Chart of the day…

I’m a big lover of charts, so maybe I’ll try to make this a daily thing.  Anyway, here is the chart of the day, and possibly the year.  Via Yglesias

Enjoy your brand new Parliament!

So, I read Pop’s post on bipartisanship with interest, and I just wanted to add a comment or two.  I mostly want to say that I think Pops is mostly right, but doesn’t go far enough.  It’s true that it’s good to have varying viewpoints in the discussion, and he’s right to say that at least to this point that viewpoint has come from conservative Democrats rather than liberal Republicans, but I don’t think that’s due to some coincidence.

The fact is that in the initial votes in the Senate and House, the controlling vote was owned by a conservative Democrat.  In the case of the Senate, when the initial vote took place, there were sixty Ds and forty Rs, so the four or five most conservative democrats set the agenda.   If the vote were to happen again today, the alternative viewpoint would come from the three or four most liberal Republicans.

That’s really just a tangent though, the fact is that so long as you have a “yea” or “nay” vote, you’re going to have at least some diversity of opinion even if we did just have a one party system.  However, the spectrum of opinions on health care reform is far broader than has been represented in the debate so far, and a political system that resulted in us hearing more of this debate would certainly be superior.  If we had a system with four or five separately organized parties, we would presumably see at least some more diversity of opinion.  I’d love to see FiveThirtyEight or someone try to game this out to see what our brand spankin’ new parliament would look like and how that might affect specific issues.

Pay for sex?

So, I discovered today that the NPR iPod app gives me access to recordings of many recent Intelligence Squared debates, so I spent a good chunk of the day listening to a few of them. Quite a few of them were really interesting and entertaining, and if you haven’t already, I would definitely recommend them. One in particular drew my attention, though not because it was particularly good, but because I felt like the debaters dropped the ball on a key point. The question was “Is it wrong to pay for sex?”

The debate broke down along fairly obvious lines. On the one hand you had people saying that prostitution is the worst thing ever, and on the other hand people saying “Ehh, maybe not.” Predictably, Tyler Cowen (some of whose thoughts on the subject you can see here) argued that prostitution was maybe sometimes good, and maybe sometimes bad, but most of the real harm either stems from, or is exacerbated by, ineffective or unjust enforcement. That was about as interesting as the discussion got, which I thought was really too bad.

Anyway, I think the failure of the discussion stemmed from its starting point. Of course prostitution is wrong; that’s boring. The real question is, if we assume that prostitution is both inevitable (debate that point if you must, but it’s called the world oldest profession for a reason) and wrong, then what is the proper ethical response for the government to take? Do you legalize prostitution and try to reduce the harm caused by prostitution that way? Or do you decide that prostitution is too evil to condone and do your best reduce its frequency by putting steep mandatory minimums on purchasing sex? Or some other clever solution?

At any rate, I think we can all agree that the current situation, whereby we call prostitution illegal, don’t enforce it much, if at all, and focus what little enforcement we do have on prostitutes, is the worst possible policy response from an ethical standpoint.

1,000 lawyers in a deep sea trench…

I think I’d like to make basketball the subject of my inaugural post. You see, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the negotiations leading up to agreeing on a new collective bargaining agreement. There a lot of points of contention, lots of issues to be hashed out, but the gist of it is that the owners are feeling pinched by decreased revenues owing to the recession, and are looking to cut their personnel costs. This, to sort of stop before I even start, is total nonsense, see here. But what’s interesting to me is the owner claim and proposed solution, not reality.

With a fairly fixed numbers of players per team cutting personnel costs primarily means convincing players to swallow lower salaries. In effect admitting that teams have not, through the usual means of negotiation, been able to control the compensation packages of their employees. The basic problem is that the existing soft salary cap system in the NBA allows teams to go over the salary cap in order to retain players already on the team. When it was initiated, this was meant to allow teams that had one way or another acquired a great team to keep it together. Unfortunately, in practice, it has meant that the teams’ middle management face a lot of pressure from their stakeholders, I mean fans, to hold on to their better players no matter what. Then the salaries for the rest of players are forced up by the inflated contracts.

That is to say that the purported problem, according to a bunch of corporate owners, is that they and a team of highly knowledgeable, motivated managers are incapable of making rational decisions about the compensation of their employees. So, what is the proposed solution? Well, what about a umbrella rule, a kind of financial regulation that would prevent the excessive  inflation of salaries by putting an absolute limit on player compensation per team?

Maybe you’ve seen where I’ve been going with this. There is, as it happens, another industry much in the news lately, where the compensation of the employees has famously gotten out of control. Except that whereas in the case of the NBA the players’ compensations have maybe contributed to a ugly financial situation for a couple of teams, in the banking industry, the compensation of inflation of employees salaries has at least continued in spite of the complete collapse of the industry, and quite possibly caused that collapse by a perversion of incentives. What’s the solution in the NBA? Regulation. But in the banking industry? Oh no, that would cause the FINANCIAPOCALYPSE!

Anyway…as that wasn’t really all that much about the NBA, I’ll just add that I don’t know how the hell this Dallas team happened. That’s just a monstrous team. I’m not the least bit surprised that they’re on a 13-game win streak, and for my money they’re the favorites to win the Championship now. I mean, we’re talking about a team that could plausible go big and put Dirk Nowitzki at SF or go small with him at the C and Shawn Marion at PF.