The Other Way To Run a Restaurant

A restaurant provides two different products—food and a place to eat it. In two different posts, one recent and one older, I raised the question of why restaurants only charge for the first. Why not have a restaurant which charges separately for the food and the use of a table?

According to a recent news story, there is now a cafe in London that reverses the usual policy. Food and everything else is free—except for the per minute cost of being there. 

The entrepreneur calls it an anti-cafe.

P.S. A commenter points to a post by a prominent restaurant entrepreneur arguing for my system—but I gather he hasn't actually implemented it yet.

007 and the NSA

James Bond, the protagonist of Ian Fleming's popular series of novels and the movies based on them, was number 007 in the British secret service. As was explained in the first book, the 00 number meant that he was licensed to kill. So far as I can remember—I read the books a long time ago—it was never explained exactly what were the limits of the license or under what legal theory it was granted.

I do not think it was ever suggested that he was only allowed to kill in self-defense since that, after all, requires no special number. He clearly did not have the hangman's job of executing people who had been convicted of a capital offense. He was not a soldier in a declared war. Off hand, those are the only contexts I can think of in which deliberately killing another human being is legal under the Anglo-American legal system. Which suggests that what Bond had was a license to break the law.

Defenders of the NSA argue that everything it does, with the exception of occasional mistakes, is legal under their interpretation of the relevant law. None of them, so far as I know, have argued that the NSA is entitled to break the law. On the other hand, I have seen no arguments claiming that the Patriot act entitled government officials to lie to Congress under oath, as the Director of National Intelligence has admitted doing. Yet the only calls I have seen for indicting him for perjury have been from people already critical of the NSA. From which I conclude that the defenders of the NSA, from Obama on down, really do believe that government security agents are entitled to break the law without the usual consequences, however unwilling they may be to say so.

As it happens, the same issue comes up in my novel Salamander, although not in our world. The speaker is Prince Kieron, brother and heir of the king and royal official in charge of dealing with magery:

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The King is not above the law. Nonetheless, I will not promise never to violate bounds or law myself, nor will I promise to instruct my servants never to do so. Law-breaking is a bad thing, whether by the King's servants or anyone else, but there are worse things, some of which it is my responsibility to deal with. I will promise not to violate bounds or law save in the most extreme circumstances, and to do my best to see that my servants will not, so that incidents such as the two you have described do not occur again. If my people are charged, as Fieras was, I will do my best to see that they get an honest trial. 

The claim that the end does not justify the means cannot be true in general—with enough at stake, all of us are willing to do things we would normally disapprove of. Kieron is not a villain. He is an intelligent, well intentioned, and reasonably honest man trying to deal with what he correctly sees as a terrible threat. Insofar as he is making a mistake, it is not bad moral reasoning. It is being too confident that his judgement is correct, hence that he is entitled, if necessary, to overrule by force or fraud the opinions of other intelligent and well intentioned people who disagree with him. 

Similarly in our world. It is easy enough to come up with hypothetical situations in which an NSA agent is morally justified in tapping a phone without a warrant or a high up intelligence official in lying to Congress. It is much harder to come up with a plausible reason to believe that the willingness of agents or officials to break the law whenever they think doing so is in the national interest is, on net, a good thing.

The Only Evidence in Christie's Favor

I do not often comment on current political flaps, but this one is hard to resist. It now seems clear that people close to New Jersey Governor Chris Christie deliberately created a massive traffic jam on the George Washington Bridge on four successive days in order to punish the mayor of Fort Lee, the town on the N.J. side of the bridge, for not supporting Christie's reelection. The only question that remains open is Christie's own role—whether it was done on his orders, not on his orders but with his knowledge, or, as he claims, entirely behind his back.

There is only one piece of evidence that I can see in Christie's favor—the fact that he would have had to be terminally stupid to think he could get away with it. 

Of course, that leaves the conclusion that the two people known to be responsible, a high up Christie aid whom he has just fired and the Port Authority official actually responsible for closing down the lanes who has now resigned, both close to Christie, were terminally stupid as well as criminally irresponsible. Prior to this, Christie was the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. A chief executive, whether governor or president, is not just one man but a team. On the interpretation most favorable to Christie, this shows that he is not competent, indeed dangerously incompetent, at selecting people to help him do his job.

One other point is suggested by the story, not about Christie but about the Port Authority and government actors more generally. Average weekday traffic volume eastbound on the bridge, found with a little googling, is a bit over 150,000 vehicles. Assume a third of them got delayed by the traffic jam for an hour each. Assume their occupants value their time at ten dollars an hour. Assume one person per vehicle. On those very conservative assumptions, a single Port Authority official, acting in effect on a whim, imposed a cost of two million dollars on New York commuters and it took four days for anyone else in the organization to notice and do something about it. More generous assumptions could easily push the number up to five or ten million.

What economists refer to as market failure occurs as a result of individuals taking actions whose net costs or benefits are born by other people. I have long argued that, while market failure is a real problem in ordinary private markets where such situations occasionally occur, it is a much larger problem in political markets, where it represents not the exception but the rule. Take this as a particularly striking example.

Rereading my Blog

I've recently been going through old posts and the associated comment threads for a variety of reasons. Some I had almost entirely forgotten. The overall impression reminds me of the four volumes of Orwell's letters and essays, a work I'm fond of reading and rereading—a mixture of comments on a wide range of subject with a common voice. Orwell did not have a blog or comment threads, but he did have correspondents.

One interesting old post with a comment thread 170 comments long was sparked by the controversy over the Ron Paul newsletters. It dealt with divisions within the libertarian movement that were more cultural than ideological. The newsletters contained a number of articles that were deliberately and forcefully politically incorrect. Some libertarians strongly disapproved, others had the opposite reaction. As I saw it, the disapproval was from people with friends were  on the left, culturally and politically, who saw it as both rude and counterproductive to deliberately offend their friends and did not want to be identified with those who did so. The approval was coming from people who saw the attempt to keep speech politically correct as offensive and were happy to see it defied and those responsible offended. From the standpoint of the first group the second were boors, from the standpoint of the second the first were wimps. Some in the commenting thread labeled the same division as between cosmolibertarians and paleolibertarians.

One commenter argued, I think correctly, that both groups were wimps and both were boors—with regard to different targets. The people I labeled wimps were perfectly happy to say unkind things about religious fundamentalists, southern admirers of the confederacy and other people they did not know or want to be associated with. The people I labeled boors had friends among those groups and, although they might not agree with them, were disinclined to be rude to them. The first group saw the willingness of the second to tolerate people they did not want tolerated as a fault, and the second group similarly with regard to the first. Almost perfect symmetry.

An interesting discussion, and not the only such in the past eight years of blogging. If only blogs had been invented a few centuries earlier.

Hardwired Tribalism

A few days ago, shopping in a local supermarket, I noticed a stranger and promptly categorized him as one of us. He was (I'm guessing) in his twenties, somewhat overweight, wearing shorts, a T-shirt, a scruffy beard, engaged in animated conversation with two younger companions. Animated conversation aside, none of that describes me. My instinctive reaction reflected the fact that he fit the pattern of people in environments where I am comfortable. He was probably an sf fan, probably a board game or computer game player, possibly a World of Warcraft player, possibly an SCA member.

Like most moderns, I am a member of more than one tribe. Some years back, when we were visiting colleges that one or the other of our children was considering, I took advantage of that fact to find sources of information not funneled through the admissions department. Part was locating members of the local SCA group, if there was one, and talking with them about the school. Part was wandering around the economics department getting into conversations. Economists are more willing to talk freely to a fellow economist than to a random parent, a trait I took advantage of.

For one final and stranger example, I offer my response to seeing someone else driving the same model and color of car I drive. I know nothing else about the driver, but my instinctive reaction is to categorize him as a sort of distant kin.

Twenty Years After

Yesterday's New York Times Sunday Review has an article that describes current plans by a county in Texas to implement an idea from an article that I coauthored in 1993. It was published again in a shorter form aimed at a more general audience in 2010. It was that version that brought it to the attention of someone prepared to try it out.

The idea is quite simple. Under current law, someone who is charged with a felony and cannot afford a lawyer has one provided for him. The system has been extensively criticized as providing very little protection to defendants, mostly on the grounds that the money available is inadequate to fund a serious defense. In some places the lawyer is appointed by the judge, in some there is an office of the public defender. In none does the defendant  have control over the choice of the person who is supposed to represent his interests.

Steve Schulhofer, at the time a professor at the University of Chicago Law School where I was a faculty fellow, came to me with an idea. While one problem with the system might be inadequate resources, another was poor incentives. A lawyer who wanted to be paid to represent indigents did not have to please his "clients," he had to please whoever appointed him. However little he was paid, he could always do less work than that. And one obvious way to please the judge or whoever else was responsible for choosing lawyers to defend the indigent was by persuading the defendant to agree to plead guilty, thus saving everyone else a lot of time and trouble.

Steve's solution was simple: a voucher system. Whatever the state was willing to pay, let the defendant choose the lawyer. For details, see the shorter version of our article. It struck me as an obviously good idea, and we ended up jointly writing the article.

Steve was viewed as on the left wing of the Law School faculty, so our collaboration led to a certain amount of discussion among our colleagues as to which of us was subverting which. I thought the question was adequately answered when we gave a workshop on the paper and I had the pleasure of hearing Steve Schulhofer lecturing Judge Posner, a prominent legal scholar generally, if somewhat inaccurately, viewed as a conservative, on the virtues of the free market.

Double Standards in the White House

The next time the President explains that because Snowden is a criminal he must be punished, somebody should ask him how soon he expects James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, to be indicted for perjury.