Legal Commentary

New Paternalism on the Slippery Slopes, Part 4: Context Dependence

Posted on November 14, 2009
New paternalists have also relied on the notion of context dependence to justify their policies. But as with hyperbolic discounting, they unjustifiably assume the existence of an inconsistency of preferences gives the policymaker license to choose among the inconsistent preferences...

New Paternalism on the Slippery Slopes, Part 3: Hyperbolic Discounting

Posted on November 10, 2009
New paternalists often rely on the phenomenon of ?hyperbolic discounting? to justify their policies. Hyperbolic discounting is difficult to define in a non-mathematical way. It is sometimes summarized as excessive impatience, but that?s an over-simplification...

New Paternalism on the Slippery Slopes, Part 2: How New Paternalism Creates Gradients

Posted on November 07, 2009
A key conclusion of the literature on slippery slopes is that they are especially likely in the presence of gradients -- meaning situations in which there is a relatively smooth continuum from one policy to another, and in which it is difficult to draw sharp distinctions...

New Paternalism on the Slippery Slopes, Part 1

Posted on November 05, 2009
Mario Rizzo and I have just published a new article, "Little Brother Is Watching You: New Paternalism on the Slippery Slopes," in Arizona Law Review. You can find the full text here.Regular readers (if I still have any) will know I've written a great deal about the new paternalism...

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Halloween Doppelgangers

Posted on October 31, 2009
If you've walked into a Halloween store recently, you've probably been treated to a soundtrack of what seem to be classic haunting favorites, like "Thriller" and "Ghostbusters" and "Weird Science." But if you listen closely, you will realize the original songs have been spirited away, their places taken by substandard doppelgangers -- lousy covers performed by unknown studio musicians...

How Top-Ranked Law Schools Got That Way, Pt. 3

Posted on August 31, 2009
Part one and part two of this series focused on the top law schools in U.S. News and World Report's 2010 rankings, offering graphs and analysis to explain why those schools did so well. This part rounds out the series by way of contrast. Here, we focus on the law schools that ranked 41-51 in the most recent USN&WR rankings, those that ranked 94-100, and the eight schools that filled out the bottom of the rankings...

How Top-Ranked Law Schools Got That Way, Pt. 2

Posted on August 23, 2009
In the first post in this series, I discussed the mysterious distribution of maximum z-scores in the top two tiers of law schools in U.S. News & World Report's 2010 rankings, and focused on the top-12 schools to solve that mystery. In brief, among the very top schools, employment nine months after graduation" ("Emp9") varies too little to make much of a difference in the schools' overall scores, whereas overhead expenditures/student ("Over$/Stu") varies so greatly as to almost swamp the impact of the other factors that USN&WR uses in its rankings...

How Top-Ranked Law Schools Got That Way, Pt. 1

Posted on August 20, 2009
How do law schools make it to the top of the U.S. News & World Report rankings? USN&WR ranks law schools based on 12 factors, each of which counts for a certain percentage of a school's total score. Peer Reputation counts for 25% of each law school's overall score, for instance, whereas Bar Passage Rate counts for only 2%...

Free Willie?

Posted on August 10, 2009
Thanks to comments on my earlier post, Copyright Duration and the Mickey Mouse Curve, I've been encouraged to reflect on what would happen if, in fact, Steamboat Willie had fallen into the public domain. Could we then reuse Mickey Mouse, the star of that show, without facing any liability to the Walt Disney Company? I drafted this answer for my book, Intellectual Privilege (here edited for blogging):Scholars have made surprisingly strong arguments that Steamboat Willie, a cartoon that the Walt Disney Company cites as establishing its copyright rights in Mickey Mouse, has fallen into the public domain...

Copyright Duration and the Mickey Mouse Curve

Posted on August 06, 2009
Herewith another recent addition to my draft book, Intellectual Privilege: A Libertarian View of Copyright, (inspired, in part, by Berin Szoka's recent claim, "I just don?t know what the right balance [for copyright] is! I?m glad there are others patient enough to try to figure it out...

Reforms Suggested by Modeling the Law School Rankings

Posted on August 04, 2009
As I recently observed, the close fit between law schools' scores in U.S. News & World Report's rankings and the scores of those same schools in my model of the ranking "suggests that law schools did not try game the rankings by telling USN&WR one thing and the ABA ...

What I Learned at the FBI

Posted on August 01, 2009
On Thursday I attended a seminar at the FBI for film and TV writers. There was lots of useful information, but what I found most interesting was the FBI agents' use of language. Specifically, I noticed that they regularly used the word 'forfeit' as a transitive verb meaning 'to acquire by asset forfeiture...

Unconstitutional Copyrights?

Posted on July 29, 2009
As part of a revise-and-resubmit process, I've been spending much of my summer upgrading my draft book, Intellectual Privilege: A Libertarian View of Copyright. That effort has led me to revisit copyright's constitutional foundations. I find them very shaky, indeed...

Z-Scores in Model of 2010 USN&WR Law School Rankings

Posted on July 23, 2009
If you want to know how U.S. News & World Report's law school rankings work, you'll want to know about z-scores. In very brief, z-scores measure how well each school performed relative to its peers, thereby establishing its rank. (See here for a fuller explanation...

Accuracy of the Model of the 2010 USN&WR Law School Rankings

Posted on July 22, 2009
I earlier offered a snapshot comparison of the scores generated by my model of the 2010 U.S. News & World Report law school rankings and the original. After Robert Morse, director of data research for USN&WR, asked me if I could quantify the fit between the two data sets, I realized that others might share his curiosity...

A Model of the 2010 USN&WR Law School Rankings

Posted on July 16, 2009
As in every year since 2005, I this year again built a model of the law school rankings published by the U.S. News & World Report ("USN&WR"). Figuring out the latest rankings?the "2010" rankings, as USN&WR's calls them?proved especially trying this time around...

Eat More, or Starve Yourself

Posted on July 12, 2009
According to a recent L.A. Times Science article, there?s new evidence that a calorie-deprived diet, with 10% to 30% fewer calories than the usual recommended intake, leads to better health and longer life. The evidence comes from a study of rhesus monkeys, though researchers believe (based on accumulating evidence) that the effect is probably common to all primates, including humans...

Libertarian Paternalism: Appearance vs. Reality

Posted on July 10, 2009
In the comments section of Russell Roberts?s link to my previous post, ?Charlie? makes some thoughtful points. I was going to respond in the comments there, but then decided a new post would be worthwhile. Charlie begins:Libertarian paternalism seems to aim to take paternalism and give it choice...

Thaler on Ski Slopes and Mortgages

Posted on July 06, 2009
So what does it take to get me to blog these days? Having an opinion is no longer enough. Apparently I have to be actively irritated.Richard Thaler is the newest contributor to the NY Times? Economic View, where in his first column he uses behavioral economics to justify new financial regulations...

Recipe for a Force Field

Posted on July 01, 2009
We don't yet have flying cars, much less jet packs. I like our Roomba, but domestic robots still have far to go before they can whip up an omelet, set the table, and pour the coffee. In these and many other areas, technology continues to lag behind the rosy sci-fi scenarios of my youth...

Exercise Breathings

Posted on June 22, 2009
I've long advocated the mental benefits of working out, and recently promised to offer some details about my own, somewhat peculiar regime. Here, I address the question: "How should I breath when I run?" My answer goes a long, long way beyond simply, "In-and-out...

How Union Bullies Fund their Critics

Posted on May 24, 2009
The L.A. Times' blog recently reported that the Los Angeles police officers' union tried to bully the San Diego Union-Tribune into firing editorial writers who argue that "lawmakers should cut back on salaries and benefits for public employees in order to help close gaping budget deficits...

Surfing Dolphin Property Rights

Posted on April 04, 2009
Do the usual surfing rules apply when a human shares a wave with a dolphin? If so, I might have pissed off one of Flipper's kin, yesterday. But I think that because dolphins use waves differently from humans, both species can ride the same wave without conflict...

Longboard Helicopter! Shortboard Air?

Posted on April 02, 2009
Today I finally managed a surf move that I've been on working for over a year: a fin-forward take-off with a regular-footed pop-up, followed by a 180-degree spin and a goofy-footed ride, wrapped up with a switch-step back to regular. If you're not a surfer, that might not mean much to you, granted...

The Transcendental Value of Consent

Posted on March 27, 2009
Consent plays a prominent role in moral reasoning. I here offer a new, transcendental argument for the moral value of consent: Because an attempted justification aims, by definition, to obtain its audience's consent, justifications presume the moral significance of consent...

A Call for Citizen Courts

Posted on March 18, 2009
It stands as a fundamental principle of justice that we cannot entrust one party to unilaterally judge its disputes with other parties. This poses a problem for the resolution of disputes between a State and those subjected to its legal jurisdiction...

Original Reasons for Non-Originalism

Posted on March 15, 2009
Although some of my closest friends might respond with expressions of fury and disappointment, I am coming out of the closet on originalism. I am not convinced that we should interpret the Constitution's text to mean what those who ratified it thought it meant, over 200 years ago...

The Problem with Rational Expectations in Macro

Posted on March 11, 2009
I'm not much of a macroeconomist, which is why I haven't had much to say about the current financial crisis and recession. But I did have to take the standard macro courses in grad school, and I remember having one major methodological objection to the rational-expectations models we were learning at the time...

The Singles Map

Posted on March 02, 2009

Adverse Selection in BDSM Clubs

Posted on February 14, 2009
In last week?s Savage Love Podcast, Dan Savage responds to a 22-year-old female caller who digs BDSM. Her problem is that when she goes to BDSM clubs, she can?t find any young, attractive men. Instead, she mostly finds creepy, gross, dirty old men. In answering, Dan says:[T]here?s a lot of attractive people into S&M, they?re just not necessarily at the BDSM clubs...

Did Prop 8 Divorce Anybody?

Posted on February 08, 2009
Whew. It?s been a long time since I posted anything here, but this video (h/t to Julian) has been on my mind: "Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.My reaction, like Julian?s, was to get just a bit teary-eyed. If you can look at these photos and still oppose gay marriage, I think your moral intuition is broken...

Physical (Re)Education 101

Posted on January 18, 2009
My co-blogger and host, Glen, might object, but I'd argue that "agoraphilia" covers not just "love of markers," but also "love of the great outdoors." Surely, the meaning of "agora" reaches at least that far. Allow me, then, to update you on my adventures under the open sky; here, specifically: surfing...

Anarchist Chess

Posted on January 07, 2009
My boy, Kai, joined his school's chess club this fall and has ardently plunged into learning the game. He enjoys setting up the board next to his mom's favorite reading chair and playing both sides of lively matches, complete with violent captures and Star Wars sound effects...

The Scale of Consent

Posted on January 01, 2009
I recently posted to SSRN a working paper, The Scale of Consent, a copy of which you can download here. Here's the abstract:We often speak of consent in binary terms, boiling it down to "yes" or "no." In practice, however, consent varies by degrees. We tend to afford expressly consensual transactions more respect than transactions backed by only implied consent, for instance, which we in turn regard as more meaningful than transactions justified by merely hypothetical consent...

Honolulu Hapa

Posted on December 19, 2008
"Damn their lies and trust your eyes. Dig every kind of fox!" I here sing one for the freedom to mix it up as you and your honey alone see fit:"Hapa" means "mixed race" in Hawaiian. Skin-tone mash ups have profoundly enriched my life, first with the Honolulu Hapa herself and then with our own little hapas...

Hello, Jonah

Posted on December 02, 2008
Like it or not, we live in the belly of Leviathan. Friends of liberty tend not to like it. Rather than giving in to death-by-digestion, or the dreaded Lower Intestines of Statism, they struggle to escape. Hello, Jonah, describes that plight, prescribes a cure, and wryly notes the outcome:As with Nice to Be Wanted, Sensible Khakis and Take Up the Flame, a Creative Commons license allows pretty free non-commercial use of Hello, Jonah...

ThinkMarkets Blog Open for Business

Posted on November 30, 2008
I'm a bit late in announcing this, but I'm pleased to report the debut of ThinkMarkets, a new blog of the NYU Colloquium on Market Institutions and Economic Processes (formerly known as the Austrian Colloquium, which I attended throughout my time at NYU)...

Nice to Be Wanted

Posted on November 23, 2008
"The doggone law. The consarned law. The lousy, frickin', nit-pickin', noveau-Prussian, freedom-crushin' . . . ." Nice to Be Wanted twangs the sad tale:Like Sensible Khakis and Take Up the Flame, Nice to Be Wanted comes with a license allowing pretty free non-commercial use...

The Mathematics of the Blame Game

Posted on November 17, 2008
I recently received a survey of economists on the subject of the financial crisis. The primary goal is to find out what economists believe caused the crisis. The various contributing factors fall into two basic categories, which I will call ?government failure? and ?market failure...

Sensible Khakis: An Entrepreneurial Anthem

Posted on November 15, 2008
Entrepreneurs rock! You wouldn't guess it, though, to listen to rock music. (Marc Knopfler's, Boom, Like That, says something about the founding and rise of McDonald's, granted, but it hardly casts the enterprise in a very flattering light.) So in honor of entrepreneurs everywhere?but especially those in the board sports industries, whom I thank for making some very fun toys?I offer Sensible Khakis:Like Take Up the Flame, which I coughed up on YouTube last week, Sensible Khakis' license leaves you free to play it just for fun...

The Electoral College: Just Like Any Other Legislature

Posted on November 08, 2008
Don Boudreaux, in defending the Electoral College, makes the following excellent point:A related, but potentially more serious, objection to the Electoral College -- indeed, the objection that, I'm sure, motivates most people who object to it -- is that it can result in a minority of popular voters getting the candidate of their choice over the candidate receiving the greatest number of popular votes...

"Take Up the Flame"

Posted on November 08, 2008
The fight for freedom has seen brighter days, I grant. I think it will see still brighter days yet, though, if we can encourage another generation to join the cause. Towards that end, I wrote a song, "Take Up the Flame": As the song's credits indicate, I've dedicated the song to my old friend and mentor, Walter E...

A Poll Tax by Any Other Name

Posted on November 04, 2008
Via Julian, I find Ezra Klein and Rachel Maddow making a really good point: long waiting lines at the polls are another kind of poll tax. A time tax instead of a money tax.And as one of Klein?s commenters points out, this kind of tax may have been used to disenfranchise certain groups ? by, for instance, having fewer (and less functional) voting machines in poorer districts...

Voter Fraud in U.S. News Surveys?

Posted on October 15, 2008
In ranking law schools, U.S. News and World Report weights peer reputation more heavily than any other measure of quality. A school's reputation among its peers counts for 25% of its overall score in the rankings (the next-most important measure, in contrast, counts for only 15%)...

Reason.tv on Health Insurance

Posted on October 09, 2008
I'm featured in the new Reason.tv video, "How to Fix America's Health Insurance Crisis: GET SOME."Interestingly, you can see both of my offices in this video: my CSUN office (at 2:45) and my FRINGE office (at 3:59, right above the Hustler store).I think the video makes this pretty clear, but it's worth emphasizing again: there are real problems with the current healthcare system, and there are genuinely needy people who can't afford health insurance...

LSAT-Free Law School Admissions

Posted on September 24, 2008
The University of Michigan School of Law recent announced an innovative program to admit 1L law students who have never taken an LSAT exam. Under the Wolverine Scholars program, potential admits with especially good undergraduate records from the University of Michigan?Ann Arbor campus may apply for admission to the law school without having taken the LSAT...

Burn After Reading

Posted on September 19, 2008
I saw it Saturday. Highly recommended. It?s like Fargo set in the halls of power, or at least sort of near them. If you have a black sense of humor (and if you don?t, what?s up with that?), then go see it. What the Coen brothers do best is comedy, and they?re back in familiar territory...

For Law and Fun

Posted on September 16, 2008
All sorts of "law and" movments have popped up over the years?law and economics, law and literature, law and sociology, and so forth. Each has its merits, and each has its acolytes. Were I to choose a "law and" movement, though, I think I'd opt for law and fun...

Housing and Mating Markets

Posted on September 11, 2008
In reading Tim Harford's article on why houses sell for more during the summer, I was struck by the similarity between his (well, Ngai and Tenreyro's) model of the housing market and my own model of the dating market. Here's Harford's description of seasonality in the housing market:If Ngai and Tenreyro are right, then the housing market dynamic is something like this: buyers slightly prefer to buy houses in the summer, so house prices are slightly higher in the summer, so sellers prefer to put their houses on the market in the summer, and with more houses on the market, the market is thicker...

The Rules of Abstraction

Posted on September 09, 2008
Notwithstanding my new gig, I haven't completely left the academic world behind. "The Rules of Abstraction," an article on a topic I first blogged about at the Volokh Conspiracy, has been published by the Review of Austrian Economics. (Online version; I'm not sure when the hard copy will be released...

Watch FRINGE, Tuesday on Fox

Posted on September 07, 2008
This is old news to most of my friends and family, but some of you might not have heard yet: I am currently taking a leave of absence from the university, because I?ve taken a position on the writing staff of a new television show, FRINGE, which debuts on Fox this Tuesday (8/7c)...

Z-Scores in Model of 2009 USN&WR Law School Rankings

Posted on August 26, 2008
U.S. News & World Report publishes scores for each of the hundred or so schools that it ranks highest, and offers some of the data that goes into calculating those scores. To really understand how each of those schools fared relative to its peers, however, you need to know its z-score in each category of data that USN&WR measures...

When Nudge Comes to Shove

Posted on August 25, 2008
Tim Harford is right: ?nudging? people to make better choices is best left to markets, not government. In politics, the nudging rubric simply provides cover for all manner of nanny-state schemes: ?Praising the egalitarian bonus scheme at John Lewis, the department store, is apparently a nudge...

Model of 2009 USN&WR Law School Rankings

Posted on August 16, 2008
As I have every year since 2006, I this year again tried to duplicate the law school rankings published by the U.S. News & World Report ("USN&WR"). Although it took me longer than usual to model the most recent rankings?the "2009" rankings, as USN&WR styles them?I ended up getting the best fit, yet...

Name that Law School

Posted on August 12, 2008
Law schools don't seem to care very much about staking out original names. Consider two Orange County law schools: Irvine University College of Law (founded in 1993), and the University of California, Irvine School of Law (which should start accepting student applications this fall)...

Practicing Practicing the Law

Posted on August 05, 2008
After teaching Contracts for ten years, I'm giving it up to teach Torts. I recall the best law profs of my 1L year cycling through the "Big Three" common law courses (Contracts, Torts, and Property), and I've long wanted to emulate that example. Unlike those, my academic heros, however, I plan to put my students to work practicing practicing the law...

A Copyright Giant Gives Up in Disgust

Posted on August 02, 2008
I regret to report the end of William F. Patry's Copyright Blog. Patry, author of a superb multi-volume treatise on copyright law and Google's Senior Copyright Counsel, not only offered a feast of news and commentary for copyright geeks; he offered it up in style...

Nice to Be Wanted

Posted on July 28, 2008
Rather than blogging, I've been spending my summer attending conferences, hanging out with my family and friends, surfing, working on a paper about consent theory, and indulging in a new hobby: composing and performing songs at open mikes. I've set a goal of performing three new songs each time I play at my favorite local open mike, held the first Monday of every month...

A Friend's Theory on Why Every Dollar Coin Fails

Posted on July 20, 2008
Because thrown dollar coins are too hard on the strippers.

Free Speech in Event Market Claims

Posted on July 08, 2008
In addition to a joint comment with a score of signers, I also responded to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)'s Concept Release on the Appropriate Regulatory Treatment of Event Contracts by firing off a solo comment. I there focused soley on question 14, in which the CFTC asked, "Should certain underlying events or measures--such as those based on assassinations or terrorist activities?be prohibited altogether due to the social perception and impact of such events? What statutory or other legal basis would support this treatment?"Much of my comment tracked the answer I posted here earlier...

The CFTC Deadline . . . Wavers

Posted on July 07, 2008
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)'s Concept Release on the Appropriate Regulatory Treatment of Event Contracts says, "Comments must be received by July 7, 2008." What deadline does that impose? I played it safe, and assumed that I had to send mine in before midnight, this morning...

Moral Concerns That Are .stupid

Posted on July 06, 2008
ICANN, the international non-profit that governs the naming scheme for the internet, has decided to allow ?almost any domain suffix,? rather than limiting the options to the familiar .com, .org, .net., etc. This sounds like good news... but why the ?almost??However, [ICANN chief executive Paul] Twomey told Agence France-Press that the organization will still try to block or reject any domain name that it deems inappropriate for security or moral reasons...

Let's Tell the CFTC Where to Go

Posted on July 03, 2008
The deadline looms for interested parties to respond to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission's request for comments about regulating prediction markets ("event markets" in the CFTC's usage). I may or may not get around to a detailed, point-by-point response to the CFTC's many questions...

Misconceptions About Health Insurance Premiums

Posted on July 01, 2008
David Lazarus reports, with a tone of righteous condemnation, that women pay higher health insurance premiums than men. Apparently Lazarus considers it obvious that the sexes ought to pay the same. But why? Premiums differ on the basis of both risk and cost...

Let Prediction Markets Fight Terrorism

Posted on June 23, 2008
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)'s recent request for comments about the regulation of prediction markets includes a number of specific questions. I am not sure whether I will manage to write up answers to all of them before the July 7 deadline, but question in particular?question 14?has attracted my attention...

Krugman on Food Safety

Posted on June 17, 2008
Paul Krugman kvetches, ?Without question, America?s food safety system has degenerated over the past six years.? Alex Tabarrok smacks him down with actual data, showing the trend in food-borne disease outbreaks is clearly downward.But what struck me about Krugman?s column was the following, offered as evidence that the FDA is falling down on the job: ?What we do know is that since 2001 the F...

Cato Unbound: Towards a Copyriot Act

Posted on June 16, 2008
Cato Unbound today published my reaction to Rasmus Fleisher's lead essay on the future of copyright. My essay, titled Towards a Copyriot Act?and Away from it, Again, describes "another future for copyright, one in which lawmakers impose crushing penalties to discourage rampant infringement...

An Economic Puzzle: Fixed Prices with Variable Unit Sizes

Posted on June 15, 2008
I?ve finally succeeded in inserting the code to make post extensions work (with the help of Hackosphere), so this seems like a good time to pose an economic puzzle I?ve been thinking about.In the absence of price controls, most goods and services respond to changes in conditions with changes in price, while the size of each unit remains fixed...

Under Construction

Posted on June 13, 2008
That Blogger template we were using was incredibly difficult to work with. So I'm experimenting with some alternative templates to see if they're any better.UPDATE: Argh. Blogger Beta is a f*$%ing straitjacket.

A Song for Loving Day

Posted on June 12, 2008
Happy Loving Day! On this date, forty-one years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court issued Loving v. Virginia, 88 U.S. 1 (1967), striking down state anti-miscegination laws as unconstitutional. All friends of liberty should venerate that worthy holding. Loving Day celebrations prove especially popular, though, among people born to parents of different races and among people in mixed race relationships...

Genetics and Life Expectancy

Posted on June 08, 2008
The major problem with using life expectancy to measure the quality of a country?s healthcare system is that life expectancy is affected by so many things other than healthcare: diet, crime, geography, education, and so on. And, of course, genetics...

Upgrading the Pledge of Allegiance

Posted on June 04, 2008
Back in 2005, I criticized the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance and offered an improved alternative. My version of aimed to correct "the odiously unconditional" demands of the present pledge and thus better honor the ideals that gave rise to the U.S. in the first place...

An Anti-Smoking Regulation I Can Support

Posted on June 01, 2008
Already barred from lighting up in restaurants, theaters and the office, Californians may also be banned from smoking in their apartments under a proposal passed by the state Senate on Thursday.At first I thought this was bad news -- yet another paternalist intrusion on the right of individuals to make their own health decisions...

Protecting Private Prediction Markets

Posted on May 21, 2008
My draft paper, Private Prediction Markets and the Law, offers a variety of detailed suggestions about how to protect the former from the latter. Specifically, I offer strategies for avoiding the scope of CFTC regulation, for discouraging liability for illegal insider trading, and for ensuring that a private prediction market does not offer gambling...

Building Exits into CFTC Regulation

Posted on May 19, 2008
Much of my draft paper, Private Prediction Markets and the Law, focuses on nuts-and-bolts fixes for the legal uncertainty that currently afflicts private prediction markets under U.S. law. I'll say more about those in later posts to Agoraphilia and Midas Oracle...

Legal Education from the Demand Side

Posted on May 15, 2008
We law professors spend a great deal of time thinking about how to help our students graduate and pass the Bar?how to supply the market with lawyers, in other words. We spend far less time thinking about the demand side of the equation?whether our students will find jobs...

Insider Trading and Private Prediction Markets

Posted on May 07, 2008
People who run in-house, corporate prediction markets have told me that U.S. laws against illegal insider trading give them nightmares. The problem arises because a private prediction market typically generates material nonpublic information about the corporation that hosts it...

Forget about Memorization

Posted on May 07, 2008
A recent article in Wired, Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm, offers both a fascinating sketch of Piotr Wozniak's single-minded pursuit of memorization and all that you need to know if you want to match his incredible achievements...

Communist Paternalism

Posted on April 22, 2008
It's scary how many people could draw exactly the wrong conclusion from this:When the Soviet empire began to unravel in 1989, Cuba was hit with serious food and fuel shortages. From 1991 to 1995, people were getting only about 1800 calories a day and had to walk or cycle wherever they needed to go...

Amsterdam on the Reservation

Posted on April 19, 2008
I'm currently attending a Liberty Fund conference on, "Liberty, Property, and Native America." The assigned readings, drawn largely from Self-Determination: The Other Path for Native Americans (2008), have exposed me to a wonderful range of new ideas...

Unintentional Humor

Posted on April 04, 2008
Or is it? Here's an advertisement for the Audi A5:Okay, I actually chuckled at the whole "you will [verb] one of these three [nouns]..." sequence. But when it got to the three cars, I thought that Audi would be one of them! Seriously, if you were going to add one more car to the sequence, "Mercedes, BMW, Lexus," wouldn't it be Audi? That's hardly breaking the cycle.

Obama: An Oppressed Minority Who Might End the War

Posted on April 04, 2008
As an oppressed minority, Barak Obama has seen life from a perspective all too rare among politicians. He has suffered being cast out of restaurants and other public accomodations. He has strived to pass himself off as a member of the ruling majority, only to have his efforts cast into doubt and his minority status thrown back into his face...

Musing about Correlations

Posted on March 27, 2008
In the course I'm currently teaching, the exams usually consist of two sections: multiple choice and short answer. I just finished recording the midterm grades, and for curiosity's sake I calculated the correlation between the two sections. For one class, the correlation between multiple choice and short answer was 0...

Death of the Diet: Doubting the Data

Posted on March 23, 2008
I wish I had known last Tuesday was ?Death of the Diet Day.? I probably would have celebrated it. It sounds like a really fun day.But why March 18th? That?s supposedly ?the day when more commitments will fall by the wayside than on any other day in the calendar? (in the U...

Listen to Me

Posted on March 19, 2008
I'm scheduled to be interviewed on Mike McConnell's radio show this morning (Wednesday) at 10:00 a.m. Eastern time. I'll be talking about the World Health Organization's ranking of national healthcare systems. The show is on Cincinnati's WLW (AM 700); you can listen to it live here; and it's also on XM satellite radio...

Transtemporal Economics

Posted on March 13, 2008
Tyler Cowen considers the economics of time travel. Actually, he starts with the economics of interstellar travel, but if you take relativity seriously, it?s the same thing. Tyler is most interested in how time travel in the presence of time dilation would affect interest rates (e...

Rum Thoughts

Posted on March 12, 2008
I recently finished reading -- and enjoying -- And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in Ten Cocktails. It's just what it sounds like. Each chapter is named after a rum drink, from kill-devil through the mojito, each drink representing an era of our history...

More Self-Promotion on Healthcare

Posted on March 12, 2008
At the American Spectator online, I have an op-ed based on my Cato Policy Briefing on the WHO healthcare rankings.The title ("WHOm Are They Kidding") was not my creation. While whom is grammatically correct in that sentence, in general I think it's okay to use who in idiomatic sayings like "who are you kidding," "who's fooling who," and "who do you think you're fooling" -- traditional grammar rules notwithstanding.

Technology as Modularity

Posted on March 10, 2008
Via Arnold Kling, I found this interview with Drew Endy, a professor of biological engineering at MIT. It?s long, meandering, and sometimes repetitive, but still fascinating reading. The main lesson I extracted from it (and it would be hard to explain how, much less find specific quotations for support) is that technology is useful to the extent that it promotes modularity...

As You Sow, So Shall You Reap

Posted on March 10, 2008
The only people I think should be prosecuted for victimless crimes are people who have prosecuted others for those crimes. Eliot Spitzer qualifies.(Via Radley.)

A Puzzle

Posted on March 07, 2008
What do handguns and soda containers have in common?Leave answers in the comments section. (Yes, yes... I realize there's an infinite possible number of correct answers -- they're both tangible, they're both products, etc. -- but in keeping with the convention of puzzles like this, you have to find the relatively narrow and interesting category into which both fall...

Against the Drug War

Posted on March 06, 2008
Via Radley, here is an outstanding editorial by the creators of The Wire advocating an end to the drug war. At the end, they call for outright jury nullification:If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented...

State vs. Community

Posted on March 05, 2008
I really liked this post by Jonah Goldberg (linked by Arnold Kling):... I don't know that you should be against building community and helping the community. I'm not against either of those things. What I generally (though not absolutely) oppose are efforts to build the state while invoking the language of community as if the two are the same thing...

Mixed Feelings

Posted on March 05, 2008
I mildly prefer Obama to Hillary, for pretty much the reasons given by Radley Balko and David Boaz. Nevertheless, I wasn't terribly disappointed by last night's big win for Hillary. Why not? Because politics is most easy to stomach when taken as a form of entertainment...

Good for Her

Posted on February 29, 2008
Excellent. Maybe this will finally put an end to the stupid (and I think recent) trend of highly public marriage proposals. I feel slightly bad for the guy, but only slightly. Against his pain, you should weigh the distress of all the women ever pressured into a "yes" by one of these stunts...

Getting from Collective Intelligence to Collective Action

Posted on February 28, 2008
I really enjoyed attending the Collective Intelligence FOO Camp, sponsored by Google and O'Reilly Media, last weekend. I'd been expecting a sort of geek slumber party, and had looked forward to rolling out my awesome Darth Vader impersonation. I was all set to cut loose with a growling, "I'm your father, Luke...

High Tech, 2008 vs. 1988

Posted on February 28, 2008
Here is a fantastic article comparing both prices (nominal and inflation-adjusted) and features of technology products now versus twenty years ago. I especially appreciate the features comparison, because even inflation-adjustment can't account for quality improvements...

Do Teens Commit Suicide More Often?

Posted on February 27, 2008
According to stereotype, yes. But not according to the data.I?ve finally returned to my old suicide project, which had been moldering in a (virtual) drawer for quite a long time. With the help of a new co-author, I?ve been analyzing the results of a bunch of regressions...

Self-Promotion on Healthcare

Posted on February 27, 2008
The Cato Institute has just released my Briefing Paper, "WHO's Fooling Who? The World Health Organization's Problematic Ranking of Health Care Systems." The arguments will be familiar to readers of this blog, since most of them were aired here first, but there's also some new material in there...

The Specter of Copyism v. Blockheaded Authors

Posted on February 26, 2008
Just posted on SSRN: The Specter of Copyism v. Blockheaded Authors: How User-Generated Content Affects Copyright Policy. Here's the abstract:Technological advances, because they have radically lowered the costs of creating and distributing expressive works, have shaken the foundations of copyright policy...

Gaming the Electoral College

Posted on February 25, 2008
Somehow I didn?t realize until this election year that the Republicans and Democratics don?t have exactly as many delegates for their nominating convention as there are electors in the electoral college. There are 538 electors (found by adding the number of reps and senators from each state, plus three for D...

In the News: Guy Likes to Surf

Posted on February 21, 2008
To my amazement, the O.C. Register ran a twee report about how I used surfing to motivate my sabbatical book project. The reporter, Marla Jo Fisher, evidently read my blog post on the topic, and thought that it would make a cute "slice of life" sort of story...

Quake Markets

Posted on February 21, 2008
Markets offer us a potentially useful tool for predicting earthquakes. Imagine the San Andreas fault divided into segments, each of which carries a price based on the present discounted disvalue of a future quake. That price would reflect both a quake's place in time and its place on the Richter scale...

Sexual Signaling

Posted on February 14, 2008
This doesn't surprise me at all:Bennett Galef's team at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, placed two male rats behind mesh screens at either end of a tank, one of which had recently copulated with a female. A number of different female rats were then placed, separately, in the middle of the tank...

Folding Heart Card, Uncopyrighted

Posted on February 14, 2008
[NB: Updated; please see concluding paragraphs.]As a matter of policy, we should favor love. It generates many private and public benefits. Individuals or communities short of love suffer terribly. Those rich in it thrive.Please allow me to offer one small step towards encouraging love: An uncopyrighted (and thus public domain) card...

How to Settle

Posted on February 13, 2008
Lori Gottlieb?s spirited defense of ?settling? in the mating market makes a number of good points, but it suffers, in my opinion, from a lack of marginal thinking. The question is not to settle or not to settle, but how much to settle. There is no such thing as the absolutely perfect, 100% match ? and even if there were, it would be foolish to wait too long for it...

Correlation versus Causation

Posted on February 13, 2008
I have a friend-of-a-friend who refuses to drink diet soda, on grounds that it makes you fat. The evidence? The fact that so many diet-soda drinkers are fat. Our friend-in-common refers to this guy as "the Caveman." I think the Caveman would appreciate this article, which notes a statistical correlation between drinking diet soda and having metabolic syndrome (a combination of cardiovascular risk factors including abdominal obesity and high blood pressure):The scientists gathered dietary information on more than 9,500 men and women ages 45 to 64 and tracked their health for nine years...

The Packet-Switched Society

Posted on February 08, 2008
Two sharply contrasting views dominate the debate over copyright policy. On the one hand?the left one, we might say?copyrights represent mere policy tools, no better in principle than any other legal mechanism and, indeed, more modern, rationally planned, and democratically chosen that anything the common law can offer...

Darwin Awards Imposter

Posted on January 28, 2008
The 2007 Darwin Awards have been announced, but if you think you?ve read them, you may be mistaken. Here is the list forwarded to me by email, and the winner sounds like the real deal:When his 38-caliber revolver failed to fire at his intended victim during a hold-up in Long Beach, California , would-be robber James Elliot did something that can only inspire wonder...

That's My Boy

Posted on January 18, 2008
Our cat, Hamlet, died last night. He'd been in poor health for some time, wasting away before our eyes, so his death came as no surprise. Hamlet lived far longer than we had expected, did not seem to suffer a great deal, and remained with us to the end...

Bad Signaling

Posted on January 18, 2008
This morning I saw an ad for Kinoki foot pads, which allegedly suck toxins out through the soles of your feet while you sleep. Right. But if the description alone wasn?t sufficient to set off your B.S.-detector, this should: they will send you a two-week supply for $19...

Copyrights as Positive Natural Rights

Posted on January 17, 2008
[I earlier explained why copyrights do not qualify as natural rights under Locke's theory of property. Here, I explain why the same holds true under Barnett's positivist account of natural rights. Both passages come from my draft book, Intellectual Privilege: Copyright, Common Law, and the Common Good...

A Casting Out of Thousands

Posted on January 15, 2008
Well, see, here?s the danger in even suggesting ideological excommunication. From the comments on my prior post:But while we're excommunicating people from the libertarian movement, why not include Palmer and his associates at CATO? After all, many of them endorsed the concept of preemptive war, which last time I checked violates oh, the entire philosophical underpinning of libertarianism...

Whom to Cast Out and Why

Posted on January 11, 2008
Tim Sandefur says the time has come for libertarians as a group to excommunicate the racist-paleoconservatives among us ? especially those associated with Lew Rockwell and the (criminally misnamed) Mises Institute.[W]e need to face up to the serious conflict within our ranks, between the neo-Confederates at the Mises Institute on one hand, and what James Kirchik calls ?the urbane libertarians who staff the Cato Institute or the libertines at Reason magazine? on the other...

Surge from the Grave

Posted on January 11, 2008
I eagerly await the neo-con op-eds telling us The Surge has been so spectacularly successful, it has not only reduced the monthly death toll in Iraq, it has actually raised 849,000 Iraqis from the dead!

George MacDonald Fraser, R.I.P.

Posted on January 11, 2008
One of my very favorite authors is dead at the age of 82. I guess I will never know how Harry Flashman came to serve on both sides of the U.S. Civil War.

But Did He Attach a Chainsaw to the Stump?

Posted on January 10, 2008
Crazy.

Google Thinks I Live in Spain

Posted on January 09, 2008
Anyone know how to fix this? I already checked to make sure English is selected in my preferences.

The Libertarian Small Sample Problem

Posted on January 09, 2008
The Ron Paul newsletter scandal (summarized by Arnold Kling here and Radley Balko here) underscores what I see as the most difficult PR issue for libertarianism: the small-sample problem.Given the relative rarity of libertarians, both in the public eye and in general, most people?s judgment of libertarianism will be based on a very small sample ? often a sample size of one...

How Surfing Saved My Sabbatical

Posted on January 08, 2008
What motivates tenured law professors to write? I suppose that some do so as second nature, as automatically as lesser scholars breath. Perhaps other law profs write out of a heroic sense of duty, confident that what they publish will change the world for the better...

Global Warming Insurance?

Posted on January 07, 2008
Just a quick thought about global warming rhetoric, which came to mind while reading this Marginal Revolution post and the linked posts by Jim Manzi. Some of those who advocate taking major steps (starting with a hefty carbon tax) to stop global warming say doing so is a way of ?buying insurance? against a major catastrophic event...

Monkey Prostitution?

Posted on January 05, 2008
If this is prostitution, then most women I've dated are prostitutes:The [macaque] males use grooming as a form of currency to buy sex from the female, the study found. ... Left to her own desires, a female macaque mates about 1.5 times an hour, but that rate jumps to 3...

The Common Law from Satellite

Posted on January 04, 2008
[My forthcoming book spends a lot of time contrasting copyright with the common law. I thus thought that I should say at least a little about what I mean by the latter.][C]ommon law originates in custom, wins recognition in courts, and develops in commentary...

Copyright, Mapped

Posted on January 02, 2008
All copyrighted works originate as ideas, born when authors choose how to express themselves. The slightest exercise of discretion will suffice; just about anything more original than an alphabetical listing of names can qualify for copyright protection...

New Year's Reaffirmations, One-Shots, and Coordinations

Posted on December 31, 2007
In general, I don?t advocate New Year?s resolutions. I think most resolutions worth making are worth making any time of year, not just at the beginning. Moreover, your ability to make and keep a resolution is a function of your will power, preferences, and circumstances...

What and How to Think About Immigration

Posted on December 31, 2007
It?s Kerry Howley versus Megan McArdle on immigration. Kerry favors a guest-worker program, while Megan opposes it (see here, here, here, and here.I won?t weigh in on the topic itself, fascinating though it is. I?m more interested in trying to parse why they disagree...

When Will They Learn?

Posted on December 27, 2007
Bayes' Rule, dammit, Bayes' Rule! You don't go giving tests to everyone for a disease without having some prior reason to think they might have it! The false positives will almost certainly outweigh the true positives.

Copyright's Path

Posted on December 27, 2007
Works of authorship originate in private, safely kept under common law protections. Once published, however, expressive works become data ferae naturae?wild and natural information. As such, expressive works roam and reproduce freely. They may get captured in fixed copies, caged in atoms or bits...

Discouraging Just Enough Infringement

Posted on December 25, 2007
While rightly shuddering at specter of copyism, we should also recognize that the unauthorized use of copyrighted works can, if it does not go so far as to undercut authors' incentives, increase social wealth. Consider, for instance, an impoverished entrepreneur relying on pirated software to start her business...

The Specter of Copyism

Posted on December 24, 2007
On the standard economic view of copyrights, as on the economic view of other monopolies, average revenue equals demand. Those two measures trace one and the same line. Why? Because for most products and services, consumption closely matches supply at the market-clearing price...

The Standard Economic Model of Copyright

Posted on December 23, 2007
Creating a work can cost authors a lot, whereas copying a work costs others very little. Absent copyright, then, authors might find it discouragingly difficult to recoup the costs of creating fixed expressive works. Authors might then underproduce expressive works, and the public consequently suffer...

Atheist Holidays

Posted on December 22, 2007
Dinesh D'Souza feigns ignorance.Yes, I agree that many nominal Christians have also forgotten the message of Christmas. Even so I wonder: what's the atheist equivalent of Christmas? Darwin's birthday?To which Radley Balko, an agnostic, aptly replies:[M]y ?equivalent? of Christmas is ...

Explaining the RAND Experiment

Posted on December 21, 2007
At Overcoming Bias, David Balan ponders the counterintuitive results of the famous RAND health insurance study. The RAND study gave one group of patients more generous coverage, and a second group of patients less generous coverage. Not surprisingly, the former group consumed a lot more health services...