The Second Amendment

One of the best - and most surprising - defenses of the second amendment I've ever read. Surprising, because it comes from the Daily Kos.

Fences

Since I don't have anything better to do at 4:30am except listen to my cat snore - and he does - I'll write about fences. More specifically, I'm trying to figure out why Europeans are so much fonder of fences than Americans. Even the style of fences differ. Europeans have big stone walls that act as fences. In eastern parts, they may be accompanied by barbed wire. The function seems to be the keep prying eyes - and people - out. In America, if people build fences, they generally look nicer and you can almost always see through them. American fences function either for looks or containment. Some of our neighbors have wooden fences that only border the road and wouldn't stop a thing. Our backyard is fenced in so our dogs don't run off.

These are generalities, but from my experience they tend to be true. There are a few reasons why this developed as such. Property laws developed in Europe over the ages. A long time ago, it might have been wise to mark off your somehow, and that somehow would be a fence. Since America imported the English system of law, perhaps they didn't need to be as cautious marking their land. Or perhaps land in America was so abundant relative to population that it was unnecessary to mark your land in this way. But this doesn't explain why the fences are built out of stone and bricks but not wood.

In Koprivshtitsa, someone (either Iori or his mother) told me the reason why fences were so high there. The Bulgarians were under Turkish rule and they didn't much like that. To get the privacy they desired, they had to keep prying Turk eyes out of their yards and out of their business. The tall fences accomplished just this. So perhaps the fences in Europe are so uninviting because they are meant to keep the government's eyes out of their business. Since the US hasn't ever been ruled by any nation other than itself, perhaps the tradition never popped up.

There is the issue of the size of yards. It seems that, even in cities, the average size of a yard is larger in the US than in Europe. I have no data to back this up, but just for fun, let's say it's true. I have seen in some American yards tall fences that seem to be meant for privacy i.e. nude sunbathing. They don't take up the whole yard, but a significant portion of it. If their yard was smaller, would they fence in a smaller portion or would they fence in the same amount and just have less yard exposed? Perhaps Europeans desire a certain amount of outdoor privacy and that amount just happens to be the size of their yard. So it's like Iori suggested to me when I first asked the question. Maybe Europeans just like their privacy and Maybe Americans just like to show off. And just so it's perfectly clear, that's completely paraphrased.

My bet is more on the "keep the government out" theory, which would mean that fence style would differ from region to region depending on certain aspects of the regions history. Maybe the theory would be more aptly named the Political Evolution of Fences.

fence style of a region = g(type of law, sovereign rule, average plot size)

Average plot size is rather self explanatory. Type of law is different. Under Turkish rule, everything belonged to the emperor. Even if you lived and farmed your land, it still belong to the emperor and he could take it on a whim. Just a bit north, there was the Austro-Hungarian empire where property rights were better enforced and protected. You could pretty safely call your land your own. Sovereign rule would indicate whether your region governed itself or was governed by an outside force. This might overlap with type of law a bit, but there's probably enough of a difference.

So this is a rather poorly defined musing on fences, but I think it conveys the general idea. And since it's 5:00 am, I think it's about time to call it quits.

Pictures

So I've posted more pictures on Flickr. I think there's a link to the right somewhere on this page which you can click to see them. This time I posted Peterhof and Kronshtadt, which was the last day before we left Russia. I also posted the Crime and Punishment walking tour - the pictures are interesting whether or not you've read the book. And I posted pictures from lasts years trip to Dallas, TX - for some American flavor. Maybe I've mentioned this before, but the captions on the pictures are serving as blog entries so I don't have to write the same stuff twice. Perhaps I'll record non-photographed memories later. Perhaps not. We'll see.

Spite in the Media

Since I seem to have all the time in the world, and would apparently rather be inside than out in this beautiful weather, I'll write about this article I read from the Telegraph. The author, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, has covered world politics for 25 years. He's writing about this letter by Dr. Kartik Athreya.

I actually read the letter first, which I found from Mankiw's site. Basically, Athreya says talking heads on the subject will likely have little to offer than a lot of confusion. He means this in a probabilistic sense, in that some of these commentators might have great ideas and be completely spot on, but it's not that likely. The simple reason that it's not likely is that economics is hard. The saying that there's no such thing as a one handed economist is true. Everything depends, and that's just the way it goes. To learn how everything depends takes a hell of a lot of effort and time. Athreya points out that there are many people willing to comment blindly on economics but few do the same about cancer research. Yet both are rather difficult. The general point of the letter seemed to be more of a public service announcement, cautioning people from taking the talking heads too seriously (and he included some economists in the group). He concluded by hoping that non-economists would start writing about the premises which lead to particular conclusions, in hopes of producing a sharper public discussion. To me, this seemed like a rational plea for a more informed media.

Then I saw this Evans-Pritchard fellow's article (linked to by Instapundit). He took a lot of umbrage to what Athreya wrote. When he read the letter, he seemed to see this as the entire federal reserve system telling economics commentators to shut up. His rebukes were basically that the institution is full of idiots and economics is rather simple and the economists (all of them) at the Fed are responsible for the current crisis. Oh, he also apparently quotes the article:

"Economics is hard. Really hard. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-boggingly hard it is. I mean you may think doing the Sunday Times crossword is difficult, but that's just peanuts compared to economics. And because it is so hard, people shouldn't blithely go shooting their mouths off about it, and pretending like it's so easy. In fact, we would all be better off if we just ignored these clowns."

Except this quote never appears in the article. Not once. I've searched the paper over and over again. Actually, when I first read Evans-Pritchard's article, I thought he was talking about a different economist who wrote a similar letter because I didn't remember this quote. This phrase, as far as I can tell, was penned by Michael Wade of the SF Examiner on the same subject. This is Wade's summary of the article in a what he believes is a Douglas Adams-y style, so he uses quotation marks. A blog called the Agonist lumped Wade's summary into a list of quotes from the article in this post.

I was trying to figure out how Evans-Pritchard could misinterpret the article so drastically, but then I realized that the answer should have been obvious. He's one of the talking heads Athreya is talking about. He's been one for 25 years. And now an economist from an organization Evans-Pritchard obviously distrusts is saying that commentators (like Evans-Pritchard) aren't adding anything constructive or new to the discussion. Of course! The obvious response is to attack not only that economist, but economics as a profession!

Just to demonstrate that he is in the know and that all economists are idiots, he whips out Keynes and Irving Fisher claiming economists have forgotten their wisdom. Oddly enough, in attempting to demonstrate his knowledge he actually proves Dr. Athreya right by only stating names and conclusions. Adding positively to the discussion would involve thinking about the underlying premises of Keynes' and Fisher's ideas and writing how they're similar or different from the conditions in 2007 (i.e. whether they're even applicable now), for one example. That is what Athreya hopes for at the end of his letter (if I understood it correctly). But I suppose Evans-Pritchard is above all that critical thinking. And how dare some lowly academic ask the media to be educated.