So listening to a piece about the RIAA lawsuits against college students got me thinking about just how broken the american legal system is in this regard. The adversarial system is supposed to encourage good precedent by ensuring that individuals on both sides of an issue have incentives to present their case as effectively as possible. Whatever your opinion about the RIAA’s lawsuits it’s clear that the exact opposite is occuring in this situation.

Instead of those individuals with the best defenses taking them trial we see just the opposite happening in the RIAA cases. While there are many individuals whose cases raise tough questions about the accuracy of the RIAA’s identifications or whether merely making songs availible constitutes infringement the case that was most throughly defended so far was that of Jammie Thomas who insisted on claiming she hadn’t even made the songs available despite the singularly strong evidence showing this to be a lie. Unsurprisingly the jury saw through the blatant deception and convicted her without reaching any of the serious issues.

Some might dismiss this as an isolated oddity but I think it reflects fundamental incentives that our system creates when large companies sue individuals for massive damages while offering cheap settlements. Given the fact that under the American rule even a successful defense might cost 60-100k any reasonable individual is likely to swallow their pride and pay the couple thousand dollars of bribe money, even if they know they were misidentified. This creates a situation where only the copyright analagos of tax protestors or the judgement proof are likely to defend their cases. Hardly providing ideal test cases. Certainly foundations and charities like the EFF and ACLU can help offset this problem but not every situation is popular enough to attract these deep pockets and our justice system shouldn’t require charitable aid to produce fair results.

One might be tempted to move to the English rule but while this rule would help even this seems to leave a dangerously imbalanced playing field. Corporations are likely to sue private individuals in such a fashion only when they hope to gain massive deterent benefit while the individual can only hope to gain a few thousand dollars. For instance suppose you produced a mix tape pushing the boundaries of fair use which you gave away for free. A group like the RIAA may have a large financial stake in convincing others such behavior will be punished while your potential gain from pursuing the lawsuit under the English rule is just the few thousand the settlement offer proposes a rational defendent will still stimply pay the protection money and give the corporation their example. Besides, the English rule risks unfairly deterring individuals from suing corporations lest they get left with the massive bill the corporation ran up on lawyers.

Hopefully some clever economist can imagine some clever scheme that results in even better incentives but it occured to me that a partial solution to both this problem and the dangers of the English rule more generally might be the following. Create a system where by default the lower pays their own attorney’s fees and gives the winner the amount of money he (the loser) spend on attorneys. This would then minimize the harms of the English rule (you still control the maximum risk you undergo) while giving some extra incentive for ‘example’ defendants to go to trial in hopes of winning a relatively large payout since their example status likely means a great deal of lawyers fees were paid out in selecting and pursuing their case.

I also think some scheme should be considered that prevents corporations from backing out of cases that might go the wrong way. However, on the other side I think that there out to be special scientific decisions with precedential value that corporations can use to easily defend against massive product liability lawsuits but these are both matters for later posts.

One person suggested that I look to the IPCC report on global climate change. Now the IPCC 2001 report does have a a report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability but this report reaches no real conclusions, instead couching it’s conclusions in statements like the following.

Even though increased CO2 concentration can stimulate crop growth and yield, that benefit may not always overcome the adverse effects of excessive heat and drought.

This is exactly the way that the IPCC should report on the economic issue. Their credibility depends on only endorsing the strongest most clear cut scientific consensus and it is far more important for them to maintain this credibility than to give clear economic guidance. While the models they propose are useful they don’t truly provide much guidance for someone who is trying to quantify the costs to a future richer society of dealing with climate change at that time compared to the costs of various solutions implemented now.

Moreover, I’m not sure this is something that is best addressed by an organization like the IPCC since I suspect that actual policy choices may be primarily determined by the risk of low probability but extreme events like large scale wars breaking out or the extreme end of the climate predictions turning out to be accurate. Certainly what we need first is much more publicly visible work by economists to boil down the conclusions of various climate models to approximate costs and benefits using reasonable assumptions. At this point what is needed isn’t precise answers but merely order of magnitude calculations to get a sense of what magnitude response is required.

So I finally got my application in for the NSF postdoc and got some needed sleep. So instead of working on my math like I should be now I went and downloaded the new Radiohead CD, “Rainbows.” Now I don’t actually like Radiohead that much so I didn’t pay anything at all¹ and that’s a perfect example of the inefficiency of the current copyright system. I’m likely to get some positive utility out of this (satisfying a hoarding instinct if nothing else) and this utility is a pure loss on a normal copyright system. However, it’s pretty annoying to hear all the people on the media and in forums act as if the fact that people are paying Radiohead for their CD shows that this is a plausible alternative model.

Even paying $0 for real honest reasons (worth less to me than transaction cost of using a credit card) even I was inclined to feel a little bit guilty and no doubt this is what causes people who actually like Radiohead to chip in a reasonable amount. But one feels guilt primarily because you feel that Radiohead is somehow stepping out on a limb by trusting users to set their own price. If this was ever to become a common practice that pressure would disappear. More critically is that the very people like me this system benefits will cause it to break.

People have strong intuitions of fairness and if you ever tried to distribute music more generally with this sort of system people would start feeling like suckers when they pay twice what their friend did for the music. Ultimately there will be an inevitable slow creep to the bottom as people check with their friends and see that their only paying $6 so that’s not cheating if I do that or come up with other reasons why it’s okay not to pay a bit less. I mean hasn’t everyone someone justifying their use of P2P by saying they would buy music if only the studies didn’t produce such crap? The same process of self-justification would start to happen with self-priced products as well. Besides, who is going to decide to buy 5 CDs worth of music they only sorta like for their car trip because they only have $15 to spend and they value the CDs they really like more than that?

No, I’m afraid solving the inefficiencies of the copyright system will require a fundamental change to the system of IP for creative content. Some means of truly collective purchase is required and the best system that I can think of at this point is to put works in the public domain after 3 years or so with a taxpayer funded system that compensates content producers based on numbers of tracked downloads from some central online repository. Maybe some clever person can figure out something better but as IP fills a bigger and bigger role in our lives the unacceptable inefficiencies of the current market become less and less bearable so sooner or latter something will change.

So recently I’ve been reading “The Myth Of The Rational Voter” (which I highly recommend). Mostly the book makes a rigorous case for the intuitively obvious position that most people’s beliefs have more to do with what makes them feel good about themselves or what their friends believe than what the evidence shows. However, it also makes the simple, but profound, point that most people exercise far better judgment when they have significant value riding on the question. For instance even people who have the strong religious belief that god favors their cause and even that martyrdom brings stupendous heavenly rewards seem to reevaluate their position when they find out the other guy has the bigger army. It also explains the puzzling phenomena of religious tolerance. That is how can people who presumably think that belief the ‘true’ religion significantly increases the chance of eternal salvation abide what should be the ultimate form of child abuse, raising children in heathen religions¹. Listening to Steven Levitt (of freakonomics fame) give a talk today about how people tend to play the “dictator game” further solidified my certainty that this trade off between self image and more prosaic forms of self interest underlies most kinds of human interactions.²

Now “The Myth Of The Rational Voter” makes the case that many common political views can be explained by the fact that the social and psychological costs and benefits for espousing political beliefs far outweigh the minuscule chance that any individual will change the outcome. For instance the average liberal gains far more utility thinking of himself as racially conscious and being recognized as such by his friends for supporting affirmative action than he is likely to lose if it turns out that affirmative action harms minorities while imposing unnecessary costs on society (and vice versa for the conservative). After all his vote is extremely unlikely to change anything. Similarly the cost of seeming cold hearted and that pain of adopting a cynical view creates an incentive for people to boycott the products of low wage asian factories regardless of the evidence that this is a net harm to the very people laboring in those factories but when the prices are sufficiently lower for Chinese goods people tend to reexamine this belief.

Now if this account is true the trillion dollar question is how can we protect democracy from these sort of harmful incentives. The theory suggests what is needed is to make sure the people making the decisions have more directly at stake in the outcomes. Now the most traditional solution would be to add more layers of indirection to the system. Instead of having voters directly express their opinions on senators and presidents, thereby making policy decisions fairly responsive to public opinion, one could move to a system more like what the US founding fathers originally imagined with local elected officials voting for their constituents on national offices. While I do favor this reform it has it’s drawbacks. For one it is inherently unstable. The public wants more direct power and it is in the interest of any officials they elect to give it to them. Secondly, while being one of a small few with the power to truly decide policy does make self-image relatively less important (the consequences of your choice are now greater) it also increases the relative social and political pressures. For instance while the supreme court obviously does a lot better job deciding questions of law than the general public³ cases like Bush v. Gore suggest that the much greater dependence of their social and professional lives on strong partisans has a detrimental effect. Or alternatively that the public declarations of allegiance to one side or the other usually necessary to reach high office radically increase the costs of changing one’s mind once entering office. While an individual might only feel a bit foolish when they change their mind on a political issue someone who has achieved high office based on public affirmations of strong support for some view may feel like an out and out hypocrite.

A more radical, and likely more effective, solution would be to randomly choose some relatively small number of citizen electors. For instance instead of holding nationwide elections for president a year or two before the election we would randomly select 1000 or so registered voters from around the country and let these people choose the next president. Instead of spending massive amounts of money running campaign ads and campaigning all over the country politicians would spend the next year explaining in detail their policy views to these 1000 individuals along with the arguments and data needed to make their case. Given the much larger impact of the decision of each of these individuals they would have a greater incentive to genuinely familiarize themselves with the issues and relatively less reason to simply vote on feel good views. Of course to avoid the risk of politicians promising these voters programs targeted at their needs selection as a citizen elector would have to come along with a quite significant cash award reducing the impact of individual government programs on their lives, e.g., they would no longer have much selfish interest in bringing government jobs to their industry or region. However, this would be a relatively small cost to pay compared to current campaign budgets and it would certainly be miniscule compared to the potential increases in efficiency.

Unfortunately, I’m doubtful that the electorate would trust a system that relied so heavily on random sampling. After all most of the populace seems to strongly (and unjustifiably) believe that it would be better if everyone voted but don’t seem inclined to adopt the obvious solution of replacing voting with polling. So another solution might be to somehow create incentives for the electorate to get things right. Now obviously one can’t incentivize value questions as you can’t readily determine the right result but luckily people seem to largely agree on questions of fundamental value, at least much more than they agree on questions of efficacy. For instance their is broad agreement, despite some specific differences, on what schooling policy should aim to achieve. The debate between people favoring school choice or eliminating teaching unions and those opposing it is the efficacy of various policies in achieving these ends. Therefore one might imagine a system that proposes specific measurements of the effects of various policies and rewards those who correctly predicted those outcomes with cold hard cash. In other words we would divide voting on policies up into questions of value and questions of implementation with monetary rewards attached to correct choices on predictions about implementations.

Frankly this later solution actually seems less politically feasible and harder to implement than the former one. However, even if both of these options aren’t truly likely to be adopted hopefully someone will come up with some clever way to better align the interests of people making political decisions and the interests of the country at large that is more palatable. Certainly something must be done as it is unconscionable for us to sit here and let others suffer more than necessary just so we can have the luxury of feeling better about ourselves and not having to challenge our closely held beliefs.

So I just heard about one of the stupidest pseudo-environmentalist public awareness campaigns on NPR’s marketplace. One of their reporters (Tess Vigeland) has decided to carry her trash around with her for two weeks. She is blogging about this experience here and challenging other people to take “Tess’ Trash Challenge” and do the same. Now if I was doing something as dumb and annoying as carrying my trash around with me I wouldn’t want to be doing it alone either but why the hell is she doing this in the first place?

Apparently this is part of a new American Public Media project called Consumed which plans to:

Is our consumer society sustainable? American Public Media takes on that question in a new special series, Consumed. We’ll follow consumerism from its origins to its dominance over the world’s economy and, arguably, its culture. And we’ll examine how, and if, it might be adapted to reduce its destructive consequence while keeping store shelves stocked.

Apparently they, along with groups like the Zero Waste Alliance, are advocating achieving “Zero Waste”¹. But for the love of god why? The answer Tess gives is distinctly unsatisfying.

Garbage critics say we’re going to run out of places to put it, and that even if we had enough space, all we’re doing is encouraging consumption. Others argue the landfill issue has been greatly improved because of technology — it’s not the old city dump anymore.

Now it may be that we have an infrastructure problem and need to spend more money building new, deeper landfills. I don’t know. But we sure as hell aren’t running out of literal space to bury trash. Tess quotes the EPA as saying we generated 245.7 million tons of municipal waste in 2005. Now it seems reasonable to suppose that after compactification this waste will have at least the density of water. That means the total amount of trash created in one year fits inside 0.26 cubic miles. Now admittedly filling a square pit that deep with trash probably poses some technical challenges but given the huge empty spaces in the american west we hardly are running out of literal space to store our waste. We aren’t even running out of literal space to store our waste without significant environmental impact. Hell all the shit we make came from somewhere so it could never be more than a problem of recompactification and containment.

In other words the trash issue is a purely economic problem. It might start to cost more to build landfills but that’s it. We just need appropriate regulations to make sure trash is disposed of in a safe fashion and we can sit back and let the price of garbage disposal take care of the problem for us. There is absolutely no reason at all to turn this into a moral crusade and the idea of the Zero Waste Alliance that this is a way to save money is absurd. Of course some increase in the amount of recycling is probably money saving but to the extent it’s economically efficient it will be incentivized by garbage fees. The fact that companies aren’t doing this for profit is strong evidence that it would cost more money than it would save. Garbage collection does not have large externalities.

So what explains the fuss? It’s yet another example of the substitution of our emotional reactions to what seems like waste for our rational judgment about consequences. This is why I hate the word sustainability so much. This word invites us to make these errors by conflating our emotional idea of leaving things the same as they were when we started and it’s supposed definition in terms of being able to continue behaving as we are now. Even the definition itself is problematic because no particular state of affairs is sustainable or unsustainable only rules for future behavior. Thus talking about whether our consumerism is unsustainable tricks people into thinking “why yes if we keep creating trash at an (exponentially) increasing rate we will run out of places to put it so it’s unsustainable and we better stop.” The problem is that this isn’t even a plausible model for our societies future behavior. The right question to ask is, “If we continue to price garbage disposal at or above the cost of creating creating landfills we will be able to continue.” The answer here is a resounding yes.

This sort of thing is why I despise most of the environmental movement (though there are many reasonable people who are part of it). There are very real environmental concerns that we need to deal with like global warming but they are economic and engineering challenges not moral judgments about our waste or consumer culture. Not only do stupid pseudo-environmental worries like this one do great harm by distracting from real issues like global warming they also help cement the idea in many people’s minds that environmentalism is just that stupid moralizing concern about wasting shit. Part of the reason so much of the right is still hostile to global warming is because the environmental movement managed to push most environmental questions out of the practical realm and into a moral one. Maybe in the past that was necessary to get results on important issues. I don’t know but this sort of shit with trash and sustainability is just garbage.

I expect this sort of thing from the BBC. I’m disappointed to see it on NPR’s marketplace of all things.

I’ve been critical of the UAW grad student union at UC Berkeley for some time. While I’m generally skeptical of the (direct)¹ benefits of unions I think there is a plausible argument for graduate student unions as well as unions in potentially hazardous working environments, professions with particularly low liquidity or those employing illegal workers². In potentially hazardous professions unions serve an important social good by mitigating the harm of many people’s irrational tendency to underestimate risks in familiar situations. Left up only to the free market I suspect that people’s desire for the immediate reward of high pay would often encourage them to accept jobs where the risk of serious injury outweighed the reward of increased pay. This is obviously not the case for grad students but there is a similar problem of hidden risk. In particular graduate study is only a worthwhile payoff if one truly receives a diploma meaning that every year spent in graduate school is effectively a deposit of resources into the university that goes uncompensated should you not graduate. Just as people’s irrational failure to take into account future risk of death can justify the otherwise inefficient mechanism of union bargaining so too can their irrational failure to take into account the risk of either not graduating or receiving poor recommendations if they don’t do excessive lab work for their mentor justify grad student unions. Somewhat counter-intuitively I take the primary benefit of unions at this stage in US history to be their role in restricting employee choice. That is by preventing employees from agreeing to certain arrangements (yes I’ll work this dangerous job for more cash or I’ll do 80 hours a week in lab for a good recommendation) they prevent employers from providing incentives that prey on human irrationality.

I recognize the benefit the UC grad student union provides for many grad students in this fashion (thankfully not truly necessary in math) and since I think TA’s here aren’t paid nearly enough I remained in the union despite a certain skepticism of it’s political policies and role in restricting differential grad student pay for different departments. However today I finally sent in an email asking to be removed from the rolls when I saw the most recent bargaining update they released. I provide the full text after the break but the section that really drove me to ask to be taken off the roles was the following:

CHILDCARE: the administration rejected our proposal to subsidize employee childcare costs though they recognized the need for a childcare program. One university spokesperson accurately characterized our proposal as “a subsidy program to enhance an [employee’s] ability to matriculate, be gainfully employed and contribute to the mission of the university.” The next day, another university representative, in rejecting our proposal, said, “The University believes that there are sufficient child care resources provided to most of the individuals that you represent, and those programs are both effective and cost effective . They provide services at a reasonable cost, recognizing the financial needs of the students.” This remark displayed an arrogant disregard for the realities of life for teaching assistants, readers, and tutors with children, who more often than not face lengthy waitlists and programs that absorb at least half of their monthly wages.

I have every reason to believe that grad student pay is a zero sum game. Every dollar the UC spends to increase child care resources is one less dollar that can be used for other sorts of graduate student support. Thus by taking the position they have the union is basically advocating for a transfer of money from my pocket to the pockets of people with families.

Now I don’t have anything against grad students who choose to raise families and I sympathize with the fact that it is very difficult to raise a child on a graduate student’s salary. However, it’s also fucking difficult to try and afford frequent plane flights across the country to maintain a long distance relationship. I’m sure it’s equally difficult to try and visit sick relatives, help with the family business or any other major life choice that requires money. Now I could see an argument that certain sorts of life choices tend to produce more utility so we should subsidize those at the expense of people who would use their money to go skiing in Vale. Yet on such a theory it should be relationships, which have a much stronger correlation with happiness than children, that should be supported and I have no doubt the number of grad students at Berkeley in long distance relationships is of the same order of magnitude as those who have children.

Now someone is undoubtedly going to say something about women running out of time to have children but I would argue that relationships, not reproduction, is the truly time sensitive concern. Very few women in grad school are anywhere near menopause and upon graduation they can still choose to reproduce but once out of grad school your ability to meet worthwhile new people plummets. Sure you could argue that once out of grad school it is very difficult for a woman to have a child without taking damage to her career but it is misleading³ to suggest this is a gender equity issue and uncompelling compared with the unconditional increased difficulty of meeting a significant other outside of school. Now I certainly agree that academia unnecessarily penalizes people with competing interests such as child care while they are young but if anything academia needlessly penalizes relationships with other academics more than it does reproduction. In other words every valid concern about fairness or individual utility that favors subsidizing childcare also favors subsidizing my plane flights to Boston as well as many other life choices.

What then about the argument that affordable childcare is needed for the child’s wellbeing? This might be a compelling argument if we were talking about a group besides grad students but while expensive child care might burden the grad student it is unlikely to cause the child to be neglected or otherwise suffer. Given the various studies suggesting that the difference merely adequate and excellent parenting makes in quantitative measures of a child’s future success is quite small this argument just doesn’t hold water for grad students. Grad students are the one group we can count on to delay having a child or rearrange their lives to make sure the kid isn’t neglected.

What then about the final argument that we need to encourage more grad student types to reproduce. I think this is the only plausible case to be made but I no longer think it is compelling. The idea that we need to encourage smart people to reproduce as some kind of selective breeding program seems to make a subtle mistake about the way natural selection works. In the long run evolution will either manage to put together the little tweaks that make grad students smart with a strong desire to reproduce or it will find a better unrelated path toward intelligence. As far as the near future I don’t see subsidies for grad student families making huge differences in the electorate but I do see social benefits accruing from discouraging academic women to reproduce. Certainly anyone who believes in the role model theory for affirmative action should think that the more we can do to discourage women from opting out of academia for children the better. In fact anyone who believes that women are somehow triked or brainwashed into taking more than their fair share of childrearing should oppose this sort of reproductive support on the grounds that it reduces the unfairness and works to eliminate the stereotypes that caused the problem.

Ultimately I was uncertain about my support for the UAW grad student union in the first place and this message finally convinced me that my membership was doing more harm than good. The university doesn’t even want to go back to the days where biology grad students could be made to work 80 hours a week but my support for the union signals my acceptance of fucked up feel good policies like prioritizing families over the childless and silly demands for equality between the summer session and the school year⁴. Since the union isn’t going to disappear all my continued membership does is help convince the union and the university these stupid policies are what the grad students want. Besides I just feel dirty being affiliated with a organization that not only makes such unjustified policy demands but also alleges “bad faith” on the part of the university for simply believing that the union’s positions aren’t correct.blah⁵

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Recently I’ve been thinking about the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) after running across a couple stories about ADA lawsuits.. The first example was a decision by the ninth circuit to classify a disability rights advocate, Jarek Molski, as a vexatious litigant. Mr. Molski, is a very very controversial and polarizing figurewho has made a vocation of searching out businesses to sue for ADA violations (but clearly went to far when he badly faked injuries). The other case I read about is someone suing the apple store for having counters and product displays that are too high and passageways that are too narrow for wheelchair based customers.

I’m well aware that these are surely unrepresentative examples of ADA litigation but Mr. Molski’s pattern of lawsuits makes one wonder about the wisdom of making every business be equally accessible to the disable. Presumably we would all be better off if we could concentrate the same amount of resources in the places they were most needed. On the other hand the lawsuit against the apple store make me think about all the businesses or aesthetic visions that ADA liability might render totally uneconomical or impossible, often with absolutely no benefit to the disabled at all.

It seems that the ADA is a model for wasted cost and effort. Like price controls it creates waste by mandating a one size fits all solution and creates compliance costs (see this post) not to mention the wasted hours filling lawsuits. So I propose instead we uniformly tax retail businesses at a rate of about what complying with the ADA would cost them (or maybe less) and then give that money directly to the disabled. Obviously this would require some bureaucracy to determine who was disabled (and to what degree) but that would be offset by savings in the legal system and other avoided inefficiencies.

Disabled people could decide whether it was worth more to them to use this money to pay a premium for products sold at accessible stores or if they would rather hire an assistant or tough it out and take trips to Hawaii. Since people with disabilities would receive extra cash on the order of the cost of complying with the ADA and concentrate that money on those features that mattered most to them they should be able (if they wish) to buy even more accessibility then they have now.

Now I realize that politically this is probably infeasible. For some reason people don’t seem to mind the government wasting money by causing many individuals inefficiency through regulation the way they do through taxation. It’s the same reason no one likes the idea of letting the EPA buy/contract to protect wetlands and other habitats instead of regulating to protect endangered species¹. Also I’m not totally convinced it would be better if implemented. Perhaps the irrational way people tend to relate to money would mean this actually lowered efficiency.

Instead maybe it might be better to try a cap and trade version of the ADA. Define what it is to be a violation and let businesses purchase exceptions on some sort of market (maybe even give disabled people a way to vote and influence it). But it just seems so crazy to solve the problem the way the ADA does, especially when it doesn’t seem to actually guarantee that the disabled can count on everywhere being accessible. At the very least we should be considering these alternatives.

I recently ran across an article on slashdot discussing the payments that hotmail accepts from businesses to have their email whitelisted and (indirectly) links to editorials praising and denouncing the 2006 deal AOL and Yahoo struck with goodmail that allows businesses to pay a 1/4 cent fee per email to guarantee their email makes it past spam and volume filters. Now I’ve been vaguely aware of calls to combat spam with micropayments for some time but this prompted me to actually take a look at some of the more carefully designed proposals for email micropayments. These schemes actually manage to answer many of the common worries about email micropayments (if really implemented). However, while I’m generally a big fan of clever economic/incentive based solutions to social problems, it seems to me that micropayments for email are a fundamentally flawed non-solution to the problem of email spam. In fact it’s far from clear if they would reduce the total amount of junk mail at all and even if they did the trouble they cause and risks they pose outweigh any benefits.

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I can’t believe this gas temperature thing is still an issue but apparently it’s even being investigated by congress. Either congress needs a lesson in economics or the media is misrepresenting their findings since apparently they found that the lack of compensation will cost the American consumer 1.5 billion dollars this summer. In my last post on the subject I argued that the hot gas issue shouldn’t make any difference because the extra profit the gas stations make just gives them extra room to lower the prices. You can look there for that argument here I want to address what appears to be the other side’s compelling argument: the gas industry must be swindling us because they install compensators in Canada and compensate on the wholesale market.

Let’s first deal with the wholesale market. Unlike the consumer market wholesalers set standard prices for a gallon of gas which apply throughout the country (or at least large regions). This means if they did not compensate for the temperature change gas stations in warm climes (and ultimately consumers) would end up shortchanged. The situation is different for gas retail where the price is set by your local gas station. If the gas stations in warm climates are giving less gas to the consumer per gallon that just means gas stations in those areas can price their gas more cheaply. In other words the local nature of the retail market lets them compensate for location based differences while the wholesale market does not. Also one needs to take into account the fact that the wholesale market needs fewer compensators and likely experiences greater variation in temperature (above ground trucks versus underground tanks) than the retail market.

Well then what about Canada? Now it could be that gas stations there follow a different model but for argument’s sake let’s assume they work like they do in the states. What could explain the fuel industry’s desire for temperature compensators in Canada? Well simple irrationality is always an option. The gas industry in Canada might very well have been tricked by the same kind of invalid arguments at work here. Another possible explanation is that the fuel is being sold at a temperature significantly above the average temperature in Canada. Thus by mandating temperature compensation the Canadian fuel industry probably reaped extra profits during the period of time it took consumers and the market to adjust to the decreased value in a gallon. Perhaps we could jigger up a one time transfer from gas stations to individuals in the US by setting the temperature standard to a lower than average temperature but likely gas stations would simply react faster when they need to change their prices to avoid losses rather than to minimize profits.

The ultimate proof that this is a false concern is that no one thinks the gas companies are being screwed over in the cold states like Minnesota or Maine. Should we compensate the gas companies in northern states out of tax dollars? If not why should gas companies compensate motorists in warm states?

I feel my last post needs a bit of clarification.

I was not and never have been arguing that the landowner has a just cause while the gardeners demands are unjust. I don’t think those distinctions are particularly meaningful or helpful. There are only better and worse choices nothing else.

Admittedly I do get pretty frustrated by the hypocrisy of the people demanding to use other people’s land to garden. As if they wouldn’t cry bloody murder if someone broke into their house and took their shit to give to people in the third world. Even if it was only their old LPs that they never ever play anymore. Short of bums and monks everyone in this country buys into the notion of private property and should at least understand why people feel upset when others take their shit without asking. If these people are willing to take the same attitude about what it’s fair for people in the third world to demand of (relatively) rich people like them as they do of even richer people I will eat my laptop. Even in berkeley and SF everyone I meet seems to believe that American’s come first.

The real point of my post was twofold:

First to point out that if your goal is more community gardens then the approach the people in both of these incidents have taken is extremely irrational. Whatever you thought of Horowitz’s behavior down in LA the best way to make sure other property owners would be likely to allow people to plant gardens on their property would have been to leave with the minimum of fuss and bother. This would make future property owners think they too could let people use their vacant land without fear that it will cost them.

In fact what would be best is for the community garden movement to create a set of standards about always trying to ask for permission first, always leaving without a fuss and so forth to reassure landowners. Just like the standards that govern camping (leave the place cleaner than you found it) and other groups who want to use other people’s land it is in your interest to reassure them that you won’t become a pest.

Secondly to argue once again that demanding particular things other people have that you want and using political or PR pressure to get them is not a good way to achieve public good in the long term. The reason so much of the modern world respects private property is because it leads to efficient economic development. Knowing that you own a particular piece of land and that shifts in public opinion won’t take it from you encourages you to develop that property. Allowing communities to just gain control of pieces of property arbitrarily and capriciously because they decide they want it (especially if it ends up costing the owner money) ultimately harms everyone in the long run.

Ultimately we do take from people to serve the public good. It’s called taxes. However, by being predictable and fairly distributed taxes allow us to take people’s money without as large a harmful effect to economic development or as much resentment. I think we ought to be doing a lot more for the public good so we ought to raise taxes. If you think more public gardens are worth the cost (whether to temporarily rent empty lots or to buy lots) then you should be lobbying for higher taxes and city programs to do just that.

If you aren’t willing (in general) to lobby and fight for higher taxes so we can buy these gardens with public money it seems you are tacitly admitting that the benefit from these gardens is not generally worth what they would cost. In other words they are only worth it when you make someone else pay the cost.

So whether or not the property owners were acting as perfect saints I am criticizing the behavior of many of the gardeners and their supporters for acting against their supposed long term interest. I am also rejecting the underlying idea that it’s reasonable to demand specific people or companies give charity for the public good. Instead we should ask what general policies are good and take from people in a fair uniform manner in order to support those policies.