The Market for Privacy

[Jim Manzi]

MIT’s flagship magazine, Technology Review, produces a an annual list of the year’s 10 most exciting technologies (as with any of these lists, of course it is really more like “the 10 most exciting technologies developed by researchers who are one degree of separation from the editors, are quotable and are, ideally, photogenic”).  Nonetheless, one striking aspect of this year’s list is that two of the ten technologies are algorithmic methods of using the large datasets created by digital transaction records to generate economically valuable insights.

The erosion of historical notions of privacy at the hands of commerce is almost inexorable, ultimately because of Moore’s Law.  You don’t need eavesdropping or other surveillance techniques when the infrastructure by which you communicate, travel, and buy things generates data as a by-product of each of these activities.  This, much more than government spies, is the primary driver of lack of privacy.

It seems to me that the logical method to protect such information is to codify and create a tangible property right in it.  When the choices are (1) opt out of modern life, or (2) implicitly surrender all of this info, pretty much everybody picks door #2.  But what if I had the practical ability to charge commercial entities for access to or use of information of this sort?  It would, first, go from a free good to a scarcer resource, and second, I could protect those parts of my transaction history that I feel to be most sensitive.  In effect, we need a functioning market into which I can sell my transaction history.

Thinking About Embargos

[Patrick Appel]

Stephen Hugh-Jones discusses the Cuban embargo and  how the EU is "making the same mistake" with the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus:

In sum, since the 1980s the EU has been trying, like the United States since the 1960s, to get rid of a regime it disapproves of through impoverishment; a regime, moreover, which, unlike Castro’s, practises a tolerable version of democracy, and has never posed any threat to the EU’s interests, let alone offered to install the nuclear missiles of its enemies. Like the US, the EU has failed. Yet, like the US, it persists.

Clinton Agonistes

[Andrew]

The staffers are turning to drink:

After 13 months of dawn-to-dark seven-day weeks, the staff is exhausted. Some have taken to going home early — 9 p.m. — turning off their BlackBerrys, and polishing off bottles of wine, several senior staff members said.

Some advisers have been heard yelling at close friends and colleagues. In a much-reported incident, Mr. Penn and the campaign advertising chief, Mandy Grunwald, had a screaming match over strategy recently that prompted another senior aide, Guy Cecil, to leave the room. “I have work to do — you’re acting like kids,” Mr. Cecil said, according to three people in the room.

This was precious from Susan Thomases:

"This is no woe-is-me woman."

Ooookaaay. Has Thomases been in a coma for the past two months? But there’s the usual Clinton brazenness as well. Her entire message since Iowa has been a constant cooptation of Obama’s message – yet he‘s the plagiarist? And she and her husband clearly played the racial card – and yet Obama is using Karl Rove tactics? If I worked for her, I would have hit the Cabernet hard a while ago.

Chocolate

[Patrick Appel]

A brief history:

It’s hard to pin down exactly when chocolate was born, but it’s clear that it was cherished from the start. For several centuries in pre-modern Latin America, cacao beans were considered valuable enough to use as currency. One bean could be traded for a tamale, while 100 beans could purchase a good turkey hen, according to a 16th-century Aztec document.

Both the Mayans and Aztecs believed the cacao bean had magical, or even divine, properties, suitable for use in the most sacred rituals of birth, marriage and death. According to Chloe Doutre-Roussel’s book The Chocolate Connoisseur, Aztec sacrifice victims who felt too melancholy to join in ritual dancing before their death were often given a gourd of chocolate (tinged with the blood of previous victims) to cheer them up.

Bolton And The UN

[Patrick Appel]

I enjoyed Brian Urquhart’s review of John Bolton’s new book, probably more than I would enjoy the book itself:

Bolton is not a neocon. His political passions were ignited in his teens by Barry Goldwater, and he has always been a "libertarian conservative." He thinks that "our emphasis must be more on liberty than democracy… the first being freedom from government, the second being one way to select governments."[1] It is small wonder that he doesn’t much like the United Nations, which consists of 192 governments. It says much about the Bush administration that someone with his views could be appointed UN ambassador.