Having reached the unlucky number of 13, it is fitting to talk about multipliers and model estimates.

Here's the latest paper on the puzzle of female protectionism - "Why are Women More Protectionist than Men?" by Eugene Beaulieu and Michael Napier.  (For earlier work, see here and here).  And here's Beaulieu and Napier's extremely frustrating closing paragraph:

Although there currently appears to be no evidence as to why this gender gap exists, a couple of theories are still outstanding. As aforementioned, women may simply be more sensitive to the framing of survey questions, causing them to answer more towards the bias, as in the question of interest in this study. This issue, however, cannot be addressed with the ISSP data sets. Also, are males or females more likely to lose their jobs due to increased trade liberalization? ...Lastly, although it is not likely that risk aversion will explain any of this gender gap; women are in general more risk averse. [sic?] However, risk aversion as a possible explanation for the gender gap cannot be estimated empirically with the ISSP data sets as they do not contain a proxy for risk.

What's so frustrating?  As far as I can tell, Beaulieu and Napier don't even consider the possibility that women simply know less about economics than men, even though there is overwhelming evidence this is so.  As I originally showed in my "What Makes People Think Like Economists?" (2001, Journal of Law and Economics), being male has roughly as much effect on economic beliefs as 1.7 steps on a 6-point educational scale.  Why do economists have so much trouble taking the obvious explanation for female protectionism seriously?

Bryan discusses policy libertarianism and structural libertarianism. If they were 60's leftists, the policy libertarians would be willing to work within the system and the structural libertarians would want to change the system. In this case, I feel ambivalence, of the sort expressed by John Lennon in the Beatles song "Revolution."

The policy libertarian can complain that while the structural libertarian dreams of revolution, day-to-day reality is that there are opportunities to block bad policy and occasionally promote better policy. On the other hand Jacob Lyles can complain that the policy libertarian serves to legitimate the democratic process, which tends to be anti-libertarian by nature.

My goal is simple. I want people to stop rooting for bigger government. Get them to lose what Daniel Klein calls The People's Romance. A long as people root for bigger government, neither policy libertarianism nor structural libertarianism can get much traction.

Lyles thinks that my approach, too, is futiile. He writes,

Quoting Jefferson at housewives isn't going to sway them when Obama Claus is on the television offering free college educations and health insurance.

I would say that if the people in your community do not find libertarian ideas convincing, then your community is unlikely to be very libertarian.

Gordon Dahl and Lance Lochner write (I can't find an ungated 2008 version of the paper, and the 2005 version seems to differ),

Our baseline estimates imply that a $1,000 increase in income raises combined math and reading test scores by 6% of a standard deviation in the short run. The gains are larger for children from disadvantaged families and are robust to a variety of alternative specifications. We find little evidence of long-run income effects, with most of the effects disappearing after one year.

In studies of interventions designed to improve education outcomes, a common result is to find statistically significant effects in the short run, but not in the long run. Researchers will report that "X improves test scores in 4th grade, but by 8th grade the difference has gone away." Why is that? Possibilities:

1. Genetic factors are too strong. You can fool mother nature for a little while, but not for long. People tend to revert to their genetically-determined level of ability.

2. Other environmental factors are too strong. You can overcome environmental determinants for a little while, but nor for long. People tend to revert to their environmentally-determined level of skill development.

3. Over time, more random factors are introduced into the lives of the subject populations. Note, however, that this should lower the R-squared in the regression and might bring down the statistical significance of treatment effects, even if it does not cause the magnitude of treatment effects to disappear But researchers are fixated on statistical significance, so they interpret a drop in statistical significance as if it were a fall-off in the effect of the treatment.

Out of all the Structural Libertarians named in my last post, there is one counter-example to my claim that "It's policy all the way down": Patri Friedman's "seasteading" proposal.  The whole point of seasteading is to get outside of existing jurisdictions, then create new institutions.  Whatever else you think about seasteading, it does bypass the problem of changing either structure or policy in existing societies.

Are policy reformers naive?  Both libertarians and public choice economists (and especially libertarian public choice economists) often say so:  "The policies we have are a rational response of political actors to the institutional incentives they face.  The only way to change policy is to change the institutional incentives."  Over at the Distributed Republic, Jason Lyles applies new labels to this old dispute:

Libertarian thinkers can be plotted on many axes. Presently, the axis I am most concerned with is Policy Libertarianism vs. Structural Libertarianism.

Policy Libertarians (PLs) include the vast majority of the most visible organizations and writers in the modern libertarian movement: the Reason Foundation, the Cato Institute, the Ron Paul campaign, the LP, the Constitution Party, most libertarian economists (e.g. Milton Friedman), and single-issue organizations like Students for a Sensible Drug Policy. PLs, as their name suggests, focus their energies on inventing and advocating a list of policies that governments should follow. For example, you can find policy libertarians opposing liberal eminent domain laws, fighting for lower taxes and deregulation, supporting cultural tolerance, opposing invasive police searches, and advocating the rest of the familiar libertarian manifesto.

Structural Libertarians (SLs) are much rarer in modern times than PLs, although the opposite used to be the case. Structural libertarians include Patri Friedman, Mencius Moldbug, David Friedman, Murray Rothbard, all libertarian Public Choice economists, Lysander Spooner, and the classical liberals that libertarians have adopted as intellectual ancestors. SLs often have the same moral and policy beliefs as PLs, but they focus their energies on the alternative ways to structure a government and the effect that government structure has on its incentive to adopt good policy.

At first glance, what Lyles calls the SLs seem a lot more realistic: To change policy, you've got to change institutions, right?  Unfortunately, institutions themselves are a kind of policy.  They arise because previous institutions create incentives for change, and endure because current institutions create incentives for stability.  Or as we economists like to say, "Institutions are endogenous."

Suppose, for example, that the SL advocates more federalism in order to get more libertarian policies.  Isn't this more "realistic" than advocating drug legalization?  Hardly.  The level of federalism is low and stable for a reason - when there was more federalism, political actors have incentives to reduce it; now that's low, political actors have little incentive to change it.  Alas, it's policy all the way down.

P.S. Even if I'm wrong about this, the SLs still need the PLs.  After all, unless the PLs are right that existing policies are bad, what's the point of working for structural change?

Doug Clement interviews Ken Rogoff. Rogoff says,

I've taught for years in my class that many types of money funds and asset classes outside the traditional regulatory system are subject to the same kind of runs as the conventional banking system. I have had my classes write papers about whether the government can credibly promise not to bail out money funds, and if it cannot, then should they be subject to more regulation? This is not a simple question, but researchers need to provide better answers.

Read the whole interview. Rogoff knows far more about the topic of financial crises than just about anyone I can think of.

Another point he makes is that it is characteristic of financial crises that governments spend a lot of money cleaning up the damage. Why is this the case? Some possibilities:

1. We don't call it a financial crisis unless there is a big clean-up. So, if we didn't do a big clean-up after the Dotcom crash, then it was not a crisis.

2. There is strong interdependence between government and the financial sector. See my 8th lecture on macroeconomics. This means that banks are bound to have political influence, and they are likely to be bailed out in a crisis.

3. It really is good public policy to bail out banks. You really do help Main Street by saving Wall Street.

Every president since Woodrow Wilson has appeared in Vanity Fair in one form or another, some immortalized by great photographers, some brought down to earth by cutting caricaturists. As Barack Obama prepares to take office as the 44th president, we present a slide show of the most memorable images of his predecessors to appear in our pages.

Do you think the government should forcibly reduce income inequality using taxes and subsidies? If so, wouldn't it follow that the government should forcibly reduce inequality in life spans? No? Then, if you answered Yes to the first question, you might want to rethink your answer. See the article posted today on Econlib by economist Dwight Lee. It's titled, "Should Government Reduce Inequality in Life Spans?"

Great paragraph:

When we seriously consider an attempt to use government power to reduce the gender inequality in life expectancy, the problems that we have always faced when government uses its power to reduce income inequality suddenly become crystal clear. Government transfers to reduce the gender gap in life expectancy would do little more than reduce improvements in both women's and men's life expectancies. For similar reasons, government transfers have done little more than reduce the income growth of both the rich and the poor. So government attempts to reduce life-expectancy inequality by transferring medical expenditures would be silly, but no sillier than its attempts to reduce income inequality by transferring money.

One of the joys of being a photographer is the opportunity to spend your life intersecting with a steady stream of very interesting people. One such recent encounter was with author Manil Suri (The Death of Vishnu), who I photographed for a literary magazine.

I never seem to have enough time these days to indulge in reading much fiction, but my wife is a big fan of Suri. My interest in him was primarily because of his alter ego as a mathematic professor at the nearby University of Maryland Baltimore County.

You don't run across too many people who can explain, in depth, the concept of infinity and crank out bestselling novels between classes.


Abstract Concrete, Redux

After a series of emails, we worked out that I would be able to photograph Suri in or near his office at the UMBC campus, before his midday class.

We would not get a lot of time, but that is part of the game (and, to me, a lot of the fun) when doing a magazine portrait. It is rather like the difference between playing a leisurely game of chess and playing a game under the gun with a timer.

An appropriate analogy in this case, because UMBC is a Big Dawg when it comes to intercollegiate chess. They delight in trapping the kings of players from schools where students pay three times UMBC's tuition.

Scouting within a small radius from Suri's office, I found an area behind his building where a weathered slab of concrete would make for an interesting background. Nearby was an indoor alcove where I could get a completely look, but I'll just be writing about the outdoor stuff to keep this post from turning into War and Peace.

In an earlier post entitled Abstract Concrete, I photographed a scientist who studies concrete at a molecular level. But for Suri, I just wanted to use the concrete wall itself as a starting point for a background.

I liked the patterns, but the tone was both too light and a little too homogenous -- both of which problems are easily solvable with a single speedlight.


Looking at this three-pic composite of the background, you can see the original (auto) exposure on the concrete as it appeared as I found it. It's just a quick grab shot, not even in focus. But it doesn't need to be in focus, as it will be my backdrop and I want to get a look at it a little out of focus anyway. The tone is maybe a stop above medium grey.

In the middle frame, you can see the the adjusted tone after dropping the ambient exposure two stops and change. I liked this one better. It is also in focus, which to my taste makes it less interesting (and more competitive with the subject) as a background.

For the third frame, I took it back out of focus (by focusing to the point in front where I would have Suri standing) and threw a little snooted flash onto it at a hard angle from camera right. The flash was about a foot or two from the wall, raking across, and fitted with a Honl shorty. I put the silver side on the inside to soften the transition from light to dark.

How much strobe you hit it with is purely a matter of personal taste. To me, this dropped-and-flashed background is more interesting than the plain, light grey wall I started out with. That random splash of light adds a little interest, and I can position it for nice shadow-side separation, if needed.

I frequently use this process to build up my backgrounds as a more interesting second layer to a photo. When looking for a backdrop, always realize that you can take your found surface down via the ambient component of the full exposure. Or you can bring it up with a little background flash. Or you can have it both ways, as we did here.


Enter Manil Suri. I used two SB-800s, each with LumiQuest SB-III modifier, for the key and the fill. The key light has a 1/8 CTO on it for a little warmth, and is about 5 feet from the subject at camera left.

At this distance the light is neither hard nor soft, which is a look that I like except you need to watch the shadow depth. And that depth can easily be controlled by altering the ambient exposure component.

But my ambient was being used to control the unlit portion of the background. So I would need to bring Suri's shadows up with a little fill. I chose to fill on-axis with a second SB-800 / Softbox-III, this one with no warming gel.

I could mount this flash on the hot shoe, although the SoftBox-III is a little big for that, and it would rotate with the vertical orientation of the camera. So I simply stuck it on a stand and shot from right under it. This way, you can get the bottom of the light right up against the lens barrel for more of an on-axis look to the fill.

The fill looked best at about 1 1/2 to 2 stops down, which kept the character of the hardish light without losing my shadow detail.

That one came off nice and quick. I liked it as a straight shot, but wanted to add another layer to it if I could do so without spending a lot of time. So I grabbed one of my favorite toys -- a Holga lens that has been mounted to a Nikon body cap.

I love the airy, ethereal, Holga look when it is added to hard, sculpted light. The two balance each other out -- like lemon and sugar in a glass of lemonade.

(You may need to click the pic for a bigger version to see what the Holga lens is doing to this photo.)

There is almost no extra time required to swap out lenses and get this extra look. And the irony of sticking a $50 piece of plastic on a $5,000 D3 (1:100 lens to body cost) is not wasted on me, either.


This shot (seen at the top of this post and repeated here) was another quick add-on before going inside for the second setup. Just grab the key light and head over to under the exterior stairway to use it as a graphic element.

The process is very quick: Expose for the ambient, drop it 1 1/2 to two stops, bring in the warmed up key light (pretty close in this case) and adjust it's output until Suri has a good exposure.

The stairway and background vignette themselves because of the falloff of the nearby key light. Nothing complicated about it, but the stairs add a graphic element that gave me a second look before heading inside.


To Infinity, and Beyond

Suri really is an interesting guy. Not many people have that right brain / left brain thing going as well as he does.

If you want to see if you are capable of truly understanding infinity, take a look at his lecture on the subject, which was uploaded to YouTube.

If you plan on really trying to understand it, I would recommend two or three anticipatory aspirin, at the very least.