Splitting the rent

Tyler Cowen links to this study on how people tend to split the rent:

It’s been a while since I split rent in college and the few years thereafter, but it seemed to be the assumption that everyone would pay the same.  If someone got a bigger room, then we would try to find other accommodations to make up the difference, like giving the other guy the garage.  I suppose that fits in either the “pick rooms then adjust” and/or “just pick rooms and split it” categories.

One of the ways we tried to keep rent evenly split in college was to agree to switch rooms between semesters.  This worked out well once when I shared a two bedroom with two other guys: one would get the small bedroom to himself while the others shared the master, and we rotated each quarter (UCI uses the quarter system).  But when we tried with a fourth guy in another two bedroom, I got to share the master bedroom with the fourth guy while the two other two got the tiny second bedroom.  This seemed like a good deal for me.  But then my wildcard roommate unilaterally, and over the objections of everyone else, brought his behemoth waterbed that took up half the room.  It wouldn’t have even fit in the small bedroom—and the other guys were charitable enough not to insist we try.  We might have insisted he pay more at that point, but he had already blown through his cash from working over the summer and was eating our left over Del Taco hot sauce packets.  Not really an option.  College.

Could you eat an animal that had a name?

I anthropomorphize, too.  It’s a wonder I’m not a vegetarian. 

H/T Bainbridge.

Cellphone police

Meanwhile, other state legislatures consider regulating cellphone and MP3 player etiquette.  The objective is to keep people from paying too much attention to their gadgets and too little attention to what’s going on around them.  As if any legal sanction could do better than this:

Come on, this is funny

 

Via Powerline

 

2010 Book Report

Following my 2009 list, here are the books I logged in 2010:

1. The Land Question, Henry George.  I continued this year to indulge my curiosity into the oddity of early Progressive/socialist thought.  Some musings on George here.
2. Cornerstone of Liberty, Timothy Sandefur. A nice intellectual and legal history of property rights and the abuses of eminent domain in the United States.
3. Ideas Have Consequences, Richard Weaver.  One of my favorite reads of the year, and which I quoted often in this space, e.g., here, here, here, and here.
4. Life After Death, Dinesh D’Souza.  This is kind of a fun, accessible theology-oriented book.  Not anywhere as good as What’s So Great About Christianity.
5. The City, Joel Kotkin.  Kotkin is an indispensible contributor in field of urban planning and demography.  His blog newgeography.com is wonderful.  This book did not flesh out his theses as deeply as I had hoped, however.
6. Plunder!, Steve Greenhut.  A very good primer on the havoc that public employee unions are wreaking on nearly every state and local government in the nation.
7. The Ten Things You Can’t Say in America, Larry Elder.  Larry Elder is fantastic, so when I found this at a used bookstore, I plowed through it in short order.
8. Don’t Call It Sprawl, William Bogart.  One of several books I read early this year on the subject of the new urbanism movement.  I’m still working to complete a longish paper on the subject, though that project has been caught in perpetual limbo.
9. The Next 100 Million, Joel Kotkin.  Kotkin describes the likely shape America will take as it swells to 400 million inhabitants.
10. The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler.  The book that Kunstler is best known for.  Quite a lot of provocative ideas coming from the new urbanist movement—many of them good, even!
11. Best Laid Plans, Randall O’Toole.  Contra Kunstler, O’Toole comes at urban planning and demography from the libertarian perspective.  Not as fun a read as Kunstler, but I’d say it would be hard to take either side seriously without considering the other.
12. Threshold, Thom Hartmann.  The allure of Progressivist thought is not for nothing.  There are quite a few bewitching ideas in this book about what’s wrong with the modern world and why, and it took me several days to find my way back to sanity.  I wrote a post about this book here.
13. The New American Economy, Bruce Bartlett.  I feel about economics like I do about music:  I have an appreciation for it.  And I think I have some aptitude for it.  But it’s slow-going and I become immediately impatient.  I wrote a short post about Bartlett’s book here.
14. Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens.  A very fine autobiography with lots of historical depth and anecdotes tracking political and intellectual thought through the past four decades.  Hitchens never fails to throw in a gratuitous jab at religion, however, and I couldn’t resist mentioning it.
15. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs.  At about a hundred pages in, I didn’t really get what was supposed to be so acclaimed about this work.  Upon completion, I still didn’t.  Maybe it’s like how people don’t get why The Beatles were so revolutionary because, by the time one discovers The Beatles, one has already heard their influence in every pop act that’s come around since, so it all sounds quite familiar.  Except, that is, The Beatles are still quite worth listening to.
16. Rethinking Federal Housing Policy, Glaeser and Gyourko.
17. The Roots of American Order, Russell Kirk.  One of my other favorite reads of the year.  An excerpt here.
18. The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis.  I hadn’t re-read this in a while.  It’s such a disarmingly insightful book.  Though I must say The Great Divorce is my favorite work by Lewis.
19. The Path of the Law, Oliver Wendell Holmes.  “The reason why it is a profession, why people will pay lawyers to argue for them or to advise them, is that in societies like ours the command of the public force is intrusted to the judges in certain cases, and the whole power of the state will be put forth, if necessary to carry out their judgments and decrees.  People want to know under what circumstances and how far they will run the risk of coming against what is so much stronger than themselves, and hence it becomes a business to find out when this danger is to be feared.  The object of our study, then, is prediction, the prediction of the incidence of the public force through the instrumentality of the courts.”
20. The History and Meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment, Herta Meyer.  It is becoming more and more quaint to look seriously at the meaning of the words in our Constitution, as that document has in large part been replaced by the small-c constitutionalism advanced by liberal judges and goaded on by the professoriate.
21. The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition, Willmore Kendall, George Carey.  I read this in law school too quickly, but not so quickly I couldn’t recognize there were some important ideas going on.  Among those ideas are:
    • that we, as a nation, perhaps do not understand our true political tradition because the academy only looks to the Declaration and the Constitution, and even there only finds what it likes;
    • that, as advanced by Eric Voegelin, political analysis begins with scrutinizing a people’s attempt at self-understanding, self-interpretation, and to discern its relationship to the transcendent;
    • that as early as the Mayflower Compact, our political tradition has recognized that the process of lawmaking—to enact laws “thought most meet and convenient for the general good”—concerns a continuing process of discovering the natural law, and that no expression of individual rights has been made to compete with the task of effecting laws “thought” to be meet and convenient to the public welfare.
22. John Marshall and the Constitution, Edward Samuel Corwin.  This was just a free Kindle download.
23. Gov. Jerry Brown’s Destruction of the California Judiciary, Barnett et al. I wrote an op-ed and gave a radio interview on Jerry Brown in October, and, once in the habit, continued to criticize the man thereafter.  This book provided some helpful background information from Brown’s first romp through the Governor’s mansion.
24. The New Science of Politics, Eric Voegelin.  Voegelin’s work provided the intellectual foundation to Kendall and Carey’s Basic Symbols, above.  I wrote a short post referencing Voegelin here.  Among the many important ideas in this work are:
    • the modern approach to social science takes method to be subordinate to theoretical relevance—i.e., that science is measured and defined by the efficacy of its results, and method is merely a means to that end; thus, it has come to pass that “all facts are created equal,” resulting in oceans of irrelevant facts;
    • this problem of amassing endless data with no appreciable purpose has been created by villainizing “value judgments,” thus unmooring science from human ends, ushering in relativism, and destroying our ability to build upon the past;
    • that empires regard themselves as representatives of a transcendent order, and thus a standard or template for truth;
    • that society reflects the type of men of whom it is comprised;
    • that God, the universal transcendence, is necessary to a universal conception of man and truth;
    • that the Aristotelian pursuit of the common, ordered summum bonum has been replaced by a Hobbesian pursuit of individual desire in competition with others, or avoidance of death—the summum malum.
25. The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis.  So long as I was on the topic of declension and relativism, I revisited this, another old favorite.
26. Common Sense, Thomas Paine.
27. The Conservative Assault on the Constitution, Erwin Chemerinsky.  I kept pretty thoroughgoing notes as I worked through this book, intending to write up a detailed review.  I may still do so, but in the meantime, I got to the heart of the problem with Chemerinsky’s general point of view here and here.
28. William Tell Told Again, Wodehouse.  Another free one on the Kindle.
29. Notes From the Underground, Dostoyevsky.  Still one of my favorite books.  An excerpt here.
30. Up From Slavery, Booker T. Washington.  I have to say this was my favorite book I read this year.  To anyone else who has let this book languish on his list of should-reads, I encourage you to put it off no longer.
31. Philosophy of Style, Herbert Spencer.  Another free Kindle book with quite a few good ideas for clearer writing.
32. The Right to Earn a Living, Timothy Sandefur.  Thoughtful and deeply researched.  I would say incredibly well-researched given the number and range of sources, but being familiar with Sandefur, there is no imposition on my credulity.  That such a basic right as economic liberty has been so nearly eradicated by those who doff the title “liberal,” and with so little benefit in return, makes the mind reel.
33. Restoring the Lost Constitution, Randy Barnett.  It’s an elegant and beautifully defended theory, but I just don’t buy it, for reasons I’ll get around to articulating sometime soon.  In short, the theory depends on the entire structure and purpose of the Constitution being upturned by the 80 words of section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment.  That simply cannot have been the purpose, nor could it have been believed by reasonable men that such a drastic undertaking could be effected by words to few in number, cryptic in meaning, and clumsy in arrangement.
34. The Unconstitutionality of Slavery, Lysander Spooner.  Barnett references this work as kind of an intellectual predecessor to the theory advanced in Restoring the Lost Constitution.  It’s an interesting and important notion that, under our founding documents which express a foundation upon natural rights, certain things might be unconstitutional that were subjectively thought to be the law of the land.
35. Looking Backward, 2000 to 1887, Edward Bellamy.  Another bit of socialist self-indulgence whose plot device is quite similar to that in Robert Heinlein’s For Us, The Living.  A man is hypnotized but waken up not in hours or days, but over a century later.  In this hoped-for year 2000, Bellamy’s man finds a sparkling utopia where money, private enterprise, and property rights no longer exist; in which the government coordinates all human labor and all product of such labor is the property of the state; and in which every human being has, as a common right of humanity, an equal license irrespective of effort or ability to those goods held forth by the state.  “No man any more has any care for the morrow, either for himself or his children, for the nation guarantees the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the grave.”  If this, the early notion of Progressive socialism, is still the latent end of modern liberals, it begins to make sense that they would advance the ridiculous economic policies like those described in Sandefur’s book:  They can see as well as the rest of us that squelching competition and barring entry to lawful productive enterprise does not help our economy.  It is the destruction of the market, not its regulation, that Progressives have in mind, to clear the way for a regime in which the fate of man will rest with “a board of fairly sensible men.”

Before You Lynch McCarthy As a Birther Nut…

NRO’s Andy McCarthy has taken a lot of flak for his recent article, in which he suggests that Obama not be let off the hook completely for his secret-keeping. The attacks on McCarthy seem to be largely based on misinterpreting McCarthy’s piece as being something other than what it really is: a lament over the abandonment of investigative reporting.

At the outset, McCarthy does not once take up cause with Birthers–those who believe that Obama was not born on U.S. soil, and is otherwise not qualified to be President based on citizenship grounds. In fact, he states just the opposite:

The mission of National Review has always included keeping the Right honest, which includes debunking crackpot conspiracy theories. The theory that Obama was born in Kenya, that he was smuggled into the U.S., and that his parents somehow hoodwinked Hawaiian authorities into falsely certifying his birth in Oahu, is crazy stuff. Even Obama’s dual Kenyan citizenship is of dubious materiality: It is a function of foreign law, involving no action on his part (to think otherwise, you’d have to conclude that if Yemen passed a law tomorrow saying, “All Americans — except, of course, Jews — are hereby awarded Yemeni citizenship,” only Jewish Americans could henceforth run for president).

Instead, McCarthy bemoans the poverty of research done by investigative reporters whose job it is to, ahem, investigate. Burden of proof is the operative concept underlying McCarthy’s point, as I take it. That is, to waive McCarthy off because he cites to questionable sources misses the issue entirely. The burden of proof does not lie in favor of the subject of a news investigation, viz., the President of the United States. Every hint, every lead, every suspicion is to be ferreted out with the zealous assumption that the fellow is a rat and a sneak and a crook ready to yield his tale of lies to that would-be case-cracker with the tenacity and contempt for public figures’ privacy to go the distance and get the story, dad-gummit.

Instead, somehow the burden of proof is now shifted to those who would challenge the “official” record provided by the Administration. A formal investigation is not warranted, under this view, unless and until substantial and corroborated evidence has already been amassed. Proffering less than this with a request for further investigation is derided as crackpot paranoia fit for scorn, contempt, and general hecklery.

That’s not how this is supposed to work. No, McCarthy’s is not piece of investigative reporting. But it doesn’t purport to be. McCarthy is not an investigator or a prosecutor—he was a fine one of those already, and I doubt he would volunteer to continue doing it on an opinionator’s wage. His piece simply suggests that there are some clues here, the sort that investigative journalists used to take up and sniff down and let us know at the end whether there is anything to jump up and down about. The observation here is that there is a curious lack of interest in any such sniffing.

Property Ownership Is Turning into a Very Fluid Concept

Jack Balkin has this amusing story:

The New York Times reports that Amazon.com found out that the publisher of Kindle versions of George Orwell’s books 1984 and Animal Farm decided that it didn’t want to give the rights to a Kindle version. So Amazon.com used its wireless connection to each Kindle to delete copies on various owners’ Kindles and refunded their money. You see, because of the wireless connection, Amazon.com knows what books are on your Kindle and it can delete them or modify them at will.

Apparently, the irony of deleting a book about Big Brother watching you was lost on both the publisher and Amazon.com.

They’ve also assumed the role of the Ministry of Truth: You own a copy of 1984. You’ve never owned a copy of 1984.

What’s next? Is the RIAA going to somehow delete all the music I pirated before they browbeat everyone into believing it was “wrong”? (They trained me to stop downloading it, but I could never get back into the practice of paying for music again. My music collection abruptly ends around the turn of the millennium. Hence the reason I’ve prematurely begun referring to “what kids are listening to these days.”)

Blogging Is Silly Enough Without Anonymity

An online spat between NRO’s Ed Whelan and a formerly anonymous blogger, now outed as South Texas College of Law professor John Blevins (see links here, here, here, and here), got me thinking about the subject of anonymous blog posting. I never thought about doing it here, and I got nervous for a bit after considering Blevins’ reasons for seeking to maintain anonymity. Perhaps it’s a good idea — I’m a practicing lawyer, and it’s possible my views on things could create professional discomfort or even conflicts. And as I noted at one point in discussing gay marriage, I always fear one of my gay friends will misinterpret my legal and political views as imputing some sort of personal intolerance, which could not be further from the truth.

On the other hand, knowing that my name will be attached to my posts adds significant motive to more closely scrutinize my own thoughts and analysis, and to edit and tailor my language to more precisely reflect my ideas. Due to my work schedule, I do much of my writing in the evenings, sometimes just before I turn in for the night. There have been instances when I woke up the next morning in a panic about about whether something unintentionally inflammatory had slipped past me the night before. This has made me much more careful to jump into sharp criticism or hot-button topics. For the better, I think.

So I’m with the guys over at Power Line when they blame anonymity in part for the “dismally low level of discourse that generally prevails online.” Not to condone Whelan’s outing of Blevins (for which he subsequently apologized), but a fake person has little grounds to complain when he is outed by a real person. Better to just write what you mean, mean what you write, and own up to your ideas.