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Light Posting Ahead

Well, when I said, “But I’ll try to keep it light for at least a little while to give everyone (esp. myself) a breather,” I did mean light in tone, not quantity. Oops. Unfortunately, post frequency is probably going to stay light for a while due to my night class.

My “Principles of Macroeconomics” course at Mission College is over, and I got an A (yay me!). Actually not that big a deal, given that it’s a community college, and I came into it already knowing a thing or two about the subject (although I still learned a lot). Plus, the workload wasn’t as bad as I expected, given that there wasn’t too much reading (I could get through a chapter in one or two nights, and we generally took 2-3 weeks per chapter), and the homework problems were easy if you understood the material.

Well, this semester, I’m taking a Political Science course, “Comparative Governments.” Political Science is another subject in which I’ve never ever taken a class (my wife keeps remarking on her shock at how Berkeley’s College of Engineering doesn’t require you to have the same core that most other colleges do). Unlike economics, however, I don’t have much background knowledge. Unless you count being a news and political junkie and bit of a voting theory geek (although this class won’t cover that). And if the first two chapters are any indication, this class’ll be harder going for me.

Of course, I could be wrong again, as I warned about lighter posting for my economics class, and it didn’t really happen. But I’d thought I’d give y’all a heads-up.

Comparative Advantage and Opportunity Cost

I’ve noticed lately that “comparative advantage” (especially Ricardian comparative advantage) is one of those terms that people throw around if they want to sound like they know about economics (another one being “Keynesian”). As this was a concept taught on the very first day of my economics night class and is fairly easy to understand, I kinda figured a lot of people were already familiar with it, especially since the Wikipedia entry on it isn’t half bad.

But I was wrong. In the past couple of weeks, I found myself correcting several people on this relatively simple topic. Since it has a nonintuitive conclusion, and since it’s very important to understand before tackling the issue of trade and outsourcing, let me attempt to explain it here. I know that economics can be an intimidating and/or boring topic for many people (partially because a lot of writers will write about economics in such a way as to make it sound complicated — presumably to make themselves seem smarter than their readers), so I’ll try to keep this as straight-forward and entertaining as I can.

Absolute Advantage

I said comparative advantage was nonintuitive because it teaches you that trade between two partners is beneficial to both even if one of them has an absolute advantage over the other. Absolute advantage meaning that one of them is more efficient at producing everything. To help illustrate this, let’s imagine a simplified economy with two people, let’s say Lisa Simpson of The Simpsons and Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes.

Lovable Libertarian Losers?

Randy Barnett of The Volokh Conspiracy hits the nail on the head:

…I think that the…Libertarian Party has been very detrimental to the political influence of libertarians. Some voters…have been drained from both political parties, rendering both parties less libertarian at the margin.

Indeed, this is a point that I made earlier in Third Party Handicaps. Of course, unlike me, Barnett has readership, and so his post attracted a great deal of attention. So much that Barnett followed it up with another one that makes an excellent analogy:

Americans view political parties as they do their sports teams. Even Independents tend to root for one party over the other. Libertarians have defined themselves as a different team that loses pitifully — and Americans do not like losers. And when you say “libertarian” to them, they think you are referring to the Libertarian team. I think this is why many libertarian-inclined citizens deny they libertarians. That is not their team.

In addition, another point I made in Third Party Handicaps is that another side effect of the plurality electoral system is to push third parties to the fringes of the electorate. Which means Americans associate “libertarian,” not just with losing, but with barking moonbats who lose because they are raving lunatics.

While I echo Barnett’s calls for libertarians to join the Republican Party (I myself have been a registered Republican since college), I don’t see this as a satisfactory solution. First of all, libertarians disagree as much (if not more) about political strategy as ideology, and there will always be libertarians who value social liberty more than economic liberty, and vice versa. The split is there for a reason. Secondly, coalitions in the U.S. are too stagnant for the smaller partners to have that much clout. As Barnett says: