Max Borders

What if Carter had Destroyed 1970 GTOs?

This is the thought experiment I use to begin my Cash for Clunkers retrospective:

When I look at a 1970 Pontiac GTO, I don’t think of old metal. I think of sideburns, sexuality, and back seats that ensured Gen X got here just fine. I see my parents riding to FM radio on a summer night, racing beneath boulevard lights, or taking on the world. With 455 cubic inches of V8, the GTO is the quintessential muscle car. But it has creases and lines that suggest the curves of a woman. To look at that car is to see a time machine that travels to a place where long-haired gods and goddesses rumble over the earth dazed and confused, longing to be free.

By 1973, muscle cars were still cool. But stagflation had set in after embargoes by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, price controls, and wacky monetary policy. Oil and energy prices rose. A few years after that, Shi'ite fundamentalists overthrew the Shah in Iran. Energy prices rose again. Before we knew it, it was 1980. The Carter administration did a lot of backward things, like make people queue for gas. But here's a thought experiment: What if at the height of the energy crisis the president had decided to pay Americans to destroy ten-year-old cars so they would go out and buy new Datsuns? How many of those Pontiac GTOs would be around today? Or Ford Mustangs, or Dodge Challengers? Despite the fact that a 1970 GTO was still considered a pretty cool car in 1980, it had not yet been infused with 40 years of romance. Now, that essence lives in every part—in its "originality."

If you like, read the whole thing.

Borders on Hayekmania

Here I'm commenting on the recent Hayekmania created by the Beck bump.

My Commentary on the "Cry Wolf" Strategy - Progressives' Academia-gate

Some activist academics have been busted trying to engage in researchprop. I have two commentaries in the Examiner on this: here and here.

The story was originally broken by Team Breitbart. 

Controversial Survey

Dan Klein's survey < (that's my blog post about it) has gotten a lot of attention. Some argue the questions are vague, ambiguous or otherwise not subject this Klein's preemptive answer in the original paper, which is:

We think it is reasonable to maintain that if a respondent disagrees with the statement “Restrictions on housing development make housing less affordable,” the respondent betrays a lack of economic enlightenment. Challengers might say something like: “Well, not every restriction on housing development makes housing less affordable,” but such a challenger would be tendentious and churlish. Unless a statement in a questionnaire explicitly makes it a matter of 100%, by using “every,” “all,” “always,” “none,” or “never,” it is natural to understand the statement as a by-and-large statement about overall consequences. Do restrictions on housing development, by and large, make housing less affordable? Yes they do. Does free trade lead, overall, to greater unemployment? No, it does not. For someone to say the contrary is economically unenlightened.

Does this answer satisfy you?

I wish I had time to go into Nate Silver's weak critique. Suffice it to say that most of the critics are running squarely into the above. You can cook up exceptions and counterexamples, or quibble with the methodology, but I think the questions stand pretty well. Are some arguable from the point of view of nitpicking? Yes. Are they arguable from a by-and-large perspective? Not really.

(I've still got people arguing in social media that free trade increases unemployment. You never saw such epicyclical argumentation in your life.)  

So, progressives still have some economics to catch up on. 

Poking at Taboos: Neanderthal Genes and Custom Kids

In this Examiner piece, I poke at some taboos about heredity, ethnicity and the possibility of custom kids.