Articles by Tim Lee

Update: Note the change in venue below.

Over the last two years, our Alcohol Liberation Front happy hours have become a venerable DC institution. (See here, here, and here for reports from previous ALF events.) We’re going to have our fifth semi-annual ALF on Monday, and it promises to be our best ever, because we’ll be joined by libertarian hero Brooke Oberwetter. Most of us talk a good talk about defying the state, but on Saturday, Brooke walked the walk, getting arrested by humorless park police for silently (and soberly) dancing in honor of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday.

In addition to Brooke, we’ll be joined by the usual TLF gang, James Gattuso’s groupies, and a few interns we’ll bring along to make our turnout look more impressive. Unfortunately, Cord Blomquist has to stay home for a hot date with “Call of Duty 4.” But for the rest of us, it’ll be from 5:30-7:30 at the 18th St. Lounge Science Club on Monday, April 21. Please leave a comment if you’re planning to join us so we know to keep an eye out for you.

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Adam last month noted the NRO interview with Larry Lessig in which he promised to blow up the FCC. I share Adam’s puzzlement about what Lessig means by this. Most of us would cheer the idea of FCC-demolition, but there are a lot of regulations that are sufficiently complex that they couldn’t be administered without a regulatory bureaucracy.

Part of it, I think, is that Lessig is merely playing to his audience. As a former right-winger himself, Lessig clearly understands what it takes to catch the interest of conservative- and libertarian-minded readers, and he’s not above spinning his arguments to maximize their appeal to the people he’s addressing. Indeed, on issues where I agree with him, such as Free Culture, I’ve appreciated his ability to frame his policy arguments in either libertarian or liberal terms.

But this makes his anti-corruption turn all the more bewildering. Surely a former libertarian ideologue and clerk for Justice Scalia has read enough of public choice economics to see the challenges his “Change Congress” movement will encounter. When he’s not talking to NRO, Lessig seems to think there’s some kind of pristine “democratic” process that we could get back to if only we could get the money out of politics. But that’s not the way the world works. As Lessig puts it:

So I don’t want a world where there are no lobbyists — I think lobbyists are essential. I think the message of lobbyists and the training of lobbyists is essential. Just like I think that what lawyers do before the Supreme Court is essential. But just as I think everybody would think it weird if a lawyer before the Supreme Court would send $100,000 to the Justice Roberts Retirement Fund or $100,000 to the Renovate Justice Roberts’s Office Fund, I think we better recognize there’s something perverse about a member of Congress having one of the people who is trying to persuade him what the right answer is raise $100,000 for his campaign. That’s the link we’ve got to break.

The problem with this is that there’s nothing special about the $100k campaign donation. It could just have easily have been a $100k contribution to an independent group aligned with the candidate. Or $100k spent on get-out-the-vote efforts in the candidate’s home state. Or promising to give one of the candidate’s staffers or relative a cushy six-figure job as a thank you. Or distributing a politically helpful message to the company’s employees or customers.

Of course, we can try to make all of those things illegal too, but this is a superficial way of looking at the situation. The problem isn’t that there’s a discrete list of corrupt practices that we can identify and prohibit. The problem is that if politicians are willing to be corrupted, and special interests are willing to spend resources to corrupt them, they’ll find ways to get it done. You can certainly reduce the effect on the margin—by banning overt bribery, for example—but once you’ve banned the really obvious categories of back-scratching, it becomes more and more difficult to make any further progress. What’s going on in Washington is disgusting, to be sure, but it’s not new or unique to the United States. And I think fixing it is going to be a lot more challenging than Lessig imagines.

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Tom doesn’t elaborate on why the topic of free makes him angry, but I think the gloss on this article—you might have no free will because your brain makes decisions before you’re aware of them!—is pretty stupid. Obviously, if your brain is the organ that you use to make decisions, you would expect your brain to be engaged in certain kinds of activity before any given decision is made. And obviously if you observed this activity closely enough, you’d find that the process takes a finite amount of time. And obviously you wouldn’t be able to report that the process had completed until it had, in fact, completed. But this doesn’t mean that “your subconscious” is forcing you to do something outside of “your” control. That brain activity was just part of the decision-making process you went through to reach the decision.

As Daniel Dennett has pointed out, the idea that this experiment is creepy comes from what he refers to as the theory of the Cartesian theater: the idea that “you” are really a metaphorical guy sitting at a little control panel inside your brain, telling your brain what to do. Dennett suggests that a lot of people have this view as their implicit model of how the brain works. Hence, people assume that “you” should be able to direct your brain’s decision-making process, which makes it creepy when the brain does something without “your” controlling it. But if examined closely, the notion of a Cartesian Theater doesn’t make a lot of sense. Among other problems, it suffers from the problem of infinite regress: if you’re really a little guy at the control panel of your brain, who’s controlling the little guy? Ultimately, if you want a materialist explanation for human cognition, it’s inevitable that you’ll wind up conceiving human consciousness as an emergent property of the physical system called the brain. And if you’re not interested in a materialist explanation for cognition, then why do you care what a bunch of neuroscientists have to say?

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I’ve finally made up my mind on the grad school issue: I’ll be going to Princeton this fall. I’ll be studying with Ed Felten at Princeton’s new Center for IT Policy, which I expect will be a leading center for tech policy research in the coming years.

One of best things about the center is that under the able stewardship of David Robinson, they’ve put together an amazing series of lectures, lunch discussions, and conferences on a wide spectrum of public policy issues, ranging from hard-core computer security to patent and copyright issues. None of the other schools I looked at have anything quite like it. And of course, the Center has already produced several ground-breaking pieces of original research, which we’ve covered extensively here at TLF.

They’re opening a new building this fall and as I understand it are actively looking for more people to get involved in the center. It’s designed to accommodate people with a variety of backgrounds, both technical and policy-oriented, so if you’re a regular reader of this blog and you’re thinking about going to grad school, Princeton should be on your list. Likewise, they’ve called for visiting scholars, so if you work in tech policy and would like to spend a year in New Jersey, you should get in touch with them. I’ll be there for the next five years or so.

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My friend Jonathan Dingel has more on the Columbian trade agreement. He quotes Bernard Gordon on the proliferation of non-trade-related provisions in “free trade” agreements:

These cases highlight the problems of incorporating non-trade issues into trade agreements. Labor and environmental standards began the practice, but no clear end-points now exist. That recalls Jagdish Bhagwati’s famous warning that “the spaghetti bowl effect” (by which he meant overlapping rules of origin) would make FTAs hopelessly complex and impossible to administer. Today we would add the “Christmas Tree Effect,” the term used in Congress for the many items, each individually attractive though unrelated to a bill’s main purpose, that are added to satisfy special interests. Similar baubles and ornaments characterize today’s world of proliferating FTAs, and will be sought by powerful negotiating partners. Along with the profoundly dangerous capacity of FTAs to revive a world of blocs, they are among the best reasons to maintain instead the global trade system.

I should note that there’s a lively debate among free traders about the relative merits of bilateral versus global trade agreements. My esteemed colleague Dan Griswold has argued that under the right conditions, bilateral agreements can help jump-start broader liberalizations. But I think both sides should be able to agree that loading these agreements up with terms that have no detectable connection to trade is a bad idea.

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