How many faculty have you ever seen ride to class on a skateboard, compete in surf championships, or play in a rock band? My dear colleague and friend Dr Ray Sturm (pictured below, far right) was a one-of-a-kind scholar, bon vivant, and original researcher (see here and here) who did all these things. Our paths had crossed many times — he was a fellow “lecture capture” professor and kindred spirit at my home institution, one of the few souls who made my little corner of the world a better place. I will be devoting my Spring and Summer 2022 classes to his memory.
I stumbled upon some additional reading materials these days as I was cleaning out some old files, so I am updating my 12/23 holiday reading list to include the ones I enjoyed reading (or in two cases, re-reading) the most:
8. “Accounting and the theory of the firm” by the late Ronald H. Coase. This little-known 1989 paper explores the relationship between cost accounting and economic theory.
9. “On the origins of property rights” by yours truly. This theoretical paper, one of the first I ever published — and part of a failed NEH grant application of mine — locates the origins of property in mating strategies; alas, it is not available online.
10. “Colombo: the grassy knoll” by William Harrington. What if there were a second assassin? I picked up a copy of this 1993 JFK-murder mystery at the Free Little Library located in Sunset Beach in Tarpon Springs, Florida.
11. “Why not more States?” by Jennifer Kindred Mitchell. Among other things, this scholarly paper explores the history of US statehood, starting with the admittance of Tennessee in 1796, and makes the case for dividing California into three separate States.
12. “Forget morality” by Ronnie de Sousa — a persuasive and devastating critique take-down of moral philosophy.
Among other things, the holidays are a time when I finally get to catch up on my scholarly readings. Below, for example, is a listing of some of the sundry papers and books I am studying this season:
Happy New Year! Having re-binged Narcos Colombia and Narcos Mexico during the holidays, I was inspired to develop a simple model of drug smuggling.
First off, assume that p is the probability of interdiction on any cross-border smuggling operation; as a result, the expected number of trips across the border until a drug shipment is captured is 1/p.
Next, assume that the profits are $X for each successful smuggling trip, and further assume that the value of the drugs and the value of the truck, airplane, or other vessel transporting the drugs totals $Y. (In reality, the values of X and Y may vary per trip; I, however, am holding both values constant for simplicity.)
On the last trip, the transport vehicle is captured and no profits are made. Therefore, in expectation, we will have [(1/p) – 1] smuggling operations earning $X per trip and one trip losing $Y.
According to standard price theory in economics, the ex ante expected profit in equilibrium of a rational, risk-neutral smuggler should be zero. This logic can be stated formally as follows:
Y = [(1/p) – 1]X
which can be further simplified as follows:
Y = X(1 – p)/p
Given these super-simplifying assumptions, if p = ½ (i.e. a 50% probability of interdiction), then Y = X. In other words, the smuggler’s initial investment is recouped in just one smuggling operation! Put another way, if we want to combat smuggling, the probability of detection must be greater ½.
If, however, p is below ½, smuggling will always be profitable. For example, if p = 1/10, then Y = 9X. That is to say, the smuggler will recoup nine times his initial investment when the probability of interdiction is just 10%. More generally, this simple model shows that the lower the probability of detection, the more profitable smuggling will be.
I will continue with my review of Nozick in the next day or two. In the meantime, however, check out this misleadingly-titled report by Sarah Holder “The Year Basic Income Programs Went Mainstream“, which begins by noting that 20 guaranteed-income pilot programs have launched in cities and counties across the U.S. since 2018, with more than 5,400 families and individuals receiving between $300 and $1,000 per month. More accurately, Ms Holder’s report also acknowledges that these “local programs are small in scale and duration” and that calls for a federal guaranteed income policy have not yet succeeded (link in the original). That’s putting it mildly! My 2020 paper “Guaranteed Income: Chronicle of a Political Death Foretold” explains why these efforts are doomed to failure.
Part 36 of my epic review of Robert Nozick, which covers the last two subsections of Chapter 6 (pp. 137-467), formally concludes my review of Part I of “Anarchy, State, and Utopia.” In summary, Nozick’s thesis in Part I of his magnum opus has both descriptive and normative components. The descriptive part of Nozick’s thesis is that a plethora of protection rackets will spring up in the state of nature until one of them becomes the dominant one, monopolizing the right to punish and settle disputes about the scope of one’s rights. By contrast, the normative part of his thesis is that this dominant protection racket is morally required to pay compensation for any disadvantages imposed on others, though he fails to explain how such disadvantages are to be measured or monetized. My concluding questions for Nozick are below:
1. What is the moral baseline for deciding when someone has suffered a disadvantage?
2. How are conflicts between neighboring protection rackets resolved?
3. What role do families play in your Lockean state of nature?
Note that I have raised many of these same queries before (see here, for example), and further note that Nozick fails to provide satisfactory answers to them.
The last two subsections of Chapter 6 (pp. 137-146) contain an extended digression on the problem of punishment and the possibility of “anti-punishment” (my term) via preventive detention in “resort detention centers”, one of my favorite Nozickian thought experiments thus far. More to the point, Nozick identifies some serious problems with Locke’s state-of-nature theory:
Don’t all persons (not just the victim) have the right to punish wrongdoers in the state of nature?
What happens when people disagree about the content or scope of their rights?
How much compensation must be paid to persons who are prevented from exercising their rights?
Nozick’s answer to the first two questions is the dominant protection association. Once a protection agency becomes the dominant one in a territory, it (the agency) will monopolize the right to punish and will settle disputes about the scope of one’s rights. Nozick, however, glosses over the possibility of conflict…
Part 35 of my epic review of Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia,” which covers the fourth subsection of Chapter 6 (pp. 133-137) and which I am reblogging below, identifies an internal contradiction in Nozick’s theory of the state of nature.
Unwittingly, Nozick contradicts himself and refutes his own theory of the state in the fourth subsection of Chapter 6 (pp. 133-137)! Recall Nozick’s previous claims from Chapter 5 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia. In case your memory needs some refreshing, we will break down his main claims here:
That a territory’s dominant protection association will eventually become a state or state-like entity;
That the dominant protection agency in each territory will prohibit non-clients from enforcing their rights in their dealings with the clients of the protection agency;
That the dominant protection agency will compensate these non-clients for this violation of their rights;
That this compensation will be in the form of in kind protection services;
That this process from protection agency to state will occur without anyone’s natural rights being violated, since non-clients will receive compensation.
Now, however, in the fourth subsection of Chapter 6, Nozick will not only…
Let’s keep it moving, where “it” is my epic review of Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” (ASU). To the point, the post below — Part 34 of my review — covers the third subsection of Chapter 6 of ASU and poses a key question for my fellow readers of Nozick. (¡Feliz cumpleaños, mi querida Sydjia!)
Nozick poses two additional questions in the third subsection of Chapter 6 (pp. 130-133). First, he asks whether individuals in a state of nature might agree with each other or unilaterally decide to refrain from creating or joining a protection agency, or in Nozick’s words (p. 130, emphasis in original): “… might not everyone choose to stay out, in order to avoid the [inevitable loss of freedom] at the end of the process.” (In other words, why isn’t option D (from our 1/9/18 blog post) the most likely equilibrium in the state of nature.) According to Nozick, such a possibility is not a stable equilibrium, since the state of nature is like a Prisoner’s Dilemma (p. 131): “each individual will realize that it is in his own individual interest to join a protection association (the more so as some others join) …” Really? If I join a protection agency, what…
Happy Birthday, my beloved Sydjia! Today, I am reblogging my review of the second subsection of Chapter 6 of “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” in which Nozick explores the morality of preemptive strikes. (The post below is Part 33 of my extended review of Nozick.)
The second subsection of Chapter 6 (pp. 126-130) anticipates the worldwide controversy over President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair’s ill-fated decision to invade Iraq in 2003, which in hindsight, turned out to be one of the worst and costliest decisions in history. Here, Nozick asks, when is a preemptive attack morally wrong, and when is such an attack morally justified?
Recall Nozick’s key question from our previous post: may I prevent others from joining a protection association in the state of nature if I know that their protection association will later prevent me from exercising my natural rights in the future? It turns out that this question and the preemptive war question are analytically the same! Nozick, however, draws an artificial and untenable distinction, invoking the “last clear chance” doctrine from tort law: if an act requires a subsequent decision to commit a wrong — i.e. if…
Happy Kwanzaa! I am now resuming my in-depth review of Robert Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia”, so let’s pick up where we left off: with Chapter 6. That chapter has six subsections, and the post below — part 32 overall of my epic review — covers the first subsection of Ch. 6, where Nozick models the state of nature as a Prisoner’s Dilemma.
We almost considered skipping Chapter 6 of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, since Nozick himself invites his readers to do so on p. 120: “The reader who wishes to pursue the main flow of our argument may proceed directly to the next chapter.” But as we have noted in so many of our previous posts, Nozick has left too many issues open and ends untied thus far, problems that he promises to tackle in Chapter 6. In addition, Nozick raises two excellent questions in the first subsection of Chapter 6 (pp. 120-125). First, Nozick asks what equilibrium is most likely to occur in a state of nature? To this end, he models the state of nature as a Prisoner’s Dilemma (see example below). According to Nozick, there are four possibilities in all:
Option A: You can join a protection association and allow your neighbors to join one.
prior probability 