Author Archives: Michael Griffiths

The Coase Theorem

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I’ve been coming across a few references to the Coase Theorem, some of which dismiss it out of hand as unrealistic. Perhaps they’ve never read The Problem of Social Cost, but complaining that the environment depicted is unrealistic is not, in itself, a criticism of the theory. Indeed, that is largely Coase’s point – that, in an environment with zero transaction costs, you will always end up with an ideal outcome; but the fact of the matter is that there are never zero transaction costs. Indeed, at the start of section VI, Coase states “The argument has proceeded up to this point on the assumption (explicit in Sections III and IV and tacit in Section V) that there were no costs involved in carrying out market transactions. This is, of course, a very unrealistic assumption.” Coase then goes onto outline how transaction costs – that, those things which exist in the real world – prevent social welfare from being maximized. Indeed, the Coase Theorem is more about stating that transaction costs lower social welfare than it is saying that an optimal outcome will come about via negotiations between two parties.

Dr. Sanity: THE POLIITICAL LEFT: UNITED IN HATE WITH AMERICA’S FOES

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 This is amazing.

All four of these strategies arose from the metaphysical, epistemological and ethical dead-end that traditional Marxism found itself in toward the end of the 20th century. Fortunately, postmodern philosophy has led them out of the "wilderness" of rational thought and objective reality, and brought them to the promised land; which, as it turns out, is a neo-Marxist revival, accelerated by the fascist goals of leftist environmentalism.

I don’t even know where to begin.

On a side note, isn’t fascism incompatible with communism? How can you have, on the one hand, neo-Marxism, while on the other fascist environmentalism? What does fascist environmentalism even look like?

The intellectuals of the left have been unable to abandon their totalitarian/collectivist ideology, even after communism and national socialism proved to be crushing failures in the 20th century.(emphasis added)

Totalitarianism and collectivism are fundamentally different. Communism and national socialism (e.g. Nazi-ism) are opposites. Both are meant to be leftist ideologies? Really?

Last time I checked (which, admittedly, was in High School), you had communism on one end, and fascism (Nazis) on the other. Democrats and Republicans were in the middle, with the former tending to the left (communism) and the latter tending to the right (fascism).

Combining communism and Nazism and labeling them as Leftist ideologies seems, to me, to be quite revisionist.

But the new face of their same old tired ideas has been rehabilitated and madeover by their clever adoption of postmodern metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Slowly, but relentlessly, the dogma of multiculturalism and political correctness has been absorbed at all levels of Western culture in the last two decades–and after the end of the cold war, it has been accelerating. Slowly but relentlessly they have found new ways to discredit freedom, individuality and capitalism.
The new face of collectivist and totalitarian thought has been seamlessly integrated into most K-12 curricula and all other learning environments. have been at the forefront of attempts by leading academics and academic institutions to rewrite most of history and undo thousands of years of Western cultural advancement. (emphasis added)

IT’S A CONSPIRACY!

Not only is leftist ideology “postmodern”, with the use of postmodern as an adjective implying that it’s a pejorative label, but there’s a decades-long conspiracy in academia to rewrite history to be anti-American.

Wait, was that a little strong?

No, I don’t think so:

If the left understands anything, it is that in order for their ideology and its promised utopia to be born, they must thoroughly destroy America and undermine everything America stands for in the world.

The Left is acting against America. The Left is anti-American. Wait, what is American? Obviously, it must be whatever the Left stands against – e.g. Republicans. Republicans therefore must be the “real” Americans.

The only logical conclusion, of course, is that Obama isn’t a real American President:

Obama’s behavior now as President is not any different than it was when he was a mere community organizer. The people he associated with then, he continues to associate with; only now he is able to appoint them to key roles in the U.S. government. He has been a member of the New Socialist Party and enjoyed their support when he ran for office; he hobnobbed with former terrorists who are now "education experts"; and his wife and many of his friends and close associates at work and church never liked America much to begin with. (emphasis added)

So how was Obama elected, then?

Yet, he is the candidate who the majority of Americans voted for; and I can’t blame them entirely because essential information was kept from the general population by the media about Obama’s character

Yes, it was the media’s fault. Again. Why does Fox News continue to fail the Republican party? Why?

Did I mention that the point of the article was to explain why Leftist ideals are compatible with an alliance with Militant Islam?

I’m not even going to touch that.

But please, check it out. It’s a truly amazing piece of writing; one doesn’t often come across that level of delusion.

Let me leave you with this chart:

The Cost of Downloading All Those Videos – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com

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Saul Hansell has an article on NYTime’s Bits blog that goes into the “cost of downloading.” Unfortunately, we have to wait until the last four paragraphs for the “meat” of the article, and even then the point isn’t clear:

All these costs, by the way, apply whether or not anyone on the system is actually surfing or downloading anything. I asked Mr. King to help me figure out what a cable company pays per gigabyte used by its customers because Time Warner wanted to charge customers $1 for every gigabyte they used over a certain monthly allotment.

He told me that telecommunications providers will not sell bandwidth by the gigabyte to businesses, even though many customers want to buy it that way. For example, some movie studios that send large files to DVD manufacturing plants, don’t want to pay for connections they only use from time to time.

“The network providers almost always say ‘No,’” Mr. King said. “As long as the bandwidth is open for business, it will cost you the same whether there is data running or not.”

In other words, the cable and phone companies want to charge consumers per gigabyte even though they refuse to sell it to business customers on the same basis.

Let’s be clear: cost to an ISP is based on peak usage, not GB/month. That means, essentially, that if Time Warner wants to add “bandwidth caps” and charge users who go beyond that, it is not actually reducing costs.

Now, Time Warner may (legitimately) argue that bandwidth caps discourage certain types of bandwidth-intensive usage – for instance, watching YouTube videos. A 5-minute HD YouTube video might be 100 MB. It also, logically, discourages P2P traffic. This may reduce peak bandwidth at certain times, which would improve service for all nodes.

However, the pricing structure remains arbitrary – and operates solely as a way of changing user behavior without changing Time Warner’s cost structure. In other words, Time Warner is “nickel and diming” people to get them to use less of their internet connection.

Time Warner – and other companies – also remain vulnerable to the charge that they’re attempting to prevent the internet from delivering some content – namely video. If Time Warner sells TV service, and also sells TV (and uses separate networks for each), then by imposing a cap that makes watching videos online prohibitively expensive, Time Warner can prop up TV use. This is a particularly important point since companies have been putting shows up on demand (Hulu, etc).

Bandwidth caps may make business sense, at least in the short term. A generous interpretation would be that bandwidth caps will give ISPs time to increase peak bandwidth capacity on their end. A less generous interpretation is that Time Warner is looking both for additional revenue, and is trying to prevent other businesses from being undermined. And, on the plus side, the RIAA & MPAA is happy since people will download less.