Oprah and Starbucks...

... the pairing seems so natural as to be almost inevitable... I have to say the marketing is lovely to look at, how Oprah's classy outfit matches the color of the chai latte...

(Photo credit: The Sistah Vegan Project blog... As you might or might not guess from the blog title, the post raises some well-taken notes of skepticism about Starbucks' motives...)

Teenage Wasteland

Joyful noise.

"... came up with the idea of a carbon tax..."?

Bill Nordhaus? Um, no. Great economist. Important work. A bit cautious on climate policy—the discount rate he uses is too high, I think—but careful and smart. But came up with the carbon tax? I think that would have to be Arthur Pigou, even if he didn't know CO2 was a form of pollution back in 1920...

This too shall pass...

Hey, I'm all for learning basic computer coding. I do some myself, and I teach a little to my students in my econometrics class. Algorithmic thinking... very good for the brain. But for every kid in elementary school? Oh, I suppose I'd place a high priority on that... right after reading, writing, math, science, literature, music, visual arts, physical education, second language, nutrition, financial literacy, appreciation of nature, conflict resolution, cooking, gardening, home repair, etiquette...

Carleton Watkins

Stanford's Cantor Arts Center is exhibiting selections from its magnificent collection of Carleton Watkins photos. Many were taken in Yosemite during the 1860s; there is also a nice selection from Oregon and Washington.

Photography in the 1860s was not a matter of point, click, and upload. Watkins made colossal negatives on glass, using a collodion wet plate process that required exposing the plate quickly and developing the negative immediately in the field. Hence he had to haul a payload of glass, chemicals, and darkroom materials on mules up into then-remote Yosemite.

The results were glorious in their composition and detail, and played a major role in fostering public and political support for protecting and preserving Yosemite. Thus these photos are of historical interest not just as artwork and technology, but as political and cultural artifacts as well.

It would have been interesting to see Watkins's prints set alongside those other iconic photographs of Yosemite, by Ansel Adams. Watkins was careful in composing his pictures: he had to be, because the process meant every shot was precious. The prints often feature dark and contrasty foregrounds--water, rocks, or vegetation--with the slightly hazy, brightly lit monuments of El Capitan or Half Dome rising in the background. This is Yosemite Valley as one experiences it in person. Adams was careful about composition as well, obviously, but as the wizard of the darkroom he was after something else: a Yosemite no human eye has ever experienced, a kind of Platonic form of perfection in granite and light.

Which Yosemite is better? Both are indispensable. I am always shocked when I speak with a Californian who has never been there. Say what?

Photo source.

Gary Becker, RIP

One could certainly defend the claim that Gary Becker was the most important and influential living economist at the time of his death Saturday, and it would hardly be outrageous to say he was the most influential economist since Keynes. He was pathbreaking on important dimensions of economics conventionally defined, such as human capital, and he was the discipline's great imperialist, seeking to extend the methodology of microeconomic theory to topics generally claimed by other social sciences: discrimination, marriage, and fertility, to name three. I didn't care much for his politics, and his insistence that rational choice models could account for every aspect of human behavior was narrow, if not the dead end that some behavioralists seem to think it is. The attempted colonization of sociology and political science by economics will ultimately, I think, prove to be as productive as it is unsuccessful. In the shorter run, Becker's brilliance and bull-in-the-china-shop confidence in the superiority of his own methods contributed to the attitude of condescension if not outright contempt economists often exhibit toward the other social disciplines, an attitude that has probably set back the cause of developing a unified science of human behavior by a generation or more.

Rational choice theory a la Becker does not inevitably lead to conservative or libertarian policy conclusions, Becker's personal politics aside. There is ample room in the real world and in rational choice theory for market failures and a concern for distribution, both of which can justify activist government intervention in markets. And Becker was a leading figure in extending rational choice models to other-regarding (in his case, specifically, altruistic) motives. Altruism, perhaps paradoxically, is itself a cause of market failure.

My favorite Becker paper is number one on Tyler Cowen's list of neglected Becker papers: "Irrational Behavior and Economic Theory" (JPE, 1962). In it Becker shows that some fairly strong behavioral predictions of rational choice theory would also be exhibited on average by individuals who behaved in an extremely irrational manner--namely, people who made completely random choices. For instance, standard micro theory predicts that individuals will reduce their purchases of a good when its price increases, even if they are fully compensated for the loss of purchasing power caused by the price hike. This substitution effect follows from rational economizing behavior. But Becker shows, with an elegant diagrammatic argument, that even random consumers, when compensated, will also cut their expected (average) purchases, because of the pivot in the set of affordable bundles of goods. Here it is, his Figure 2; I leave it as an exercise for you to back out how the points p and p' clinch his argument.

This is a great paper for undergrad intermediate micro students, because it can be used to illustrate a couple of important points: (1) Rational choice may serve as a model--or perhaps better, a metaphor--for predicting behavior arising from a range of behaviors, including non-rational behavior; (2) Much of the "action" in the rational consumer model is a result of shifts in the budget constraint, not the specific rules that govern choice along that constraint. But Becker took it a little further, writing that "households may be irrational and yet markets quite rational" (p. 8). One must be careful not to read too much into this claim. If markets being "quite rational" means that in the aggregate, the compensated demand curve will slope down, as it would for an individual rational consumer, yes. But one might also take "quite rational" to be a statement about the efficiency of the resulting market allocation from a normative perspective. And here the rationality or irrationality of the agents makes all the difference. The Pareto efficiency of market allocations requires optimizing (rational) individual behavior--and selfish behavior to boot: no rational economic man (sic), no market efficiency.

Any trained economist will recognize that I liked my Becker best when he was at his least Becker-esque. But he was a giant of our field whatever the shape of your preferences.

Orestimba Wilderness hike

Orestimba is a particularly remote section of the enormous Henry Coe State Park, which lies east of Morgan Hill, CA. Henry Coe is not far from Silicon Valley as the crow flies, but in some ways it might as well be the Yukon Territory. Public roads barely pierce the perimeter, and visitors are relatively few. Our guide, Ron Erskine, seems to know this country as if it were the city block he grew up on, even though the park encompasses nearly 90,000 acres. (Kudos to Bay Nature, the fine magazine and nonprofit that sponsored the walk.)

These hills, part of the Diablo Range, have a specific muted color palette that is difficult for a snapshooter to capture. So I abandoned color, and focused on the textures of the photogenic blue oaks...

   













with a return to color for portraits of a couple of native reptiles...

"This Town Needs a Better Class of Racist"

I found myself pretty quickly tuning out the Bundy and Sterling stories... the easy, self-congratulatory outrage from all quarters nearly as tiresome as the endless media repetition of the ugly statements from the principals. Mr. Coates has something more useful to say, in typically eloquent fashion.