Quiet Declarations

I enjoyed Megan’s response to questions about why she’s picking on Ron Paul:

Why harp on Ron Paul? ask my interlocutors. Do I hate liberty? Do I not realize that he’s the closest thing there is to a libertarian candidate?

Well, for one thing, there’s not much point in my arguing with a John Edwards supporter.

“But he’s a demagoguing populist who wants to gut trade, jam taxes sky high, and spend the money on a ludicrous state-run health care program!” I cry.

“I know! Isn’t it marvelous?” they reply, and that’s the end of the discussion.

I think that’s the right attitude about picking on primary contenders, and the sentiment is almost certainly true on both sides.  The primaries are when you get to compare apples to apples, or at least something closer to apples than you’ll be comparing in the general election.  Is the “infighting” counterproductive?  It can be.  But I think it’s a more intellectually rigorous debate then we’re going to see between March and November.

I was recently accused of being a Scrooge because of my opinion that Christmas is really just a whole lot of work, and because exchanging presents is a botched system.  What follows is my defense.

First, if it were up to me I wouldn’t Celebrate Christmas on Christmas.  Christmas the day doesn’t mean anything to me.  I don’t attend any special church service, and I’m pretty darn sure we didn’t pinpoint the exact day of Jesus’s birth.  Normally I fly home to Nashville, but many of my friends typically go somewhere else so I can’t maximize the utility of my flight cost by seeing them on the same trip.  My hometown football and basketball teams rarely play at home on the same week, and I would probably pick different games to attend anyway.  My favorite restaurants and coffee shops are closed half the time I’m home and on shortened hours the other half.  Catching up on my shopping is a fool’s errand because everyone else is shopping, or else those stores are closed too.

It gets better!  Most of my office goes home the week of Christmas, meaning this is the best time of the year to catch up on work.  Yet instead of staying in my deserted office, I’m going to one of the few places with a higher concentration of people than usual — and better yet, the people most likely to try and convince me not to work because it’s Christmas.  I have a flexible leave policy and I can telecommute, so I can really take a vacation almost anytime — but instead I choose the week with the most expensive flights.  In summary, I am all about finding a sensible week to come home and spend time with my family, but I’m paying a well-above-average price to come home at the least efficient time for me simply because it’s Christmas.

As I said earlier, I am further a Scrooge because I don’t appreciate gift exchanges.  This is because it’s a totally garbage system of value creation.  We exchange gifts (a) to make ourselves feel good about giving and (b) to make others feel good about receiving.  Assuming I spend the same amount of time and money buying gifts for others as I could spend buying my own gifts, it’s not hard to see what leads economists to argue that Christmas is a deadweight loss.

I do not feel good about giving in the following situations: I have no idea what the recepient wants; I am merely choosing off a detailed list and demonstrate no originality; I give a gift that doesn’t meet a minimum threshhold of usefulness or thoughtfulness (and the threshhold increases the more money I spend).

I do not feel good about receiving in the following situations: the gift has little emotional value and is also unusable; the gift is both unusable and unreturnable; the gift is unusable and returnable but I have to request the receipt; the gift is close but not exactly what I want so I neither return nor use it; the gift costs way more than something else I wanted but is way less useful.

I’ve tried to minimize the emotional damage caused by gift exchanges by requesting detailed lists from my family, and by submitting links to the exact items I want along with my list.  But in spite of the hazards of deviating from the list, people often feel guilty about not coming up with something original so they deviate anyway, dramatically increasing the risk of a botched exchange!  “But isn’t it the thought that counts?” You ask.  My answer is yes if you guess right — meaning mostly no.

But if we have to give gifts for cultural reasons, I’ve recently come to the conclusion that the best gifts are gift cards.  Caleb links to reasons gift cards suck compared to cash, but I disagree.  If you give me cash, I’m going to feel compelled to buy something I need (or save or invest) rather than buy something I want.  Moreover, an equal exchange of cash is a loss in transaction costs with virtually no gain in emotional value.  So gift cards satisfy the two conditions of exchange because they give the recepient a strong opportunity to be satisfied courtesy of the giver.  A second best option is food or beverages, because even if the recep atient doesn’t like it, they’ll probably have guests or other friends who will — and in any case, the guilt of not using the gift expires with the food’s shelf life.

Still think I’m just being a Scrooge?  Well, Brian McCann links to a defense of Scrooge here.  So yeah.

This morning I was supposed to fly American Airlines out of Nashville at 10:45 am, connecting through Chicago, to arrive in Washington at 4:35 pm.  Both legs of the trip I was booked in the middle of a 3-seat row.  Moreover, I was going to lose virtually an entire day of work.

Cue snowstorm in Chicago!  My flight from Nashville was cancelled and I was rebooked on an American Eagle direct flight to Washington departing at 2:05 pm to arrive at 4:30 pm.  The plane has a 1-2 seat configuration and I’m in the solo seat, plus I now have three hours in the airport to get some work done.

Bonus: I just discovered that when you buy 24 hours of wi-fi on Boingo, it’s not 24 hours of time but 24 hours of connectivity, meaning I’m connecting on the pass I bought at a different airport last month.

For someone who enjoys simple pleasures, it’s nice to have things just work out once in a while.

[Update 12/28/07: When I said Boingo carries over my original 24-hour purchase, what I meant was they bill me a new $7.95 and don’t email me about it until after I’m already logged in.  Still worth it though!]

I said a while back that I wouldn’t do any “series” blogging, but if I did, I would certainly consider a “Krugman Blames” series — this guy is getting ridiculous.  Today he writes in Slate that “progressives” have an opportunity to abandon the middle ground and take over the world.  I encourage you to read it; it might represent everything that’s wrong with the American political system.

Part of what’s wrong is hyperbolic speech, of course.  I happen to think it’s plausible that Bush could end up with the “worst president ever” label, but the reason historians wait till presidents are ten or so years out of office to make such assessments is precisely to avoid having them determined by people like Krugman, who are just choosing to be shrill.  And part of what’s wrong is his bastardization of definitions — Krugman actually defines “liberal” and “progressive” relative to each other without defining either of them at all!  As best I can tell, they both mean wanting whatever Krugman thinks America ought to want.

But the big point I object to is Krugman’s claim that what’s wrong with America is the political machine that brought Bush to power.  The problem with this claim is that American politics has always been machine politics, and Krugman knows this, which is why he supports partisanship.  He’s decided that one side’s machine is a lecherous bunch of wealthy neoconservatives who somehow managed to hatch a 40-year plan to destroy the world mainly to line their own pockets, and the other side’s machine needs to fight back and establish permanent majority rule in order to save the world.

Doesn’t this seem absurd on its face?  Shouldn’t Krugman be more worried that a faction of mercenaries as terrible as he describes can co-opt the system and spend trillions of the people’s dollars on horrendous decisions that are extremely difficult to reverse?  Shouldn’t the last thing Krugman wants be to destroy one side and make it easier for the other to establish a supermajority over such a system?  Why has Krugman studied the last 100 years of economics and politics in preparation for his latest book and decided that the enemy is a party rather than a process?

As best I can tell, the only reason Krugman seems to want partisanship is because he thinks a particular group of people who shares his ideas has an opening, and he wants to seize it.  How is he any different, then, from the people he opposes?  And how is this kind of behavior supposed to change the world for the better?

Interesting points linked here.

By one writer’s assessment, here are the twenty ugliest colleges in the US.  I’ve been to thirteen of the twenty, and to over 200 in total, so I feel at least marginally qualified to comment.  I actually see three categories of ugliness in these results:

1. The ugly friend.  Nobody visits these colleges without visiting the schools nearby, and then things really go downhill.  Granted, all the Claremont colleges are awful, but it’s a wonder anyone goes to Harvey Mudd or Pitzer once you’ve seen Scripps.  Would anyone who can afford it visit Boston’s many colleges and pick Northeastern or Brandeis?  I’ll also put Ithaca, NC State, and UCSD into the category of schools that are simply unmemorable till you look next door and see what might have been.

2. Guilty by association.  Ugly campus plus ugly town equals hideously, memorably, never-visit-again ugliness.  When people are willing to make decisions about top-20 schools because they don’t like the nightlife, how do schools surrounded by crime or the state of New Jersey even have a chance?  I’d say that Maryland, Rochester, Carnegie Mellon, Rowan, Southern Connecticut, and Drexel all fall into this category.

3. Planning ineptitude.  These are colleges who either forgot to hire a landscape architect or are currently employing one who’s in a coma.  Making every building the exact same color and design as a miltary barracks is not a winning recruitment strategy, and neither is delegating land allocation to a team of crackshot chimpanzees.  Rutgers, Texas A&M, UT-Dallas, Drew, IIT, the SUNY schools, and UMass seem to fit this category well.

It’s worth noting that I don’t necessarily think this is the authoritative list of ugliest colleges, but thanks to the elements I’ve mentioned they managed to keep their profile high enough to end up on the most wanted list.  Don’t get me wrong; all of these colleges are architectually inept, but I bet you’ll find a few equally hideously campuses that were saved from this list by their obscurity or by exceedingly low prior expectations.

For the record, I have far more disagreement with his twenty most beautiful colleges, but I’ll leave that critique for another day.

Apparently when I say I enjoy football as much as the next guy, what I mean is unless that guy is from Louisiana – this is ridiculous.

My opinion of the Mitchell Report is essentially reflected here and here.  Matt Welch says it so well:

In any case, we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that if you give a former Senate Majority Leader $2 million a month for more than a year and half, force clubhouse lackeys to testify under threat of $100,000 fine, and have federal prosecutors grant vastly reduced sentences to drug convicts in exchange for cooperating with Mitchell’s private investigation, you can indeed produce circumstantial evidence that Nook Logan (career home runs: 2) and nearly four score others may have taken legal supplements without a prescription to help them recover more quickly after working out, many during a time when such supplements were perfectly acceptable according to Major League Baseball’s own rules.

If Major League Baseball wants a completely clean game, that’s their right and it’s also their business.  If a baseball player is using a substance deemed illegal by federal, state, or local law, that’s a job for law enforcement and not Congressional hearings.  This seems obvious on its face, but apparently it was not so since we now have a Mitchell Report.

I’ll actually go one step further and say that I’m not sure I care whether or not baseball players are using legal performance-enhancing substances, provided that the individuals are making the decision voluntary.  If you just look at differences in the way athletes eat, exercise, train, and receive medical care, you’re already looking at superhuman athletes relative to their predecessors.  You think many athletes spent their offseasons training in high-altitude environments before there were airplanes?  Think Babe Ruth slept in an oxygen tank?

If MLB is trying to preserve old records by preserving the early-1900s human condition, they’re being preposterous.  We’re not on the cusp of some new era of professional conditioning, we’re already in it.  People will play baseball as long as it’s fun to play and they’ll watch baseball as long as it’s fun to watch.  In short, I think everyone’s complaining too much.

A few weeks ago, I finally caved and wrote a little something about the surging Ron Paul.  Quoteth myself:

Many libertarians plan to ultimately vote the pragmatic choice, not the idealistic one, which I respect.  Other libertarians are opposed to voting altogether on philosophical or statistical grounds, and while I don’t agree with that position I respect it as well.  But this business about a libertarian planning to vote on ideological grounds and questioning Paul’s libertarian credentials is just ridiculous!

I think, thanks to Matt, I’ve decided to disagree with myself.  He writes:

The conservative establishment is now flailing wildly to regain control and I’m almost certain they’ll ultimately succeed in delivering the nomination to an establishment-approved figure. But the movement as a whole is clearly sputtering and sick and the better the outsider candidates do the more it frays.

I attended an AFF-sponsored roundtable last week featuring representatives from the Romney, Guiliani, Thompson, Paul, and Huckabee campaigns, and I felt that two particularly intriguing points came out of the discussion.  The first was that most of the panelists would vote Thompson as their second choice (though whether this was honest or strategic I don’t know).  The second was a discussion about which matters more in a presidential candidate: credentials to run the government or sympathies to an ideology of governance.

This latter point, I think, represents the real rift worth discussing, which I’ll do after the break.

(Continued)

This story so needs to be the Onion’s next American Voices feature…

SI has a great analysis of the BCS Championship selection debacle, which begins appropriately:

It took 10 years, but the day is finally upon us.

BCS Armageddon.

This post will be obsolete, or at least in need of updating, in about 2 hours.  Nonetheless, the mess has to be noted.

And for the record, I support some type of playoff, so I am somewhat relishing this moment.  Of course, I also notionally support requiring a conference championship to qualify for the national title, increasing the importance of the strength-of-schedule metric, eliminating GPA requirements for college players, removing the requirement that transfers sit out a year, paying college athletes, removing the NFL’s prohibition on players within 2 years of high school, repealing Title IX, eliminating preseason Top 25 polls, reducing the total number of bowl games, and enacting any change that results in reduced control over college sports by the NCAA cartel… so maybe I’m a bit of a radical  :)

[Update 12/3/07: Now that we’ve seen the matchups… my thoughts exactly.]