Month: January 2013

The Platinum Coin Option

Drum doubts it would work:

There is, apparently, a widespread belief that courts will uphold a literal, hypertechnical reading of legislative language regardless of its obvious intent, but I'm quite certain this isn't true. Courts are expected to rule based on the most sensible interpretation of a law, not its most tortured possible construction. I don't think there's even a remote chance that any court in the country would uphold a Treasury reading of this law that used it as a pretense for minting a $1 trillion coin.

Agreed. The only way to end Republican nihilism is by exposing and shaming it. Wilkinson is on the same page:

The fancy of a $1 trillion platinum coin is so tantalising in part because it puts a monetary option in play. The larger attraction, though, is that it does so in a way that honours democracy by sticking to the letter of democratic legislation, yet also flirts with the heady unilateral decisiveness of fascism. This is, I'm afraid, a combination powerfully intoxicating to the pundit id. We'd be better served, however, if the commentariat would rein in its id, stop its idle chatter about exotic, coin-based, presidential monetary policy, and begin seriously to consider the more probable but less glittering eventuality of a Greek-style default.

Why Does Libertarianism Skew Male?

Julie Borowski wants more libertarian woman:

Sarah Skwire and Steve Horwitz reject Borowski's premise:

Telling women that they aren’t libertarians because they are too stupid to choose something better for themselves isn’t great advertising for liberty. Claiming that women are passive, easily programmed, and incapable of critical interaction with political and cultural ideas is simply wrong—as centuries of history of women fighting against the state and decades of critiques from the left and the right of women’s magazines and popular culture have shown.

Jessica Flanigan weighs in:

Where Julie and I will disagree is about what libertarians should say when we talk about social issues. I think that libertarians should not oppose feminist cultural values. Libertarians should embrace feminism. Freedom is a libertarian and feminist ideal–an ideal that should inform our politics and our culture. States are not the only institutions that should aim to be more voluntary. So should the family and the workplace.

Borowski responds to the backlash:

I do not think women are "stupid" or incapable of thinking on their own. I just realize that there are a lot of societal pressures on women to act and believe a certain way. There are likely numerous reasons why there are far more males than females in the libertarian/liberty movement but this point should be made: men are more likely to embrace views outside the mainstream.

Yglesias Award Nominee

"SO OVER THE YEARS I’VE OFTEN SAID that in my ideal world, happily married gay couples would have closets full of assault weapons. You’d think that right now, with all the gun-owner-hating going on, that the second half of that statement would be the controversial part. But you’d be wrong. I was just disinvited from a scheduled speech by the Utah County, Utah GOP because — after a special meeting to discuss the subject — I was deemed "too controversial" because of my support for gay rights. Er, okay. Having an unpaid speaking gig (which I seldom do anymore) canceled is no hardship. And people are welcome to believe what they want to believe, and invite whom they want to speak — but as the GOP looks at why they’re viewed as intolerant, well, this kind of thing might be part of it. "Big tent" or teepee? Your choice," – Glenn Reynolds.

Where No Fuel Has Gone Before

Esther Inglis-Arkell describes the “Woodward Effect,” a potential solution to the biggest problem facing space exploration: the need for “a source of propulsion that can be accessed anywhere, without needing an outside source of matter or energy”:

[The Woodward Effect] proposes that we can, essentially cycle a group of particles through a loop again and again, and they will change mass. We can pull on them when they’re at a light point in their mass, and push them away when they’re heavy. It will be like grabbing a balloon and pulling it towards you, only to have it change into a bowling ball as it reaches its nearest point and you push it away again. You’ll feel an overall push outwards.

But not everyone agrees that the idea would work:

Many scientists dismiss the very idea — and Einstein was one of them. Others are considering the utility of the idea, and looking into the practical benefits that we could get from it if it’s true. The Woodward Effect has been tested multiple times. While some tests indicate it might be even greater than Woodward himself estimated, other tests are muddy and inconclusive.

Running Against Their Own Party?

Beinart suspects that 2016 Republican presidential candidates will distance themselves from the DC GOP:

Even if Democrats don’t choose Hillary Clinton, their 2016 nominee will be the de-facto incumbent. The worse Washington looks, the easier it will be for a Republican to campaign, as both Bush and Obama did, as outsiders untainted by beltway dysfunction. Even more importantly, the recent cascade of Republican horribles—Boehner’s inability to control his caucus, the breaking of the anti-tax pledge, the dissing of the Hurricane Sandy victims—has made it easier for Republicans to bash their Washington leadership, even from the center. Listen to Chris Christie’s rhetorical assault on John Boehner over Sandy aid—especially his declaration that in New Jersey, unlike Washington, people work together across party lines—and you can hear the beginnings of a new, Bush-like, anti-Washington Republican centrism.

How Much Is A Penny Worth In Business?

A reader writes:

You seem to be soliciting opinions, so I’d get rid of the .99 if I were you and just make it $20. I think the .99 makes the whole thing seem sorta cheap. Your audience is much better than that (although I did appreciate humor in the $9,999.99 donation).

Another is more blunt:

The .99 cents business has always struck me as plain and simple bullshit that I always round it out to the dollar amount.  Anyone who is taken in by $19.99 rather than $20.00 is a fool.

Another:

Myself, I dislike the .99 pricing (and the 9/10 cent on gasoline is the most stupid variant) and I suspect you would not see a significant variation.  The place where .99 pricing comes into play is when you have direct competition to whom you haver to price match.  That's not the case with The Dish … yet. 

Another:

99-cent pricing for smaller ticket items can work, because people look at the left numbers of the price more than the right. But this effect can backfire by making items seem cheap.  Nice things are usually priced in whole dollars. In other words, it's gimmicky, may increase sales among value shoppers, but may make your product seem cheap to non-value shoppers. (I looked to see if I could find something backing up my memory, and found this article in Science Daily.) So I'd change your asking price to $20 if I were you. Your product is not cheap and you're not marketing to people who need to you to use a psychological trick to get them to pony up!  (I subscribed yesterday!)

More reader feedback and empirical evidence on pricing below:

I'm a new reader of The Dish (which I found out about from stories about your new subscription model), and I don't see how to comment on a Dish post directly on the website, or I would have done that. But in response to your post about "that .99 stuff", Wikipedia calls it "psychological pricing" and references some research on it. It's hard to get a sense for the research from the Wikpedia article, but it sounds like one of the studies found that psychological pricing is effective. 

But personally I adhor it; and if I subscribe to your new site, which I am strongly considering, I will donate an extra penny just to be able to pay $20!

Another with first-hand experience elaborates on "psychological pricing":

I have been in the marketing and advertising field since 1996 and before that studied microeconomics which leads me to this perspective. Most consumers will ignore the .99 part of the price and round down to $19 subconsciously. This means for the cost of charging $0.01 less than $20, you are gaining $0.99 – a 99:1 return on investment one penny at a time! This is why you typically see pricing always end with 95 or 99 – especially in tight margin businesses.

This type of approach plays on the psychology of the consumer and works best when you know the exact price at when a consumer is no longer willing to purchase. In this scenario, your $19.99 price assumes that $20 is too high for your consumer and therefore you need to send the signal to the consumer that the price is not $20. 

If $20 is the efficient threshold at which consumers will not pay for a subscription, charging $19 vs. $19.99 will probably lead to statistically insignificant differences in signup levels; whereas the $0.01 difference between $20 vs. $19.99 would. If this was academic, and not your livelihood, we could run an experiment where consumers who go to the signup page see either $20, $19.99 or $19 as the price and then measure if there is a statistically significant difference in signup rate. Many ecommerce sites are now using this type of testing to ensure that they are charging the most efficient pricing at any given point. 

Another:

Anecdotally, I consulted for one wine retailer in particular whose owner swore by the .99, so much so that when he overheard me tell a prospective buyer "It's $25 per bottle," he blew a gasket and upbraided me right then & there. Thankfully, a regular was nearby, walked over and said to the owner, "Come on, man. Nobody actually believes they're getting a deal because of a penny." And that's why I gave you $25 even!

Another points to this piece in Business Insider:

The illusion, Schindler says, isn't the last number on the price tag. It's the first number. "People focus more on the left-most digit," says Schindler, who reviewed about 100 different studies in performing his meta-analysis. "Just-below pricing certainly makes it seem like the price is less than it actually is. It gives an image of being a bargain or a discount."

Another cites a countertuitive finding we've noted before:

At least one study published in 2003 by two economists from MIT and University of Chicago showing that not only does an item priced at $39 sell much more than the same item priced at $40 (and by much more than needed to offset the extra dollar not made), but that the same item priced at $39 actually sells more than if priced at $34, because we're psychologically disposed to think the one ending in 9 is a better deal.

Another:

Of course .99 works.  We all know that.  Even companies such as Saturn ("A different kind of car company") with its one-price-for-everyone model, and Apple ("Think different") could not bring themselves to drop the .99 from their pricing. 

The next trend, I fear:  My local "99 cents" store (I'm in Berkeley, CA) prices everything at "99.99 cents".  Yes, you read that correctly.  They know their name gives them an edge over the abundance of "dollar stores" out there, but they still charge you a dollar (rounded up)!  You would need to buy 100 items ($99.99) in order to get a penny back in change.   Does the Dish really want to join this crass, deceptive culture?  Make the Dish an even 20.

Another suggests:

Personally, I prefer the straightforward $20 to the sneaky $19.99, but perhaps you could set up your own experiment: randomly display either a $19.99 price or a $20 price when visitors load this page and record what percentage of visitors actually donate.

By the way, your map of purchases by location brought to mind a recent comment (which I would attribute to its author if I could remember where I read it) that most heat maps (the technical term for this type of graphical display) are really just population density maps. In other words,it's no wonder that NY and CA are the most darkly shaded states. Perhaps shading according to donations per capita might reveal more salient information.

To close, let me thank you for going to a metered model rather than throwing up a paywall. I resent paywalls enough that I would not have subscribed under that model. But given that your model feels more like a donation or a tip jar, I'll be sending in $20.00 the next time I have a positive PayPal balance.

If you are interested in joining that reader in subscribing to the independent, ad-free Dish, go here. And thanks to everyone for the great feedback, please keep it coming.

The High Cost Of Waiting

A recent study in Nature finds that “political choices that delay mitigation” are the biggest factor making climate change unstoppable. Steve Hatfield-Dobbs discusses [paywalled] the implications for efforts to slow warming:

The study’s key message reinforces previous findings that urgent and more ambitious global action is required to maintain any chance of limiting global warming to 2 °C. The clear finding that the world would be better off acting from 2015 rather than 2020 also raises sharp and serious questions about the trade-offs implicit in the current pace of global negotiations and action. The window for effective action on climate change is closing quickly, and Rogelj et al. have put a price tag on each year of delay.

Climate Progress summarizes the study’s findings:

Keywan Riahi, IIASA energy program leader and study co-author said, “With a twenty-year delay, you can throw as much money as you have at the problem, and the best outcome you can get is a fifty-fifty chance of keeping temperature rise below two degrees.” Two degrees is the level that is currently supported by over 190 countries as a limit to avoid dangerous climate change.

Alister Doyle has more:

The study indicated that an immediate global price of $20 a ton on emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas, would give a roughly 60 percent chance of limiting warming to below 2C.Wait until 2020 and the carbon price would have to be around $100 a ton to retain that 60 percent chance, Riahi told Reuters of the study made with other experts in Switzerland, New Zealand, Australia and Germany.

Hewitt Award Nominee

"I'm sure that the Arabs are drinking orange juice and toasting Hagel’s good health," – former New York mayor, Ed Koch, on the nomination of Chuck Hagel to head the Pentagon.

Note his use of the phrase "the Arabs." One amorphous entity. Do you think any public figure could use the equally foul term "the Jews" when discussing those with whom he disagrees? Or do you think he'd be called a bigot – and deserve to be?

The Dish Model, Ctd

Noah Millman, who wishes us well on our new venture, contemplates the economics of the web:

[N]one of Sullivan’s revenue will downstream to the content-creators on whom he depends. And that remains the essential business-model problem of the written word in the age of the internet. Newspapers were vertically-integrated: the same organization produced the content, aggregated it, and delivered it. But in the age of the internet, the delivery mechanism and editorial function have been disaggregated from content-production. You get access to the internet from a utility company like Verizon that does not own and is not responsible for providing content. And you find what you want using an advertising-supported search engine like Google that similarly does not own and is not responsible for producing content. Or through a reliable aggregator like Andrew Sullivan, who also does not own or pay for most of the content he steers people towards. These business models depend on content-generation for their own viability, but they aren’t primarily responsible for content-generation.

It’s easy to see how things could be structured differently. Aggregators could downstream a fraction of their advertising or subscription revenue to producers of content that was clicked through to. But it’s not obvious what would motivate these entities to adopt such a model, there being no actual shortage of content. And there will never be a shortage of content, because there is a large enough group of people who will do this for fun, whether or not it is profitable.

All questions we are closely considering as we go along. More on this soon. Freddie DeBoer, for his part, focuses on the Dish’s endless search for new online voices:

I literally started this blog at a public library, here on Blogger’s free platform using Blogger’s free server space, with no connections in media or journalism or commentary, no published work, and seemingly no entrance into the Byzantine and cliquish world of professional media. I had little thought of anyone reading this blog. But within two weeks or so of starting it, Andrew Sullivan had linked to one of my pieces, and from their came far more clicks, links, and attention. My readership is small, but it is committed, and while I am terrible at communicating with people who thank me for my work, their support means everything.

This is still an amateur blog, one for which I have never received a dime, although I have had people buy me books from my Amazon wish list, for which I’m immensely grateful. That amateur status suits me fine, both pragmatically and theoretically. But to be in the conversation, to have the ability to weigh in and be listened to– that’s a blessing, and I owe it to Andrew and his deep commitment to equality on the level of ideas. Whatever disagreements I may have with Andrew or with the Dish as an entity, his fierce commitment to looking anywhere and everywhere for fresh voices, quality writing, and provocative opinions is a profound credit to him. When it comes to writing, he is truly an egalitarian. More than anything, that commitment, and the workload it requires, will be his enduring legacy. I can only thank him and his staff and wish them all the best.

You can read Freddie on a regular basis at L’Hôte, his excellent little blog. Update via email from Patrick O’Connor, whose tweet is embedded above:

FWIW that tweet was made within moments of reading about the plan at Huff Puff before they corrected their story saying the rate would be $19.95 a month, not $19.99 a year. So I retweeted “never mind” soon after. After learning the correct (and very reasonable) amount to be charged, I regretted the flippancy of tweet’s “huh?” I have great admiration for what you all do.

O’Connor adds:

By the way, I don’t know if any of you are Californians, but a dear member of the California Public Broadcast community passed away today at 67. His name was Huell Howser. Everyone I know is very upset at his passing. He was like Fred Rogers for grown ups. His programs on every facet of California life are treasures. His format was simple. No crew for his shoots. There was a hand-held cameraman. Huell was his own sound man, holding a microphone. He would travel thoughout the state, stopping wherever appealed to his fancy to interview the locals. It was as close to blogging as you could do on television. For example, did you know that the world’s biggest wisteria vine was just east of Pasadena in Sierra Madre?