Co-opting Your Opponent's Issues

Steve Teles talked about a good idea in a conference here last weekend: the idea of going on one's opponent's issue ground in politics and beating him on his own terms. His paper was on Compassionate Conservatism. Here are perhaps other examples. The paradigm is:

"Liberals say X helps Y, but X actually hurts them."

1. X = Immigration, Y = Mexican-Americans

2. X= the minimum wage, Y = poor people

3. X= easy divorce laws, Y = women

4. X= low penalties for crime, Y = blacks

5. X= unions, Y = workers

We need a good name for this tactic. It is not the same as Co-Opting, really, or Issue Stealing

Italics and Asterisks

For emphasis, I wonder if *asterisks* might be better than italics. They convey different impressions; that is certain. Asterisks are more masculine, more heavy-hitting, which is sometimes but not always desirable. For titles of books, however, asterisks are all wrong, since there emphasis is not desirable. Write not *Huckleberry Finn*, but Huckleberry Finn.

A Short Speech and a Bye-Ku. Stromata Blog has two good entries. One is an all-purpose stump speech from one of Mark Steyn's readers:

My friends, we live in the greatest nation in the history of the world. I hope you’ll join with me as we try to change it.

The other is an original bye-ku for Dennis Kucinich as he drops out of the presidential race:

He could have gone far
if that saucer had landed
little green voters.

Poetry to Memorize. Jough Dempsey has a good poetry page, good both for its selection of memorizable poems, for its poems as poems, and for his commentary.

One of the best aspects of learning a poem by heart is that you get to take a poem inside of yourself. It becomes a part of you. That sounds touchy-feely, but it’s true. When you memorize a poem it is no longer just a poem, but your poem. It’s in your head, and you can call it up from memory as you would any other experience.

He has “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost, “For Whom The Bell Tolls” by John Donne, “Musée des Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden, “Tears, Idle Tears” by Alfred Lord Tennyson. They aren't easy to memorize, but they are good poems.

Penmanship. A good page on penmanship, featuring scans of old instruction books, is "Lessons in Calligraphy and Penmanship" . I was looking for a cursive alphabet page for my daughter and couldn't find any page that had all the letters in cursive upper and lower case in beautiful handwriting. "ALPHABET PRACTICE - WRITING WORKSHEETS" has good dotted worksheets for all-caps or all-small and for individual letters repeated over a page that are at least acceptable in quality.

Armamentarium 1: the equipment and methods used, esp. in medicine 2: matter available or utilized for an undertaking or field of activity--"a whole armamentarium of devices"

HTML-Expanding Thumbnail Images. Highslide is javascript for putting a thumbnail image to show up in your HMTL page and for another, larger, file, to appear if it's clicked upon. (Click here to read more.)

It's freeware for noncommercial use. The instructions are not very clear, but I got it to work without too much trouble. Here are my instructions:

1. Download the zip file.

2. Unzip it.

3. Upload the "highfile" directory to the top directory of your weblog. In my case, with Blogger, this is the same directory where I have blogger.html and index.html, and it is not the root directory for my server.

4. Save one version of your graphic file with full quality (say, 1012kb) and another with lower quality but faster to load for the thumbnail which shows up first (say, 24kb).

5. Don't put the entire code into your weblog entry. Blogger objects to having things like html, head, body, there. Instead, put in something like my example: http://rasmusen.org/t/images-2007/highfile.example.txt. What it looks like as a blog entry is here.

6. Or, change your Blogger template, which as the css style file as part of its file, by inserting http://rasmusen.org/t/images-2007/highfile.example3.txt in the style section of it. Then you can leave the style parts out of each blog entry, just using a blog entry like http://rasmusen.org/t/images-2007/highfile.example2.txt.

I've also done this for Wordpress. There, the css file in step 6 is inserted in the Style Sheet. The highfile directory in step 3 is loaded up to some wordpress directory. I put up duplicates to make sure, to the top directory and to the wp-content one where the index.htm file is.

I changed the code slightly. I deleted the height parameter, because if you have both a height and a width parameter the image is fit into that thumbnail space and distorted. Some people might want that, though.

Negative Reviews and Inframarginal Subsidies for Investment. MR emailed me recently asking me to look at part of a review by RM of his recent book. As you can see, the review says the book's theory is "remarkable", quotes at length including a diagram, and then implies that the theory is wrong, without saying why. (Click here to read more.)

MR wondered if he and his co-author had made some obvious mistake and if I'd explain it to him.

I was equally puzzled, though. Maybe they should have used a numerical example. Suppose that a Japanese company invests 10 billion yen because it has to pay a 4% interest rate to borrow the money in the private financial markets and the last yen of those 10 billion invested would have a return of 4%. If they invested another billion yen, they'd only get 3%, having to go to worse projects, so they don't. But then the Japanese government offers to lend them the 10 billion at an interest rate of 2%. They eagerly take up the offer of course. But they still don't invest more than 10 billion. If they invested another billion by borrowing at 4% from the private sector, they'd still only get a 3% return and they'd lose money. Thus, government lending meant to increase investment won't succeed unless the government lends more than a private company was originally borrowing. Put more technically, this is an example of how inframarginal price changes have zero effect on real behavior.

That idea is correct, unless I'm missing something big, and it looks to me as if the explanation above is correct too. Am I missing anything?

I think there are two morals to the story. First, simple Chicago-style price theory really is remarkable. It can surprise even an experienced, much-published economist. Second, when criticizing someone's ideas in print it's a good idea to send a copy to them to see if they have a response you hadn't thought of.

December 2: Someone suggested that even an inframarginal subsidy would increase investment via its effect on the probability of bankruptcy. A firm which has a subsidy will be more profitable, and hence less likely to go bankrupt, and hence will be able to borrow more cheaply, and hence will invest more. That sounds right. A lump sum subsidy would have the same effect.

Is Not Necessarily Equal To

At lunch at Nuffield I was just asking MM about some math notation I'd like: a symbol for "is not necessarily equal to". For example, and economics paper might show the following:

Proposition: Stocks with equal risks might or might not have the same returns. In the model's notation, x IS NOT NECESSARILY EQUAL TO y.

Click here to read more

I can't say x \neq y there, because maybe x=y, maybe not, depending on the parameter values.

If anybody knows of such a symbol, please let me know. In fact, just a symbol for IS NOT NECESSARILY might be useful, since we could combine it with other symbols, e.g.

x IS NOT NECESSARILY = y

Horse heights ARE NOT NECESSARILY > cow heights

The biased estimator IS NOT NECESSARILY \sim N(0,1).

OCTOBER 7. Stimulated by a comment below: The modal logic symbols might work well. Wikipedia's "Modal logic" says: "The basic modal operators are usually written (or L) for Necessarily and (or M) for Possibly."

Maybe I could say " x ≠ y" for "x is not necessarily equal to y".

Shoulder Muscles and Handwriting

"Tips for improving your handwriting," by Dyas A. Lawson sounds worth trying.Click here to read more

Here's it's idea for improving one's handwriting:

I’ve found only one reference to using the right muscle groups to write, and this is critical. I can’t be the only person who knows this; I’m neither that smart nor that good. Calligraphy instruction books address hand position, desk position, lighting, paper, you name it--but for some reason, not using the right muscles.

As you’ve probably surmised, the "right muscles" are not those in the fingers. You must use the shoulder-girdle and forearm muscles. This muscle group is capable of much more intricate action than you think and tires much less easily than fingers, besides giving a smooth, clean, sweeping look to the finished writing. Though it seems paradoxical, since we’re accustomed to thinking of small muscles having better control, the shoulder-girdle group, once trained, does the job better.