Condoms and AIDS

David Friedman had a post on AIDS and condom use a while back. He took the traditional point of view in economics that when something is made safer, people change behavior. For example, when cars are made safer, people offset some of the effect by driving faster. I posted a comment that did not add much, and then someone else posted a comment to my comment that made no sense to me.

I don’t think anyone’s disputing that reducing risk with condoms will change behaviour. As is said upthread, that’s one of the reasons for opposition to condom use. The outrage at the Pope comes more from the fact that reducing risk with condoms will also reduce the spread of HIV. It’s a bad idea not to acknowledge that.

I thought I had posted a further comment, but it got lost on the Internet.

I remain mystified about what the comment on my comment meant. AIDS is spread in Africa by multiple overlapping sex partners. If condoms make people feel safer having sex, they will be more likely to have more overlapping sex partners, and hence they may undo some or all of the effects of condoms making each sexual encounter less risky. The situation is similar to the question of whether driver's education reduces teenage fatalities. Driver's education makes teenagers better drivers, but it also increases the number of teenage drivers on the road. The second effect can more than offset the first effect.

One way to express these ideas is in the framework of moral hazard. In this framework, things that reduce risk such as insurance reduce the costs of certain events, and therefore people do not have to be as careful about avoiding those events. Another way is in terms of complements and substitutes. Driver's education and teenage driving are complements, so making driver's education more available will also increase teenage driving. Are condoms and sexual intercourse outside of monogamous marriage substitutes, complements, or unrelated? A lot of advocacy of condom use seems to be based on an implicit assumption that they are unrelated. If they are complements, the push for condoms may have consequences quite different from those that are expected. It may, for example, increase AIDS rather than reduce it. The same argument, by the way, holds for teenage pregnancies.

Would you buy a Chrysler?

Kausfiles.com at Slate.com doubts the wisdom of Obama's intervention in Chrysler and slams reporting in the New York Times:

NYT's Sanger and Vlasic, with what must be willed credulousness, describe how President Obama's "hard line" on Chrysler gives him and his "team" the "leverage" they will need going into the GM negotiations.

That appears to be the part left out of the Obama administration's self-aggrandizing deal spin: Who is going to buy the New Chrysler's cars? Consumers "in new markets around the world," say Sanger and Vlasic, with a straight face.

P.S.: It's one thing to politicize the reorganization of a prominent failed firm, leaning on private investors and making up new rules--if it works, are voters going to complain? It's another to engineer a slow-motion calamity.

Some commentators like to talk about no one being above the law (i.e., when the Bush Administration is being examined), but I have not read much about no one being above the law when Obama decided to rearrange contracts for Chyrsler bond holders. If respect for the law is good in the first case, why not the second?

Update: More on Chrysler on bondholders from Megan McArdle here and here.

I think most of the people enthusing about this actually recognize that in other countries, when the government uses the banking system as a slush fund to reward its constituencies, this generally turns out badly--and makes the banking system a lot more frail.

Also, there was an comment at National Reviews Corner blog about the agility of hedge funds:

This administration has made it quite clear that they can't be relied upon to honor contracts or legal precedents and if I can't know what the rules are before the game starts then I'm not going to play.

Europe's future, and maybe our own

From Spenglers new blog, a link to an article in the Daily Telegraph that looks at the problems of high deficits and an aging population. It is generous of Europe to blaze the trail for us. Maybe we can change direction if the road they (and we) are on leads to disaster.

The EU "dependency ratio" will soar: there will be two workers to support each person over 65, compared to four today. It will be worse if Europe fails to attract enough immigrants, all too likely given the catch-up under way in the developing world.

Faced with this future, Britain and Europe need to slash debt and salt away investment wealth in the rising East. Instead, public debt is exploding. Brussels has laid it bare: we will need hair-shirt discipline once we emerge from this recession. It may be our last chance.

What are the odds that they will be able to sustain "hair-shirt discipline?"

Update: Here is a long article on fertility and population predictions from Wilsoncenter.org:

A similar upturn is under way in the United States, where the fertility rate has climbed to its highest level since 1971, reaching 2.1 in 2006, according to the National Center for Health Statistics. New projections by the Pew Research Center suggest that if current trends continue, the population of the United States will rise from today’s total of some 300 million to 438 million in 2050. Eighty-two percent of that increase will be produced by new immigrants and their U.S.-born descendants.

By contrast, the downward population trends for southern and eastern Europe show little sign of reversal. Ukraine, for example, now has a population of 46 million; if maintained, its low fertility rate will whittle its population down by nearly 50 percent by mid-century. The Czech Republic, Italy, and Poland face declines almost as drastic.

And Mark Steyn responds, arguing that Europe will become Muslim.

If you have a million people, 90 per cent of whom are ethnic European and 10 per cent immigrant - and the 90 per cent have a fertility rate of 1.3 kids per couple (the Euro average) and the ten per cent have a fertility rate of 3.5 (the Euro-Muslim estimate), the 90 per cent will have 380,250 grandkids and the 10 per cent will have 306,250.

Clocks

There is a review of the book Decoding the Heavens: A 2,000-Year-Old Computer–and the Century-Long Search to Discover Its Secrets by Jo Marchant over at Chicagoboyz.net. The book is about the Antikythera mechanism, a set of gears that intrigued and mystified researchers for the past century. We now know that it

"allowed the successful prediction of solar, lunar, planetary, and eclipse cycles across many decades. It was meant for an educated amateur and came with extensive inscribed instructions on its metal parts. It is the ancient ancestor (in a sense) of the elaborate clocks that were to sweep through western Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries. Except that it was likely built around 100 BC, after what was clearly a long period of earlier experimentation and technical wizardry."

We often think of technological progress as one way. Knowledge accumulates and never is forgotten. The story of this mechanism dramatically illustrates that technological knowledge can be lost. It also raises questions as to why the ancient world did not have an industrial revolution. One answer is that they never got several key inventions that were necessary (zero, accounting systems, lenses). Another is that they never got the right set of political and economic institutions (intellectual property rights for one).

Styen channels Schumpeter

Joseph Schumpeter thought that capitalism would be a successful economic system but would not be successful socially. A recent column by Mark Steyn made me think of Schumpeter.

Margaret Thatcher was a great leader, who reversed her country’s decline — to the point where, two decades later, the electorate felt it was safe to vote the Labour party back into office. And yet, in the greater scheme of things, the Thatcher interlude seems just that: a temporary respite from a remorseless descent into the abyss.

Rent seeking

An example of rent-seeking behavior from The Wall Street Journal:

At times, Mr. Ulizio finds it all a bit surreal. "We mine and sell sand. Sand. That's all we do. We aren't the evil empire. We aren't manufacturing some exotic chemical that we're unleashing on the world. We're taking sand out of the ground. We don't even process it, except to clean it up a little and size it. And we are selling something that has been around forever, the dangers from which have been known since well before anybody involved in this litigation was even born," he says.

He looks at me as if to say, "Can you believe it?" I wish I could tell the tort warrior I couldn't.

The sky is not falling (yet)

In the past two days I have been to two events in which they swine flu (or the H1N1 virus) has intruded. In both cases events that previously had been self-serve now became events in which a person served the guests. It slowed everything down and was inconvenient.

I will be shocked if this virus leads to be a serious pandemic. My rule is that once the news media starts hyping a story, you can ignore it. The media almost always over-reacts one way or the other.

I do not like making predictions because it is dangerous--one can be wrong. However, I am confident enough in this case to take the risk.

There are risks and problems that I am worried about a lot, but none of them are things that the news media pays attention to.

Drug legalization?

Don Bourdreaux argued a couple years ago that the primary reason that alcohol prohibition ended in the 1930s not because people thought it had failed but because the federal government needed more revenue. If he is right, there should be a good chance that use of marijuana will be legalized and taxed in the next few years because with the large increase in government spending coming down the pike, the government will need all the tax revenue it can find. In addition, if marijuana and perhaps other illegal drugs were legalized, there would be a lot fewer people in jail, cutting expenses of catching, convicting, and maintaining them.
Update May 13: I got this one right. See here.

Tit-for-tat and poverty

This past semester I reread Robert Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation: Revised Edition. The book was originally published in 1984 and a revised edition was published in 2006. I could not see any changes in the revised edition other than a forward by Richard Dawkins.

Axelrod demonstrates that in situations where we are playing a repeated prisoner's dilemma, a simple tit-for-tat strategy is successful against a wide and diverse group of other strategies. Tit-for-tat invites cooperation and discourages exploitation. Richard Dawkins was so impressed with Axelrod's conclusions that the suggested the book should replace the Gideon Bible.

There were a number of places where I noticed potential extensions to Axelrod's discussions. For example, in his Chapter Seven, "How to Promote Cooperation," Axelrod says we need to enlarge the shadow of the future. When future interactions become more important, the temptation to exploit the other for short-term gain is reduced. Cooperation is more likely when both parties value the benefits of future interaction.

One obvious result of this principle is that we should expect married couples to do better than cohabitating couples. (For those who say that a marriage certificate is only a piece of paper, so are cash and the most of what I have in my safety deposit box.) I will leave it to the reader to complete the argument for marriage.

Another implication that Axelrod does not explore is the link between poverty and the extent to which people emphasize the present versus the future. There is a substantial literature showing that the poor tend to be present-oriented. However, correlation is not causation. Do the values of the poor, including their focus on the present, cause poverty, or does their poverty cause people to be present-oriented?

Adam Smith recognized that use of markets generated wealth because specialization and division of labor increase social cooperation. However, many or most of our interactions with others are not market transactions. A person with no concern for the future who takes short-term gains from others at the expense of long-term cooperation will earn a lower standard of living as a result. Hence, Axelrod's discussion suggests that present-orientedness causes poverty. (It may also be that poverty causes present-orientedness, in which case a feedback loop traps people in poverty.)

Addendum: The marshmallow experiment shows extreme present-orientedness in small children, but I am not sure it adds anything to the above discussion. However, it makes for fun youtube viewing.

I got mail

I was a bit surprised when I got e-mail about a past post After all, the daily readership of this blog is rarely hits double digits.

Hey Robert,

I remember reading your post last week mentioning the Wall Street Journal article arguing that there are as many 450,000 professional bloggers. I recently came across an item that indicates a more peculiar trend --some people are being hired as full-time, 40-hour-a-week Twitterers:

http://bloggasm.com/screw-professional-blogging-become-a-professional-twitterer

Anyway, I thought this was something you and your readers would find interesting.

take care,
Simon

--
http://bloggasm.com
http://twitter.com/simonowens

Blogging, twittering, tweeting, youtubing, facebooking, myspacing, texting--the ways we communicate are changing. Last summer I attended a conference at DePauw University and was told that e-mail as a way of communication was old-fashioned. I thought my grandparents had experienced the greatest technological revolution early in the twentieth century with the internal combustion engine, the electric motor, and radio, but maybe the changes caused by the computer chip will be as profound.

Check the comments on a post on another of my blogs for an example of innovative advertising. I wonder if it is also effective.