Freedom, Justice, and Economics

Statistics on undergraduate admission rates at the University of Oxford ought to be a scandal.  First, examine Table 5.  The racial groups designated White or White&Other represent 84.2+0.4+0.3+2.2 = 87.1% of applicants.  Despite this overwhelming share (comparable to the share in the general population), the combined admissions rate for these groups substantially exceeds the admissions rate for the combined pool of non-white applicants.

Table 6 implies the even more astonishing fact that gender disparities are also exacerbated by the Oxford admissions process.  Even though 2% more men apply than women, the overall acceptance rate for men exceeds the acceptance rate for women by 2.3%.  In the sciences, where the applicant pool is nearly 3/5 male, the acceptance rate gap is even larger, 3.1%.

Likewise, only 5 out of the 30 colleges listed in Table 8a have higher three-year average admission rates than application rates from “maintained” high schools (ie, the equivalent of “public schools” in the US, which are maintained by the state).

I am not claiming that these statistics imply Oxford admissions officers practice discrimination.  Despite the numbers, it could be the case that the marginal racial minority, female, and maintained school applicant is less distinguished than the marginal white, male, prep school applicant.

However, these numbers imply that disparities in applications expand during the Oxford admissions decision process, contrary to diversity’s recognized essentiality for education in a modern, interconnected world.  Oxford should lead the way in extending opportunity to underrepresented groups, and consequently the Oxford admissions statistics should be a scandal.  The central administration may only partially be to blame, since admissions decisions are made by individual colleges.  Non-discrimination rules may be applied in the UK in the way that opponents of affirmative action would interpret the equal protection doctrine in the US.  Nevertheless, I hope to see fast action to raise application rates of qualified members of underrepresented groups, and equally fast rises to statistical parity in acceptance rates.

… throughout Africa, says a wise former teacher in The Gambia, would make a world of difference.  Why not flood schools with Dr. Seuss?

Most papers written by university students are seen by two people:  the student and her TA.  I think this should change radically:  the default should be that all student work is published to the web.  This would give students output to point their friends and family to; it would encourage students to take more pride in their written work; and it would promote discourse about class subjects among students who could read each other’s work.

The technology is there.  The students are more than talented and diligent enough that  we should have faith in them and their writing.  How could universal web publication be made to happen?

Though transit passengers have to go through immigration and customs at the Halifax Airport, all the rest more than made up:

• Going back through security, there was no line. I repeat this astonishing fact: I walked directly up to the x-ray machine.
• After going through security, I went through US immigration. How brilliant to run the checks before departure!
• Wi-fi is proudly supplied free by the airport.
• At the Spirit of the Maritimes pub they happily brewed my decaf coffee fresh. I write this from their high counter facing the runways and pines beyond, with mottled cotton-ball clouds drifting across half the sky, and bright blue in the other half, down to the distant mother-of-pearl horizon.

The New York Times is running a series of articles on environmental degradation in China.  The newest feature (perhaps others too?) is available in Mandarin translation, as both text and audio.

In the UK, prices for broadband contracts are generally quoted in terms of an introductory rate and a post-introductory rate. For example, the twelve-month version of BT’s “Option 1″ costs 12.99 for the first three months and 17.99 thereafter. This structure is notable because it pertains to FIXED TERM CONTRACTS. Most of the economics literature on behavioral contract theory, stemming from the brilliant paper of Stefano Dellavigna and Ulrike Malmendier, has focussed on cases where consumers have post-adoption choices about service use. For example, credit card adopters can decide how much to borrow; cell phone adopters can decide how many minutes to talk; gym members can decided how often to work out. In the UK broadband case, subsequent prices are unconditional on use: They are merely the way the firms partition the annual contract price into installments.

BT is not unusual in quoting its contracts in these terms. AOL UK, Tiscali, and Virgin are included in its company (though not TalkTalk and Orange). The quotes generally have a few features:

• The introductory period tends to be 3 months for 12 month contracts and 6 months for 18 month contracts.
• The introductory monthly rate is 20-50% less than the post-introductory monthly rate.
• Firms generally require that early termination results in responsibility for payment of all the contract’s remaining installments.

As I see it, there are two main reasons firms may offer contracts structured this way. First, consumers may be more liquidity constrained at the time of adoption than later during the contract term. However, it seems implausible that differences of a few pounds from month to month, within a given year, would make a difference for the typical consumer.

The second reason strikes me as the correct one: firms want to confuse consumers about the true price of the offered contracts. Firms often advertise the introductory rate, and many of the price-comparison websites report this rate despite its irrelevance.

Two questions come to mind. First, given the way (boundedly rational) consumers make decisions about contracts, how should monopolists and competitive firms design their installments? For example, why is it that we don’t see offers like “FIRST MONTH FREE! Next three months only 4.99! Last 69 weeks 39.21.”  Maybe then termination rates would rise, and enough consumers would get irritated to decrease brand karma.  Also, too much complexity could cause consumers to throw up their hands and turn to a competitor.  (Some consumers might also notice a rip-off when confronted with one.)

The second question I find interesting is how regulators should act in these markets.  For example, should there be limits on how long a non-renegotiable contract consumers can sign to?  Should firms be required to quote their contract offers’ total annual costs?  (Certainly, extended agreements shouldn’t be prohibited entirely, because firms face fixed costs of signing up new customers, which must be recouped over time.)

My feeling on the second question is that regulators should require the most prominent advertised price to be the total price for the duration of the contract.  If the firm wants to offer financing (an installment loan), I suppose it’s fine to let them arrange that offer however they wish– though I would probably end up advising everyone to pay up-front if possible, since installment credit is usually very expensive.  Alternatively, (and almost equivalently) regulators could prohibit contracts that ex ante specify varying payments for materially identical services, forcing the broadband providers to advertise only the weighted averages of their streams of monthly prices.

All trip long, the famous Swiss meticulousness did not disappoint.

• Most chalets were of the traditional style, with shutters, overhanging roofs, and a prominent gable or two; flower gardens exploded autumn’s pretense with color.
• I could set my watch by the trains, the buses, and the local shops’ opening hours.
• By homes, small cow sheds, and stopping points along major trails, wood was invariably stacked, cross-hatched, covered with corrugated iron, awaiting its chance to warm a hearth.
• Bergweg signposts, white-red-white, stood proudly along mountain trails, ready to remain visible in feet of snow to come.
• As the train from Gstaad descends into Zweisimmen, it makes a hairpin turn in a tunnel.  My wife thinks the engineers were drinking one day and challenged each other to pull off the u-ee.  If so, such gambling is common:  from Gstaad to Montreux we were treated to additional 180’s on buried tracks.

All this impressiveness noted, toward the end of our hike from Lenk to Lauenen, we passed a small old man in a stocking cap fighting to saw a 2×4 by hand.  The place was no idyll for the poor, and a century had somehow passed him by.

Kingsley Amis’s Roger Micheldene is a poor English cousin to Ignatius Reilly. Though both are supremely bloated on themselves, Roger is more self-aware (perhaps, older, owing to more time away from overprotective maternal influence), and unapologetically lacking in the consolation of philosophy. Some might appreciate One Fat Englishman for its charms, but for humor I’d say skip it in favor of rereads of Wodehouse, and for singular, hysterical experience John Kennedy Toole’s Confederacy of Dunces is supreme.

I support the fundamental principle of “one person, one vote,” and I interpret the common voting age of 18 in most democracies as contravention of this principle. To sustain the principle, the voting age must be zero: newborn babies (assuming they have citizenship) ought to emerge into the cares and wonders of the world with the right to a vote.

This proposal is far more radical than some recent discussion about incrementally reducing the voting age. It deliberately ignores questions of “competence” and “maturity” that are sometimes bandied when mulling criteria for franchisement.

Of course, we can’t have two-year olds bounding into voting booths alone and scribbling all over their ballots, just saying “no” to all the candidates. Rather, to make this work, the trick would be to assume that kids’ guardians will share in the exercise of this right to a vote initially; and to devise rules governing when and how kids could exercise it with additional levels of autonomy.

To my mind, having parents exercise the right on their kids’ behalf would be just fine: who better to look after the kids’ interests? Why shouldn’t those interests be looked after at the ballot box?

The rules would explain what assistance could be offered, how, and when, with the intent of preventing uncertainty or open conflict between child and guardian about whether to vote and who to vote for.

Note that many practical rules already exist regarding voting assistance for the elderly and disabled. I would favor modifying those rules, too, to ensure that their right to a vote is never rescinded, but see them as a possible source.

I’ve obviously set aside, for the purposes of this discussion, the question of whether people should bother to vote at all.

British territorial abdication following WWII caused disasters around the world. Two were particularly grievous.

First, the British failed to prevent partition of India and Pakistan or create conditions of safe passage for the religion-based mass migration that occurred. Hatred and fear during the exchange of 15 million people between the two new nations resulted in between 200,000 and 1 million deaths. The over-hasty British abdication on the subcontinent also caused a half-century of suspicion and war, now overhung with nuclear threat.

Second, the British let the Jews and Arabs fight it out in Palestine. The result was a tenuous state, surrounded by enemies, with millions of universally unwelcome refugees just across its borders.

Tired after WWII, and incapable of sustaining Empire, the British around the world just left. I do not quibble with their decision to depart; but for the tragedies their abdication of responsibility invited, we are more than fair to blame Britain.

Addendum:  Pankaj Mishra’s excellent recent review of Indian Summer by Alex von Tunzelmann concludes, “The rival nationalisms and politicized religions the British Empire brought into being now clash in an enlarged geographical arena; and the human costs of imperial overreaching seem unlikely to attain a final tally for many more decades.”