Dynamist Blog
Incentives for Marrow Donors
The Institute for Justice has filed suit to overturn the federal prohibition on financially compensating bone-marrow donors. Megan McArdle has a good post on the subject.
I do take issue with the idea that bone marrow should be exempt from the federal prohibition because, like blood or sperm (but not eggs), it regenerates. The same is functionally true of kidneys, where the remaining organ grows to take up the slack; liver lobes also regenerate.
New Books in the Mail
Inspired by the FTC, and with apologies to InstaPundit
Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400-1600
Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn't Buy Presents for the Holidays
Don't Let U.S. Capitalism Go the Italian Route
Blunt-spoken, deeply informed, and relentless, Luigi Zingales has been one of the great public-intellectual heroes of the financial crisis. (See this September WSJ op-ed with John Cochrane for a sample of his work.) In this meaty and readable essay for National Affairs, he spells out just how much is at stake in the response to the crisis. Here are just a few small samples from a nuanced and long (by the standards of the Twitter age) essay:
In countries with prominent and influential Marxist parties, pro-market and pro-business forces were compelled to merge to fight the common enemy. If one faces the prospect of nationalization (i.e., the control of resources by a small political elite), even relationship capitalism (which involves control of those resources by a small business elite) becomes an appealing alternative.
As a result, many of these countries could not develop a more competitive and open form of capitalism because they could not afford to divide the opposition to Marxism. Worse, the free-market banner was completely appropriated by the pro-business forces, which were better equipped and better fed. Paradoxically, as the appeal of Marxist ideas faded, this problem in many of these countries became worse, not better. After decades of contiguity and capture, the pro-market forces could not separate themselves from the pro-business camp. Having lost the ideological opposition of Marxism and lacking any opposition from pro-market ideology, pro-business forces ruled unchecked. In no coun- try is this more evident than in Italy, where the pro-market movement today is almost literally owned by a businessman, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who often seems to run the country in the interest of his media empire.
...
The problem is that people who have spent their entire lives in finance have an understandable tendency to think that the interests of their industry and the interests of the country always coincide. When Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson went to Congress last fall arguing that the world as we knew it would end if Congress did not approve the $700 billion bailout, he was serious and speaking in good faith. And to an extent he was right: His world — the world he lived and worked in — would have ended had there not been a bailout. Goldman Sachs would have gone bankrupt, and the repercussions for everyone he knew would have been enormous. But Henry Paulson's world is not the world most Americans live in — or even the world in which our economy as a whole exists. Whether that world would have ended without Congress's bailout was a far more debatable proposition; unfortunately, that debate never took place.
Compounding the problem is the fact that people in government tend to rely on their networks of trusted friends to gather information "from the outside." If everyone in those networks is drawn from the same milieu, the information and ideas that flow to policymakers will be severely limited. A revealing anecdote comes from a Bush Treasury official, who noted that in the heat of the financial crisis, every time there was a phone call from Manhattan's 212 area code, the message was the same: "Buy the toxic assets." Such uniformity of advice makes it difficult for even the most intelligent or well-meaning policymakers to arrive at the right decisions.
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If the free-market system is politically fragile, its most fragile component is precisely the financial industry. It is so fragile because it relies entirely on the sanctity of contracts and the rule of law, and that sanctity cannot be preserved without broad popular support. When people are angry to the point of threatening the lives of bankers; when the majority of Americans are demanding government intervention not only to regulate the financial industry but to control the way companies are run; when voters lose confidence in the economic system because they perceive it as fundamentally corrupt — then the sanctity of private property becomes threatened as well. And when property rights are not protected, the survival of an effective financial sector, and with it a thriving economy, is in doubt.
The government's involvement in the financial sector in the wake of the crisis — and particularly the bailouts of large banks and other insti- tutions — has exacerbated this problem. Public mistrust of government has combined with mistrust of bankers, and concerns about the waste of taxpayer dollars have been joined to worries about rewarding those who caused the mess on Wall Street. In response, politicians have tried to save themselves by turning against the finance sector with a vengeance. That the House of Representatives approved a proposal to retroactively tax 90% of all bonuses paid by financial institutions receiving TARP money shows how dangerous this combination of backlash and demagoguery can be.
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We thus stand at a crossroads for American capitalism. One path would channel popular rage into political support for some genuinely pro- market reforms, even if they do not serve the interests of large financial firms. By appealing to the best of the populist tradition, we can intro- duce limits to the power of the financial industry — or any business, for that matter — and restore those fundamental principles that give an ethical dimension to capitalism: freedom, meritocracy, a direct link between reward and effort, and a sense of responsibility that ensures that those who reap the gains also bear the losses. This would mean abandoning the notion that any firm is too big to fail, and putting rules in place that keep large financial firms from manipulating government connections to the detriment of markets. It would mean adopting a pro-market, rather than pro-business, approach to the economy.
The alternative path is to soothe the popular rage with measures like limits on executive bonuses while shoring up the position of the largest financial players, making them dependent on government and making the larger economy dependent on them. Such measures play to the crowd in the moment, but threaten the financial system and the public standing of American capitalism in the long run. They also reinforce the very practices that caused the crisis. This is the path to big-business capitalism: a path that blurs the distinction between pro-market and pro-business policies, and so imperils the unique faith the American people have long displayed in the legitimacy of democratic capitalism. Unfortunately, it looks for now like the Obama administration has chosen this latter path.
Read the whole thing, either at National Affairs or in PDF form on Luigi's University of Chicago website.
Bravo to the Econ Nobel Committee
And to Oliver Williamson and Elinor Ostrom for their well-deserved Nobel Prize in economics. Here's a Times column I wrote about the New Institutional Economics, in which they are major figures. Their work is extremely fundamental. (I discuss some of Ostrom's work on fisheries in The Future and Its Enemies
The Economic Institutions of Capitalism
Here's a Reason editorial I wrote in 1997 that hints at why honoring Williamson and Ostrom is coincidentally quite a negative comment on the current rage for technocratic planning: "Conventional political discourse continues to define government as the manipulative determiner of national purpose, but the twin challenges of Third World development and postcommunist transition have revived the fundamental insight of classical liberalism--the idea that government best serves its citizens by limiting itself to enforcing neutral rules."
UPDATE: Lynne Kiesling has lots more. Start here. Also, see Organizations and Markets. (I'm assuming you've already checked out Marginal Revolution.)
Sometimes You Just Have to Say, WTF????
The smartest take on Barack Obama's gobsmackingly premature Nobel Peace Prize I've read is Ryan Sager's.
The prize unites the president with the Iranian resistance, as once again Twitter proves to be "medium of the moment". MSNBC has collected some of the best reactions under NobeLOL.
The FTC Thinks You're Stupid. I Want You to Shop.
I posted the following notice on DeepGlamour yesterday.
DeepGlamour is an Amazon
affiliate. Virginia Postrel receives a percentage of the purchase price on anything you buy through one of our Amazon
The Federal Trade Commission demands that we tell you this — they think you're idiots and are violating the First Amendment with their regulation of what bloggers publish — but it's also a friendly reminder to Support DeepGlamour by starting all your Amazon
We also get money or in-kind compensation from places that have ads on the site, our contest prizes are donated, and Virginia receives review copies of lots of books (most of which never get mentioned on the site and end up donated to the Westwood branch of the L.A. Public Library). But you could probably figure that out on your own.
Now that we've complied with federal regulations, how about a little shopping?
The same applies to Dynamist, except I don't run contests here.
Is Subject-Verb Agreement Too Much to Expect?
An interesting point in this Forbes.com report is marred by an egregious grammatical mistake.
Gourmet's dive into "cheap eats" service stories were a big mistake, says another ad executive. "Gourmet went down-market. It made matters worse by pandering to readers' financial fears with budget recipes."
I've given up on the its/it's distinction and become tolerant of various homonyms (fare/fair) used interchangeably. But is BASIC GRAMMAR too much to ask from a respected publication? With a surfeit of unemployed journalists, it should be possible to hire ones who can write their own sentences without making basic grammatical errors.
Comics & Creativity
I came across two great comics-oriented works today, both of which are interesting even if you don't care about comics. First, a moving essay about how a work-for-hire artist took a crass, licensed media tie-in, turned it into art, and inspired a generation of comics fans and pros.
And then the great Scott McCloud on Ted.com.
Usually I share these links on my Twitter feeds rather than posting them on the blog. So subscribe to vpostrel or deepglamour.
Win A Washington Post Column
As Dave Barry would say, I'm not making this up. As far as I can tell, it's not yet a reality show, but it sounds like one:
Here's your chance to put your opinions to the test -- and win the opportunity to write a weekly column and a launching pad for your opinionating career!
Start making your case.
Use the entry form to send us a short opinion essay (400 words or less) pegged to a topic in the news and an additional paragraph (100 words or less) on yourself and why you should win. Entries will be judged on the basis of style, intelligence and freshness of argument, but not on whether Post editors agree or disagree with your point of view. Entry deadline: Oct. 21, 2009 at 11:59 p.m. ET.Then get ready for the great debate.
Beginning on or about Oct. 30, ten prospective pundits will get to compete for the title of America's Next Great Pundit, facing off in challenges that test the skills a modern pundit must possess. They'll have to write on deadline, hold their own on video and field questions from Post readers. (Contestants won't have to quit their day jobs, but they should be prepared to put in about eight hours a week for three weeks.) After each round, a panel of Post personalities will offer kudos and catcalls, and reader votes will help to determine who gets another chance at a byline and who has to shut down their laptop.Eyes on the prize.
The ultimate winner will get the opportunity to write a weekly column that may appear in the print and/or online editions of The Washington Post, paid at a rate of $200 per column, for a total of 13 weeks and $2,600. [Emphasis on the bad pay mine--vp] Our Opinions lineup includes a dozen Pulitzer Prize winners, regulars on the national political talk shows and some of the most influential players inside the Beltway. We'll set our promising pundit on a path to become the next byline in demand, the talking head every show wants to book, the voice that helps the country figure out what's really going on.So what are you waiting for?