What gets conservatives' goat

Over at Kids Prefer Cheese, blogger Angus (after merciless heckling from Yours Truly in the comments section) relents and gives me his reasons for thinking Obama is an "uncompromising" far-leftist:

So I started to wonder exactly why I had the perception that Obama was "pretty far left".

Hence this Top 10 signs Obama is a lefty list:

10. His incessant pandering to unions

9. His child-like love for high speed rail

8. His pushing for subsidies for solar, wind, & ethanol (i.e. uneconomic boondoggles).

7. His refusal to understand that electric cars actually burn coal in many parts of the country!

6. His firm belief that a small group of experts can competently run the economy

5. The amazing growth in the Federal budget under his watch

4. His habit of flip-flopping like a boated marlin

3. His inability to consider issues of moral hazard or unintended consequences in policymaking

2. His belief that anyone who disagrees with him is stupid or evil or both

1. His overall superior, moralistic, and condescending attitude

Not much evidence for the "uncompromising" part (what's the difference between "flip-flopping" and compromise, again?). But I'll take what I can get. At last we know what makes someone a leftist in conservative eyes.

Two big points here.

Point #1: Attitude speaks louder than actions. Reasons 1, 2, 3, 6, and 10 are all about attitude, mannerism, and rhetoric, as opposed to real policy actions. This reinforces something I've been slowly realizing over the past few years - in politics, what group or movement you seem to be part of is more important than what you actually do. I think this was behind much of the anti-Bush animus that liberals felt long before Bush launched wars, attacked civil liberties, or even got elected in the first place. And as I've mentioned, I think Obama is seen as anti-business despite his efforts to do things to help business mainly because of his rhetoric lambasting "multinational corporations" and "big business." In other words, politics is first and foremost about coalition-building and allegiance; policy is always and everywhere a secondary consideration.

Point #2: Conservatives really, really love oil and cars. Reasons 7, 8, and 10 on Angus' list are about Obama's support for alternative energy and alternative transportation. At first, this might be surprising - since when does wanting to build trains and support technological R&D make one an uncompromising far-leftist? But if you look carefully, you'll see that this is no oddity at all. Conservatives really dislike any thing that threatens America's dependence on oil or our use of the automobile. The blinding animus conservatives hold for rail is well-documented, as is their decades-long effort to kill alternative energy research. But why? Possible explanations include:

A) The oil industry is the main financial backer of the Republican Party (see: Koch bros., Halliburton, Exxon).

B) Promotion of alternative energy is seen as a backdoor to large-scale government regulation of carbon-producing activity (i.e. everything), which is seen as a backdoor to socialism.

C) Rail transport and dense urban areas both force white people into daily contact with nonwhites, which conservatives really really really don't want.

D) The car is seen as an instrument of individual empowerment and liberty, and hence "libertarians" think we should promote car transport.

I'd say there is some truth to all of these. But it's still sometimes astonishing how central the defense of the car/oil transport structure is to the policy priorities and worldviews of conservatives (and "libertarians"), especially considering how much government spending and regulatory policy has gone into creating that structure. Where social conservatives draw their battle lines on religious issues (abortion) or racial issues (welfare, affirmative action), economic conservatives' wedge issue is transportation and urban structure. Of course, the fact that lots of black people currently live in urban centers probably has a lot to do with the enduring strength of the conservative big tent.

Anyway, thanks to Angus for giving me his reasons for believing Obama is a leftist, and props for making it an honest one. I may never stop being surprised at how much A) attitude and B) transportation issues matter to conservative thinkers. But I suppose that is my fault, not theirs.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Don't count Japan out yet

It is fashionable these days to speak of Japan as the "sick man of Asia," a country in severe and possibly irreversible economic and social decline. The list of Japan's ills is both familiar and daunting: two "lost decades" of slow economic growth, persistent deflation, massive government debt, ultra-low fertility, a sclerotic political system, technological and social isolation (called "Galapagos syndrome"), and - as if all that weren't enough - wimpy "herbivorous" men. Typically, China is held up as the example of what Japan could be (and once was!), but isn't - a high-growth East Asian economic powerhouse.

Now, perhaps I'm a natural contrarian, or a natural optimist, or just a tubthumping Japanese nationalist, but I think that rumors of Japan's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Almost all of these problems are either overstated, misunderstood, or common to most rich countries.

First, let's take a look at those "lost decades." In the 1990s, Japan's economy did indeed slow, but not disastrously so - per capita, annual Japanese growth was only 0.5 percentage points lower than that of America, whose economy boomed during that decade. And in the years that followed - the "second lost decade" of the 2000s - Japan's per capita growth actually outpaced that of the U.S. It was only because of Japan's declining population that the countries' total GDP diverged so markedly.

Then there's that public debt. Although scary headline figures put the government debt at over 200% of GDP, much of that is held by the Japanese government itself. Japan's net government debt is only about 100% of GDP - still way too high, but not that different from Europe or the U.S.

The ultra-low fertility rate - 1.27 children per woman by the most recent count - is indeed a big problem, as it will strain the pension system and raise the dependency ratio. But it's not a problem that's unique to Japan. South Korea's fertility is 1.24, Germany's is 1.36, Italy's is 1.38. Few people are talking about the terminal decline of Germany or Korea. Low fertility is just something that all developed countries are having to learn to deal with.

Japan's political system is indeed sclerotic. Both major parties are weak, riven by internal discord and beholden to the powerful bureaucracy. But at least Japan has a two-party system now! When the Democratic Party of Japan was elected to power last year, it was the first time that an opposition party had won a popular majority in over 50 years of "democracy." If Japan's politics are sclerotic now, they were simply tragic back in the 60s, 70s and 80s; one perpetually-ruling party, deeply corrupt, divided into internal factions that doled out government protection and largesse to favored companies and constituencies. Japan's political system is one of the institutions that has most dramatically improved over the past 20 years.

As for Japan's isolation, here too the doomsayers overstate their case. It's true, as many lament, that few Japanese students study overseas; this deprives Japan's professionals and scientists of valuable connections, experience, and perspective. But French students study mostly in France, German students in Germany, and British students in Britain, and little is said of it. In fact, the only large rich country that does send a substantial portion of its students overseas seems to be South Korea.

Regarding the technological "Galapagos syndrome" that has supposedly deprived Japan's export industries of international competitiveness, I don't deny that some of this is happening, especially in mobile computing and communications. But Japan still runs a substantial trade surplus, despite its currency no longer being undervalued. And plenty of Japan's once-heralded industries - cars, construction equipment, machine tools, cameras, video game systems - are still just as world-beating as ever. Furthermore, small and medium-sized Japanese companies have increasingly captured market share in parts and components, the un-sexy back end of the value chain that nevertheless makes Germany an export powerhouse. Conclusion: Galapagos syndrome is an annoyance, but it is not bringing down the Japanese economy.

Deflation is a thornier problem. Here is one issue where I agree with the consensus view, which is to say that a long deflationary spiral has sapped much of the vitality from Japan's economy. This is the problem that is most unique to Japan, and is something that will continue to plague the country for a long time, as high-paid Baby Boomers retire and are replaced with lower-paid youngsters.

That about covers my list. As for the much-ballyhooed "herbivorous men," well, sorry to say this, but Japan, welcome to the club. Rather than some kind of collective loss of civilizational pride and will, I blame internet porn.

All this, I want to stress, is not to shrug at Japan's difficulties, or to claim that Japan is cruising along. The country has real problems. But look around - Europe and the U.S. are in much the same boat on many of these points, or else have equally vicious problems all their own. Japan needs serious reforms and bold experiments, but it does not deserve its reputation as a sick, exhausted society in a slow, terminal downward spiral.

Why, then, is this meme of Japanese decline so popular, both in the West and in much of Japan itself? I believe that the main culprit is expectations. After all, Japan was experiencing China-like levels of growth as recently as a few decades ago. And it is similar, in its economic model and (though few mention this aloud) its racial composition to countries like South Korea and Taiwan and China that have been on a tear of late. We look at the other Asian tigers, and expect Japan to be an Asian tiger too - and when it's not, we assume it must be some special sclerosis.

But Japan is not another "Asian tiger." It did its rapid catch-up growth a long time ago. Japan was the first East Asian country to join the ranks of the developed nations, and so it naturally was the first to hit the wall of slower growth that inevitably puts the brakes on any country that reaches the technological frontier. This is just economic destiny. In fact, don't look now, but Korea is hitting this wall as well, as is Taiwan.

So how well is Japan doing, really? Its per capita GDP, measured at purchasing power parity, is very close to that of Germany, the UK, and France - countries with roughly similar populations and natural resources - and a bit ahead of South Korea and Taiwan. It has nearly the lowest murder rate and the highest life expectancy of any country on the planet. On the downside, its suicide rate is extremely high, and its inequality is a bit worse than Europe's.

Not the best-off country in the world, therefore, but no slouch either, and in some areas still a world-beater. And those who claim Japan is a society in stasis should look again. In recent years, Japan has shown a (relatively) bold willingness to tinker with its institutions, instituting a jury trial system, for example. Once-respected (and thus deeply corrupt) institutions like prosecutors and police have deservedly fallen from grace. Service industries like retail, once the cozy sinecure of politically-connected firms, are being challenged by entrepreneurs like Tadashi Yanai of Fast Retailing. the flip side of Japan's "Galapagos syndrome" is that many Japanese customers are opening their eyes to the innovation and quality of foreign brands like the iPhone. Even Japan's famously paleolithic gender roles are changing.

Japan is not (yet) in the middle of a Renaissance, nor can it recapture the economic "miracle" of the 70s. It assuredly has a hard road ahead. But the country is neither as sclerotic nor as badly off as pessimists and critics allege. This is one country that may surprise you on the upside.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

La la la, I can't hear myself

"Angus" at the blog Kids Prefer Cheese gives us a post called "one reality, many interpretations?":

The progressive drumbeat that the Dems are in trouble because Obama was too conservative continues.

Mark Thoma gives a clear articulation of the view:

"I don't know if the centrist, bipartisan seeking, compromising Obama we have seen to date can actually embrace an encompassing vision. He seems afraid to be a Democrat.."

It's hard for me to understand this sentence coming from a person (i.e. Mark) who I like and respect. From my perspective, Obama is pretty far left and uncompromising.

Ah, I think, a conservative blogger. Expecting a list of reasons explaining why Obama is "far left and uncompromising," I instead get the following:

So let me invoke Robin Hanson and try to list things Obama has done that qualify as evidence for Mark's view.

I would say on economic policy the closest thing to centrist & compromising that he's done is appoint Summers and Geithner.

Can you count not pushing for single payer as bipartisan seeking or compromising?

Then there's Guantanamo, renditions, wiretaps, and the like. I view the continuation of these policies as wrong, but are they being continued as a compromise? Or out of bipartisanship?

Oh and then there are the wars. Do they count?

Oh my, there's also no action on immigration reform and the monstrosity that is DADT.

Holy Crap! Maybe Mark has a point.

Ah, I think. An open-minded conservative! Rare breed these days. But here, again, I expect a list of counterarguments; reasons why, despite this well-articulated (though by no means comprehensive) list of evidence for Obama's centrism, the President is actually "far left and uncompromising." I mean, the title of the blog post is "one reality, many interpretations?", right? It sure would be weird if I only got evidence for one of those interpretations, wouldn't it?

But instead I get this:

I see Obama as the worst possible policy mix. Wrong on economic issues, wrong on foreign policy and wrong on social issues too. A Dem should at least get the social issues right!

That Robin H. sure is a smart fellow.

And that is the end of the post. No, I haven't left anything out; the quotes above represent the entirety of the article.

So what we have here is a conservative blogger stating his opinion (that Obama is "far left and uncompromising"), listing a bunch of evidence why he's dead flat-out wrong, and then concluding that there are "many interpretations of reality." Well, heck. Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but what he seems to be saying is: "Even if all the available evidence is against me, I choose to trust my pure instinct as the best guide to what's really true."

This is, in a nutshell, what I see as the big problem with the modern conservative movement. They have left the "reality-based community" for good and all. Instinct is viewed as a proper substitute for facts; a conservative is free to list evidence against his viewpoint ad infinitum, with the blithe and comfortable certainty that none of it really counts.

And where does the instinct that "Obama is far left and uncompromising" come from? It comes from a whole bunch of other conservatives and Republicans saying that he is. And where do they get their certainty that Obama is a leftist? Uh-huh. Yet other conservatives and Republicans. The feeling of consensus is powered by a whole bunch of people repeating the same things back to each other over and over. Conservatives have declared that the communal will of their tribe is more powerful than any outside reality.

Some call this "epistemic closure." I would call it "tribal secession from the intellectual life of the nation."

Update: In the comments thread for Angus' post, I try to press him on why exactly he thinks Obama is an uncompromising far-leftist. He repeatedly refuses (fails?) to state one single fact or piece of evidence that he thinks supports his chosen interpretation of reality. Sigh. It's actually pretty sad. Not that I'm surprised, though; like I said, it's not about evidence, it's about tribal instinct.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

First impressions of Acrobat X

For the past several months, I've been privileged to be allowed to test Acrobat 10, which has now been released as the Acrobat X family. Now that I'm finally at liberty to discuss actual features in detail, I can give some impressions of the software. Overall, the news is good. Very good.

The biggest news is that by virtue of a serious UI makeover, Acrobat has gotten much easier to use; it no longer feels quite so heavy and monolithic. Adobe has done an excellent job of moving little-used commands out of view while putting more-frequently-used tools and commands in logical places (and letting the user configure toolbars as needed). There are now only 5 main menus instead of 10, for example. The product has scored a gigantic (and much needed) usability win, as far as I'm concerned.

The Save as Word functionality has undergone a significant, long-overdue improvement in quality.

Forms creation/editing is easier, thanks to the aforementioned UI overhaul. I'm getting things done in fewer clicks now. For heavier-duty form-design tasks, Acrobat Pro and higher (on Windows) will ship with LiveCycle Designer ES2. I'm of two minds about that. On the plus side, LiveCycle Designer offers superior forms-creation tools and comes with a nice assortment of prebuilt templates. As form designers go, LiveCycle's tooling is right up there with the best of the best. On the down side, forms you create with LiveCycle are (as before) not editable using the standard form-design tools of Acrobat. So you're stuck either in LiveCycle Designer mode or Acrobat-native form-design mode. And LiveCycle Designer makes it very hard to add scripts to form elements. I haven't tested the most recent Designer, but the version that shipped with Acrobat 9 has not proven (in my experience, at least) to be very stable, and on the whole, I remain somewhat disappointed with the relatively primitive integration between Acrobat and LiveCycle Designer. The sooner Adobe can make LiveCycle forms compatible with Acrobat, the better.

Acrobat X introduces a notion of Actions. The ability exists to standardize processes in an organization/department by combining multiple tasks into a single Action that can run on single or multiple files and that can be accessed through a single click. Users can author a new Action through File > PDF Actions > Create.

Enterprise customers of Acrobat X will no doubt laud the product's integration with SharePoint:

• You can open files hosted on SharePoint from Acrobat or Reader's Open dialog by browsing to a mapped drive or a WebFolder under "My Network Places".
• When a PDF is opened from SharePoint, you have the ability to independently check that PDF in and out, similar to Office, via an option in the File Menu.
• SharePoint is accessible from all of Acrobat or Reader's Open and Save dialogs: e.g., if there’s a dialog that prompts you to browse for a file, you can browse to a SharePoint hosted file just like a local file. And if there’s a dialog that prompts you to save a file, you can save to SharePoint just like you can save to your local drive.
• If the SharePoint system requires that version information be specified when the user checks in a PDF into SharePoint, Acrobat/Reader will prompt the user to provide that information.

The ability to save search results in PDF and CSV file formats is a nice plus, as is the new .xlsx export functionality.

Adobe Reader has been enhanced with the ability to create sticky notes and highlight text on PDF documents. Also, the Adobe Reader browser plug-in is now a 32/64-bit universal plug-in which supports Safari running either 64-bit (default) or 32-bit.

What's missing from Acrobat X? The JavaScript API still offers no Selection API. (I blogged about this before.) Also, the Net.HTTP API remains a disappointment: It's possible to do AJAX-like (asynchronous) POSTs programmatically, in JavaScript, but only from an application-scoped script (a so-called "folder-level" script), not a document-level script. And I couldn't get HTTP GET operations to work at all.

But overall, my quibbles with Acro X are few. On the whole, I think it's the best major new release of Acrobat to happen in many years, and customers should be quite happy with it.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Freeeeeeeeaaaaaaak!

Steven Levitt, of Freakonomics fame, writes of Paul Krugman:

I did not think that Paul Krugman was still writing academic papers. Nor have I seen any evidence in the last decade that he still has any sense of humor.

Consequently, I was surprised to see an article written by him entitled “The Theory of Interstellar Trade,” published recently in the journal Economic Inquiry...

A quick look at the acknowledgments, however, clears things up. The original manuscript was written in July 1978, when Krugman was an active researcher and being a curmudgeon wasn’t part of his professional identity.

Checking Steven Levitt's CV, I find that his last published paper was published in 2004. And here is an example of Levitt's sense of...um, levity, taken from the introduction to Freakonomics:

An elderly homeless man approaches [Levitt's car]. It says he is homeless right on his sign, which also asks for money. He wears a torn jacket, too heavy for the warm day, and a grimy red baseball cap.

[Levitt] doesn’t lock his doors or inch the car forward. Nor does he go scrounging for spare change. He just watches, as if through one-way glass. After a while, the homeless man moves along.

“He had nice headphones,” says [Levitt], still watching in the rearview mirror. “Well, nicer than the ones I have. Otherwise, it doesn’t look like he has many assets.”

A real knee-slapper.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Why is Liu Xiaobo China's first Nobel prize winner?

Last week, Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on Charter 08, a document that calls for democratic reforms and greater political freedoms in the People's Republic of China. He is currently in jail for writing that document. When the prize was announced, China's state-controlled media and security apparatus began an all-out campaign to censor the story, blocking Web access to information about the award, arresting people who gathered to celebrate, and promptly imprisoning Liu's wife.

I should mention at this point that Liu Xiaobo is the first resident of China to win any Nobel Prize. Ever.

I cannot help but think that this is no coincidence.

Name a well-known piece of technology invented in China since the year 1400. Or name an important scientific discovery made in China since that year. If you can, you're a better Google hound than I, because I find absolutely nada. Nothing. In 600 years. China's technological and scientific underachievement is not a figment of Swedish/Norwegian bias.

What could cause a country with 20% of the world's population - twice as many as all of Europe! - to be the world's most spectacular scientific and technological dunce for six centuries?

Racist and Eurocentric theories that East Asians are less creative than Caucasians are patently false, as both historical and modern facts demonstrate. Japan, for example, has plenty of Nobel prizes and great scientific discoveries to its name, and is the birthplace of inventions such as (deep breath) the digital camera, the hand calculator, the floppy disk, flash memory, pluripotent stem cells, B-vitamins, the camcorder/VCR/VHS, and the compact disc (not to mention MSG, high-fructose corn syrup, methamphetamine, and karaoke). People of Chinese descent have made huge numbers of landmark contributions to science and technology...outside China. And, as everyone knows, pre-1400 China was the birthplace of paper, gunpowder, the compass, movable type, the horse collar, the astrolabe, compartmentalized ship hulls, and a long list of other awesome things that rivaled (and, during the Middle Ages, far exceeded) anything in Europe. It is clear that China's underachievement has been due to collective deficiencies, not individual ones.

Similarly, China's turbulent history in the 19th and 20th centuries, though undoubtedly a contributing factor, is hardly an excuse. Russia, which lost a far larger percentage of its population to wars and famines than did China during the same time period, and suffered under an equally blinkered communist regime, managed to put the first man in space and clean up plenty of Nobels. And the upheavals of the modern age cannot explain the so-called "Great Divergence" of 1400-1870, in which Europe took over from China as the locus of global innovation long before British warships showed up pushing opium.

Nor is this simply a case of China's inevitable catch-up. The U.S. was the birthplace of inventions like the steamboat and the airplane long before it caught up to European levels of per capita GDP. Even if China now starts to produce some innovations, it will still have 600 years of stasis to explain.

So what is China's problem? As I said before, I believe that the fact that China's first Nobel winner is an imprisoned dissident is telling. Liu Xiaobo is not the first Chinese citizen to be imprisoned by the state for calling for intellectual freedom; he joins a long and hallowed line of such persecuted thought-criminals, stretching back at least to Li Zhi of the Ming Dynasty.

Glib theories cannot easily explain the broad sweep of history, but my guess as to the cause of China's technological underachievement goes something like this: the act of trying to keep together a nation as large and diverse as China has come at the cost of intellectual, scientific, and technological progress. After 1400, as Mongol domination of China ended, the rulers of the Ming Dynasty soon found themselves in charge of an empire vastly more populous (thanks to new rice-farming techniques) than the earlier Han and T'ang dominions. Controlling and stabilizing this mega-nation required more government intervention in daily economic life than in most countries. China stayed together where European and Indian empires of comparable population crumbled, but the cost was constant suppression of potentially disruptive technologies.

The Ming began this unfortunate tradition by banning private shipping (just as European explorers were gearing up for world conquest), by purging science from the civil service examinations, and by sending a bunch of (basically) lawyers called the "Confucian Scholar-Gentry" into the countryside to regulate economic activity. Mechanical inventions comparable to, and centuries ahead of, the textile machinery that kicked off Europe's Industrial Revolution languished in obscurity and were forgotten.

European countries, of course, would have loved to do the same thing, but they couldn't. Although European nations were arguably more despotic than China during the Early Modern period, they were forced to fight each other in a series of endless wars; this not only spurred them to allow their scientists and inventors to do their thing (in order to gain a military edge over the neighbors), but it allowed visionaries like Columbus to shop around for patrons among the cornucopia of European rulers. China, with one Emperor - even a benign one - could afford to sacrifice progress in favor of stability. This is basically Jared Diamond's theory of "optimal fragmentation."

Even in the modern day, the absolute priority that China places on internal stability ("harmony," in their favored terminology) has contributed to the aforementioned bloody and chaotic history that delayed China's industrial revolution until 1979. The Chinese Civil War (really, wars), the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen Square - all of these were overkill on the part of Chinese rulers desperate to keep the far-flung empire as a single, unified, homogeneous nation-state. Excessive government control of academia has led to a culture of fraud and fear that continues to hamstring Chinese science. Meanwhile, Chinese splinter nations Hong Kong and Taiwan, and smaller East Asian neighbors like Japan, Korea, and Singapore, sped ahead while massive, monolithic Mainland China languished.

Far from being the champion of the Chinese race, as it has always claimed, the Chinese Empire - and its successor, the People's Republic of China - has been the greatest force preventing 80% of East Asians from finding new and better ways to live.

If my theory is right, it is no surprise that China's first Nobel laureate is not a scientist, but a would-be reformer. China's high-speed economic growth primarily relies on foreign technology and on brute accumulation of physical capital; the people who are doing the most new and revolutionary things in that country are those who are trying to reform a society hobbled by 600 years of excessive government enforcement of "harmony."

I think there is great hope for China to change. Modern communications and transportation technology has made it more possible than ever to hold together a large, diverse nation without sacrificing intellectual dynamism - the U.S. and India are cases in point. But cultural change is no sure thing. It seems to me that until and unless China Liu Xiaobo's succeed in their attempts at societal innovation, China's scientists will continue to lag behind those of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the West.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Do higher taxes make the rich work less?

Greg Mankiw is an economist whose academic work I greatly admire and respect, but whose economics-related punditry often leaves me gaping in incredulous dismay.

Case in point: Mankiw has an editorial in the New York Times explaining why higher taxes on the rich will make the rich work less. He writes:

An important issue dividing the political parties is whether to raise taxes on those earning more than $250,000 a year. Democrats say these taxpayers can afford to chip in a bit more. Republicans say raising taxes on those who already face the highest marginal tax rates will hurt the economy.

So I thought it might be useful to do a case study on one of these high-income taxpayers. Fortunately, I have one handy: me. As a professor at Harvard and the author of some popular textbooks, I am comfortably in the income range that would be hit by this tax increase. I have been thinking — narcissistically, to be sure — about how higher taxes would affect me.

This is not how economics should be done; anecdotes prove nothing. And anyway, Mankiw's case is a terrible example of what he's trying to prove; he could make a lot more money in the private sector, but doesn't, because the prestige of working at Harvard matters more to him.

But let's put that aside and look at the data. That is what good scientists should do. When people are taxed for supplying something (for example, labor), the amount that taxes make them reduce their supply is called the "elasticity of supply." If this elasticity (or the "elasticity of demand) is high, then taxes hurt the economy by causing people to stop doing whatever productive activity is getting taxed. If the elasticity is low, then taxes don't hurt the economy much, and instead simply move money around from one place to another (which is what we want them to do).

So what is the elasticity of labor supply? How much does income tax cause people to work less? When economists look at the micro-level data, they find that it's about 0.1; raising average income taxes by 10% reduces labor supply by about 1%.

That's not much. The reason it's so low is that most people can't actually decide how much they work. Greg Mankiw may have the chance for side gigs as a consultant or a speaker, but he's a rarity in that regard; most people collect one single paycheck, and can't decide their hours. It's either a full workweek or unemployment. (In labor economics, this is known as the "extensive margin," in case you were wondering.)

This fits perfectly with what we see when we examine the historical record. In the 1970s, the top marginal tax rates were very very high - including state taxes, it was over 90% in some states. And yet working hours have actually declined since taxes were drastically cut in the early 80s. That's right: lower taxes, less work. Now, this is not to say that the lower taxes caused people to work less. The point is that Mankiw's warning about how higher taxes on the rich is going to stop them from working has no basis in historical fact.

These facts heavily imply that Mankiw's opposition to higher taxes on the wealthy is based not on any concern for the efficiency of the economy, but on his personal ideology. In fact, this is not conjecture; Mankiw has repeatedly and explicitly expressed the idea that rich people, having contributed more to society than others, "deserve" lower taxes.

In my opinion, this is not how good economics is done. Economics, I believe, should be about the facts first and ideology second; when Mankiw invokes largely specious arguments about the impact of taxes on labor supply, for the (unstated) purpose of advancing his ideology, he behaves not as a scientist but as a lawyer, disingenuously pushing his case using any means at his disposal. This is not fair to the American people.

Neither, in my opinion, are the policies he supports. This country already faces huge deficits, and spending cuts alone - though absolutely necessary - will not be enough to close the gap, especially as the Baby Boomers retire. Higher taxes are needed to keep our economy solvent. Because the elasticity of labor supply is so low, personal income taxes are a relatively efficient way of raising this money (as opposed to, say, corporate taxes, which are actually way too high in this country). If Greg Mankiw wins his battle to protect the rich from "undeserved" taxes, economic efficiency - which he claims to support - will be swamped under a rising tide of debt. Mankiw sullies his reputation as an economist by ignoring this looming danger.

Update: There's also another reason why income taxes don't discourage work as much as Mankiw claims: income effects.

Update: Ryan Avent makes a bunch more points about why Mankiw's analysis is simplistic.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad

Google's WebP image format

Google has announced a new image format for the web, called WebP. Its advantage over JPEG? Better compression, of course. The above graph shows results obtained when compressing approximately "1 million images randomly sampled from a repository of images crawled from the web." Google's comparative study of WebP, JPEG 2000, and Re-JPEG can be found here. An image gallery is here.

According to Google, "WebP typically achieves an average of 39% more compression than JPEG and JPEG 2000, without loss of image quality ."

Converter code is available on the downloads section of the WebP open-source project page.

The WebP team is reportedly developing a patch to WebKit to provide native support for WebP in an upcoming release of Google Chrome. It's anyone's guess as to when (or whether) the format will be supported by other browsers, but it seems likely that Firefox, Opera, and Safari will follow suit. The question, of course, is what happens if Internet Explorer ignores the format altogether (as seems likely)? The answer, I think, is that IE continues on its trajectory of becoming less relevant by the day.

reade more... Résuméabuiyad