Nuclear Subs

Zane notes that India's not got 'em.

It strikes me as ironic that, actually, the Indians probably have more uses for nuclear subs at the moment than the US does. Not only do we have enough weaponry for use against conventional foes without our subs roaming the deep, but we also don't have a major conventional adversary at the moment.

And of course, we're still building them--18 new ones coming off the line from Electric Boat, starting in 2008 (for something like 1.8 billion a pop).

Isn't this money better spent on... I don't know... millions of pounds of jelly beans or massive trampolines in all US elementary schools? Or (more seriously) improved counter-insurgent weaponry or a larger intelligence apparatus?

Libertarianism

Over at the Monkey Cage, they're talking about libertarianism, and it's possible death in the near future.

I don't have much to add on this topic, but as a guy with libertarian tendencies, it has always puzzled me why "libertarianism" is always equated with extremism. I sometimes describe myself as a "moderate libertarian," only half-joking, and people laugh. Why? You can be a moderate Democrat or Republican, but not a moderate libertarian, marxist, or (in the US), a moderate Socialist?

It isn't true that you're either a Marxist or not--there are many different varieties of Marxism, some more radical than others (compare, for example, the mild Marxist tinge of the dependency theorists like Cardoso and Prebisch to the Adolf Hitler grade of insanity of Ariel Guzman and the Shining Path).

Likewise, there are more and less insane versions of libertarianism.

So why does libetarianism need to be an on/off kind of thing. Does libertarianism have to die? Or can it become more moderate?

M. Jackson Tribute

In case I haven't made it abundantly clear, I think the amount of
attention paid to Michael Jackson is ridiculous. Nevertheless, you
should all check out the following M. Jackson tribute, a remake of
Billie Jean. Awesome.

For some reason, Google isn't letting me sign on at the moment, so I
can't make a direct link, but here's the web address:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/laplaza/2009/07/mexico-mourns-mj-with-tribute.html

More on shady missionaries

Blattman turned me on to this post on development blog "Blood and Milk" on missionaries. I agree with much of what they say.

Market prices for lumber and exportation

When I was at ISNIE, Krister told me that one of the things that we have
to figure out is a way to get local market prices for lumber in the
regression model, to satisfy all the economists. However, when I
mentioned that I was looking for a source of lumber prices to my
interviewees today, things didn't look so good for me getting a single
data source on this type of information:

The dude actually reached into the garbage can, pulled out a crumpled up
sheet of paper, un-crinkled it, and read off a list of prices to me.

I was thinking, though, about the rest of the interview. These guys
told me that by far the biggest market for these products is the US
export market--they were describing how lumber prices went down by more
than a third after the ATP-DEA was canceled (I must have written about
the ATP-DEA before...

If this industry is pretty much driven by the cost of lumber in the
United States, therefore, there shouldn't be that much difference in
prices across municipalities for the stuff. However, these guys
explained to me how the biggest cost--the biggest thing affecting their
profitability (or rather, the profitability of the local communities) is
the cost of transportation, and this too has been impacted with the
rising gas of gasoline (which has actually gone down again here, but
which is still pretty expensive, especially for Bolivians).

Therefore, it might make sense to model the profitability of these firms
by modeling transportation costs. I should be able to do this using
ArcGIS, although I might need to track somebody down in the Geography
department. And I need to find out where the lumber actually goes
before it's shipped to the states, so I can trace the shipping route
effectively.

Appetite for deconstruction?

The comedor that I've been eating at here in San Ignacio was open again
tonight--it must be getting to be close enough to the weekend that all
the rich Santa Cruz kids are coming out for vacay, because the place had
more people than I had seen there before. Half-drunk guys drinking bad
Bolivian beer and shouting at the girls as they walk by, and a visibly
dirty Bolivian hippie rolling cigarettes (what kind, I can only guess)
at his table.

While a couple of burros pulling a cart of firewood walked by, turned
the corner, and headed around the plaza and motorbikes with two or three
people riding whined by, some dude in curly hair got up, put a couple of
Bolivian pesos in the jukebox and started playing "Sweet Child 'o Mine."

And I'm back, a couple thousand miles away and about fifteen years ago,
thinking about high school, boy scouts, strip malls and rusty domestic
automobiles in the half-hick part of Connecticut (which sounds like a
contradiction until you've been to my hometown and seen the guys that
are still wearing mullets and acid wash jeans).

Thinking about climbing Mount Washington with my boy scout troop, with
John Murphy (who is now in Iraq) repeatedly shouting "we're all going to
die!" then laughing wildly; Driving home from school in a rusty '87
Chevy station wagon with a dent on the roof where we'd sat up there too
many times, filled with me and seven others, two trumpets, a baritone
sax and a tuba (Danny K. is still playing, and that tuba is probably
still playing, too); Eating an apparently endless flow of Taco Bell
chile-cheese burritos and only leaving the place when the floor was
covered in broken sporks and straw wrappers; Bill Horka blowing the
radio fuse in my car by sticking the tongue of the seatbelt in between a
couple of exposed posts in the broken interior light; Melting a nylon
jacket while lighting things on fire in a culvert under a rail-trail
behind another Nick Cohs' house--not far from where he still lives;
Shooting glass bottles with a bb gun--glass bottles filled with paint
thinner, stuffed with a rag and lit on fire--and nearly starting a
forest fire; Heading out to the mall in the days before cell phones,
looking for Dave, thinking (correctly, as it turns out) that I would be
able to spot him because of the really loud shirt.

I wouldn't ever want to go back, but I sure get a kick out of thinking
about that stuff now. Too many memories to write about.

Fried chicken (woot!) And comparative advantage (boo!)

I was a little worried that the fried chicken I got the other night wouldn't
sit right with me, but I couldn't taste any pig flu in it, and my
stomach hasn't been playing any Ethel Waters tunes, so I think I'm good
to go.

Man, though, I could really go for a burrito.

When the heck are the Bolivians going to catch on to the fact that they
should completely abandon any pretenses at a local culinary tradition
and just start eating Mexican food and waffles all the time?

I've been thinking about my post the other day on comparative advantage,
and I'm not sure that what I was saying is right (big surprise, I know).

Basically, what I said is that a desire for local competitiveness and
tax revenue should cause local governments to promote industries in
which the municipality enjoys a comparative advantage. Consequently,
local government intervention in local economies will tend towards
efficiency, as long as there are no serious barriers to competition with
firms in other municipalities.

I think that the assumptions I was making were that (a) municipalities
are primarily seekers of income, and (b) income primarily comes from
local sources. Both of these assumptions are wrong. Municipalities do
seek income, but they seek income to pursue political gains (victory in
elections being the most important goal).

Therefore, any economic interventions of municipal governments must
follow a much more complicated logic:

They will be interested in:
1. How much electoral benefit they will receive from a given
policy--how many votes they will win per dollar spent in a given policy,
compared to the benefits of other types of policies.
2. How much economic benefit the municipality will receive from a given
policy, transformed into the electoral benefits of that policy. In
other words, if a policy gains the mayor no political support, but
increases revenues, he needs to consider how much his revenues will
increase by, and how much political support that increase in revenues
will buy him when invested in other types of policies.
3. Which of the many policies--and what combination of policies (both
policies that increase revenue and increase political support) will
guarantee the mayor the minimum amount of support needed to gain him a
victory in the next election.

This combination won't necessarily be economically efficient, but it
does imply a political efficiency, defined as getting the most political
support for the dollar invested. In some ways, this type of efficient
may be more "just" than economic efficiency, because it means that the
largest number of individuals possible (under ideal conditions) are
benefiting from a given set of municipal policies, as opposed to an
economic efficiency, in which efficient government in an economic sense
would presumably permit citizens to gain the most money per dollar
invested, without any recognition of the distribution of income
resulting from that investment (could be that one guy makes a pile of
money and everybody else makes nothing, and that would still be defined
as an efficient outcome, but wouldn't be a just or desirable one).

Economists have pretty well established that, under many conditions, the
most economically efficient government is one that intervenes as little
as possible in the economy. That may promote economic efficiency, but
we don't always like the other kinds of outcomes that produces.

¡Feliz Día de Independencia!

Hey y'all, happy 4th of July. I'm looking forward to being back in the
states for it next year (first time in at least three years.)

Pig flu again

Saw my first pig flu masks in San Ignacio today. Pig flu insanity.
Tomorrow morning, I won't be able to understand anybody because the
whole town will be masked. And the following day, the whole town will
actually be covered in a huge pile of pig flu masks to a depth of
fifteen feet. After that, the masks will develop the ability to reason
for themselves, and will drive humans out of the settlement, solving all
of the communities' deforestation problems by increasing substantially
all taxes on ranching and forest extraction. But by then, I'll be in
Chile, since it will be at least another couple of days before the masks
can solve their collective action problems and write a constitution.

Pig Flu

The Bolivians are swine flu crazy, at least down in Sta. Cruz. Can't
buy a bloody ice cream cone without having to deal with some surly
teenager in a facemask. Fortunately, things are a little more
reasonable out here in the boondocks. Haven't seen a single mask since
leaving the Sta. Cruz bus terminal.

_La Razon_, the Bolivian newspaper I read online (the only one with a
dependable RSS feed, albeit one that feeds me 300 articles a day)
reports that the pig flu has gotten to Potosí. Probably a good time for
flu in Potosí, as the weather up there now is freezing at night, and all
the good people of that fine city have to huddle together for warmth
when it gets cold, since there is nary a heater nor wood stove to be
found (it's above treeline anyways, so there's no wood for burning, or
not much, anyways).

On the other hand, down in Sta. Cruz it never gets very cold, and yet
people pretty much seem to be freaking out, or at least freaking out as
much as Bolivians do (they're a pretty resilient bunch, as they're used
to roadblocks that last for months and obstruct food supplies, as well
as mobs assaulting the national bank, as well as invasions by
privatizing US imperialists and Chileans. And guys with moustaches.)

I find it amusing that the beauty queen of the Chiquitanía region, where
I am currently located, is "Señorita Litoral," "Miss Coastline."
Speaking of resilient Bolivians and Chilean invasions. I also ride to
and from the La Paz in the "Coastline" cab company cabs, and I take a
"Coastline" bus from La Paz to Cochabamba. I'm looking forward to
getting to ride on Argentinian and/or Chilean buses that are named
non-socially obsessive things like "Arrow Bus" and "Chile Bus."

Cumbia sucks.

Face it. It does. Compared to cumbia, the backstreet boys are (were?)
freaking J.S. Bach. Only two things are worse than cumbia. Chrysler
minivans and raw tomatoes.

Ranting and raving...

...is not what I'm doing now (or am about to do), but what I sat through
about an hour ago. I was supposed to interview one of the members of
the municipal council, but the municipal lawyer forgot to tell them that
I was coming, so instead, I got to listen to the lawyer rant about
Cousin Evo for about 45 minutes. I love listening to people tell me how
well treated the indigenous folks were before Evo came around. Really.
Love it.

So I went out for fried chicken after.

Okay, I didn't actually go to fried chicken to cleanse myself of the
ranting and raving. I got chicken because I couldn't find any other
restaurant open in this town. I did find a place, though, where you
could get really good baked goods, but I wanted ice cream, so I got some
coconut ice cream on a stick.

It's not Carhuaz, but it'll do.

Take that, Kirchner!

First, let me preface this by saying that I don't know jack about
Argentine politics today. Still, Cristina Kirchner is kind of creepy in
a Sarah Palin-esque way, and I think it's totally shady that the
Kirchner family has been doing everything in their power to keep it in
the family.

So I'm kind of happy that they did so poorly in the mid-term elections
this week.

Maybe I should watch my mouth, though, since I'll probably be heading to
Chile through Argentina coming right up here. Keep my opinions to myself.

Al Franken again

...okay, not totally unrepresented, but half unrepresented. You know
what I mean. Geezums. (As the Maineiacs would say)

Al Franken

While the GOP tries to convince everybody that it really isn't that big
of a deal that the Dems have 60 seats, let me just express my disgust at
the fact that Minnesota has been unrepresented by _anyone_ for five and
a half months.