The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    The imaginary Tyler Cowen

    By Flavius on Sun, 05/29/2011 - 11:55pm |

    For my sins reading  Tyler Cowen  today brought to mind Marianne Moore's hankering for an Imaginary Garden with real toads in  it.

    Cowen (no he's not a toad, real or imaginary. Flavius does not do insults. That's  the next office) imagines a driverless auto. Or a lot of them doing various imaginary  good things. One unfortunately has an imaginary accident and kills an imaginary child. I'll  drop imaginary from here on because it's getting tedious ( I know , I know that never stopped me before). 

    Anyway following this accident the

    "evening news might show a "Terminator: car...killing a child.There could be demands to shut down....until about every problem is solved. ..But it's clear that in the early part of the 20th century , the original advent of the motor car was not impeded by anything like the current melange of regulations, laws and lawsuits".

    True. And  Triangle Shirtwaist Co was not impeded by intrusive  regulations about not barring the fire exits. Ah, those were the days!

    And as for nostalgia for  the unimpeded motor car industry of yore  Cowen might reread  Alfred Sloan's My Years At General Motors . The passage where Sloan says that of course GM could have built safer cars and prevented deaths. But  decided not to. Didn't pay.

    Cowen's certainly free to pick out real  examples  of real  regulations impeding progress. As clearly he thinks they do. And we could argue the merits of that case.

    But it's loading the dice- simply not intellectually respectable-  to take half a page in the Sunday Times to create an imaginary (oops) regulatory abuse as a rhetorical device to defend Cowen's theory that if we could just get rid of  all the laws (first , kill all the lawyers- , I like it, it's got legs) we'd reach the best of all possible worlds. 

    I mean I could imagine a real estate bubble where home owners were tricked into  mortgages they couldn't afford , which were bundled by Wall Street , feloniously over rated by the credit agencies and then.........Oh. that's not imaginary?

    Couldn't the Times assign Cowen's space to somebody else. An economist , perhaps..  

    Comments

    Driverless cars!   How often stalled in traffic did I dream of them?  Every single time.

    If you haven't already read, Yglesias clarifies the regulatory dilemma:

    "the idea of autonomously piloted robot cars which could have enormous benefits if they became widespread. There are, however, a lot of regulatory barriers to this. As long as the highways are full of human-piloted cars people are naturally reluctant to let untested autocars cruise the streets. But by the same token, it’s difficult to know how autocars can prove their safety and reliability if we don’t let them on the road. At earlier stages of human development we tended to take a “life is cheap” attitude to discovery and technology (compare the casualty rate of Columbus’ voyages to NASA) that facilitated progress at the cost of a lot of death and destruction. These days, we’ve got things pretty good and tend to be risk-averse."

    and offers a somewhat Solomon-esque and progressively questionable solution:  "let Mikey do it".

    "Letting someone else work out the kinks of new systems is often a great solution to a thorny problem. And the more China, India, etc. catch up to the size of our market the more things will be developed in those markets that we can copy."

    Oy. That is what one of the best and brightest of young progressives considers a viable solution.  Nevermind the loss of secondary benefits that result from innovation.  What a waste.  As a society, we really should be able to come up with a better than t


    by EmmaZahn on Tue, 05/31/2011 - 12:22pm

    Driver + cell phone = driverless car


    by Donal on Tue, 05/31/2011 - 12:35pm

    :-D

     


    by EmmaZahn on Tue, 05/31/2011 - 12:36pm

    Tyler Cowen + an economist=s one economist


    by Flavius on Tue, 05/31/2011 - 6:29pm

    http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_23/b4231066695798.htm?ch...


    by EmmaZahn on Tue, 05/31/2011 - 6:43pm

    Thanks.

    If every other economist in the world was wiped out by the neutron bomb  Cowen would be the world's leading economist. Not before.


    by Flavius on Wed, 06/01/2011 - 6:54pm

    I think Steve Denning at Forbes is more on your side.

    http://blogs.forbes.com/stevedenning/2011/05/31/americas-hottest-economist-tyler-cowen-the-great-stagnation/

     


    by EmmaZahn on Wed, 06/01/2011 - 8:57pm