of the pension liabilities.

Posting on the post

A long Business Week piece detailing the imminent financial crash of the US Postal Service.

Some postal workers, though, are still having a good time.

This is a really easy one. Everyone knows what to do. Even the Europeans have done it. All it takes is for Congress to act like an adult. Just this once.

Don't hold your breath.

Aside: Rick Geddes, a Cornell economist quoted near the end of the piece, is a friend of mine from graduate school.

Paramilitary police state on parade

Reason honors the sad occasion of the 40th anniversary of Nixon's declaration of the war on drugs. Can it be over now?

Calling on the hotline ...

The sad story of the Danish government's hotline for men "addicted" to buying sex.

Key bits:

Four ministry employees, working six-hour shifts, two days a week, received an average of 1.4 phone calls per shift. And a significant number of those callers hung-up or didn’t say a word.

The fact is that a lot of men like to buy sex – and they aren’t interested at all in the government’s programme to change that.

Approximately one in ten Danish men over the age of 18 bought sex at least once – often many times – in the last 12 months. Yet of the approximately 200,000 Danish men who bought sex from prostitutes last year, only one in one thousand called the Social Ministry’s hotline.

Moreover, a campaign the ministry ran in 2008 to inform men about human trafficking in Denmark seemed to result in slightly higher number of young Danish men going to prostitutes and massage clinics.

The social affairs minister, Benedikte Kiær, nevertheless, reported in a council meeting that the hotline was “working well”.

Putting aside the obvious waste of money, and the misleading informal performance evaluation by the social affairs minister, the reported fraction of men purchasing sex in Denmark is much higher than comparable numbers in the US. This likely reflects several factors. The first is simply reporting differences. Purchasing sexual services is legal in Denmark and so, presumably, survey respondents are more likely to truthfully report it conditional on having done so. Second, demand may be higher in Denmark as well, both because such purchases are legal (making it less risky both in the sense of law enforcement troubles and in the sense of being ripped off) and because Danes are a much less religious bunch than Americans, so that the average psychic cost is likely lower.

It would be interesting to write down a model of the implications of legal sex work for the marriage market. It should affect the set of marriages that form, the division of rents within marriage, sexual behavior within marriage as well as the duration of marriages.

Hat tip: Lars Skipper

Entitlement reform

I don't usually sign the sorts of "500 economists agree with X" statements that I am invited to sign every few months, but I did decide to add my name to this one on entitlement reform.

I agree with basically all it has to say, though I would add that we also need a major rethink of, and reduction in, our ideas about military involvement overseas. Welfare to farmers and corporations should go as well. The bright side of having our public finances run by drunks for the last 10 years is that opportunities for budget cutting are literally everywhere.

Another reason I signed this particular petition is the involvement of Doug Holtz-Eakin, who is doing a very good thing indeed by devoting himself to improving public policy rather than cashing in on his experience in the Bush II administration.

NPR and PBS

I've read a bunch of pieces about privatizing NPR/PBS. This one by Matt Welch is the best of the lot.

Like Matt, I enjoy NPR and I do so on two levels. First, I find their coverage of music and culture more broadly to be quite good. I enjoy the interviews with musicians and other artists, as well as the classical music (during the day) and the jazz (during the evening) that one of the local public radio stations broadcasts. Second, I enjoy the news part of NPR for the same reason that I enjoy watching Fox News in the morning when I am in hotels: I like to deconstruct how they craft and present the news both to further their ideological ends and to pander to the egos of their consumers. Both NPR and Fox are really good at this!

I am quite confident that both NPR and PBS will persist without federal funding. And I am genuinely puzzled that people on the left think it is a good idea to have the federal government fund cultural amenities for the well-off (thus moving money, on average, up rather than down the income distribution) or that it is a good idea, in a free society, to have government-run media organizations at all.

I am disappointed in those who make arguments along the lines that Sesame Street will disappear if federal funding goes away. This is obviously false given the strong demand for Sesame Street; even if PBS did go away, and I do not think there is much chance of this, the more successful shows such as Sesame Street would quickly find homes elsewhere. So, those making arguments like this either are really, really lost when it comes to basic economics (not entirely implausible in this context) or simply lying.

Finally, this post gives me a chance to tell my very favorite NPR story ever. This was back when I was in college and the right was referring to NPR as the "Voice of Nicaragua". I was in a used bookstore on Capitol Hill in Seattle - long since closed sad to say - and they had NPR on in the background. It was Sunday evening and they were reading letters from listeners. The letter that has stayed with me all these years criticized NPR for their coverage of some Soviet news event the week before, arguing that they had been "too hard on Stalin."

Addendum: a fine reason post from Nick Gillespie.

Justice department not so keen on free speech. Who knew?

They NYT on a former Penn State chemistry professor being persecuted by the Feds for passing out information on jury nullification.

The story neglects to mention that jury nullification has a long and distinguished history in the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition. I guess the NYT reporter does not want the feds persecuting him as well.

This is just pure and simple harassment of someone exercising his free speech rights. Shame on the justice department.

Subsidizing the arts

Wise words from Tyler Cowen at MR.

Like Tyler, I don't mind the indirect subsidy via the tax system. Unlike Tyler, I do not see the point of having government boards that dole out money. Let people vote with their voluntary contributions.

As a second best, I agree with Tyler's suggestion to have the funding at the federal level, rather than the state and local level. I would also focus it on mainstream cultural institutions that everyone can agree on and that have very low political content.

On regulation of the financial sector

Some smart thoughts from Ken Troske.

I would put it very simply: when talking regulation, the key dimension is smart versus dumb rather than a lot versus a little. Design is everything and details matter.

Hat tip: well, Ken Troske, of course!

Missed opportunity, indeed

Robert Samuelson on Obama's missed opportunity.

Someone - actually many someones on both sides of the aisle - really need to step up and get serious about the budget.

There is no great mystery about what needs to be done, it just needs to get done.

Uncle Sam: Monopoly Man

In truly appalling news, the TSA has put the kabosh on the further replacement of TSA security workers by private contractors at airports around the country. Says CNN:

A program that allows airports to replace government screeners with private screeners is being brought to a standstill, just a month after the Transportation Security Administration said it was "neutral" on the program.

TSA chief John Pistole said Friday he has decided not to expand the program beyond the current 16 airports, saying he does not see any advantage to it.

Clever program design there, allowing the TSA to stop its competitors in their tracks. Oh, and guess what, the TSA labor cartel is on board as well:

A union for Transportation Security Administration employees said it supported the decision to halt the program.

"The nation is secure in the sense that the safety of our skies will not be left in the hands of the lowest-bidder contractor, as it was before 9/11," said John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees. "We applaud Administrator Pistole for recognizing the value in a cohesive federalized screening system and work force."

The TSA seems remarkably tone deaf here. I suspect that a quiet strategy of delay and discouragement, rather than a very public confrontation that allows the Obama administration a chance to show that it can actually say no to a labor union in the context of a program that the public hates would have been more clever. We'll see.

My view: if we must have security theater, let's at least do it as cheaply as possible.

Via: MR

A government jobs program that works!

But they hid it inside the War on (some) Drugs.

Key bits:

ST. LOUIS – At the height of the methamphetamine epidemic, several states turned to a new weapon to disrupt the drug trade: electronic systems that could track sales of the cold medicine used to make meth.

Tracking sales by computer allowed pharmacies to check instantly whether a buyer had already purchased the legal limit of pseudoephedrine — a step that was supposed to make it harder to obtain raw ingredients for meth.

But an Associated Press analysis of federal data reveals that the practice has not only failed to curb the meth trade, which is growing again after a brief decline. It also created a vast and highly lucrative market for profiteers to buy over-the-counter pills and sell them to meth producers at a huge markup.

In just a few years, the lure of such easy money has drawn thousands of new people into the methamphetamine underworld.

"It's almost like a sub-criminal culture," said Gary Boggs, an agent at the Drug Enforcement Administration. "You'll see them with a GPS unit set up in a van with a list of every single pharmacy or retail outlet. They'll spend the entire week going store to store and buy to the limit."

Inside their vehicles, the so-called "pill brokers" punch out blister packs into a bucket and even clip coupons, Boggs said.

In some cases, the pill buyers are not interested in meth. They may be homeless people recruited off the street or even college kids seeking weekend beer money, authorities say.

But because of booming demand created in large part by the tracking systems, they can buy a box of pills for $7 to $8 and sell it for $40 or $50.

This program is ripe for a serious cost-benefit analysis that also takes into account the extra suffering to those with colds and flu who end up with weaker medicine as well as all the extra time wasted by people in line at drugstores.

The end of the article indicates that some states want to make cold medicine available only by prescription, a move no doubt promoted by their local medical gatekeeper cartel - I mean medical association.

Via: reason

Not sure what to say about this ...

... other than maybe "oh dear" ...

NB: College of DuPage is a public junior college in Illinois.

Hat tip: Dan Black

Forever stamps

The post office is taking the values off of stamps. This is certainly nice for consumers, who will not have to keep track of one and two-cent changes in the price of a first-class stamp. I'm not sure how much, if at all, it will help the post office financially.

This move will provide some minor challenges for whoever does the accounting for the post office, for the same reason that gift certificates and gift cards pose an accounting issue for private firms. They represent a liability but one whose expected cost changes over time.

Be nice, given that the post office continues to lose money, if they would just take away its monopoly and privatize it. They say I'm a dreamer ...

CBC kids

I had occasion to watch a couple of hours of CBC kids, the children's network of the government-run Canadian Broadcasting Company, the other day. It engendered the following thoughts:

1. I quite enjoyed Dirt Girl. This Australian show was low on preaching, what it preached was actually useful (e.g. wear gloves when handling fertilizer) and all the characters had cute Australian accents. Plus the animation was creative and happy and reminded me a bit of what Terry Gilliam used to create for Monty Python.

2. In contrast, Turbodogs was dull, smarmy and preachy. As is often the case when I watch cartoons produced after about 1975, I wondered what it was that was broken about Road Runner and Bugs Bunny that needed fixing with a lot of preaching.

3. I still have never heard a coherent case for having a government-run television network in a democracy. If there is such a case, it is hard to see how it extends beyond news to entertainment programs that look exactly like those on commercial networks. It is also hard to see how an independent non-profit could not fill the same niche without relying on tax funding and without implicit or explicit worries about pro-state bias.