THE MEANING OF AUTONOMY Great post from Catallarchy:

Consider two men: one a lone nomadic hunter on some primitive savanna thousands of years ago, and one an ordinary, downtrodden citizen of a modern totalitarian but non-genocidal dictatorship, say the Soviet Union of Brezhnev’s time. Who has more autonomy?

On Bill’s account, it’s gotta be the Soviet. He has a wider range of professions and life-paths available to him by far; he can travel much further and know much more; he can expect to live much longer. It is true that the Soviet is heavily constrained in the sense that there are numerous innocent things which, if he does them, will result in severe pain or violent death. But that’s true for the hunter too; the only difference is that for the hunter the pain/death will come at the hands of animals, diseases, and other natural forces, where for the Soviet it will come from the officials of the State.

But I think it quite obvious that this doesn’t accord well with most people’s intuitive notion of autonomy. The hunter’s life has a distinct romance to it, a sense of open-ended adventure; the Soviet’s does not. The hunter has a degree of dignity and self-possession which the Soviet is denied. The hunter, within the admittedly heavy but morally neutral and unchangeable constraints of physical reality, may do as he pleases without asking the leave of any man. The Soviet is a slave of other men who clearly are morally wrong to enslave him, and could have chosen not to. A notion of autonomy which does not capture these differences and declare the hunter the more autonomous one is a ridiculous notion.

On the other hand, consider what result you would get if you asked people whether they would rather live in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, or on the Savannah? Autonomy-loving libertarian that I am, I would find this a tough choice. Being eaten by a lion, dying of appendicitis, and slowly expiring from malnutrition after your teeth fall out are way no fun. So of the two competing notions of autonomy, which should we build a society on, if we had to choose?

That’s the magic of the market, actually; we don’t have to choose. For which I humbly thank God every day.

SYSTEMATIC SILLINESS Lynn Kiesling quotes one of my favourite passages from Adam Smith:

The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. He goes on to establish it completely and in all its parts, without any regard either to the great interests, or to the strong prejudices which may oppose it. He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

Click through for a very interesting discussion.

SLATE CHRONICLES the Israeli army’s preparations for the evacuation of Jewish settlers from Gaza.

THERE’S A GOOD ARTICLE in the Wall Street Journal (subscription, alas, required) on how refinery problems are contributing to the recent spike in oil prices. People in America don’t like having refineries near them, or indeed, anyone else; the last time America built a new refinery was in 1976. Refiners have done amazing work increasing throughput with technology, but there are limits. Especially because they are hamstrung by the patchwork of local regulations, which mean that gasoline destined for Dubuque can’t be sold in Chicago. Oil must be processed in smaller batches, limiting efficiency, and worse, making the system vulnerable to bottlenecks: if something happens to a Chicago refiner, gas stations can’t buy “foriegn” gas to fill the gap, so consumers get sudden price spikes at the pump. Next time you wince at the cost of a gallon of regular unleaded, don’t just curse OPEC; curse the environmental regulators (and special-interests lobbying local officials for their particular brand of fuel additives) for making the market less efficient.

MARRIAGEE MINDED Two men are planning to get married in Canada. I know, yawn. The twist: they’re straight.

In response, a gay rights spokesman sounds downright old-fashioned:

Words of warning came from Toronto lawyer Bruce Walker, a gay and lesbian rights activist.

“Generally speaking, marriage should be for love,” he said. “People who don’t marry for love will find themselves in trouble.”

Meanie! Trying to restrict marriage to his tired, outworn definition!

Seriously, I find it difficult to phrase an objection to this that does not basically hew to the anti-gay-marriage line: i.e. marriage in the west has traditionally been between two people who want to have sex with each other. The objection to this argument is the same one that pro-gay-marriage forces employed against those who claimed that marriage was for child-rearing: we allow all sorts of people who cannot have sex with each other (certain classes of parapalegics, for example) to wed, so how can you exclude these people on this grounds? I think it’s funny, but if this sort of practice becomes more than a stunt, it seems very likely to me to weaken an already ailing institution.

On the other hand, it doesn’t seem very likely to become widespread. Most people who get married will continue to do so for the good, old fashioned purpose of having frequent sexual intercourse. God bless ’em.

THE PERPETUALLY DOOMED DOLLAR David Altig poor mouths the dollar, pointing out that it fell on news that the Russian Central Bank decided to hold less of it, and that things are looking up in Japan and Europe.

Yes, well, when you’re at the bottom of a pit, there’s nowhere else to look but up. Japan is still struggling against deflation; EU GDP came in at an anaemic 0.3% in the second quarter (compared to 0.8% in America). There are a couple of bright spots in Europe, such as Ireland and Spain, but they are dwarfed by Germany, the EU’s biggest economy, which had no growth at all in the second quarter, and France, which posted 0.2%. Italy rebounded from recession with an unexpectedly strong 0.7%, but as traders like to say, even a dead cat will bounce if it falles from a great enough height. These numbers are encouraging only because analysts had expected them to be worse still.

Until GDP growth improves elsewhere, America will continue to be the destination of choice for capital looking to invest in the rich world. That will boost the dollar (and our current account deficit). China’s revaluation of the yuan was distinctly underwhelming (and as this article from The Economist explains, its currency peg is still heavily weighted towards the dollar), meaning that for the time being, it will continue to pour money into propping up the dollar.

Over the long run, of course, America’s gaping current account deficit is not sustainable, and the natural path of adjustment is a decline in the value of the dollar. But given the countervailing pressures in the world economy, I wouldn’t try to make any money betting against the dollar.

WENT TO DINNER TONIGHT with my co-blogger on my regular blog in Jersey City. I walked down a couple of miles from Hoboken, enjoying the oddness of it. Half of Jersey City looks like a “City of the FUTURE!!!” exhibit, ca. 1960–shiny glass skyscrapers and wide, empty boulevards. Most of the rest looks like a rotogravure spread on “The Tragedy of the Tenements”, ca. 1908. I find the juxtaposition aesthetically stimulating. But I had to laugh at the sign just south of the Holland Tunnel informing me that I was entering Historic Downtown. Judging from the area where it was located, the history of Jersey City was written in cinderblock.

NOT TURNING TAIL YET Bush says that the US will not prematurely withdraw our troops from Iraq.

IN THE WAKE OF OUR BLOATED NEW TRANSPORTATION BILL, Robin Hanson suggests the government switch to diet pork. One-third less guilt than regular log-rolling!

JEANINEE PIRRO, currently the DA for Westchester, is running for the Senate against Hillary. This is a long shot, but yesterday I heard Dick Morris on the radio making a credible case that Pirro can make things uncomfortable for Hillary by demanding that she committ to serving out her term. He also argued that if Pirro gets enough money early on, and does moderately well in the polls, she will force Hillary out of the race, because Hillary will want to conserve money (and credibility) for her 2008 run at the presidency.

Pirro’s biggest weakness, that her husband was convicted of tax evasion (Pirro herself was cleared as an “innocent spouse) is harder for Hillary to capitalise on, since Pirro can always say “Why don’t we take the focus off my husband’s arrest and your husband’s lost law license, and talk about the issues”. I still think Hillary is probably the clear winner, but it will be an interesting race to watch. Pirro is a pro-choice, socially liberal and fiscally conservative Republican. She may well be able to take some of the shine off Hillary’s presidential campaign.

THE WASHINGTON POST DISCOVERS THAT high paying jobs are boring too. Having spent a summer as an investment banking intern during a mad moment in business school when I imagined that I could somehow shoehorn my personality to fit the pathologically detail-oriented, hyper-competitive, number-hugging world of Wall Street, this was not news to me.

While I would not go so far as to say that proofreading pitch books and tweaking capital asset models is as boring as the year I spent working a cash register at the Love Pharmacy Chain (no, it was a perfectly respectable chain of drugstores, and no, I have no idea what was going through the head of the fellow in marketing who decided that “Love Pharmacies” would look good on the letterhead), investment banking was nonetheless considerably more boring than most of my other jobs, including (prior to business school) building the computer systems that the investment bankers used to tweak their models.

Part of this is, of course, that while I obtain moderate enjoyment from reading balance sheets, I don’t enjoy it enough to spend days on end speculating about whether retail growth in Disney’s Latin American markets will average 2.4% or 2.6% over the next three years.

But even my friends who live and breathe finance find a large portion of their work intensely boring. They are doing it because they hope that if they spend long enough proofreading powerpoint presentations and scrutinising IPO prospectuses, they will one day be paid really gargantuan sums of money to fly all over the world and tell CEO’s how to finance their companies. This job is so fun and exciting that most of the people who do it retire by 50. But until they reach that halcyon horizon (and, with banking’s military-inspired “up or out” model, only a small fraction of freshly-minted MBA banker larvae will ever get to that level) most of them are bored for much of the time.

There is a tendency among liberal arts types to think that it is grossly unfair that investment bankers make so much money, when said artsy type’s clearly more socially valuable work is so pitifully renumerated. Having spent a summer doing it, I personally think that anyone who is willing to spend his Saturday night going over the fine print in an SEC prospectus until 2 am is welcome to all the filthy lucre they will pay him. I chose to become a journalist because I’ve only got forty or fifty years left on this planet, and if I’m going to spend the majority of my waking hours doing something, I’d rather do something I feel is worthwhile than something that will buy me a cushy place to sleep. It seems downright piggy for those of us with what my mother calls “English Major Jobs” to demand both fulfilling work and lavish renumeration.

GRAND ROUNDS is up, and full of interesting medical posts.

WHITHER OIL? If you’re driving one of this big, gas-guzzling American cars, these days you probably cringe every time you pull up at the gas station. Will price relief ever come?

Probably not soon. OPEC, scarred by the memory of $10 a barrel oil, is not bringing new capacity online as fast as it could, and consumers seem strangely reluctant to let higher gas prices affect their behavior (perhaps they too are under the spell of the halcyon days when gas was practically free and Saudi princes lined up at the gas station to beg you to accept a free toaster with your purchase of 1 gallon of regular unleaded). But eventually things will even out, and probably go the other way–the current shortage will eventually produce a glut.

Alas, probably not soon enough to ease your pain as you steer the family SUV onto the road for the annual trek to Yellowstone. This might be the year to think about renting a Mini.

WE’RE DOING IT FOR YOU, DARLING Laura at 11D, a premier politics-and-parenting blogger and one of my absolute favorite reads, has a great post on a new book arguing that divorce isn’t really better for the children after all.

Update: Not so new–the book was published in 2001.

THE ONLINE ARMS RACE CONTINUES The Wall Street Journal, to which I subscribe online, has apparently decided to prevent concurrent logons. Since I generally leave my login on at home when I go to work, I had to call them to clear that session so I could login here.

The object, obviously, is to prevent people from sharing their subscriptions, which quite a few people I know have been doing (and I bet they’re kicking desks and throwing things this morning). However, I’m not quite sure the folks at the Wall Street Journal have thought through what this means, at least if they have many subscribers like me. Absent-minded subscribers. Subscribers who never turn their computers off. Subscribers who use several computers each working day. Subscribers who will now be calling their technical support people two or three times a day to clear their other login so they can read the paper.

On the other hand, I suppose the typical WSJ subscriber is your type-A perfectionist who will have no trouble remembering to make sure that he logs off his WSJ account before moving to another computer. In which case, I demand to know why the folks at the WSJ haven’t quite thought through what this means for me.

THE PROBLEM OF HATING SPEECH Kevin Drum sums up the problem of hate speech laws: “I’m not convinced that content-based speech restrictions can be defined in a broad enough way to make them workable but a narrow enough way to keep them from being dangerous.”

In the case of Britain and its terrorism promoters, I’m somewhat ambivalent. I’m certainly against deporting citizens of the US for advocating terrorism (though I have no problem with stripping citizenship from dual-nationality American citizens who have clearly indicated their allegiance to a foriegn power; until the 1960’s, you couldn’t have dual citizenship in America, and I’m not so sure that was a bad thing). But what about immigrants? All but the very hardest-core open borders folks would allow that we, the current citizens of the United States, have a right to some say over who gets to come join us in our reindeer games. And advocating the killing of our civilians would seem to be a slam dunk disqualifier.

As I understand it, a major reason that Britain has heretofore not shipped its firebreathing troublemakers abroad long before is that they are signatories to the EU’s declaration of human rights, which forbids them from deporting anyone to a country where they will be killed or abused. Sidestepping the thorny debate about whether a country should hold itself morally obligated to support refugees because of the bad behaviour of another state (many refugees end up in Europe’s generous welfare systems), it seems hard to argue that you have a moral obligation to worry more about the impending mortality of people who are encouraging terrorist attacks than about the well-being of the citizenry they are attempting to decimate.

I suspect that if terrorist attacks continue, Muslim immigration to Europe and America will be slowed to a trickle, or even reversed in the European states where decades of guest-worker imports have combined with stringent citizenship requirements to produce a hereditary alien class. This may, of course, be what Al Qaeda wants; the fewer Muslims have intercourse with the West, the easier it will be to stir up hatred against us.

Update Eugene Volokh has more. His post points out that the above usage of “immigrants” is incorrect, since what I mean is “non-citizens”. Naturalised citizens should, and do, have the same rights as born-and-bred ones, with a few limited exceptions.

THE PERILS OF PERSNICKETY PASSWORDS I just reserved a campsite for Labor Day at Reserve America, which has taken password requirements to new heights: eight characters, instead of the standard six, with a requirement that two of those characters be numbers. This for a website that allows you to reserve campsites in state parks.

Before I was a journalist, I used to design and build networks for financial firms, and I was a conscientious objector in the password arms race. Many companies require long passwords, number/letter combinations, frequent password changes, unique passwords (you can’t ever re-use old passwords), and so forth because these are harder to crack. The problem is, they’re also harder to remember. Users who can’t reemember their passwords have to write them down. It is, to my mind, substantially less safe to have a user’s password written on their computer, or taped in their desk (two favourite tricks I spent a great deal of time discouraging), than to have it be a five-letter word. Good security should worry at least as much about internal users gaining unauthorised access (to view confidential data or cover up illicit activity by confusing the audit trail with another user’s account) as they should be about hackers who, frankly, generally aren’t all that interested in breaking into the assistant payroll clerk’s computer. What they want is administrator access, and if your tech employees can’t be trusted to devise secure passwords without the computer forcing them on everyone else in the company, well, then, you should fire your network staff and hire someone competent.

The technology world is full of these sorts of things: ideas which, in theory, make everything wonderfully secure, but which make things much less secure when implemented with plain old human beings, instead of the flawless automata that so many security theorists seem to imagine. If you’re interested in how to actually make security good, check out Bruce Schneier’s site.

Update A professional takes the opposite view.

CHOCK FULL OF MONEY-GRUBBING GOODNESS The new Carnival of the Capitalists is up.

GREETINGS, EARTHLINGS! As Ann points out below, August is a slow news time. In my day job, I’m a journalist (yes . . . a member of the dreaded MSM), and for us, August is undoubtedly the cruellest month. Everyone except baseball players goes on vacations, so we have no summits, reports, or even scandals to keep our editors happy. Story pitches take on an ever-more desperate hue as the month wears on . . . “No, really, Ted, the Australian Toe Weevil poses a clear economic threat to development in Southeast Asia!”

But at least one newsworthy event happened today: Peter Jennings died. The death of any human being is deeply tragic, of course. Peter Jennings’ death will touch more lives than most, and not merely because many of us are worrying whether we quit smoking quite soon enough.

Many people spent more time with Peter Jennings than with their adult children. I don’t watch television news except during big disasters; I find it too shallow and graphic to be useful. But for many people, Peter Jennings was their point of contact with the wider world.

And his death represents the end of an era. No one will ever occupy the place in the world that Brokaw, Jennings, and Rather did. Americans are no longer limited to three channels, nor forced to take their news in discreet bites between 5-7. The world is probably better for it, but something–if only a connection to our past–has been lost.

WELL, A LOT OF CONVENTIONAL WISDOM has tumbled: the incumbent rule, the “taller person wins” rule (to my great personal sadness), the predictive validity of the final Redskins game before the election, the exit polls, and all the other “infallible” indicators which showed Kerry going by a landslide.

What can we take out of this? Well, some of the conventional wisdom — like how the incumbent always wins if the economy is doing okay — has held up. Until next time, anyway.

I think the big story of this election was distributed information. That starts with blogs, of course. Bloggers were able to skewer some of the SwiftVet stories, blow up Dan Rather’s big “scoop”, and in other ways bring thousands of fresh eyes and fresh analysis to important issues that might otherwise have lain fallow. The media is a bubble world; we all mostly live in the same places and talk to the same people. The mainstream media has many advantages over blogs: resources, experience, editing, time to pursue a story, rigorous fact checking (no, really, I mean it), accountability. But it’s invaluable to have bloggers around to burst that bubble when needed.

But it sure doesn’t end with bloggers. I’m probably happier about the performance of the election betting markets than I am about the performance of George Bush in this election, because they vindicated a long held belief of mine: that if you take a bunch of people, and make them put their money where their mouth is, they generally get the right answer. Oh, there was a wild ride when the exit polls started showing up, but if you look at the electronic markets the day before the election, they called it better than the pundits — certainly better than yours truly, who had been expecting a Kerry win for months. (This is the first time I’ve voted for a presidential candiate who actually, y’know, became president. It’s a rather heady feeling.)

Finally it was a victory for public opinion, and not because the public voted the way I did. America’s a pretty neat place, and it’s been taking care of itself since long before I was alive.

I’m talking about Americans’ assessment of who would win. The polls had a hard time pinning down their eventual votes, but when the pollsters asked people who they thought would win the election, they called it correctly by an overwhelming majority. Each of the people asked was their own little pollster of family and friends; collectively, they were an information processing powerhouse. So really, what we should take away from this is that we shouldn’t trust the pollsters or the commentariat; we should trust ourselves. While those of us in the pundit biz were see-sawing with every poll, your friends and neighbours knew the answer all along.

It’s been an amazing experience blogging here for all of you, especially with three such outstanding co-bloggers. I hope a few of you will drop in at my blog, Asymmetrical Information, and keep sending me emails and leaving me comments, because I’ve enjoyed your attention immensely. Thanks to all the Instapundit readers, to Michael and Ann, and most of all, to Glenn, for inviting me to spend a week here. I’ll miss you all.

MORE WORDS OF WISDOM ON ELECTIONS from economist Steve Lansburg:

. . . if you really believe in democracy, and if the election is close, then it doesn’t much matter who wins. The theory of democracy (stripped down to bare essentials, and omitting all sorts of caveats that I could list but won’t) is that the guy who gets more votes is the better guy. Surely, then, it follows that the guy who gets only slightly more votes is only the slightly better guy. And if one guy’s only slightly better than the other, then a miscount is no great tragedy.

You might have a strong preference for one candidate over the other, but if you have an overriding preference for democracy (“Let the majority rule, even when I’m in the minority”), then you can stop worrying about miscounts. Surely there’s not much difference between a world where Bush gets 3 more votes than Kerry and a world where Kerry gets 3 more votes than Bush. If Bush is the rightful president in one of those worlds, he’s got to be darn close to rightful in the other.

Just something to consider.

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE WINNERS is to be responsible for their vote. Now that Bush has won, to my frank surprise, I’ve been denied the pleasure of being in opposition, which is to say the pleasure of disclaiming responsibility for any stunts the president may get up to in the next four years.

What’s more, those of us who voted for Bush, warts and all, haven’t even the excuse that Kerry voters would have, which is to say declaring they had no idea he’d do that. Bush voters walked into his next term with eyes wide open. Even if we voted not so much for Bush as against Kerry, we still have to be willing to accept that if he screws up, we put him in a position to do so knowing exactly what he was like.

That gives us, I think, a special responsibility not to gloss over his policy flaws, but rather to hold him to account as much as possible, to make sure that we can be proud of our choice. That means getting on the phone to the white house, congressmen and senators to block bad legislation. That means being honest about his mistakes, rather than trying to gloss over them in order to make ourselves look better. It means, in short, thinking about what’s best for the country, rather than What’s Best for The Team.

That’s the responsibility of anyone who voted for the guy in office, whether he’s a Democrat or a Republican. It’s the responsibility of the people who voted against him, too, but they generally don’t need reminding. We’ve put all our eggs in one basket, guys–so in the words of Mark Twain, let’s watch that basket.

A DEMOCRATIC FRIEND OF MINE JUST GOT A PHONE CALL from a Republican she doesn’t speak to that often, allegedly to “say hi” but transparently to gloat. This is my plea to Bush voters to give peace a chance. If we have any chance of ending the sniping and bitterness that characterise the current political scene, it’s going to start with Republicans being gracious winners. If you have to indulge your schadenfreude, do it silently by lurking on Democratic websites and reading hair-tearing left-wing editorials, not by alienating people with whom we’d like to eventually build a better America.

PREDICTIONS FOR THE NEXT FOUR YEARS I don’t have many at this point, but try this one on for size: Republicans in New York and California will follow the lead of Democrats in Colorado, and propose initiatives to split the states’ electoral votes.

In the case of New York, California, and Texas, that would actually be good for the states, since each could easily put as many votes in play as any medium-sized battleground sate. It would attract a lot more attention their way. I don’t expect such a measure to pass in any of the three, but I imagine the Republicans will give it the old college try anyway.

I SEE SOMETHING VERY HEALTHY ON THE LEFT-WING BLOGS: commenters who are looking at themselves, rather than blaming Karl Rove, the supreme court, or [cough] conservative media bias for their loss. The most destructive trend of the last four years has been the left’s resort to ever-more-tenuous conspiracy theories to explain their political failures.

This is certainly not a unique vice of the left. Libertarians have it in spades. I’ve sat through aproximately 8 zillion heated conversations about how the reason libertarians don’t have more power is that the electoral system is stacked against us, when it’s crystal clear to me that the reason we don’t have more power is that a clear majority of Americans don’t agree with us. They like middle-class entitlements, drug laws, mortgage tax deductions, farm subsidies, and most of the rest of it. If we want to see our programmes enacted, it won’t help us to change the system (proportional representation is the usual magic bullet of choice for libertarians) if we don’t first change America — at which point we won’t need to change the system.

Though of course I’m not exactly rooting for it to happen, I firmly believe that the left can stage a convincing political comeback, if they’ll stop looking for a scapegoat and start looking for some new ideas. I think we may be witnessing the beginning of that change.