EclectEcon

If a politician has a net worth of, say $2 million, does it matter in what form they hold their wealth?

Suppose they have $2 million in Treasury Bills. If the gubmnt provides them with a monthly allowance to cover their rent, people do not seem to object too much.

But suppose instead they have a $2 million home. If the gubmnt provides them with a monthly living allowance to cover the implicit rent on their home (what they could have earned from renting it; or, alternatively, what they could have earned from selling the home and buying other assets such as T-bills), people get so terribly upset.

So a Brit politician sold her house merely to justify to the econo-ignorant receiving a monthly rent cheque.

The Sunday Telegraph has learnt that the Wintertons have decided to move out after being barred from claiming any more in Additional Cost Allowance (ACA) for living there. Instead, they will move into a rented flat in Westminster which will cost the taxpayer thousands of pounds a year in ACA.

Lady Winterton, the MP for Congleton, Cheshire, has written to John
Lyon, the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, informing him that the
family trust, which owns their previous home on behalf of their
children, would now rent it out to a new tenant "at the current market
rate, as now".

And the ignorantia are upset by this.

Again, I ask, what's the difference? Why should it matter how the politicians hold their wealth? If they are to receive a rent allowance, is there a wealth test? If not, whether they own a flat/house should be irrelevant.

Addendum: The criteria for who should qualify for the ACA do, indeed, seem to open the door for some questionable activities (see this); but given the criteria, the buy-rent decision and the wealth of the MPs should not cloud the issue. Opportunity costs are still important.

Principlex has posted Ayn Rand's 1944 column, The Only Path to Tomorrow, which originally appeared in The Readers' Digest in 1944 [h/t to Stephen Hicks]. It is a forceful, but not compelling, statement about the importance of individual freedom. Here is a very brief excerpt:

The history of mankind is the history of the struggle between the Active Man and the Passive, between the individual and the collective. The countries which have produced the happiest men, the highest standards of living and the greatest cultural advances have been the countries where the power of the collective — of the government, of the state — was limited and the individual was given freedom of independent action. As examples: The rise of Rome, with its conception of law based on a citizen's rights, over the collectivist barbarism of its time. The rise of England, with a system of government based on the Magna Carta, over collectivist, totalitarian Spain. The rise of the United States to a degree of achievement unequaled in history — by grace of the individual freedom and independence which our Constitution gave each citizen against the collective.

While men are still pondering upon the causes of the rise and fall of civilizations, every page of history cries to us that there is but one source of progress: Individual Man in independent action. Collectivism is the ancient principle of savagery. A savage's whole existence is ruled by the leaders of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Kip Esquire has a very thorough discussion of SCOTUS [the Supreme Court Of The United States] and campaign reform. After a lengthy discussion of the US Bill of Rights, especially the 1st Amendment on Freedom of Speech, Kip then explains why campaign reform is important and how libertarians have a valid point to be made on the topic:

Every campaign finance case is opportunity for libertarians to
“stand above it all” and sigh with disappointment (disgust?). All sides
in the debate seem to agree on one thing: The whole point of the
exercise is to combat corruption in politics. Fair enough, and noble
enough.

But it is the libertarians, and only the libertarians, who ask the precedent question of why
we have so much corruption in politics. The answer is simple: Because
government does so much that invites corruption, that caters to
corruption and that perpetuates corruption. Things that have nothing to
do with the core functions of government — the functions that the
Framers did, and most people today do, associate with a free society.
Things that are explicitly designed to benefit, not everyone equally or
equitably, but some at the expense of others. From earmarks to tax
breaks, from nanny statism to nanny subsidies, from oil wells to oil
wars.

If the politicians didn’t do so much that they were never meant to do, then no one would try to buy them. That would be the best “campaign finance reform” of all.

It is easy for economists to point out some of the flaws with US farm policy, but Carly Zubrzycki of the Adam Smith Institute Blog says it so well. Commenting on the latest US farm bill:

The most ironic thing about the bill is its provisions for both massive subsidies to American farmers and, a few pages later, its provisions for food aid to third world countries. There’s a brilliant, productive solution to global poverty if I’ve ever heard one: make it impossible for farmers in the third world to compete on a global market, then inefficiently deliver more expensive American food to save the day. With this sort of policy, all America (and the EU, which has strikingly similar policies) does is continue a cycle of dependency while subsidizing unprofitable enterprises within her own borders.

The sponsors of the bill, among other things, express concern about the cost of rising food prices for the poor. If the goal is lower food expenses for poor workers, then let’s stop taxing workers in cities to pay for subsidies to farmers and start importing food from the places where it can best and most economically be grown.

A recent study for the C.D. Howe Institute is called, "The Welfare Enigma: Explaining the Dramatic Decline in Canadians’ Use of Social Assistance, 1993–2005," by Ross Finnie and Ian Irvine. The title is misleading, though, for there is no enigma: welfare benefits were reduced, employment options improved, and the combination meant fewer people sought social assistance.

...the SA rate fell, from a peak of 3.1 million individuals
in the early 1990s to 1.7 million in 2005.

In other words, as social assistance benefits fell, and as the opportunity costs of going on social assistance rose [eco-speak for saying that people had improved options, compared with going on welfare], surprise! Fewer people chose to go on social assistance.

The importance of these empirical findings is to see that welfare is not an either-or thing; rather, adjusting the height of the social safety net plays a role in determining how many will avail themselves of the support provided by that net. And if we opt for a lower social safety net, fewer people will use it.

For further evidence along these same lines, see this by Tim Worstall at the Adam Smith Institute.

From News Quirkies in Ananova (via BenS and JM):

Council bans 'brainstorming'

A council has banned the term "brainstorming" - and replaced it with "thought showers".

Officials Tunbridge Wells Borough Council in Kent feared the phrase might offend epileptics or the mentally ill. ...

But Margaret Thomas, of the National Society for Epilepsy, said: "Brainstorming is a clear and descriptive phrase.

"Alternatives such as "thought shower" or "blue-sky thinking" are ambiguous to say the least.

"Any implication that the word "brainstorming" is offensive to epileptics takes political correctness too far."

And Richard Colwill, of mental health charity SANE, agreed: "This ban goes too far. Few would be genuinely offended by the word "brainstorming" in the context of council meetings."

A council spokesman said: "We take diversity awareness very seriously. The majority of staff have taken part in training and been asked to use the term "thought showers"."

"What can we do," the Syrian Finance minister asked, "to increase Chinese investment?" "Well," the Chinese minister replied, "before we invest in Syria you most open your markets, cut your subsidies, and reduce regulation..."

This quotation is from Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution, still one of my first reads each day.

The WSJ-Online has a good summary item on how and why Argentina devolved into a country which failed to develop its growth potential because of its abrogation of so many freedoms [subscription, but available for a few days for non-subscribers; h/t to Eva].

As the [US] presidential campaign drones on, Barack Obama and the Democrats are fleshing out the promise of "change" with some specific, big-government policy proposals. Many are familiar, perhaps because they already have been tried – in Argentina.

That country has gone from South American breadbasket to world-class basket case. ...

The [Argentine] constitution once held limited government and private property to be among the highest ideals of the land. But in the 1920s these protections, which had made the country a magnet for immigrants and the seventh-largest economy in the world, began to erode.

An early example of this assault on liberty was when Congress imposed a rent freeze to deal with a housing shortage after World War I. This only exacerbated the problem, and in 1922 a politicized Supreme Court widened state powers to allow the regulation of rents. That decision put property-rights protection on a slippery slope. A decade later the Court gave the legislature the power to regulate interest rates.

The interventions didn't end there, and as state control of the economy expanded and the nation grew poorer, the country could not recover its footing. Economic populism and labor militancy took hold; protectionism blossomed and Argentina became a welfare state. Meanwhile, the informal economy swelled under the high cost of legality.

Fiscal crises have been recurring. According to a paper recently released by researchers at the Buenos Aires business school Eseade, external debt as a percentage of GDP has now climbed to 56% compared to 54% in 2001. If you include the unpaid debt to bondholders, the number is 67%. More than a few analysts are worried that should the economy slow, the government may tap Central Bank reserves, sparking a run against the peso or, fearing that, choose default, for the second time in a decade, as its escape hatch.

Will that mean an end to ballooning entitlements, class warfare, hostility toward producers, capital and private property, protectionism and subsidized central-planning? Unlikely.

Americans reading that laundry list may note that it sounds a lot like the mindset of the left wing that will dominate the Democratic Party's convention and choose Barack Obama as its candidate in August. From nationalized health care and government-owned refineries to punishing taxes on the rich, Argentina has been there, done that. There are good reasons to find the resemblance disturbing.

Addendum: After I wrote/quoted the above, I saw that Don Boudreax quoted precisely the same passage. Be sure to see his additional comments at Cafe Hayek.

A recent article in Popular Mechanics says [h/t to Instapundit],

Sorry, folks, but the SUV is dead ...

Sorry, Pop-Mech, but it isn't.

After having spent the springs of 2006 - 07 in England, where the price of gasoline/petrol was then the equivalent of about $2/litre or very roughly $8/gallon, I could see that even at those prices, many people still bought and ran the big gas guzzlers. Probably not as many, proportionally, as in North America during that same time, but there were still lots of them.

So even if the price of gasoline in the US reaches $5 or $6, the SUV is not dead.... at least not if the market is allowed to work. Some people will still want to use their income to buy and feed the big SUVs.

But watch for the elitist interventionist enviro-nazis to try to ban SUVs as being socially irresponsible. Those folks will never understand, much less accept, the possible benefits of a Pigou tax on gasoline, should such a tax be appropriate.

Tom Hanna argues quite convincingly that those who oppose opening up more off-shore oil drilling are really elitists who don't want their views "spoiled" and who really don't give two hoots about the environment:

We can let oil companies drill here, where they'll be expected to keep it clean and be proactive to prevent problems, or we can import more oil from Nigeria, which «has one of the worst environmental records in the world. In recent years, the country has seen the execution of a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, widespread social and environmental problems stemming from oil operations in the Niger River delta, and the world's highest deforestation rate.

We can have a few more oil rigs breaking the clean blue line of the Hollywood horizon or we can help finance the Russian exploration of the Arctic, leaving the Arctic Ocean to the devices of the country that «succeeded in wiping from the map almost an entire sea - the Aral, now largely a toxic desert - and turning the world's deepest freshwater lake, Baikal, into a borscht of cadmium and mercury deposits.» How do you think those Alaskan lichens will fare if the Russians repeat their recent history?

And, by the way, aren't our neighbors to the North a socialist paradise that can do no wrong? Yet, they also seem to be expanding oil production as fast as humanly possible - and selling it to us. If oil production is so bad for the environment, why are the sainted Canadians doing it and why isn't Barack Obama demanding they stop?

Let me add a question: Which is worse for the environment, off-shore drilling or converting Alberta tar sands into refineable crude?

Fathers' Day, and Obama said some pretty straight things:

The African-American Illinois senator amplified one of his campaign themes in condemning absent fathers who have "abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men."

"You and I know how true this is in the African-American community," Obama said, recapping government statistics showing more than half of all black children live in single-parent households.

Such children are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and 20 times more likely to end up in prison, he said.

"And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it," said Obama, who dwelt on his own challenges growing up with a single mother from the age of two after his Kenyan father abandoned them.

And this guy had the most liberal voting record in the senate? As much as I liked hearing this, I wonder what type of chameleon he really is.

Kip's picks: Richardson and Huckabee. For his reasons plus some commentary, see this.

Whenever I hear people complain about the greed of the large oil companies and others, jacking up prices and earning big profits, I have several reactions:

1. What are you complaining about? You could have bought into those profits if you had bought stock in those companies last year or three years ago or...; why didn't you?
2. The greed of the complainants is appalling in these situations. What they are really saying is,
   • You have the oil and the profits, and I want some of what you have. I might make an appeal that says, "The oil belongs to all of us" when in fact I chose not to become an owner of some of the oil or a claimant to some of the profits.
   • Or I might make a more general statement that it is not right for the rich to get richer at our expense.
   This strikes me as being at least as greedy as charging what the market will bear.

Even if those who complain about other people's wealth are not asking for more for themselves, they ARE asking to be able to control how others use their wealth. Doing so is also a form of greed. It's like saying, "You have the wealth, but I want to tell you what to do with it." This latter approach sounds less greedy if couched in terms of making things affordable for the poor, but it is no less greedy in the sense that I want to take it from you and use it how I want it used, not how you want it used.

Is it appropriate for the university to bar the tax authorities from receiving information about a student's class schedule?

I received the following notice from an associate dean a couple of days ago:

It has come to my attention that Canada Customs and Revenue Agency has approached an instructor in a large first year course to provide information about a student's examination schedule so that the student could be served with papers, presumably at the examination. (CCRA was clearly fishing. The student in question is not enrolled in that instructor's class.)

There are NO circumstances under which any information about students should be given out to persons outside the university. If faculty or staff receive inquiries of this type, they should direct the questions to the Office of the Registrar.

Does this sound weird to you? Why wouldn't the tax authorities go directly to the registrar in the first place? And if they had already been rebuffed by the registrar, how would they go about selecting various professors for their fishing expedition? Do you think maybe this was a collection agency or something similar?

About a month ago, I mentioned that a student in my introductory economics class had sent me e-mail expressing concern because I frequently said insulting things about York University and the students there. She also objected to my spelling of gubmnt. I never met this student, and I also have no idea what she looks like (she was one of 350 in the class).

Today my teaching assistant sent me the grades for the class. My correspondent earned a mark of 39 (out of 100, not out of 40 as one person wondered). I figure she's a prime candidate for York's Sociology department. Jack figures she's likely to sue me for discrimination.

Back in the days when I thought I might be able to do some acting (how disillusioned we all can be sometimes), I read some plays by David Mamet. I didn't much like them, even though he was revered by many as a great playwright. But, WOW, look at what he has written recently about his transformation (h/t to Salim Mansur, but others have already blogged about this, too):

What about the role of government? Well, in the abstract, coming from my time and background, I thought it was a rather good thing, but tallying up the ledger in those things which affect me and in those things I observe, I am hard-pressed to see an instance where the intervention of the government led to much beyond sorrow.

... I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.

When utopian schemes fail, we are left to choose from among the feasible alternatives. Within that choice set, once we rid ourselves of our pollyanna-isms, less gubmnt intervention looks pretty good.

I see Mamet mispelled "gubmnt".

For the most part, Rondi Adamson liked it:

He is an amazing speaker, no matter the topic, and it was a beautiful speech.
I thought the speech was maybe a bit long — he could have left out the part where he read from his own book, I suspect. And frankly, if I were his grandmother I doubt I'd like having him say bad things about me. But surely he got her permission, first? (Is she alive?) I find it odd, as well, that he would compare Wright's insane comments — expressed to a crowd — with the concerns of an elderly lady — expressed to family members.
Still, I like any man who quotes William Faulkner — and he used one of my favourite Faulkner quotes.
I am, however, left with one worried thought: I had liked Obama because, unlike Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, he didn't make his candidacy about race. He made it about stuff like taxes, health care, foreign policy. Now, sadly, it appears to be about race. I hope it doesn't stay that way. One lives in hope.

Kip Esquire has a different take on it:

I fail to understand why people are so orgasmic over it:

--I agree with Jeremiah Wright, except when I disagree with him.

--I look up to him, except when I condemn him.

--I'm proud of my membership in his church, except when I'm ashamed of it.

--I transcend race-based politics, except when race matters.

--Oh, and more government is always the answer to every problem, especially the problems created by government in the first place.

Did I miss anything?

Salim Mansur, writing in the Trono Sun, has a careful statement of why western cultures are in danger of being swamped if they continue to pursue multi-culturalism without regard for the ethics and culture of individual freedom:

The most pressing issue in the West at the present time relates to culture and not the economy....

At the core of this culture is the affirmation that an individual irrespective of gender and colour represents the centre of the liberal world's ethical foundation. This was a radically altered vision of humanity rejecting the view that an individual is an appendage of the collective -- tribe, caste or class -- into which he or she is born.

The triumph of the West as the second millennium ended was a confirmation of this liberal idea, however incomplete and with distance still to go, of freedom and democracy. ...

But the worm inside the multicultural apple was the mistaken view that the West could extend equal treatment to other cultures based on group identity without concomitant erosion of its own cultural value of individual freedom.

Multiculturalism weakened the argument that newcomers should adjust to the cultural values of the West by adopting the guilt-ridden notion that any such demand smacks of imperialism....

It became a one-way concession in which the West did the conceding and non-Westerners made rising demands....

The West is now exposed to the paradox of how self-generated loss of cultural identity is politically weakening in a global village, and the task ahead is for its recovery from multicultural delusion by reasserting once again values that made it strong and appealing to the rest.

Bens recently recommended that I look into some of Murray Rothbard's writings. One bit that struck a chord with me was this, from Wikipaedia,

Rothbard notes that the functions of the economist on the free market differ strongly from those of the economist on the hampered market. "What can the economist do on the purely free market?" Rothbard asks. "He can explain the workings of the market economy (a vital task, especially since the untutored person tends to regard the market economy as sheer chaos), but he can do little else."

And that, it seems, is more than enough to provide full-time endeavours for hundreds, if not thousands, of economists.

I hasten to add that most philosophical debates about libertarian thought and the role of gubmnt are way over my head. I'm sure the more anarcho-libertarians will disagree with me, but I see an important role for gubmnt in helping to define, provide, and enforce property rights and contracts.

via BenS and John Meuller:

Many years ago, Stan Liebowitz analyzed the Boston Fed's study on mortgage discrimination. His finding? It was flawed beyond belief. From the NYPost (via Newmark's Door [still the first blog I read each weekday]),

...[A] "landmark" 1992 study from the Boston Fed concluded that mortgage-lending discrimination was systemic.

That study was tremendously flawed - a colleague and I later showed that the data it had used contained thousands of egregious typos, such as loans with negative interest rates. Our study found no evidence of discrimination.

Nevertheless, political correctness carried the day:

No sooner had the ink dried on its discrimination study than the Boston Fed, clearly speaking for the entire Fed, produced a manual for mortgage lenders stating that: "discrimination may be observed when a lender's underwriting policies contain arbitrary or outdated criteria that effectively disqualify many urban or lower-income minority applicants."

Some of these "outdated" criteria included the size of the mortgage payment relative to income, credit history, savings history and income verification. Instead, the Boston Fed ruled that participation in a credit-counseling program should be taken as evidence of an applicant's ability to manage debt.

Stan warned back then that such policies could lead to bigger problems in the future:

For years, rising house prices hid the default problems since quick refinances were possible. But now that house prices have stopped rising, we can clearly see the damage caused by relaxed lending standards.

This damage was quite predictable: "After the warm and fuzzy glow of 'flexible underwriting standards' has worn off, we may discover that they are nothing more than standards that lead to bad loans . . . these policies will have done a disservice to their putative beneficiaries if . . . they are dispossessed from their homes." I wrote that, with Ted Day, in a 1998 academic article.

Sadly, we were spitting into the wind.

What bothers/puzzles me is that investment bankers bought these collateralized debt instruments. Surely, even three years ago, people could see that these sub-prime mortgage packages were not bundles of independent risks but were bundles of highly correlated risks, all of which would tumble if/when housing prices began to fall. Even if the regulators forced lenders to make crappy loans, and even if the lenders fobbed them off on investors as quickly as they could, who was forcing these investors to buy the packages? Didn't they do their due-diligence and risk-analyisis?

Tom Hanna says it is because Obama presents a message of hope and optimism whereas the other candidates downplay the strengths of the US and engage in fear-mongering.

With the mixed outcome of the Democratic Party primaries yesterday in the US, what are the chances that Edwards will be able to call the shots in the end?

I have rarely come across such a good example as this one.

• From Greg Mankiw:
  

  When designing a tax system and evaluating tax proposals, policy analysts have at least four goals in mind:
  
  1. Efficiency: The tax system should distort incentives as little as possible (and, in the case of externalities and Pigovian taxes, correct incentives when necessary).
  2. Intergenerational equity: The tax system should raise enough revenue so current generations do not unduly burden future generations.
  3. Egalitarianism: The tax system should try to achieve a more equal distribution of after-tax incomes.
  4. Stabilization: The tax system should help maintain the economy at full employment.

• And in contrast from Gabriel Mihalache,
  

  Let me offer a different picture.
  
  When designing a tax system and evaluating tax proposals, policy analysts have at least four goals in mind:
  
  * Reelection of the incumbent party.
  * Nondecreasing interest groups’ income.
  * Having the burden fall on the least (politically) organized group possible.
  * Bullying the central bank into monetarizing the debt.
  
  Harsh, I know, but don’t come to me complaining when you’ll get European-style G shares of Y. (60%+) You have been warned.

It is left as an exercise to the reader to determine which is normative and which is positive (I know: there's a chance they're both positive, but I don't believe it.)

Via Hispanic Pundit, who always has good quotes, comes this by Charles Krauthammer:

Clinton is no doubt shocked that a simple argument about experience versus inspiration becomes the basis for a charge of racial insensitivity. She is surprised that the very use of “fairy tale” in reference to Obama’s position on Iraq is taken as a sign of insensitivity, or that any reference to his self-confessed teenage drug use is immediately given racial overtones.

But where, I ask you, do such studied and/or sincere expressions of racial offense come from? From a decades-long campaign of enforced political correctness by an alliance of white liberals and the black civil rights establishment intended to delegitimize and marginalize as racist any criticism of their post-civil rights-era agenda.

Anyone who has ever made a principled argument against affirmative action only to be accused of racism knows exactly how these tactics work. Or anyone who has merely opposed a more recent agenda item -- hate crimes legislation -- on the grounds that murder is murder and that the laws against it are both venerable and severe.

Courtesy of the WSJ, via Brian Ferguson:

Yesterday, the San Francisco company that runs the popular fantasy game pulled the plug on about a dozen pretend financial institutions that were funded with actual money from some of the 12 million registered users of Second Life. Linden Lab said the move was triggered by complaints that some of the virtual banks had reneged on promises to pay high returns on customer deposits.

Second Life is an elaborate online world where players create new identities for themselves -- images called avatars. These avatars can own land, run businesses and build homes. And there's a link to the real economy: To buy things, players use credit cards or eBay Inc.'s alternative payment service PayPal to convert actual U.S. currency into "Linden dollars," which can be deposited using pretend ATMs into Second Life's virtual banks.

The banks of Second Life were operated by other players, who enticed deposits by offering interest rates. While some banks paid interest as promised, others used depositors' money for unsuccessful Second Life land and gambling deals. Under its new banking rules, Second Life says only chartered banks will be allowed -- though it isn't clear any real chartered banks will operate in the virtual play world.

The company now believes that (and I am translating very loosely here) transaction costs of the players to check out the banks' reliability, etc., are greater than the benefits from having no regulations of the banks.

Which candidate has policy positions and views which are closest to yours? To see, click here, via Phil Miller. Of course there is an underlying premise to this survey/questionnaire that people are actually able to identify what a candidate's position is on each of the questions.

As usual, I did the questionnaire twice, to test for robustness. Both times, I ended up with Giuliani #1, and McCain #2. Also both times I ended up with Obama ahead of Clinton, but much lower than the leading Republicans.

I did not like all the questions (especially the one about the environment), but I guess it was reasonably informative anyway.

Ms. Eclectic also did the test/survey. There was almost a perfect negative correlation between our choices! Makes you wonder how we lasted this long, doesn't it? Maybe it's true that "opposites attract." [Update: But maybe not. See this]

My favourite drug dealer, JB, sent me a link to this quiz, which gave similar results — mostly Republicans ahead of the Democrats, McKeyneMcCain near the top, but in this one Thompson was ahead of him. The second time I took it, Giuliani moved ahead of both of them. One major reason for the differences might be that in the first one I could attach weights to some of the issues.

From Roger Simon:

Big winners tonight:

John McCain
Charles Darwin

Big losers:

Mike Huckabee
Sean Hannity

Don Boudreaux says it very well:

I'm in the camp whose members ... hold that hiring the state to forcibly stop people from patronizing competitors at mutually agreeable prices is no different morally than hiring a street gang or your brother-in-law to do the same.

It's not just inefficient; it's immoral.

Many years ago, my older son, David Ricardo Palmer, had a summer job paying minimum wage. When the province raised the minimum wage, he thought it was a great idea. He said something to me like,

I know you don't like the minimum wage, Dad, but it means I'll get paid more.

Explaining to him that a higher minimum wage would lead to increased unemployment among teenagers just didn't carry much weight with him; he didn't know of anyone who had been laid off because the minimum wage had been raised, and he knew he'd be better off. Based on his own experience, he simply didn't believe the economic analysis of minimum wages.

If economists have such a lack of success in explaining their tools and analyses, we're doomed to have increasing amounts of inefficient gubmnt interventionism.

Mike Moffat, prompted by Gabriel Mihalache, explains why views which are so widely held by economists hold so little sway with the general public. His answer is two-fold:

1. Economists are really lousy at presenting ideas to the general public....
2. The incentives for academic economists are really, really screwed up.

I completely agree with both of his points.

Unfortunately, the comparatively few economists who do try to popularize our consensus views (see here, here, and here, for example) do not seem to be convincing very many people (comparatively few, that is, relative to the special interest groups arguing for gubmnt support, protection, intervention, etc). Even Milton Friedman, one of the most convincing and brilliant economist-libertarians, had only limited success.

One reason for this lack of success is that no matter what we say, no matter what evidence we present, it is just too easy in the case of trade to see who loses, and not at all obvious to many people that consumers all gain from lower prices, increased choice, etc. And for many voters, these small gains for the many just do not seem worth the imposition of losses on a few.

Similarly for minimum wages, it is easy to see that those who have jobs receive higher wages. But rarely, if ever, are people actually laid off because of an increase in the minimum wage, and so it is difficult (or impossible) to point to someone who wasn't hired and say, "See? That person was hurt by the minimum wage."

Politics seems to be very visible. Politicians and voters seem to respond to visible, obvious, winners and losers. I'm not sure economic analysis can overcome this phenomenon.

George Will is aghast at the misdirected populism of candidates Edwards and Huckabee:

Edwards and Huckabee lament a shrinking middle class. Well.

Economist Stephen Rose, defining the middle class as households with annual incomes between $30,000 and $100,000, says a smaller percentage of Americans are in that category than in 1979 -- because the percentage of Americans earning more than $100,000 has doubled, from 12 to 24, while the percentage earning less than $30,000 is unchanged. "So," Rose says, "the entire 'decline' of the middle class came from people moving up the income ladder." Even as housing values declined in 2007, the net worth of households increased.

Huckabee told heavily subsidized Iowa -- Washington's ethanol enthusiasm has farm values and incomes soaring -- that Americans striving to rise are "pushed down every time they try by their own government." Edwards, synthetic candidate of theatrical bitterness on behalf of America's crushed, groaning majority, says the rich have an "iron-fisted grip" on democracy and a "stranglehold" on the economy. Strangely, these fists have imposed a tax code that makes the top 1 percent of earners pay 39 percent of all income tax revenue, the top 5 percent pay 60 percent and the bottom 50 percent only 3 percent.

... Although Huckabee and Edwards profess to loathe and vow to change Washington's culture, each would aggravate its toxicity. Each overflows with and wallows in the pugnacity of the self-righteous who discern contemptible motives behind all disagreements with them and who therefore think that opponents are enemies and differences are unsplittable.

The way to achieve Edwards's and Huckabee's populist goal of reducing the role of "special interests," meaning money, in government is to reduce the role of government in distributing money. But populists want to sharply increase that role by expanding the regulatory state's reach and enlarging its agenda of determining the distribution of wealth. Populists, who are slow learners, cannot comprehend this iron law: Concentrate power in Washington, and you increase the power of interests whose representatives are concentrated there. [emphasis added]

This observation helps explain why so many economists tend toward libertarianism.

From Mark Steyn (h/t to Eva):

This is the time of year, as Hillary Clinton once put it, when Christians celebrate “the birth of a homeless child” — or, in Al Gore’s words, “a homeless woman gave birth to a homeless child.”

Just for the record, Jesus wasn’t “homeless.” He had a perfectly nice home back in Nazareth. But he happened to be born in Bethlehem. It was census time and Joseph was obliged to schlep halfway across the country to register in the town of his birth. Which is such an absurdly bureaucratic over-regulatory cockamamie Big Government nightmare it’s surely only a matter of time before Massachusetts or California reintroduce it.

Tim Worstall summarizes it succinctly, saying "To Spend Is To Tax":

It’s not just the tax rises, it’s also the rise in borrowings: and, even more than that, the rise in promises of future spending (on pensions and the like) which are not being accrued.

Future taxes have gone up by vastly more than current ones have.

and with good reason. See his latest column here. He concludes:

In the month since the NAS released its study, none of the schools covered by it has contested its findings. Because there might as well be signs on the doors of many schools of social work proclaiming "conservatives need not apply," two questions arise: Why are such schools of indoctrination permitted in institutions of higher education? And why are people of all political persuasions taxed to finance this propaganda?

I am convinced that the average and marginal social products of social workers are negative.

If people stay home in droves today, it will be because they recognize the wisdom of these words by Schumpeter (from Cafe Hayek):

Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with keeping in the saddle that they can't bother about where they go.

That observation, sadly, captures the essence of both the Ontario PCs and Liberals.

Jack is spending some time in British Columbia. He writes that the provincially operated auto insurance is,

... far pricier than the private Ontario system, in part because of subsidies to bad drivers who wouldn't be insurable there.

This is to be expected. If the risk pool includes people who impose high costs on the system, and if they cannot be charged premia to match those costs (probablistically), then everyone else will have to bear a share of those costs. It is inefficient because the system tends to encourage too many risky drivers to be on the roads; it also, because of the higher insurance premia, tends to discourage some very low risk drivers from driving.

Jack continues,

Privatized alcohol businesses compete with the Provincial outlets. Prices about 25% higher than Ontario though, flying in the face of the usual predictions.

This seems unlikely to me. I know from nothing about the BC retail liquor business, but here are my suspicions:

1. It is extremely unlikely that gubmnt and private retail liquor outlets compete head-to-head.
2. One way the gubmnt stores can survive is if they are subsidized, directly or indirectly.
3. More likely in this instance is that the prices are regulated and kept above the Ontario levels to guarantee the survival of the gubmnt stores. Otherwise the private outlets would compete the snot out of them.

On Facebook and elsewhere, I list my political views as "Libertarian", which in my mind means favouring individual freedom and responsibilities over state or gubmnt interventionism.

I'm far from being a hard-core libertarian, though, as this quiz revealed. Depending on how I answered some of the questions, my score was between 25 and 35 [out of a maximum possible of 160!]. Here is the assessment of scores in that range:

16-30 points: You are a soft-core libertarian. With effort, you may harden and become pure.

31-50 points: Your libertarian credentials are obvious. Doubtlessly you will become more extreme as time goes on.

As you go through the survey, you get the impression that to get a really high score, one must be a wacko-anarchist, something I think of as substantially different from a libertarian. But, then, check out some of the scores listed in the comments here.

I had long thought that one reason modern developed societies have more gubmnt intervention is that there is a positive income elasticity of demand for gubmnt-provided insurance [i.e. as we become wealthier, we politically demand that the gubmnt look after us more, especially regarding unanticipated negative events].

It turns out there is a strong alternative explanation. According to John Lott, gubmnt intervention in the economy really took off after women were given the right to vote. His analysis is presented in an article in the Journal of Political Economy, and is summarized in his recent book, Freedomnomics:

There is a close relationship between marital status and women's voting patterns — generally, as divorce rates have increased, women have become more liberal. Over the course of women's lives, their political views on average vary more than those of men. Young single women start out being much more liberal than their male counterparts and are about 50 percent more likely to vote Democratic. As previously noted, these women also support a higher, more progressive income tax as well as more educational and welfare spending. But for married women this gap is only one-third as large, and married women with children become even more conservative. But divorced women with children suddenly become 75 percent mor likely to vote for Democrats than single men. [pp. 164-5]

[and from the footnote to the above quotation] Interestingly, men raising children on their own are only three percent more likely to vote Democratic than single men without children.

Of course, given some recent trends among Republicans in the US (and Conservatives in Canada), it is no longer absolutely clear that Democrats (or Liberals in Canada) are the only interventionists out there.

. .

digression: I note that Amazon.ca, Amazon.uk, and Amazon.com prices still do not fully reflect recent movements in the exchange rates!

Tom Hanna has a great post about the use of dishwater, etc., to water lawns and gardens or to flush toilets. Sounds good, right? But maybe not in California:

A lesson that environmentalists should have learned about socialism after the Iron Curtain fell is now striking a bit closer to home. Liberty frees people to solve problems, including environmental problems. Bureaucracy entrenches problems, including environmental problems. Bottom line: Capitalism is better for the environment than socialism.

Nightline ran a piece on a group calling themselves the “Greywater Guerillas.” This is a group of environmental activists doing exactly the sort of voluntary action to conserve water that conservation minded conservatives and libertarians love. They’re revamping plumbing to recycle waste water from sinks and showers to water yards and gardens and flush toilets. One of the group’s founders estimates that she saves 100 gallons of water a day.

The problem…they’re in California.

This shouldn’t be a problem, after all California is ecologically minded and constantly suffering water shortages (in spite of being right next to 1/3 of the liquid water on earth). Ah, but you see, California is also one of the most regulated places on earth. ... And, in that California, you have to have a permit to install a greywater system (the technical term for what these folks are doing). A system that passes the requirements could exceed $10,000 in costs, not including the cost of the permit. The systems they are installing start at less than $100 for a system to divert sink water for flushing toilets.

Who else has a greywater system in his home? Not Al Gore, not John Kerry….George W. Bush.

Once the gubmnt gets involved, look out!

There is a shortage of physicians (at P=0) in many places in Canada. In New Brunswick, the gubmnt decided to offer physicians a bounty of $150 for each new patient they took on. Sounds like a good idea for getting physicians to work a bit longer and sandwich in a few more patients, doesn't it. Here are the bizarre results:

New physicians receive a bounty for each new patient they take on. Hence, they are unwilling to buy the built-up good will in the practices of retiring physicians. So as a physician retires or leaves the province, that doctor's patients must scramble to try to find a new family physician. At the same time, new physicians do not fill their practices instantaneously. Consequently, if anything, the match between patients and physicians is imperfect and there remain many patients without a family doctor.

Current physicians nearing retirement age are upset because they have invested so much in building up their practices and now are unable to sell them. Also, taxpayers recoil when they learn that the bounty is not going only to those who have nearly full practices.

As Brian Ferguson is quoted in the article as saying,

Doctors' decision-making is affected by financial incentives to a greater extent than many think, according to a 2002 AIMS report. Dr Ferguson looked at a number of Canadian and international examples and concluded that physicians respond to market forces, including cash bonuses, the same as any other professionals.

But that's a view not universally shared in government circles. "Much confusion and bad policy follows from the inability of many policy analysts to handle the techniques of an elementary economics course," wrote Dr Ferguson in a scathing commentary that now appears prescient.

As Brian has said, if he is so prescient, he is going to start picking stocks.

On the right is Ms. Eclectic, mailing some of many postcards she sent while she was with me in England.

The mailbox looks old and beaten up, but that is mainly because it is on a high traffic route at Paddington Station and probably has, indeed, been seriously beaten up many times by delivery vehicles. It cannot be more than 55 years old at the most, though, because it has "ER" on it, with II between the E and the R, meaning it was installed while Elizabeth II was queen (she became queen in 1952).





On the left is an older mail boxin Hailsham (in East Sussex, southeast England). It has GR on it, meaning it was installed while George VI (Elizabeth's father) was king.






And below, from the town of Rye, is a photograph of a mailbox that is probably more than 100 years old. It has VR on it, meaning it dates from Queen Victoria's era.



Here are some other examples of the different-aged mailboxes. Most of the VR mailboxes I've seen have been embedded in brick columns. Presumably they are left in place because ripping them out and replacing them would be costly (though it appears that all the mailboxes are repainted fairly frequently).



[h/t to JZ for explaining all this to me!]






Update: Here is a website with tonnes of information about British Letter Boxes. Part II of the history has more information about the era about which I wrote above [h/t to Tim Worstall in the comments].

One of the papers at the conference I am attending has the phrase "social justice" in the title. Last week, before leaving for the conference, I told my colleagues at The Castle that typically this is just a buzz word/phrase for "condescending paternalistic pinko left-wing elitist interventionism". I'll be very curious to see if the paper fits the mold. I have tight priors that it will.

Here, from an article in the New Criterion about Hayek, is a similar perspective:

Think only of the odious phrase “social justice.” What it means, in practice, is de facto injustice, since it operates by enlisting the legal machinery of justice in order to support certain predetermined ends. Partisans of “social justice” eschew “merely formal” justice; in so doing they replace the rule of law—which was traditionally represented as blind precisely because it was “no respecter of persons”—with the rule of (pseudo) “fairness.”

Let me add that despite his strong criticisms of socialism and big gubmnt, it is not at all clear to me that Hayek was opposed to having some sort of social safety net provided by gubmnt. It seemed to me, though, from what I read by him, that he favoured a much lower social safety net than we now have in either Canada or the US, that he saw the ideal as a bare minimum safety net.
[h/t to BenS]

I am in Madrid this weekend to attend a conference on the economic analysis of intellectual property. I am really looking forward to spending some time with my friend, Stan Liebowitz at the conference (who is doing some interesting empirical work in the field).



The conference starts on Monday, but I arrived Friday evening so I could do some sight-seeing first. I had no idea where to stay or what to do here, and the conference organizers booked me into this hotel.


As you can see from the "norte" it is in the north end of Madrid, in a newish business section of the city. Unfortunately it is miles and miles and miles from central and old Madrid, so I am quickly familiarizing myself with the Metro/subway here, having bought a tourist 5-day pass.

As you look north from the steps of the hotel, you see all the construction continuing in this section of town. Spain, like Ireland, seems to be booming in part as a result of its entry into the European Union.




The hotel is on a short street named Mauricio Ravel. I think he probably deserves more that a two-block-long street named in his honour, don't you? But maybe it's because Ravel was French, even though Bolero was a (sort of) Spanish dance piece. Or, more likely, it's named for someone else who isn't even listed in Wikipedia.

I arrived at about 6:30pm and had read that the city just wakes up then and stays up very late.

So after checking in, I started walking south toward the main part of the city (note: I never really got there). The first place I passed of interest was a shop with this in its window:



An interesting toilet paper holder, but even more interesting toilet paper! I've never seen toilet paper in those colours before, and I'm not sure I'd want to use it. I'd seen pink crepe paper masquerading as toilet paper near the Victoria Gardens in London, but never these colours.

A bit further south is the Plaza Castilla. That diamond shape sculpture in the foreground is not really all that tall (maybe 3or4 stories tall), but look at the twin buildings behind it! I sure hope (and certainly expect) that they are well-anchored because they look as if they would fall over if you let too many people visit the upper floors. You can see the construction just north of my hotel in the very centre of the photo.



After I walked south some more, I decided to stop walking (I've been doing far too much walking lately) and went into the next place I saw (after making that decision) that had outside tables where I could sit and drink some beer or wine.

Btw, the temp at 7pm was shown by several places as 32.5C, which is about 149F, I think. Or so it felt after leaving cool England. Thank goodness the forecast highs for the next few days are only in the mid 20s. I brought along a pair of shorts to wear, but I noticed last night that I saw zero men wearing shorts in this part of Madrid, and heaven knows I do not want to stand out, looking like a tourist (of course the only short-sleeve shirt I brought was my Eastbourne soccer/football shirt, which is probably a tip-off anyway....). I didn't bring any sunscreen, so I went into a pharmacy to buy some. They wanted 21 Euros for a small thing of 50block — that's about $30 Cdn or so. I decided to look elsewhere.

The first food and drink place I went into didn't serve wine, so I tried to order a beer. But the server didn't know English, and the phrase section in my travel guide didn't have the word for "beer". Another customer helped me out though.

The woman who helped me there chided me for not ordering a sandwich, too, because that place just happened to be the best place in Madrid for sandwiches, according to her. I told her I was saving room for food from some tapas bars — bars where they serve little bits of food to go with your drinks. She pointed me in the direction of several that she said were very good.

But when I got to them, I realized they were very upscale, and I really wanted more of a smaller neighbourhood type place where the waiters weren't wearing tuxes. So I wandered on south, thinking I might go past the the stadium where Real Madrid plays football/soccer, but I didn't get that far. I passed a smallish corner place that had a few tables and lots of glasses hanging over the bar and all the patrons were looking at the far wall. I figured they were watching something on tv, so I stopped to look.

Yup, a bullfight. So I went in. That bartender also spoke no English, but I had memorized how to say "a glass red wine please", figuring I'd stay watch a bit of the bull fight and try to figure it out. He poured some wine for me, and then put up a plate of tapas — a small ham and potato thingy that was sort of nice, and I hadn't even expected it. It turned out to be one of the places where tapas are complimentary.

I had that wine, watched tv and then had another. The second plate of tapas was a small piece of bread (from a baguette) and some thinly sliced dried sausage/salami type of meat.

Bullfighting. I really can't understand it. I'll have to read up on it some more before Sunday, when I think I might go to one with my friend Stan and his wife. but it looks pretty damned cruel, even to me, a devout speci-ist.

By the time I'd had a beer and two glasses of wine, I was pretty blitzed. and I had at least a mile, maybe two, to walk to get back to my hotel. It was 9:30 by then, and the city was just coming alive. That's so hard for me to get used to. People just going out to eat so late, even in delicatessens, some obviously just leaving work:



Look at all that ham!! And look at the old guy who had pulled up a chair so he could play the slot machine there.

As I continued to walk home, I saw this car, an Aixam "half-car" which is a French vehicle that is probably too underpowered to make it in North
America. Cute, eh?



And then in a bus stop, I saw a sign for my favourite soft drink, Coke Zero. I don't know Spanish, but I agreed with the ad that seems to be saying something like "It tastes just like the original Coke, not like crappy old Tab or Diet Coke"-- that's a very loose translation.



Sadly, though, it doesn't. I bought some, and the Spanish version tastes nothing like the original Coke in North America anyway. So I'll have to stick to beer and red wine.

If one of the goals of the public funding of the CBC is to help inform the rest of the world about Canada, surely a mandate of the CBC should be to telecast everything they can (I realize there might be contractual barriers with some programming) via broadband so that anyone with a computer anywhere in the world can watch CBC programming. And yet, the last time I scoured their website, I could find nothing about broadband telecasts from the CBC. This just smacks of more misplaced priorities within the CBC.

The next time they need a chairman, I nominate myself.

I have never understood formulas that determine pay people receive when they retire — defined benefit plans. Such plans are often un- or under-funded, expecting to make payments out of current revenues. I guess such plans are okay so long as you expect the revenue sources to continue to grow at adequate rates. .... and so long as you trust the people managing the plan. But I don't much trust politicians and CEOs of struggling firms not to dip into the funds of these plans, as has happened recently in New Jersey:

In 2005, New Jersey put either $551 million, $56 million or nothing into its pension fund for teachers. All three figures appeared in various state documents — though the state now says that the actual amount was zero.

The phantom contribution is just one indication that New Jersey has been diverting billions of dollars from its pension fund for state and local workers into other government purposes over the last 15 years, using a variety of unorthodox transactions authorized by the Legislature and by governors from both political parties.

The state has long acknowledged that it has been putting less money into the pension fund than it should. But an analysis of its records by The New York Times shows that in many cases, New Jersey has overstated even what it has claimed to be contributing, sometimes by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Another good reason to prefer defined-contribution plans. Or as Craig Newmark said on Monday,

Now do you want to tell me how privatizing Social Security is too risky?

From yesterday's London Free Press (aka "the Freeps"),

Mayors of Ontario's automotive cities are rallying to fight a recently announced tax on gas guzzlers they say will "decimate" the province's auto industry. ... Mayors from 13 Southern Ontario cities met in Woodstock to talk about how to help the province's auto industry.

... "This could decimate an entire industry," said Woodstock Mayor Michael Harding, who will co-chair a committee opposing the tax with Gray.

... The mayors oppose penalizing large fuel users, fearing Ontario will move toward adopting California standards for vehicles that, by 2012, would mean Ontarians would not be able to buy cars assembled here, Harding said.

... In its budget, Ottawa said some large gas users will be hit with a tax of up to $4,000, hurting primarily the traditional Big Three. Buyers of fuel-efficient vehicles will receive rebates of up to $2,000.

New cars contribute to only only one per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, yet the largest contributors, fossil fuel burned for electricity and the Alberta tar sands project, were ignored in the budget, the mayors point out.

... The only automaker to speak in favour of the federal government policy is Toyota, the company building a new assembly plant in Woodstock that will employ 2,000. Despite the fact Harding's hometown manufacturer supports the policy, it is still bad for the industry, he said.

"I appreciate that Toyota is green, but the Big Three are still the largest employers of auto workers. We cannot, as an industry, favour one automaker over another."

I had two reactions to this article:

• It seems like a clear case of NIMBY [Not In My Back Yard]. The mayors might all be in favour of reducing pollution or reducing carbon dioxide emissions, but at the same time they want policies that do not affect their constituents so directly.
• If, indeed, burning carbon fuels is so horrible, why tax the vehicles??? Why not just tax the fuel purchases directly (and reduce other taxes, so the programme would be revenue-neutral)? Then, if people want to burn a lot of fuel, they would be individually paying high taxes to do so. People who drive small cars a lot would be paying for all the negative externalities they generate, and people who drive humongous SUVs very little would be causing less total pollution and could easily end up paying less in total taxes, too.
  
  Taxing the vehicles is such an indirect way of doing this, involving ham-fisted taxes, when fuel taxes would be tied much more directly to the use of carbon-based fuels.

So while I am not at all thrilled with the mayors' position that the federal gubmnt shouldn't pursue policies that might hurt the auto industry, I agree that there is a better, more efficient way to pursue the same goal. I'm guessing the mayors' reactions to a big fuel tax would be less negative than would the reaction from the oil patch, even though it might have a similar (though smaller) effect on the demand for gas guzzlers. One reason is that it would appear to be a tax on oil, not on SUV manufacturers; another is that it would tax all fuel users according to how much fuel they use and would not be directed only to the purchasers and suppliers of gas guzzlers.

Tom Palmer, who is with the Cato Institute, is a strong supporter of individual freedoms. He recently was quoted by the Washington Post as saying,

Let’s be honest: Although there are many fine officers in the police department, there’s a simple test. Call Domino’s Pizza or the police and time which one gets there first...

Unfortunately, he is right, and that makes the case for personal defence and prevention measures all that much stronger. If the publicly provided protection is not likely to be as good as we might like, we have more incentive to invest in locks, alarm systems, private weapons, and private security systems. We also have an incentive to buy detection systems, such as video cameras, to deter potential criminals.

At our house, we have reset our alarm system to ring at Godfather's Pizza, which is just down the street from us and can be here in no time flat.

Some of about 20,000 mobile homes and travel trailers owned by the Federal Emergency Management Agency sit at the Hope Municipal Airport near Hope, Ark., Friday, March 2, 2007. A year and a half after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, FEMA is auctioning off at fire-sale prices thousands of trailers used by storm victims, raising fears among mobile-home dealers that the government will flood the market and depress prices.

(AP Photo/Danny Johnston); story from AP via Yahoo, via Coyote Blog. The non-market interventionist policies and fiscal mismanagement by the Republicans in the U.S. has been very disappointing.

Low-income people enjoy much more leisure than do high-income people, no matter how you measure it. Steven Landsburg provides an overview of these data and then says that if we want to fix income inequality, we should also want to fix leisure inequality:

[A] certain class of pundits and politicians are quick to see any increase in income inequality as a problem that needs fixing—usually through some form of redistributive taxation. Applying the same philosophy to leisure, you could conclude that something must be done to reverse the trends of the past 40 years—say, by rounding up all those folks with extra time on their hands and putting them to (unpaid) work in the kitchens of their "less fortunate" neighbors. If you think it's OK to redistribute income but repellent to redistribute leisure, you might want to ask yourself what—if anything—is the fundamental difference.

If blogging is work, I have very little leisure time.

And you may want to get the Microsoft patch to update the auto-clock in your PC.... then again, if it is just to change the time, I think I'll do it manually. Here's a slightly edited version of one memo about it:

This is a reminder of an upcoming important date, Sunday, March 11th, 2007.

This is the day when the newly proposed time zone changes will take effect.

Starting in the spring of 2007, Daylight Saving Time (DST) start and end dates for most time zones in Canada and the United States will be changed to comply with the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Daylight Savings Time dates in affected areas will start three weeks earlier (2:00 A.M. on the second Sunday in March) and will end one week later (2:00 A.M. on the first Sunday in November).

For official site information on this subject please visit:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/timezone/dst2007.mspx

Actually, I think it'll be easier to set the time ahead manually in March, back in April (when the computer makes the auto-adjustment) ahead in October and back in November. Then again, maybe MS has already automagically loaded the correct time-changer along with all the other updates it keeps installing on my PC.

Then again (again), let's just spend lots of hours arguing about which is more efficient — downloading a patch or manually changing the time....

[h/t David Ricardo Palmer]

Update: Stephen Gordon's comment that it is probably just as easy to live with a computer that has the wrong time for a few weeks each spring and fall might be correct. When I teach in England, I do not change the time on my computer — I just do mental mapping of time zones. It might be easier, though, to do that for a five-hour time difference than for a one-hour time-difference, but I think I'll try his suggestion which amounts to, "ignore it."