Happy new year!!
Sadly, one of my dozen resolutions is NOT to blog more ;). Um, pretty clearly, i suck at blogging and i don't plan to change. I could explain why, but that will have to be the subject of a future post.
I just spend the last week and a half sitting around with family, which gave me some free cycles to ponder. I have a lazy mind and don't often think abstract ideas off into too much detail unless i have an immediate need like trying to solve, discuss, or write about a problem. This is why i need to get out more and interact. ;) Conversations on subjects i hadn't considered too much lead to forced thinking. Some holiday converstations of interst:

- The WTO is not doing their job.
I'm not against globalization or free trade or capitalism, but the WTO would seem to be much more interested in maximizing the benefits of globalization for the biggest corporations, not for the people. Clearly an international body is needed to set the agenda on levelling the global playing field. Why don't they spend more time on worker's rights and environmental regulations? Regardless, labor in China, India, Mexico, etc. will be cheaper than elsewhere for sometime to come, but why should this be at the expense of the environment and what the "West" has come to know as worker's rights? You want to join the WTO? Ok, you must allow trade unions, end of story. They don't even have to go any further into detailed rights of workers. Just allow them to organize and let them establish their own rights. Otherwise, it seems workers in every one of those countries without Western-style labor rights will follow through the same bloody evolution we did. This could be a lot uglier and maybe even impossible under a repressive enough regime.

- A Purer Capitalism. Shockingly, i'm a capitalist pig ;). Not to say that the public sector does not have an important role to play in providing many things (including regulation of the private sector), but that's not what i'm on about here. A capitalist market can be seen as an immensely powerful computer. It has proven itself to be vastly superior at making decisions than any combination of the "best and brightest" (central planning). This only works when "true costs" are involved though. In the U.S. there is far too much interference in the way of subsidies and tax breaks that enable our economy to make bad decisions. As an uncecessarily complex example, consider the price of gasoline. When you pay for gasoline, you are basically paying only for the gasoline, but your use of that gasoline has costs too (increased traffic, road wear, air pollution, etc.). Things like clean air have a value. We pay for all of these things, but not in any relation to how we consume them. These resources are consumed incrementally, but we pay for them via the public sector which isolates individuals from the impacts of the true cost. The burden should be shifted in order to approximate true costing. One easy way to do this would be a honking gas tax. Suggest this and people scream bloody murder. "The price of goods like California tomatoes in NYC will skyrocket!". This argument is somewhat of a red herring since obviously, there are no new expenditures being incurred; the burden has just been shifted. Yes, products with prices that include a significant proportional fuel cost will rise, but both the non-incremental costs (taxes) for you and the seller will drop. This would improve the competitiveness of locally-grown produce in a rational way that allows the market to make better decisions. When the market is artificially insulated from reality, it cannot make good decsions. Average gas users would pay the same as current (more gas money == less tax money) while light users and heavy users see the benefit/cost proportionally. Right now, driving alternatives (like cycle-commuting and mass transit) are encouraged via artificial subsidies. One subsidy computing against another... the big brain of the marketplace cannot function like this: it is central planning once-removed. Subsities have a place in catalyzing and accelerating the marketplace, but any long-term subsidy is short-circuiting the market's ability to do what it does best: optimize.

- On a lighter note, what will happen to commercial television in light of the DVR? Well TiVo and other DVRs are booming. Once you have one, you'll time-shift nearly 100% of your TV rather than the 10% you did with your VCR. This means you can skip commercials at will. How will adverstisers and commercial television respond? A few obvious points sprang to mind: 1. traditional ads will be targetted increasingly towards lower-income non-DVR-havers. 2. The subscription model of pay-TV and other non-commercial TV will benefit. 3. Ads will be shorter and more subtle. 4. More product placement. 5. We'll see "banner ads" on TV. Like the news scroll on CNN, ads will roll by... yuck.

- I should update my thinking on Iraq sometime... Heaven help us...

and happy new year!

- posted by scott @ 10:22 AM (0) comments