Gas Lines and Empty Shoes

A primer on gas lines for those too young to remember the 1970's.

To begin, remember everyone has a routine. That includes when and where to gas up--what's your trade off between having the security of gas in the tank and the hassle of refueling? Do you believe in "just in time" refueling or do you always want half a tank just in case?

The answers to those questions determine how many gas pumps we have and how much gas stations keep on hand.

The routine also determines routine consumption of gas, how many miles we drive.

Now throw a hurricane or an OPEC embargo into the picture. Suddenly everyone gets a little worried, so we all start refilling a little sooner, i.e., a little more often than we used to. That means the supply of gas pumps is not enough, so we start seeing lines. Then there's real scarcity in places. That increases our anxiety. The existence of lines proves that gas is in short supply, so everyone gets really anxious and refills every 50 miles.

That giant sucking sound is the preexisting gasoline stockpile slurping from gas stations into gas tanks. Now there are real shortages and real lines. But the lines don't affect demand for gas, at least not directly. Gas lines raise the price of gas by throwing in costs of time and aggravation.

Gas lines vanish when everyone has gas in their tank at their new comfort level so they stop refueling so often so the supply of pumps rebalances with the demand.

(The foregoing suggests that lines are a creation of panic, which they are and Malcolm Gladwell may or may not have discussed the phenomena in "Tipping Point". Real shortages are solved by higher prices, both in dollars and in time, which end up reducing the amount of driving.)

The empty shoes and sandals on the Baghdad bridge remind that panics can occur everywhere and any time multiple people have to interact. Gas lines remind that Adam Smith's "invisible hand" has limits: our interacting routines are an example of the invisible hand working; our gas lines are an example of the failure of the invisible hand.

Copter Parents

Daniel Drezner posts and gets comments about "copter parents", those parents who hover over their college student children.

My Irish and German great grandfathers emigrated to the U.S. at 17, by themselves we think, which is much the same age as many current immigrants. It seems to me that modern progress, by shrinking the size of families, increasing the premium on competition and learning, and giving us more to learn, is in a race with the healthcare industry, itself a vital part of progress.

What's the race: whether the life span is going to grow faster than the span of adolescence. I fear, over the next millennia, we're doomed to see adolescence grow faster until there's just a month or so between the time the last child becomes independent and the parent goes into the nursing home.

Surprise from Powerline

Powerline is apparently a highly rated conservative blog, which I usually find unbalanced. But in the interest of rewarding fairness, wherever found, there's this bit, arguing against the divided country idea:

"Bill Clinton was a bona fide liberal and George W. Bush is a legitimate conservative, but neither they nor the vast majority of their supporters are as liberal or as conservative as their predecessors of a generation ago. No Democrats talk about nationalizing industries, and no Republicans talk about abolishing Social Security or Medicare. Whether the maximum marginal tax rate at the federal level should be 40%, as it was at the end of the Clinton administration, or 35%, as it is now, is a serious public policy issue; but it is frankly ridiculous to denounce proponents of either view as extemists.

Even in foreign policy, I don't think Republicans and Democrats are as far apart as they might seem. Democrats are violently opposed to the Iraq war, I think, because it is being conducted by a Republican. If the President were a Democrat, the Democrats would support the war just as they did every one of Clinton's military adventures. "

A Tale of the Modern DC Area Economy

Herndon, VA has been in the news as the town fathers debate whether to support a building where immigrant labor could wait for employers to hire them. Dating back 15 years or so, laborers have congregated around a 7-11, which is across from a branch of a bank I used to use. (Or rather the ATM I used--it was the closest branch of the bank that I'd started with when I lived in DC, but merged when Reagan permitted banking across state lines.) The arguments for--it's humane and rational; against, moving the site raises NIMBY concerns and, as the issue gets into the national discussion, it encourages and rewards illegal immigration. The debate's been very heated.

My wife and I almost every Saturday visit a nearby strip mall in Herndon to patronize the Tortilla Factory. I guess it's Tex-Mex. It's been around since 1975 serving good food cheap. There's a supermarket in the mall. When we first went in the late 70's, it was a national chain, maybe A&P. But it's rather small so A&P left. Then a local chain came in. This outfit was specializing in taking over the smaller stores as Giant and Safeway, the two big chains in the DC area, built super supermarkets. If I recall correctly, it survived by being non-union.

But patronage wasn't enough and the local chain left. The supermarket building was closed. The strip mall had a number of empty buildings, although a laundramat was able to survive. Meanwhile, down the road, someone established a Hispanic store in the house next to the bank branch. My wife tried it once, but it was small and didn't attract. Then we stopped using that branch as bank mergers created a branch and ATM closer to home.

Finally someone put a Hispanic supermarket in the vacant building. My wife finds it has good vegetables for good prices, perhaps because it's also nonunion. The parking lot in front is crowded on Saturdays now. As I wait for my wife, I see all sorts patronizing the store, though heavily Hispanic. The patrons are driving cars, and some SUV's, all newer than mine (because I'm cheap). Sometimes you can see people loading up, presumably either doing a week's shopping for a family or for a group home, but it's not that different than my local Safeway, except significantly busier.

What's the moral?

Ah Memory

I did much of my early traveling to and from college and to Ft. Belvoir by Greyhound bus. My youthful sense of romance was fed by seeing the lights of the farmhouses as we passed on the roade. But as rural America changes (i.e., "declines"), this too changes. From the Christian Science Monitor: Rural Greyhound passengers get last boarding call

"The biggest culprit behind declining ticket sales is the car; even the poorest rural family likely has one. But, from a business point of view, Greyhound's leaving is an affirmation of many towns' decline as destinations and points of departure.

'The real reason that service has gone down is that people are leaving those communities,' says Elvis Latiolais, general manager for Carolina Trailways, a Greyhound subsidiary."

Liberals Can't See Reality: Healthcare as an Example

Kevin Drum highlights the Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker:
The Washington Monthly: "Malcolm Gladwell asks the key question about American healthcare in the New Yorker:

"One of the great mysteries of political life in the United States is why Americans are so devoted to their health-care system. Six times in the past century — during the First World War, during the Depression, during the Truman and Johnson Administrations, in the Senate in the nineteen-seventies, and during the Clinton years — efforts have been made to introduce some kind of universal health insurance, and each time the efforts have been rejected. Instead, the United States has opted for a makeshift system of increasing complexity and dysfunction. Americans spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, almost two and half times the industrialized world’s median of $2,193; the extra spending comes to hundreds of billions of dollars a year."

Gladwell mentions the historical fact that unions in the U.S. worked individually in collective bargaining to get health care for their members; in Europe they worked together through social democratic parties to get health care for all. The theme of the article is tracing the impact of ideas: Americans focus on individual responsibility and moral hazard, therefore on actuarially sound insurance; Europeans focus on the community and sharing the burden of accidents and random illnesses.

I don't quarrel with this, but I do note with bemusement the blinders that liberals wear. Americans spend much more on health care than others--that's the message that Kevin Drum and other liberals repeat incessantly. What I don't see is analysis of what it means, as thus: If we spend more on healthcare, that means organizations and individuals who are getting the money. All of the paperpushers in each of the separate laboratories, medical practices, hospitals, research organizations, rehab units, nursing homes, hospices. All of the professionals in these places. All of the individual practitioners. Now they aren't all overpaid by comparison to a French style system. But they all can and will fear that they are. It's eminently rational for the participants in the current system to fear any proposed changes, particularly when we say that the system is wasteful. (Just as government bureaucrats rationally fear the politicians who attack government waste.) Under a new system, most of today's fat cats would lose and they'd hate that. But even the alley cat who works hard for a meager diet of leftovers from the fat cat meals has fears. Better the known present than the unknown future.

With this as the background, is it any wonder that Harry and Louise saturated the airwaves?

The Nation's Gone to the Dogs: Heisman's Last Course

The man who won the Heisman is taking his last course:

The Last Waltz - Los Angeles Times: "Leinart, who announced in January that he would forgo a chance to turn pro and would return for his final season of eligibility, is taking only one course: ballroom dancing. The elective fulfills the final units Leinart needs to graduate with a sociology degree.
"

As a contrast, Joe Namath is trying to beat his daughter to be the first in his family with a college degree and has only an education paper to complete.

Originalism in Interpreting Committee Results

Kevin Drum is involved in a discussion over "originalism" in interpreting the constitution, on which I've commented, but will expand here.

As a bureaucrat I've been in many meetings, some of which were committees, some just work groups. A minority of meetings had some sort of product representing the consensus of the members. Typically the mere fact there was a meeting meant that some people had strong feelings and we needed to be inclusive. So there's a parallel to the Constitution making process. Some of the meetings were of peers, some were with a decision-making authority.

What happened when issues arose after the meeting? The way I remember it, we seem to have wavered between two rules of interpretation. At one extreme we adhered to strict originalism, particularly so when it was a meeting with a decision maker who wasn't in the room when we debated interpretation. The issue was what we thought the decider had meant and intended. Ordinarily if that made sense, we went with original intent. But if new factors had arisen we'd often try for a new meeting (i.e., a process of amending the original result). Sometimes, though, we'd decide we could read the mind of the decider, that today he or she would decide X, even though the original intent might say Y.

Toward the other extreme, particularly in the wake of a meeting of peers, the question was whether the issue was such we, as a subset of the meeting, felt comfortable deciding it or whether the uncertainty was so great and the importance so crucial that it was worth the hassle of reconvening a meeting.

Seems to me the same applies to the Constitution. Take one example raised in the comments on Kevin's blog--the Lousiana Purchase. While Jefferson wasn't in the Constitutional Convention, and had many doubts about the Constitution and how to interpret it, he does count as a "Founding Father". In 1803 the LAP(urchase) fell into his lap. He recognized that buying it would stretch the Constitution beyond what he was comfortable with. But the practicalities were that he couldn't afford the time required by the amendment process and enough of the elite agreed with the need for LAP to get the treaty through the Senate. Presumably, the same elite would and could have pushed through an enabling amendment, if time had permitted.

So I view "originalism", "legal realism" (the idea that the Court follows the election returns and the power elite), "critical realism" and all the other theories as make-work for lawyers. The reality is that SCOTUS can and will make decisions they can get away with, based on the reasons that make sense to them. There's no magic rule, except what works.

One of the problems an originalist runs into is that illustrated above in the reference to the split between Scalia and Thomas. It seems that Thomas might well say that we should give back the Louisiana Purchase, because he applies originalism to the original document. Scalia seems a bit more apt to say while originalism might lead me to position A, 202 years of history makes me disregard the original intent in favor of pragmatism.

I'm always reminded of committees I've participated in. We don't reach an agreement on how our work product will be interpreted. In my experience the question of interpretation is answered by wavering between "originalism" and "avoiding stinks"--the latter saying: if no one with a concern in the issue will raise a real big stink, we'll all quietly change the committee's work. Seems to me that's the way the Constitution has operated. The Federalists didn't make a big enough stink about the LA Purchase to void the treaty, so we changed the Constitution.

Treason and Daniel Pipes

Daniel Pipes is quoted on the History News Network: "This absence points to a deeper reality: the crime of treason is now as defunct as blue laws, prohibition of alcohol, or laws banning miscegenation. I predict that, short of radical changes, no Western state will again prosecute its citizens for treason."

I think he's right. We've globalized opinion, so everyone now is competing in the global marketplace of ideas. The Sopranos may still believe in death as the punishment for treason, but the rest of us don't.

Primate Gamblers

MSNBC reports on a study tending to show that some monkeys will gamble more than makes sense--apparently gambling is rewarding.

"'It seemed very, very similar to the experience of people who are compulsive gamblers,' Platt points out. 'While it's always dangerous to anthropomorphize, it seemed as if these monkeys got a high out of getting a big reward that obliterated any memory of all the losses that they would experience following that big reward.'"

I've always thought people were dimorphic--there are the gamblers and the nongamblers--and this has evolutionary advantages. If we were all sticks-in-the-mud, we'd have no progress; if we were all gamblers, we'd destroy ourselves. So I'm looking for future studies that show the study is wrong. Maybe the scientists just created a monkey fad, similar to hula hoops or chlorophyll. Maybe it's true what Lincoln almost said: you can fool all of the monkeys some of the time, you can fool some of the monkeys all of the time, but you can't fool all of the monkeys all the time.