The Liberal Order

Price of New York Taxi Medallion Hits All-Time High

George Will had an excellent column the other day regarding an immigrant who legally bested the existing rent-seeking taxi owners in Minneapolis. Of not was this concluding statement:

It would be wonderful if every time someone like Paucar comes to America, a native-born American rent-seeker who has been corrupted by today's entitlement mentality would leave.

Now comes word of a record price paid for a New York taxi medallion.

"Prices of corporate medallions have increased from $195,000 in 2001 to the record $600,000 this week," Andrew Murstein, president of the lending company, said in a statement on Tuesday. It said the previous record was about $550,000. (MS: Bolding mine.)

Understanding Average Lifespan

During a carriage tour of Mackinac Island with my son last week the tour guide (a college student with an entertaining, if not poorly paid, summer job) took us by the three cemeteries on the island, the Catholic Cemetery, the Protestant Cemetery and the Post Cemetery. While passing one of the cemeteries (I believe the Protestant Cemetery) the guide noted that therein lies the longest surviving person buried on the island, a woman who lived to what I recall was maybe eighty-four-years old. He then commented on the unusualness of her longevity given that the average lifespan at the time of her death (mid-1800s) was about forty-one. Unfortunately, her longevity was not that unusual.

The following example illustrates the guide's mistake in understanding of average life expectancy at birth and living to a ripe old age.

Orchestra conductors live to an average age of eighty-nine years, while the random person has an average life expectancy at birth of 78. We can therefore conclude that being an orchestra conductor is better for your health,  which translates into an increase in your expected lifespan.

Notice, however, the wording in my sentence above. "Orchestra conductors live to an average age of eighty-nine-years," and "the random person has an average life expectancy at birth of 78." The former is an average age of death of orchestra conductors taken at the time they died, while the latter is an average age of death for all people, including infants who died shortly after birth, young children who died before the age of five, older children who died before ten, teenagers who died from accidents, etc.

In order to become an orchestra conductor one has to survive beyond the age of, say, thirty. Once he reaches his thirtieth birthday he can't die at 1 or 2 or 10 or 20 years of age. As you get older you can expect to live to an older age relative to years past only because something didn't already kill you at a younger age.

Yes, this woman buried in the Protestant Cemetery was fortunate to not have succumbed to some disease or accident at a young age, but it certainly wasn't unusual. Go to a cemetery and you'll see many tombstones for people buried in the 1800s who lived well into their seventies and eighties. You'll also see tombstones for kids buried during that time who didn't make it past their fifth birthday. In fact, far more than what you'll see for kids born since, say, 1950. For that I am grateful for our market capitalist institutions.

That's an understatement.

David Leonhardt on Lou Dobbs.

For one thing, Mr. Dobbs has a somewhat flexible relationship with reality.

Update: Lou Dobbs responds to his critics.

Sweet Justice

A Connecticut secretary who suffers from the "winter blues" is suing her ex-employers for $33 million, claiming they wouldn't give her a well-lit desk with a window view.

Caryl Dontfraid says she has seasonal affective disorder, which causes depression during the fall and winter and can be alleviated by exposure to bright light.

"She wanted to work closer to a window with good light," her attorney, Robert Campos-Marquetti told the Daily News. "This is a request that could have been easily accommodated."

And what evil employer would perpetrate such injustice on its employees?

Dontfraid was cited as an "exemplary employee" for Binder & Binder, a Park Avenue law firm specializing in disability claims.

Story here.
Link via Fark.

Markets in Everything

Via Personal Finance Advice, through Autoblog, comes this creative, yet simple, entrepreneurial story.

This is what happened. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, the commutes in certain sections are absolutely horrendous. This guy was sitting in a traffic jam one morning watching all the people in the carpool lane drive by while he was moving at snail’s pace. He decided that he needed to get someone else in his car so that he could get to work in a timely manner using the carpool lane, and at first thought that his only option was to start a carpool.

As he thought about it more, however, he thought that he (as in himself and his body) was actually a valuable commodity and he could sell himself and that is exactly what he did. He walked to the freeway entrance and held up a sign that said,

“Traffic is bad. Spend 2 hours or pay me $10 and get there in 20 minutes”

He said the first day he was picked up within 15 minutes. When he got dropped off, he walked to the other side, held up his sign and got paid to go back the other way too. On a typical day he makes 2 to 3 round trips during the morning commute rush hour and 3 - 5 round trips during the evening rush hour. If there is an accident and traffic is really slow, his price doubles. He clears $100 - $300 a day sitting in a car so others can get to work and home faster!

When your curriculum is empty . . .

Who's to say that this isn't learning? (NYTimes - rr)

LIVERPOOL, N.Y. — The students at Liverpool High have used their school-issued laptops to exchange answers on tests, download pornography and hack into local businesses. When the school tightened its network security, a 10th grader not only found a way around it but also posted step-by-step instructions on the Web for others to follow (which they did).

Scores of the leased laptops break down each month, and every other morning, when the entire school has study hall, the network inevitably freezes because of the sheer number of students roaming the Internet instead of getting help from teachers.

When your curriculum is empty, students will learn what's meaningful and relevant.

So the Liverpool Central School District, just outside Syracuse, has decided to phase out laptops starting this fall, joining a handful of other schools around the country that adopted one-to-one computing programs and are now abandoning them as educationally empty — and worse.

Many of these districts had sought to prepare their students for a technology-driven world and close the so-called digital divide between students who had computers at home and those who did not.

And then:

“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

Acheivement at what? Here is an area where students can compete against each other and try to define a clear winner. It seems that there's a lot of learning that was actually going on, just not the stuff the stuff the educational bureaucracy is pushing.

Then why are nannies paid so little?

If this were true, then why are nannies paid so little? Even if you take into account the non-pecuniary benefits received by nannies, their compensation falls way short of $138,000 per year.

Market comparisons like this have a lot of problems given the disparate opportunity costs faced by different individuals, as well as the supply comparisons.