The land with the hairy jaws

We always thought it was funny to turn over an item and read this on the country of origin tag: "Hecho en China". And given the fact that most of the gifts given to celebrate the Christian holiday in the West will probably come from that non-Christian, communist, land in the East, we decided that they ought finally to get a special place in the lexicon, in our hearts, and in mythology.

Thanks, China Claus.

(It sounds better if you pronounce the first word as in Spanish, CHEE-na)

P.S. The title of this post is a reference to a Cheech & Chong song.

P. P. S. We definitely need a claymation holiday special to help children remember this new marketing gimmick darling character.

Time travel issues

I'm intrigued by the possibility of time travel, though I don't obsess on it (in other words, I probably haven't read all the books you have on the subject). However, it occurred to me the other day that most fictional accounts seem to either overlook or oversimplify one problem. If you are going to travel in time, you probably won't be traveling in space simultaneously (though some use space travel as the means by which time travel occurs). In "practice", as fictionalized, this becomes an issue of making sure that you don't place yourself inside a wall in the future, or possibly a glacier in the past.

That acknowledgment of the problem leads to yet another error that would be made by a non-physicist. They (the author/screenwriter/whatever) are assuming that your space displacement is zero ... but relative to what? The earth is both spinning and moving rapidly through space as it orbits the sun. If you move in time but not in space, you would find yourself in outer space, unless you timed your travel precisely so that you caught earth on another orbital path.

But that assumes that the sun about which we revolve is stationary, which it is not.

Oh well, 12 Monkeys is still a pretty good movie. And ST:TNG still sucks eggs.

EULA

How many end user license agreements have you agreed to in the last few months?

How many have you read?

There is an old joke about there being a line hidden 3/4 of the way through that commits the end user to give up his/her immortal soul or first born child as part of the deal. Suppose we start a new joke that EULAs are now committing users to an 18 month tour in Baghdad?

I bet you read your next EULA.

Electric Utility economies of scale

I have been trying to get this right, so this may just be another unsatisfactory article in a series (others here and here).

Let's suppose that in the late 19th century, you are using kerosene to light and coal or some other fuel to heat your house. In comes Mr. Tesla and his alternating current and Mr. Edison with his electric lamp. Suddenly, you are able to get the same benefits at a lower price. In a complete analysis, we might have to account for the energy required to refine the kerosene, and the resources required to mine the coal and oil in order to get a complete comparison, including externalities, but they were probably roughly equivalent.

The big advantage there was the price, and that was made possible by economy of scale of using large generators and large distribution networks. By economy of scale, I mean that the cost of producing your consumption plus that of your neighbors was lower when using one large generator than each of you using a small generator. A small generator would cost you not only the fuel, but the upkeep and depreciation, both of which are buried in the price of retail electricity.

Over the intervening years, however, we began using the electricity for more than just the light and heat. The number of variety of appliances exploded; it is thought that the small electric motor was as important to the late industrial revolution as the steam engine was to the early revolution since it freed workers from the line and allowed them to be organized in different ways. Small appliances were thought to free people - especially women - from the drudgery of household work, since now machines could wash, dry, wash dishes, store large amounts of perishable food and eliminate the need for a daily trip to the grocery store, etc. The television became the primary form of entertainment, replacing the local pub, lodge, or club.

At some point, then, the economy of scale exploded to more than just a simple replacement of what had gone before (light and heat). Huge generation capacities were built and then overtaken, forcing utilities to build ever larger plants farther from the cities that use the power; transmission systems became intercity and then interstate; and the cost of electricity fell as never before as the utilities, with their high fixed cost of capital and low variable cost, sought to pay for the capacity rather than the actual marginal cost of power delivery.

At last, it has gotten to the point where the transmission facilities are sometimes several hundred miles away, and the system is built to run at high capacity so that the heat and line losses are now the overwhelming feature of the system. The plants run mainly on coal and nuclear fuel, both of which create enormous externalities. There is now a diseconomy of scale: many smaller plants and shorter, less complex distribution systems would be more efficient than the behemoths now operating, but it would force us to grapple with the pollution, noise, and infrastructure to transport fuel in and waste out.

How did it get this way? Where were the regulators?

The problem is that the regulators helped make it this way, contra Kos. Just as the electric utility business was getting started, the main player asked to be regulated. Samuell Insull worked with Nikola Tesla to create the industry as it exists today. At the time, Tesla invented a generator that created the alternating current electricity while Edison was still trying to sell everyone on direct current electricity. The problem with direct current is that you lose power to line losses, so that over very long distances, there is very little power left. To get enough electricity down the line for the end user, you have to elevate the voltage at the near end to dangerously high levels. That meant that the brightness of your lights and the safety of the system depended on where you were relative to the generating plant. Tesla's breakthrough idea was that alternating current was a more efficient way of moving electricity over long distances because you can use transformers to increase and decrease the voltage. Power equals voltage times current, and power lost as heat equals current times line resistance squared. To maximize power delivered as a percentage of power generated, run the voltage on the line high so the current and therefore line loss is low, then use transformers to drop the voltage at the user end to something safer. From a safety standpoint, it would be better if you had low voltage direct current in your house, but from an efficiency standpoint, it would be better if you had a large AC generator supplying all of the houses.

Insull saw the advantage of Tesla's system, commercialized it, and began building or taking over distribution systems. In the popular literature, he is characterized as becoming concerned over the possibility that someone might monopolize the electricity industry. It sounds very altruistic to be so concerned with the plight of others, but it must be emphasized that he volunteered to become a regulated monopoly rather than a state-owned industry. With the cooperation of the state, he eliminated any potential competition (along with a great deal of real competition). In most states, the mechanism by which this is accomplished is not a clause which says, "A monopoly is forthwith granted to ...", but rather by a clause which rather innocuously states something like (from the New Mexico Statues Annotated, 62-9-1)

A. No public utility shall begin the construction or operation of any public utility plant or system or of any extension of any plant or system without first obtaining from the commission a certificate that public convenience and necessity require or will require such construction or operation. This section does not require a public utility to secure a certificate for an extension within any municipality or district within which it lawfully commenced operations before June 13, 1941 or for an extension within or to territory already served by it, necessary in the ordinary course of its business, or for an extension into territory contiguous to that already occupied by it and that is not receiving similar service from another utility. If any public utility or mutual domestic water consumer association in constructing or extending its line, plant or system unreasonably interferes or is about to unreasonably interfere with the service or system of any other public utility or mutual domestic water consumer association rendering the same type of service, the commission, on complaint of the public utility or mutual domestic water consumer association claiming to be injuriously affected, may, upon and pursuant to the applicable procedure provided in Chapter 62, Article 10 NMSA 1978, and after giving due regard to public convenience and necessity, including reasonable service agreements between the utilities, make an order and prescribe just and reasonable terms and conditions in harmony with the Public Utility Act to provide for the construction, development and extension, without unnecessary duplication and economic waste.

So, without defining "public convenience", "public necessity", "unreasonable interference", "unnecessary duplication", and "economic waste", all competitors must stand in front of the public utility commission and prove that their new plants, systems, or extensions are necessary and convenient, but don't interfere, unnecessarily duplicate, or waste. Invariably, they fail the tests. Further, since any competition is unnecessarily duplicative (what is necessary duplication?), potentially economically wasteful (sometimes they go out of business), and probably afoul of the other provisions, it's unlikely that you could ever find competition to be lawful.

Other actions by the state over the past 100 years have only strengthened the power of the electric power industry. In the Depression, Roosevelt eliminated the nascent wind power industry by introducing the Rural Electrification Administration (REA). He also put government directly into the market by starting the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). These two reinforced the economy of scale, overbuilding, and the interdependent network architecture of the industry. After World War II, the Department of Energy was created to both promote and to regulate nuclear power, a clear conflict of interest which led them to first convince utilities in the 1950s that nuclear was the safe way to expand in the post-war boom, and then to change the requirements and increase the prices after the utilities made the commitment. Later on in the century, when it was thought that all this coal-generated power was fouling the air and water, Congress solved the problem with a nod to the interlocking constituencies of the coal-fired power generators, Eastern coal mines, and coal miners unions, requiring a technological solution to the problem (flue scrubbers) rather than allowing them to choose the low-cost option (low-sulfur Western coal), keeping the older and less efficient plants online, and ironically resulting in more sulfur dioxide emitted than if they had chosen a more market-like approach (the one that finally surfaced in the 1990 act, with its Coasian cap-and-trade sulfur market). Even more recently, we saw the nearly incredible result of California's pseudo-deregulation, in which the state left its role as referee and entered the market as a player. California became the middleman between the producers and the consumers, artificially held consumer prices down while demand soared. This led to rapidly mounting costs and eventually to rolling blackouts. Since the difference between the price and the cost was born by the state, they pumped millions of taxpayer dollars into Enron, and then had the chutzpah to blame the free market!

I hold out the hope that the decentralizing capacity of solar and wind energy is destabilizing to these entrenched political-industrial interests. Thus I read things like this interview (hattip: Mutualist Blog) with Travis Bradford, author of Solar Revolution: The Economic Transformation of the Global Energy Industry with hope, but also with a good deal of skepticism. Typical of all such journalism, the Alternet interviewer and commenters commend Bradford for sounding like techno-optimist Amory Lovins and not like Doomslayer Julian Simon, of whom they have probably never heard except in disparaging tones. Like Lovins, et al, in Natural Capitalism, Bradford seems to be arguing that technorevolution will happen and should happen simultaneously. To the extent that something will happen, why agitate for it? It's like encouraging people to breathe. To the extent that it should happen but might not, I see little in the interview to indicate that Bradford or many of the commenters are aware of the technical problems with solar. The "thoughtful" solution to the drawbacks of any one solution (wind, solar, geothermal) seems to be that we will have an integrated system of geothermal and wind to provide the base generation (and probably nuclear and coal for at least the next 100 years), with additional wind and solar to provide the peak generation, but this doesn't bring forth visions of an environmentally benign, decentralized or anarchist utopia.

For one thing, there is the problem that alternative energy is only "on" for part of the day. This means that you need some way to obtain power at night, when it's cloudy, or when it's not windy (if you're depending on wind). The two normal solutions for this are batteries and grid tie. Between the chemicals and processes required to produce polysilicon and other photovoltaic architectures, and the chemicals used in batteries, these aren't exactly the environmentally benign technologies we've been led to believe. The Alternet commenters mention Copper Indium Gallium Diselenide (CIGS) - what are the chances that those are surface deposits that can be mined in an environmentally and democratic way and that they don't require vast quantities of caustic chemicals to process? Then there is the problem of grid tying: yes, if you run a standalone system (in the neighborhood of $50-100k for the average household, with battery and PV cell replacement every 10-30 years), you don't have to coordinate with anyone else. For us mere mortals, grid tie is a less expensive alternative. It also requires a massive effort to centrally coordinate the decentralized grid: standards, inspections, licensing, legislation, etc., plus there is the fact that it requires the existing, centralized generation and distribution system to operate. Kirkpatrick Sale thought the electric grid was too large, too complex, and therefore too fragile back in 1980 when a few central utilities were tied together, so just imagine how much more complex when every house is tied to it and we are all billing one another for generation and use.

There are two passing references to Howard Hayden's Solar Fraud; Why Solar Energy Won't Run the World: one says that he assumes prices stay constant, the other that he has ties to the nuclear power industry. Neither addresses his criticisms, which I will try to summarize in a future post.

Peace activists

How far should anyone be willing to go to right an injustice? In his "debate" with Bill O'Reilly, Michael Moore suggests that brutal dictatorships and other tyrannies are overthrown by spontaneous uprisings.

O'REILLY: Look, if you were running [Saddam] would still be sitting there.
MOORE: How do you know that?
O'REILLY: If you were running the country, he'd still be sitting there.
MOORE: How do you know that?
O'REILLY: You wouldn't have removed him.
MOORE: Look, let me tell you something in the 1990s look at all the brutal dictators that were removed. Things were done; you take any of a number of countries whether its Eastern Europe, the people rose up. South Africa the whole world boycotted ...
O'REILLY: When Reagan was building up the arms, you were against that.
MOORE: And the dictators were gone. Building up the arms did not cause the fall of Eastern Europe.
O'REILLY: Of course it did, it bankrupted the Soviet Union and then it collapsed.
MOORE: The people rose up.
O'REILLY: Why? Because they went bankrupt.
MOORE: the same way we did in our country, the way we had our revolution. People rose up ...
O'REILLY: All right, all right.
MOORE: ... that's how you, let me ask you this question.
O'REILLY: One more.
MOORE: How do you deliver democracy to a country? You don't do it down the barrel of a gun. That's not how you deliver it.
O'REILLY: You give the people some kind of self-determination, which they never would have had under Saddam ...
MOORE: Why didn't they rise up?
O'REILLY: Because they couldn't, it was a Gestapo-led place where they got their heads cut off ...
MOORE: Well that's true in many countries throughout the world ...
O'REILLY: It is, it's a shame ...
MOORE: ... and you know what people have done, they've risen up. You can do it in a number of ways. You can do it our way through a violent revolution, which we won, the French did it that way. You can do it by boycotting South Africa, they overthrew the dictator there. There's many ways ...

The problem with this is that we can't tell if Moore is just being disingenuous or is really that naive. These dictatorships may go on for generations, but his point of view is that we should let them, no matter (apparently) how bad they are, because war is wrong, full stop. It isn't clear why war is wrong but uprisings are okay despite the massively violent French Revolution and South African uprisings and the fairly violent American Revolution. He maintains that democracy can't be introduced from the barrel of a gun despite the examples of both WWI and WWII. Unfortunately for him, the world does not yield to clever slogans, which is all Mr. Moore seems to master (his other great contribution to this debate has been the "Would you sacrifice your own child" canard, which I disposed of here).

Moore isn't the only one making such wishful claims, nor is he the first. Other politicians spoke up before, but to little effect. About this, one prominent Democrat was quoted, while still in the minority, thus:

He talk[s] sarcastically of "King [Bush]," specifically denounce[s] [The Patriot Act], and repeat[s] all of his familiar arguments seeing the war as a step toward despotism and demanding an immediate peace. [In] a wild, fire-eating speech, coming tolerably close to an outright declaration of sympathy for the [Ba'athists] .... "The war [...] is, in your hands, a most bloody and costly failure .... War for the [original cause] was abandoned; war for the [victims of tyranny] openly begun, and with stronger battalions than before. With what success? Let the dead [...] answer." He want[s] peace, and peace at once, and he cried: "Ought this war to continue? I answer no -- not a day, not an hour. What then? Shall we [cut and run]? Again I answer no, no, no!" His program was simple, based upon faith: "Stop fighting. Make an armistice. Accept at once friendly [international] mediation."... [He] had denounced the war as "wicked, cruel, and unnecessary" and had had said in so many words that it was not being waged to [save the country from terrorists] but "for the purpose of crushing out liberty and erecting a despotism."

The basic problem, of course, is that it is difficult to sort the problems of opposing war and opposing the party in power.

Among the possible victims of circumstance in this [period] were the Democrats who made up a majority of the [..] legislature. Without realizing it these men were struggling against the fact that the American political system, wide enough for many things, had not by the founding fathers been made wide enough to contain [wartime dissent]. They were Democrats taking normal advantage of the fact that they had won an election, and what they were running into was the fact that there was no way, in this moment of all-out war, by which they could do no less than oppose the war itself. There could be no delicate shadings of action or belief. The administration was fighting for complete victory; to stand against the administration in the ordinary way, using the grips, feints, and arm locks of normal political struggling, meant in actual practice to stand for something less than victory -- something a good deal less, perhaps, if the wrestling got a really strenuous, so that the struggle might finally appear to be a struggle against the war itself rather than simply against the people who were conducting the war.

In addition to the problem of the struggle between the parties over the war, and over those conducting the war, and how far to go in this struggle, there is also the question of what weapons to use.

Among the assembling Democrats there were stout [patriots] who opposed the [war to free the people] and the [increases in executive powers]; among them, also, were others who wanted only to have the war end -- with a [...] victory if possible, without it if necessary. And there were also men who saw the war consuming precious freedoms and creating tyranny, who blended extreme political partisanship with blind fury against the war party and who at least believed they were ready to strike back without caring much which weapon they used.

I admit that the setup above and the book quotes above are intended to mislead. They are in fact from Bruce Catton's three volume series, The Army of the Potomac. The politics of the war were only slightly less complex than those of the current war in which we find ourselves. Although he doesn't go deeply into it, Catton does touch on the ways the Civil War changed the national character, and not necessarily all for the better.

I am a proponent of local rather than national government. The original constitution of the country, embodied within the document of the same name, was of a union of states joined for national defense, but holding sovereignty within the states themselves. It is the reason the Senate exists (each state is represented equally there, regardless of population), and the reason the Electoral College was created (to give weight to states at least as much as people).

The Democratic politician cited above was Clement Vallandingham, a leader of the Copperhead movement. Copperheads were generally sympathetic to the South, but their motives are as unclear as those of some of the current anti-war Democrats. It seems that they were in favor of both states rights (good) and slavery (bad) when they may have been in fact simply in favor of peace (very good). On the topic of the Civil War, libertarians usually favor the pro-peace, pro-states' rights side, offering various arguments to blunt the criticism that this makes them pro-slaveholder. Having been through this experience, I understand the experience of the modern equivalent of the Copperhead, whose anti-was stance makes them (if you accept the terms of their opponents) pro-Saddam.

The arguments offered to blunt the pro-slavery accusation may approach the issue from the doomed structure of that kind of society (the oppressed outnumber the oppressors and would have eventually risen up as they did earlier in Haiti), from the economic unsustainability (it would have eventually become obvious that paying them would be less expensive than feeding, clothing, and housing them, and their motivation and productivity would be higher), or from the angle that it would have been cheaper for abolitionists to simply purchase the slaves (freeing some and raising the value of the remainder to the point that it would no longer be in the interest of holders to abuse them). While interesting, I find these uncompelling. A more ignorant accusation is that capitalism itself supported slavery, when in fact the capitalist North opposed it and that only the state -- more specifically, the pro-agrarian Southern variety -- made slavery possible. Without the state there was no law, no sheriff, no posse, no possibility of keeping hordes of healthy workers under your thumb.

In the final analysis, I have found Tibor Machan's argument to be wholly consistent with libertarian (though not anarchist) values. Machan, taking up the question of whether Lincoln's attacks on free speech, property rights, and habeas corpus and whether his ambiguity on questions of slavery and race makes him a racist, a bad American, and bad president, decides to the contrary:

Still, when it comes to endorsing southern secession it is not enough to point out Lincoln's failures in his position on slavery. More important is whether one group may leave a larger group that it had been part of -- and in the process take along unwilling third parties. The seceding group definitely does not have that right. Putting it in straightforward terms, yes, a divorce (or, more broadly, the right of peaceful exit from a partnership) may not be denied to anyone unless -- and this is a very big "unless" -- those wanting to leave intend to take along hostages.

Seceding from the American union could perhaps be morally unobjectionable. It isn't that significant whether it is legally objectionable because, after all, slavery itself was legally unobjectionable, yet something had to be done about it. And to ask the slaves to wait until the rest of the people slowly undertook to change the Constitution seems obscene.

Once you grant that, as they say, it's on.

And when you talk about the American Civil War being "on", Catton leaves little doubt as to how bad it could be. Over 600,000 total dead, 400,000 wounded, totalling about 3% of the population (1 in 30, or 1 in 15 men). The power of these books is not their detailed statistics (that might even be a shortcoming - the preceding figures come from Wikipedia); it is instead in the details of the men who had to fight on the front lines. The major officer figures -- little Mac McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, Meade, Grant, Upton -- are profiled as needed, and the fringe politicians -- Vallandingham and others -- receive similar treatment when the narrative requires context, but the overwhelming narrative is from the point of view of the soldier himself. The war technology of that era gave advantage to defense, but the officers were taught and the political climate required offense. The result was wholesale slaughter, as officers sent or led thousands into the enemy's maw. Where are the reparations for the men who died or their families?

How fair is it that I compare the Copperheads of that era to those who prefer peace today? My only point was that war can be much more complicated than most people want to admit. If you accept the principles on which the Union was founded, then the Civil War seems to have been a tarnished but successful struggle for which it would be difficult to make a utilitarian argument (which I mention because I continue to struggle against utilitarianism). What are the similarities and differences between the Copperheads and today's peaceniks?

Though most would admit that war was bad, they admitted then that slavery was worse. Coming back to the utilitarian calculus, how many dead or wounded men were worth one freed slave? The mortally wounded suffers but a few moments, while the slave suffers a lifetime. However, the slave may endure a lifetime of hope, while the dead man is deprived of future happiness. It's an impossible calculus, but one which most people would agree was ultimately worthwhile.

Or was it? If the war had not been fought, and instead the secession had been allowed, the United States might today be broken up into two or possibly even more smaller nations, some of which might have combined with Canadian territories or Mexico. Slavery probably would have endured in the South for a few more years until it was ended by insurrection or enlightenment or both. We might all today live in something a great deal more like Swiss cantons or the original United States rather than the modern, monolithic, ambitious, leviathan called America. Or, having abandoned slavery, the South might have rejoined the Union.

Should the same path be taken today with Iraq? Saddam was reportedly killing 10,000 people a year, and occasionally stirring up wars with his neighbors; assuming this might have gone on for a generation or more, and that the situation in Iraq will soon improve, the war will result in an improvement compared to what might have been. On the other hand, since the fall of the Ba'athists, researchers have calculated a horrific butcher's bill of 100,000 additional deaths -- are those worth the additional freedom that could come to the Iraqis (but at this time has still eluded them)? On the other hand, Saddam's reign would have ended eventually anyhow, so perhaps the factional violence would have come after another 20 years of 10,000 per year.

Even if we could sort out all of those hypotheticals, we still have the problem that fighting our fellow countrymen to free slaves is quite different than going around the world to free Shias and Kurds from Saddam. On the other hand, why shouldn't we? If there is a moral imperative to free people from tyrants, it would seem that this is the right thing to and ignoring the other instances is the wrong thing. On the other hand, if we were to build a system that could actually be capable of going about and freeing people from the world's tyrants, it seems likely that we would become just such a society ourselves since it would require a massive state apparatus built around a military and run by a man or group with no sense of compunction about sending men to their deaths (and probably a lot of things less serious).

It has to be recognized, after all, that Lincoln went through several commanders before he finally settled on Grant. Winfield Scott was too old, McClellan was too reluctant, Burnside was incompetent, and Hooker was perhaps the victim of fate or of the superiority of Lee's tactical skills. In Grant, Lincoln finally found a general who would fight, and moreover who understood "total war", remorselessly sending thousands to die, holding Lee by the collar while Sherman marched on Atlanta, destroying Lee's foraging ground by destroying the Mennonite and Amish farms in the Shenandoah Valley, and grinding away on Lee until the attrition finally took its toll. Though that toll fell hardest on the men who fought at the front, it continues to fall on every generation since as governors then turned more of their sovereignty over to Washington, and Washington was transformed from a sleepy little artificial martial parade ground into the center of American power. The current conflict continues to reinforce that trend.

Go Bananas

Every week, I make out my grocery list.
Then go shopping.
I usually buy bananas and bring them home.
We place them on the table, and wait ...

Eventually the survivors darken, and we think about banana bread. It never happens.

We have become a banana hospice.

Utilitarian blindness

A couple of nights ago, my wife blindsided me while I was eating with a question about what I thought of the recent decision by Federal Judge James Robertson that directed the Treasury Department to make our money blind-accessible (NY Times). The truth was that other than recognizing the obvious problem, I had not thought about the ruling because I had not yet had a chance to read about it and should have said so. The only thing I had seen or heard was a CBS or CNN radio report which began with a detailed discussion of the number of ancillary changes required: cash registers, change machines, and even wallets are all designed around the existing bills and must change. Thinking aloud, I began with that and a recent debate on MarginalRevolution (linked below) and the "discussion" went downhill.

Later, upon reflecting on the problem, it occurred to me that a solution so simple exists that you could conceivably retrofit existing bills by hand. Contrary to popular belief, US money is not only not low tech as the judge and others have implied, but is possibly among the most high tech money around in an attempt to thwart counterfeiters 'round the world. For example, there is a stripe in each bill (not the one you can see) visible only to short wave infrared devices - though little good that does you and me. So of course the judge and everyone else have jumped in with ideas to insert other high tech features to help the blind, even though these have a number of disadvantages - bumps wear, holes and varied edges tear, and I really don't get how the watermarks in Japanese bills help the blind.

I propose this simple modification to the currency: simply cut 1, 2, 3, or 4 corners off each bill to designate its denomination. The $100 bill will remain the same, the $50 will have one corner removed, the $20 and $10 two corners (one along the top edge, the other along the side), the $5 three corners, and the $1 all four. If you don't like the fact that a $50 can be made into either a 20 or 10 (though who would do it?), the diagonal corner arrangement is also available. We could do it with all the money we have on hand right now and a pair of scissors. It won't wear out, it is against the counterfeiter's interest to change one into another (because more cuts means lower denomination), they will still fit in cash registers and wallets, and they will still work in change machines. The cost to the Treasury to change their die cutters is minimal.




















But this is quite beside the point of the title of this post, in case you're keeping track. The problem that I have with my initial reaction to this was one guided by simple utilitarianism: determining whether a thing is worth doing simply on the basis of whether the benefit is greater than the cost. The problem is that the benefits are localized while the costs are generalized, making it difficult to assess them. As my wife pointed out - correctly, I might add - there are two problems with this approach: first, that it paralyzes anyone trying to do it because you can't add up the costs and benefits in any reasonable manner, and second, because that problem can always be used as an excuse to inaction.

If you could map out where such decisions lie on a chart, there would be an area of high cost and low benefit where you would tend to avoid those decisions, and another area of high benefit and low cost where you would tend towards accepting those decisions at face value. This logic is not isolated to libertarians - it is accepted by everyone on the political spectrum because they can always argue up the benefits and downplay the costs of their favorite programs, and because the benefits are frequently easily seen while the costs are frequently hidden. There is, unfortunately, a no-man's land out in the middle where it is not clear whether costs and benefits would govern the decision. Parenthetically, there is finally an area of what I would call special cases, where the costs and benefits are both low; in this area, it is easier to make such decisions if the people involved are few and the decisions local. This is an argument for local governance, for human scale, for the kind of organization described in A Pattern Language.


















I would go further and argue that my initial reaction was flat wrong, misguided by the radio story I heard. Yes, the costs to converting all of the cash registers and money machines would be enormous; however, they would be one-time expenses. The benefits to blind people would continue year after year, eventually overwhelming the costs. On the other hand, those of you who immediately applaud this decision should step back and consider the effect of this and thousands of others just like it: Wal-Mart and other giant retailers can more easily absorb these one-time expenses and large manufacturers can more easily design and introduce the needed machinery than can any Mom-and-Pop store or small businessman scratching a living on vending machines. Oh well, too bad for them, huh? The need of some people outweighs the need of a different set of people, so they just need to pick better needs. But don't be surprised when giant corporations happen to succeed in an environment that favors giant corporations, even if that was not the intent of people who loathe giant corporations and who merely wanted to help the blind.

But my wife's other point is an even stronger one. There are finite resources and infinite needs, it is true, so there will always be some need to make cost/benefit evaluations. However, if you fall back on the fact that they are difficult to make, and probably inconclusive, you may have a tendency to not make those decisions on the justification that there are other, more clear-cut actions requiring attention and resources. Disenfranchised people are unable to persuasively argue up their benefits or argue down the costs to others. In 1864, after winning his re-election, Lincoln proposed making low-interest loans to the South to repay them for the destruction wrought by Federal troops: his cabinet responded negatively since there was still a war on. Later, after an initial period of rebuilding, it just wasn't important enough to make good on the "40 acres and a mule" promise. We had bigger fish to fry in the 19th century than enfranchising women. And so on. This is an excuse that is too easy to make.

[On the other hand, if you don't acknowledge the problem of finite resources, you quickly find yourself in a budget situation like we had in the 1980s and today: let's try to please everyone and fully fund everything and bill future taxpayers (too bad for them, huh?).]

In this case, however, I favor the argument that I make two paragraphs above regarding costs (one time expense vs. constant future benefits). I would also say that the government, which spends $400 million on the currency every year anyhow, has an obligation to make reasonable changes in their design to support the blind in addition to those design features that prevent counterfeit. The judge was acting within the law (ADA), so this is not judicial activism (which I would define as acting outside the law and the constitution). I am nevertheless concerned about the balance between large and small companies to absorb the costs, and would recommend that the Treasury do what it can to accommodate their concerns - but I won't hold my breath.

I regret that I frequently fall back on utilitarian reasoning, even though I don't consider myself to be a utilitarian. Utilitarian reasoning says that you might sacrifice one person if it would add seconds to the life of billions, in an extreme (and nonexistent) case. I could not accept that, and apparently neither can other people, but real world examples of less clear-cut situations exist everywhere (Alex Tabarrok cites the case of coal miners, who risk their lives every day so that we might be marginally better off in response to the previous link), and people including me don't seem to have a problem with those. You can either approach each of these situations one at a time (situational ethics or consequentialism, where the ends justifies the means), or adopt rigid dogmatic rules (never do X, even if it would be better if you did), or find some more clever road between them (rule consequentialism? negative consequentialism? See my kindergarten summary of these here). I would like to shake this utilitarian blindness, but seem unable to find a consistent means of reasoning to replace it. Note that both of the arguments above for the decision are utilitarian in nature.