I Was Grumpy

The WSJ published an amusing article about how parents are going to great lengths to pick ever more unusual (perhaps even bizarre) names for their kids. This prompted a large number of letters to the editor lamenting the practice. One reader suggested that we pass a law requiring that all children be named after one of the Seven Dwarfs and then be allowed to select their own name at 16. Ha! That made my day!

Selected Readings

I can’t keep up with posting links to all of the good articles I find on the Web, so I’m making a change. I’ve created a Web Page called Selected Readings, which itself contains links to several Google Notebooks. Each notebook page contains a brief quote from an article I’ve found interesting and a link to the article. The topics are Healthcare, Immigration, and Political Economy. I hope to expand and refine these soon. Check out Selected Readings.

Online Docs, Revisited

I have, from time to time, written about the use of online documents, particularly those using the services of Zoho and Google. I’ve tried to compare the services, but any information I provide is short lived. Both Zoho and Google update their products frequently. I’ve been using Zoho Writer for a while now, but now I see that Google has updated their word processing with a cool document management system. Call me a trogdolyte, but I like the old-fashioned ability to use folders to organize information. I will probably to spend some time with Google Docs again. But because there seems to be a never ending escalation of capabilities, I wouldn’t call this a final decision.

A more basic question that I’m often asked is whether online docs are worth the effort. Are they as good as using offline document software such as Word, OpenOffice, or NeoOffice? For many uses, the online versions are almost as good in terms of capabilities provided to the user, although some capabilities are lacking and response time is sometimes iffy. The lack of page control in Zoho Writer, for example, keeps me from using it for all of my document work. (I see that Google Docs now claims to support simple pagination - another reason to take a second look).
But the online versions have some great advantages that, in my case, compensate for their shortcomings. First and foremost is the fact that I trust Google or Zoho to do a better job of securing my documents. I don’t know exactly how they manage backups and data recovery, but I’m sure they apply more expertise and effort than I will! A secondary reason is the ability to integrate the online documents with other aspects of online life - publishing a document, sharing with another author, linking to Web pages, etc. All of these things are easier and better in the world of online documents.

Pricing for Dummies

Now that gasoline prices are heading down (at least for the moment), do people think there is a conspiracy among the big oil companies to impoverish themselves? Nothing seems to make people quite as irrational as gasoline prices. Of course, people don’t understand pricing in general. Even those who claim to understand pricing often have a limited idea of how it works. For a good readable description of how pricing really works, try Frank Shostak’s explanation.

We Are The Borg

Jane Galt gets it mostly right in her comments about illegal immigration. Lots of things are illegal and most of us have probably “broken the law”. In terms of illegality and its consequences, I can’t understood why people worry so much about people working illegally and worry so little about the carnage on our highways, due in part to violations of traffic laws. Maybe my sense of proportion is different.

I think Jane is right: the real underlying issue is the alien part of “illegal alien”, not the illegal part. That doesn’t make people bigots. There are principled reasons for being concerned that an influx of aliens could overwhelm our institutions and culture. We’ve had these concerns before with the Chinese, the Jews, the Italians, the Irish, and the Cubans. The threat level seems low to me. After all, we value our culture and institutions because of good results. Others, who want those same results, seem more likely to be assimilated than to overthrow or undermine the system.

Goodbye Yahoo

As I’ve mentioned, Yahoo has discontinued their photo hosting service. This will sour me on Yahoo for a long long time. They do at least offer a way to migrate to various other hosting services. I’ve researched the options and will try what looks to be least painful. I’ll report back on this (probably) gruesome adventure. Wish me luck.

Back From Safari

I while back, I decided to start using Safari, Apple’s Web browser for the Mac and now for PCs. Safari takes less memory than Firefox and seems to run faster, plus it has a couple of neat features.

My experiment was short lived. I’m back to Firefox. There were simply too many “Web 2″ sites that either didn’t run at all or ran very poorly. I even tried the Safari 3 beta, which was better, but it had some bizarre renderings of sites I use frequently.

I might try Safari 3 again when it’s completed Beta, but for now, I’ll stick with Firefox.

To Your Health

The problem with health care costs may not be what we think it is. There are interesting explanations that go beyond conventional wisdom.

Everyone seems worried about health care. Arnold Kling is following up his discussion of Douglass North’s insights by applying them to the problem of health care. If you remember, North’s basic idea is that economics is driven by institutions and institutions are driven by beliefs. Kling argues that our beliefs about health care are wrong and that there can be no substantial improvement until our beliefs change. It seems to me that given what we know about cognitive bias, the chances of changing belief systems seem scant.

Indeed, our health care system is distorted because the market for health care is distorted by government intervention. Lots of folks want to increase the distortion. I doubt that health care will get less crazy anytime soon.

Testing Truisms

As long as I can remember, I’ve heard and thought that the GI Bill, which educated so many after World War II and the Korean War, was a good thing. The huge increase in doctors, engineers, teachers, etc. just had to be good. There are, however, other points of view. I’m not entirely convinced, but as I’ve learned more about economics, I’m increasingly open to counterintuitive ideas. Could it be that we would have been better off without the GI Bill?

The Dead Weight We Carry

I keep thinking about Byran Kaplan’s thesis: we are inclined to individually make poor judgements and will therefore collectively make poor judgments. This explains a lot about politics.

But are we really inclined to make poor judgments? Alas, it is so, because of cognitive bias.

So what kind of poor judgement is going on these days? Well, we could start by looking at Congress working to create a gasoline shortage (as well as trying [but failing] to undermine the most basic notions of fairness). Naturally, this is just as the summer driving season arrives. With a little work, we could probably identify several forms of cognitive bias at work in Washington.

I have a little more sympathy for politicians these days. They must appear to do what voters want, but avoid doing it because it would be a real disaster. And they must do this while wrestling with their own cognitive bias!

Are we doomed because of cognitive bias? I think not. After all, it’s not a new problem and the biases can be overcome with discipline. This is the importance of economics: it forces more disciplined thinking. Education, in general, has the same advantage. But the implications are that progress comes slow and hard, carrying a lot of dead weight. If education is the answer, I wonder if it’s not too important to be left to schools?