Market Power

You, Private Citizen, Have No Right to Criticize What *We* Believe to be in the "National Economic Interest" (Whatever that is)

Here is a letter apparently sent by the House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services in response to a letter a private citizen (William Frey, President of Greenwich Financial Services) sent to the New York Times.  The committee, which consists of Barney Frank, Maxine Waters, Luis Gutierrez, Paul Kanjorski, Carolyn Maloney, and Melvin Watt was "outraged to read in today's New York Times that you are actively opposing our efforts to achieve a diminution in foreclosures by voluntary efforts.  Your decision is a serious threat to our efforts to respond to the current economic crisis and we strongly urge you to reverse it."

Read the whole thing.  Here is a little more background.  Here is James Hanley with a take.

As Mr. Hanley notes, Mr. Frey is not a sympathetic character.  But whether he's sympathetic or not is irrelevant.  The point is that his has a legal claim to assets and wants to have those claims enforced in the courts (not to mention that he also has the right to speak against the government's actions).

The arrogance and the hubris of politicians never ceases to amaze me, especially when it comes to meddling in the economy.  What makes Mr. Frank et al so smart?  What makes them think that they know what's best for the other 304,000,000 who live in this country?  And even if they are the smartest people in the room at all times, why should we believe that they are incorruptible?

HT Don Boudreaux at Cafe Hayek

Was it Deregulation or Bad Regulation that Led to the Financial Crisis

Niall Ferguson explains that it was the latter, and puts the blame squarely on the Fed.

Tracking Changes in MLB Baseball Attendance

Baseball-Reference.com has a handy page (HT to JC Bradbury) where they are tracking changes in MLB team attendance.  It calculates overall attendance, per-game attendance, and comparisons between this year and last year.  It also allows you to sort the data and it allows you to display the data in csv format for copying and pasting into your favorite spreadsheet.

As of yesterday (May 15th, 2009), teams as a whole have seen per-game attendance drop by about 5%.  While the Yankees, as usual, are garnering most of the headlines (especially with their $2,500 dollar a game seats), the Mets, Nationals, and Tigers all have seen steeper declines in average attendance. 

Nine teams have realized attendance increases with the Tampa Bay Rays leading the way.  That's not at all surprising given their success on the field last year.  Studies routinely show that when teams perform well one year, their attendance tends to be higher the following year because the good performance changes fan expectations, ceteris paribus.

The recession is surely hurting teams.  Both the Mets and the Yankees have moved into new palaces, which should ceteris paribus translate into attendance increases, but both rank in the top 4 in per-game attendance decreases with the Mets seeing the sharpest decline so far.

As I metioned above, a lot of attention has been given to the pricing policies of the Yankees.  It certainly is possible that they erred when setting ticket prices, but without digging deeper into the numbers, it's hard to say how much of the decline is due to factors such as weather, the recession, poor pricing policies, team quality, changes in capacity, etc.  The Yankees' new ballpark has a capacity of 51,800 while the old Yankee stadium had a capacity of 57,545.  The Mets' new ballpark has a capacity of 45,000 while its old ballpark had a capacity of 55,601.  Surely this is one of the factors that explains why fewer fans are attending Yanks and Mets games this year.

Cross-posted at The Sports Economist.

Traffic Report

Reading Stephen Karlson's post on the traffic at Cold Spring Shops made me curious about my traffic here at MP.  So here it is via Sitemeter:  my visits and page views:

My traffic usually slows down in the summer and picks back up in the fall, but it's usually pretty robust as we get closer to finals.  But this year it fell quite a bit in April.  I really didn't post much in March and April while I focused on a revision of one of my papers (which was recently accepted for publication - yay!).  Or maybe the blogosphere has reached maturity.

In any case, I appreciate all y'all for stopping by and reading what I have to write.

RIP Wayman Tisdale

Former OU and NBA star Wayman Tisdale has died of cancer.  He was 44.  In addition to being a great basketball player, he was also an accomplished smooth jazz bassist. Here are a couple of videos of Mr. Tisdale.

The Beginning of a Damaging War?

Have the trade wars begun in earnest now (HT David Strom)?

Ordered by Congress to "buy American" when spending money from the $787 billion stimulus package, the town of Peru, Ind., stunned its Canadian supplier by rejecting sewage pumps made outside of Toronto. After a Navy official spotted Canadian pipe fittings in a construction project at Camp Pendleton, Calif., they were hauled out of the ground and replaced with American versions. In recent weeks, other Canadian manufacturers doing business with U.S. state and local governments say they have been besieged with requests to sign affidavits pledging that they will only supply materials made in the USA.

...This is not your father's trade war, a tit-for-tat over champagne or cheese. With countries worldwide desperately trying to keep and create jobs in the midst of a global recession, the spat between the United States and its normally friendly northern neighbor underscores what is emerging as the biggest threat to open commerce during the economic crisis.

Rather than merely raising taxes on imported goods -- acts that are subject to international treaties -- nations including the United States are finding creative ways to engage in protectionism through domestic policy decisions that are largely not governed by international law. Unlike a classic trade war, there is little chance of containment through, for example, arbitration at the World Trade Organization in Geneva. Additionally, such moves are more likely to have unintended consequences or even backfire on the stated desire to create domestic jobs.

Self-sufficiency is the road to poverty, and if politicians (or, more specifically, the Obama administration) really wanted to impose economic hardship on the citizenry, they could do little better than place restrictions on international trade.

What Do Academia and "It's a Wonderful Life" Have in Common

Here is the text from a Glenn Reynolds post about his father's retirement dinner.

YEAH, LIGHT BLOGGING TONIGHT. Went to a retirement dinner for my dad, who closed out 40 years as a professor of Religious Studies, and only had a couple of posts scheduled for the evening. Lots of reminiscences about his confrontation with Billy Graham and Richard Nixon (more on that here), his founding of the Journal of Religious Ethics, and an amusing message from Stanley Hauerwas. Plus, more affectingly, lots of people talking about how he started or boosted their careers in academia. As an academic, your life is like George Bailey’s affecting people in ways you often don’t fully realize, except, on rare occasions like a retirement dinner, when they tell you.

That is so true.  It reminded me of a chance meeting I had with one of my father's former students.

We talked about Morningside and realizing that he would have been there when my father was an assistant professor, I asked him if he knew Dr. James Miller.  He asked me why I asked and I told him Dr. Miller was my dad.  He leaned towards me, took my hand again, gave it a big shake and said, "That man taught me how to think."  John told me a story of the first test my father gave to students in John's class.  It was a very hard test and many students did poorly, but John said that it was that test and the way my dad encouraged students to think about history that taught John how to think.

Here is another of my old posts about teaching and why student evaluations are poor ways of judging the ability of teachers.

The Economics of the New Yankee Stadium

My latest at The Sports Economist is up.  In this post I look at a NY Post reader's calculations that find it's cheaper to fly to Seattle to watch the Yanks take on the Seattle Mariners than it is to buy the most-expensive tickets to games at the new Yankee Stadium.

"Stop Worrying About Your Children"

Here's an excellent Salon interview with Lenore Skenazy (HT to Eric Parsons) about the idiocy of today's uber-helicopter parenting notions. An excerpt:

Then there are products out there that will prevent this from happening. Here is a helmet your child could wear when she starts to toddle, lest she fall over and split her head open and die, or suffer traumatic brain injury.

Kids have been toddling -- it's a whole stage we actually call toddlerhood -- ever since we started walking upright, which has been a pretty successful experiment for the human species. But now you're supposed to think that it's too dangerous for a kid to do without extra protection and without extra supervision and without this stupid thing you can buy.

There are kneepads that you're supposed to put on your kid because crawling is considered too dangerous for the knees, as if knees weren't built for crawling. That's why they're cute and dimpled and fat.

Read the whole thing.

My wife and I fell into this trap a bit.  We bought a house that had safety gates at the top of the stairs and we locked them up religiously.  We plugged the electrical outlets. 

But we are a lot less anal these days.  I don't require my kids (7 and 8 year old boys) to wear helmets etc. when they rollerblade or ride their bikes.  Do I worry about my kids?  Damn straight I do.  I want them to grow up happy and I want them to grow up safe, but I also want them to grow up to be independent adults which means that they will have to learn how to take their own risks. 

Sam Keller Takes on EA Sports and The NCAA

My latest post is up at The Sports Economist.  I link to an article on former Cornhusker Sam Keller's lawsuit against EA Sports and the NCAA.