Asymmetrical Information

If you're going to do that, you should put the blogads on the individual article pages. When I click through from the RSS summary, it doesn't take me to the main page, it takes me to the article archive page.

I second gek's commment -- this is the way aggregator's generally work, no?

Incidentally, I prefer excerpts, and generally dislike it when blogs give me whole posts. The whole point of reading via a feeder is to quicken the whole process, and excerpts make skimming much easier. So, I extend my sincere gratitude to you for the "inconvenience".

If you don't put enough of the post in the RSS feed that I can tell what it is about, there is no chance I will click through to read the post, and you will not get paid (but you will still pay for the bandwidth of my RSS aggregator checking for updates throughout the day).

As gek points out, the page you go to when you click the link on the RSS feed has no ads. Do hits on this page count while hits on the RSS feed page do not, or am I missing something here?

Personally I have no problem if the whole post is not in the feed, but like I said, if there's not enough there to make it obvious that it is something I want to read, I move on to the next feed in the list. There are plenty of them and not enough time to read them all.

Holy crap, Mindles, that article you linked to really is horrifying!

Schwartz posits a novel and completely idiotic argument in favor of income redistribution. If it's true that happiness tends to bear an inverse relation to the number of options one must choose between, it must surely rise with income level, not fall. Life is an endless series of tough decisions and tradeoffs for those who have to allocate scarce funds. On the other hand, there's no need to choose between the ski chalet and the beach house if you can have both.

I'm not a big fan of lefty academic nut-jobs, but all-in-all I prefer those who express their crackpot ideas in the mannerist drivel of post-modernism. At least they don't get articles published in TNR, and nobody takes them seriously.

Mindles, you're correctly serveing etag and last modified headers, so properly implemented feed readers shouldn't flood you. Double check your logs and consider selective blocking by user agent of the ones that don't get 304's back.

If you are finding the site expensive to maintain, you might consider dropping the feed entirely. As much as I like downloading blogs in to Thunderbird, I know that these feeds can be a sort of bandwidth killer because people are downloading them constantly to get a sort of real time notification of new articles effect. This problem is even larger than someone refreshing the site every minute because, unlike when a user refreshes your site in his browser, when he downloads feeds he doesn't regurgitate half of the information from his own cache.

Anyway... I prefer full articles in the feeds too.
;)

The article--what tripe! This is what has always intrigued me about the left; their very creative ways of twisting things to justify their positions.

That article posits, in the context of wealth redistribution as a means of increasing the general welfare of all citizens, that too much choice is bad because people become unable to choose.

A similar argument is now being made about any privatization of Social Security (can't find a link right now). Giving people more investment choices will only make it too difficult to choose and, therefore, reduce the value of their pension over time and, ultimately, reduce their state of welfare during retirement.

To some we are just incompetent boobs incapable of making reasoned choices/decisions on our own behalf. I say we should do everything in our power to prevent these same folks from having any say in determining government policy.

Steves - same author in yesterday's NYT.

This brings us to the second argument in favor of privatizing Social Security: giving people options makes them better off. There is now accumulating evidence that choice isn't always good. Whether people are choosing jam in a grocery store, essay topics in a college class, or even potential partners in an evening of "speed dating," the more options they have, the less likely they are to make a choice. In other words, increasing options induces people to opt out of choosing altogether, and this comes into play when people decide how to invest their money for retirement....

...The payroll tax is not "your" money; it's our money. Social Security was created as an insurance scheme, not a pension scheme. It was meant to provide a safety net, to protect the unlucky from immiseration in old age. The benefits we get are not payouts from accounts in which we have accumulated our own private stash. What we get is largely determined by what we earned, but we keep getting it even after we've taken out every penny we put in. And if we happen to die early, someone else reaps the benefits of our contributions.

I love that. Your salary isn't your money because SS is 'pay-as-you-go'. That makes sense.

Ha, thanks. Should I be comforted by the fact that it is the same author? Maybe there is only one person who thinks this way?

I will doubt but hope.

It's times like this when I wish we were living in the alternative timeline where an enlightened government adopted Shwartz's idea before he ever had a chance to come up with it-- with the result that Schwartz himself was made a serf on my feudal estate so that he wouldn't have to suffer from having to decide whether or not to become a professor of psychology. All for his own good! I sense his gratitude in the way he tugs at his forelock whenever I ride by.

Steve Verdon has done a lot of good stuff on this recently, and there was a post at Cafe Hayek not too long ago about it, but I am too lazy to dig through the archive.

What strikes me is that these psychologists feel some sort of authority on an essentially economic matter. Call me territorial, but the day a psychologist is qualifed for economic analysis is the day I open up a therapy clinic.

Hey, uh Mindles, what's the story on maintaining the blog and finances for you and Jane and all of that?

I gotta say that this is one of the better trafficked blogs with a lively comment section that isn't full of p.o'd people (Eschaton's comment section just makes my head hurt). If you all could give us an idea as to how much to stuff in the tip jar or something like that, that'd be great. Just don't want the site to go away, I suppose...

hi all,
with all due respect to your outrage that someone would question that there could be something like "too many choices" he may have a point. why is it hard to believe that there could be such a thing as an "optimal level of choice." in this, i am thinking analogously to work done in the literature on search unemployment and the optimal level of searching for a job amongst many given (sequentially offered) choices.

it would appear that there may be instances where there is too much choice. the author mentions some instances that should give us (as supporters of coherent, experimentally based "science") some pause. the opportunity cost of more choice is the extra time you need to take to consider them. perhaps there is an increased anxiety associated with such situations? is that a cost as well? i submit that "choice" in and of itself is not an "ultimate good" that somehow is not subject to the same analysis of any other goods. it is a question of the comparing marginal benefit and marginal costs; right?

also, we do have a branch of economics called "experimental economics" that appears to borrow quite heavily from techniques developed in the discipline of psychology. so, calling someone a "psychologist" doesn't appear to me to be enough to dismiss someone out of hand as "non-technically competent," though the author doesn't appear to get the central economic concept of comparing marginal benefits and costs. having said that, i agree that his final conclusion that the rich will benefit from lowered anxiety etc by being taxed more needs some evidence to specifically support it.

cas: sticking to the notion of choice in investments, we do have some pretty good experiential evidence from the 401k plans.

Most people who work at a company, rather than for themselves, have access to and take advantage of 401k plans. They make choices in these plans. All the plans that I have participated in had a seemingly limitless number of choices. I could choose standard issue, conservative investments; I could pick more risky stuff; I could vary the percentage of my investment in risky vs safe. And so on.

What I could not do is simply put my money into a low or negative interest bearing account, which is substantially what Social Security either is or headed toward.

Btw, was it ice cream choices that put Howard Johnson's restaurant out of business?

I second the "put the BlogAds on the archive pages" comment. It's not just click-throughs that matter page adstrip page views. Yours will almost surely at least double by adding the strip to all pages of your template.

If you're like me, probably 2/3 of your visitors enter through an archived page rather than the main site, whether from search engine referrals or links on other blogs.

Actually, I can attest to the truth of Schwartz's comments on choice. I discovered the joys of pornography back in the Golden age in the late 70's and 80's. Back then it was easy to decide where to spend your porn dollar -- at whatever was showing at the movie theater. One or two choices at most. When video came around things became more difficult as costs were high and there was so much more content. What to buy? Which one matched my particular likes? Even so, I muddled through. Fast forward to today. Walk into any decent adult video store and tell me how you are going to make a choice? Which DVD are you going to spend your $30 on? Which actors or actresses do you like? How can you find out when you only have so much time and so much money? It's completely overwhelming. Then add in the Internet and the possibilities become endless. I almost never buy any kind of DVD or Video porn anymore. It's too expensive and the Internet provides more choice and higher quality content. The problem lies in the fact that even when I'm enjoying the content that I do find I'm still always overwhelmed by the fact that there are probably better choices that I'll never see.

The problem with Schwartz's argument is what to do about it all. He proposes the Overlord solution. There's where the real objection lies. The inherent arrogance of that position is revolting to free thinkers. The only moral solution is to allow the market to decide.

Just yesterday I was thinking that the fact that I only had 20 or so choices for my 401k plan was actually a very good thing; it meant that I only had to research/diversify within that group.

The difference between that and having lots of money is that I will NEVER think, "Gee, having less money is a good thing!"

(In fact, I have just graduated, and in my new job I am making four times what I was making as a grad student. And I am at *least* four times happier in terms of purchasing happiness, if it's possible to quantify like that.)

I wonder what level of income would make Schwartz happier? (A new reality show: get guys who write articles like this to pick themselves levels of income?)

Another thought that occurs to me is that perhaps we should bring back slavery, if circumscribing choice is really the way to go. I'll even nobly volunteer to raise my choice level and decrease my happiness by being one of the masters, especially if I can have Schwartz ("Hmm, should I order him to write libertarian columns or have him clean my car? So many choices!").

Heh. My wife often runs into problems deciding what to eat. For me, it's easy:
1) Check for cravings
2) Reject any obvious dislikes (or moldy food, etc.)
3) View the first 2-3 options and choose (flip coin if necessary)

Note that this solution works for any number of choices, as long as one can parse out 2-3 as 'first' or 'easiest'.

Warm and fuzzy bullies: always kind to themselves.

Am I the only person who likes to conflate TNR and NRO to "The National Republic", when confronted with tnr.com?

Well, I probably ain't the only one now. Hah!

If Schwartz were right, there would be a booming industry in personal shopping services. You make one big choice -- delegating all your future choices to an agent. Once you choose your agent, you're done. Heaven, if Schwartz is right.

Ok, let me get this straight... people are too stupid to choose, so rather than try to educate them on making smart choices, the solution is to limit or remove those choices.

Now, which party is supposed to be the champion of education?

Well, very disappointed (being the person who asked for full posts in the first place), but I can understand that.

Can you at least modify the feed to display the author of each post, like the way Marginal Revolution and the Volokh Conspiracy do it?

The problem lies in the fact that even when I'm enjoying the content that I do find I'm still always overwhelmed by the fact that there are probably better choices that I'll never see.

The fact that your enjoyment is hampered by the notion that you might not have settled on the absolute perfect photo or moment of footage to...ahem...enjoy...is the most amusing commentary on porn I've heard since Kevin Nealon's porn video reviews on SNL (all identical): "at first it wasn't interesting, then a little bit interesting, then extremely interesting, then suddenly I wasn't interested anymore." ;)

The problem with Schwartz's argument is what to do about it all. He proposes the Overlord solution. There's where the real objection lies. The inherent arrogance of that position is revolting to free thinkers. The only moral solution is to allow the market to decide.

I wholeheartedly share your opposition to an authoritarian solution, but I still don't think there's much of a problem, at least as it relates to wealth. If you're wealthy, you simply buy the best of everything. There's no agonizing over whether to get the plasma tv or vacation in Europe, you simply do both. And in the case of the tv, it's a lot easier to just buy the biggest, most expensive one on the market than it is to decide between feature trade-offs on a dozen different moderately-priced models.

Schwartz' examples are ridiculous. I have very little sympathy for anyone who gets distressed over what kind of jam to buy. If the choice is really that difficult, you'd probably be equally happy with any of them. Go with the cheapest. Or resolve to try a different brand/flavor every week until you find your favorites. Or ask someone else to decide for you. If none of those are good enough, assign each jar a numerical value, and roll one of those many-sided Dungeons & Dragons dice (and then go find a good therapist). I mean, really.

Here's another tip: if you're having a really tough time deciding whether or not to do something, then unless it's something you're almost certain to later regret (like cheating on your spouse or blowing your paycheck on lottery tickets), just do it. If you do it, then there's no more decision to make. Every day you don't do it, the decision will continue to weigh on your mind.

At first I thought this had to come from the Onion.

I've occasionally felt the "too many choices" agnst, but I usually consider it a reason to do more research, not rail against the choices offered.

In one sense the observation is trivial. Of course I would be better off if the local supermarket only carried exactly those items that I wanted at that time. The store would be nice and small, and I wouldn't have to walk down a dozen aisles. I don't know how happy my neighbor would be.

I wonder if the author has investigated how real world people deal with lots of choices: things like branding, shopping in more exclusive stores, consumer research, arbitrarily considering only the brands on the right, etc.

The non-market methods of reducing choice that I can think of tend to require an arbitrary reduction of new choices. Someone has to decide what gets introduced and what doesn't. The "Secretary of Consumer Choice," perhaps?

The notion that one would be better off with less money stretches a tiny, marginal insight well beyond the breaking point. One can easily park the extra money in the bank and pretend it doesn't exist.

ps--Care to guess at which brand of ketchup would be favored by a Kerry Administration Secretary of Consumer Choice?

Too bad. Excerpt-only blogs generally get axed from my RSS rolls. Given the number of articles I read daily (300+), usable barriars are a self selecting thinner.

I know some RSS readers don't play nice and DL an article over and over with each refresh. I read someone who was having this problem and found an easy fix for it. It deduced the traffic by a significant amount.

If I have many choices, and I eventually choose none of them, what basis is there to claim that my ultimate choice to abstain is a BAD thing? I mean, who knows what I want better than I do?

Besides, when I look at the jam aisle and see that they haven't restocked any of the premium brands and have only 46 different Smuckers knock-offs, is it any wonder I decide to give it a pass?

Here is the nub of the good professor's argument:

The significant implication of this news, both for individuals and for policy makers, is that wealth--which is what increases the choices available to people--is not a reliable proxy for welfare, at least beyond a certain point. In fact, if people already have more choices in life than they can handle, then adding wealth only exacerbates the problem.

But this is exactly backwards. Increased wealth reduces the need to make choices. As wealth increases one is less likely to be forced to make a choice between that Ace inhibitor and a week's worth of groceries, between getting the kids clothes for the coming school year and fixing the transmission in your work truck, or between fixing the roof and putting away some retirement savings.

Further, the professor conflates the concept of choosing between an increasing variety of commodity items (jam, for example) for which you've already made the decision to allocate resources and making an initial resource allocation. As a wealthy person, I find it very easy to allocate x% of my income to groceries but choosing between dozens of varieties of jam, once I've made the purchase decision, will be just as vexing for me as for poor Sally Jo who lives over in the trailer park.

Bonehead.

Definitely put the blogads on the archive pages.

We had a German foreign exchange student shortly after we were married - a 16-year-old who was 11 when the Wall Came Down. The first night he spent with us, he showed us a picture of himself and about five friends sitting on a low wall, taken a few years previously. They were all wearing identical red-and-black tennies - looked like the ugliest bowling shoes you ever saw. I am certain that his mom and dad suffered not a moment of angst in choosing those shoes for him, because there was no other choice to be made. Was he (were they) better off thereby?

Depression caused by "too much choice" is, like diabetes, heart disease, and menopause (not to say that a normal life phase is the same as a disease - just that it's not a condition regularly undergone by those living at bare subsistence) a problem that comes with prosperity, it seems to me. The solution to the problem isn't to return to bare subsistence (or the 50s, as Schwartz suggests) but to figure out how to manage the prosperity so that it fulfills its potential to enhance your life, like taking up an exercise program and learning to cook nutritious food made with healthful ingredients to ward off health problems. Being rich doesn't mean you must attempt to indulge your every whim, a conclusion most of the rich people I see seem also to have reached (not celebrities, maybe).

I solved the RSS feed problem. I delete all feeds that are not complete and only read through RSS. I don't subscribe to "teaser" RSS feeds. What I miss I can live without. I can live without Asymmetrical Information. Goodbye. I'll miss you.

That's what I call a suboptimal equilibrium! We'll miss you as well. I certainly hope (and strongly suspect) that everyone can 'live' without us.

As someone who has gone from a low income, and even food stamps once, to someone who would be looking at the 90% rates this dip proposes, let me say something about choices now and then. Choices then were compromises, sometimes painful, sometimes not. Choices now are much simpler. Honest.

And at a 90% tax rate, I would be presented with another choice. Why bother to work at something productive when I could make the same money after taxes being a 'pool boy', assuming anybody had swimming pools in this guy's world.

One of the things I made sure we did on updating to Expression Engine was to make sure the blogrolls and so forth - basically the columns where ads *could* go - were on all pages, not just the main page.

It always amazed me that people would forget to, or not want to, put Site Meter on secondary pages. Yet we lost a lot of opportunity to give people a fuller idea of what the blog was like, or to click through to one of the blogs we link, by having bare post pages.

If we carry advertising, the ads have to be on post pages or an advertiser misses out on at least half of the traffic. By having the same page structure throughout, we're prepared for the possibility of ads.

The masses quibble
the masses all a quiver
at the babbling bufoons
but they do not seek an objective truth
but a version to justify
their bitterness, loyalty and faith
simple, endless machinations
To believe what they want to believe
and chasing after the wind

I stopped using BlogLines because people were doing what you're doing. I'm not going to "follow" a blog unless I expect to read most (if not all) of what gets posted. Summaries don't cut it.

Yes, please do put your blogads javascript on the full article (individual post) HTML!

I haven't read the Schwartz piece(s) (I read his book - some good points, some not so good), but what I find more interesting is how far certain standard "smart markers," (even if just restricted to Dems) like the NYT, and TNR, (and for me TIME magazine, though I'd bet the cognoscenti have always considered it low-brow) have fallen. I don't consider the NYT to be THE paper of record anymore, I haven't considered TNR "necessary" or even good reading in over a decade, and TIME has been less than Newsweek for at least a half decade. You could probably throw CBS and 60 Minutes in there as well. What the hell happenned? Or am I way off the general perception here?

If you're rich enough, you don't choose between brands of jam at the supermarket. You just hand the grocery money to the cook. You've made one big choice (hiring a cook) instead of thousands of little choices. And when you're poor enough (apparently the way Reich wants everyone besides himself to be), the issue isn't which jam to buy - it's whether you can afford jam at all.

I have to admit, I don't understand someone who would obsess on a trivial choice, like which brand of jam. Find one that's good enough and get on with your life. The tough choices come when you simply can't afford what's "good enough".

When I was a graduate student and lived on $500 a month my living was easy. I had simple choices like "Do I get my car fixed and live on Ramen for the next two months or do I ride my bicycle 10 miles a day to school during the winter." Now my life is ruined by having to decide which resort in Hawaii I should spend my vacation at. Oh for the good old days.

If I recall, the original research on the perils of choice was related to two personality types, which the researches termed "satisficer" and "maximizer." Satisficers are doing what you guys are talking about--just pick one of the brands of jam, it doesn't matter which one you get. They're willing to accept "good enough." Maximizers insist on getting the absolute best possible, and so drive themselves absolutely insane trying to learn everything about every choice before they choose anything. The paradox of the research was that the people who spent more time investigating choices were less happy with them afterwards, because the satisficers knew their choices had been good enough, while the maximizers would be very stressed out by the idea that they may not have gotten the best deal (sort of a "that item went on sale the day after I bought it" for every choice you ever make). For maximizers, increasing choices just increases this stress. Of course, if people can learn to be satisficers, it's not that big a deal.

Most of the redistribution these days is from the bottom to the top, because the government takes publicly-created Ricardian land rent and hands it to landowners.

BTW, Jane, Are you a Real Libertarian, or a ROYAL Libertarian??

See also the Geolibertarian FAQ.

"I love that. Your salary isn't your money because SS is 'pay-as-you-go'. That makes sense."

Are your house insurance premiums "your money?"

Are your house insurance premiums "your money?"

Yes. Home insurance is an optional purchase. Well, unless you have a mortgage, but then again buying a home is optional. Earning an income to support oneself is generally not.

Anyway, this thread died when the "geolibertarian" crackpot chimed in. ;)

Rob

Yeah, probably. But virtually all homes are mortgage financed, and (I think?) most rental housing is financed through boring, so there's an effective near-mandatory directive for insuring your home.

there's an effective near-mandatory directive for insuring your home

Fair enough. But there's also a near-mandatory directive toward buying groceries. Both of these directives arise naturally: you need food to survive, and if you want to buy a home on credit, any rational lender will require you to insure their collateral. The directive to participate in a government-mandated Ponzi scheme does not arise naturally, as do these other directives (from the constraints of biology and the rational behaviour of lenders, respectively).

The whole objection is specious. The fact that something is 'mandatory' or 'near mandatory' doesn't magically transform your property. It merely speaks to the threat of force if you don't surrender it.

The only reason it isn't the individual taxpayer's money anymore is because the government took it and gave it to someone else.

Although the discussion above brings to mind a surgeon demanding advance payment for a life-saving operation - "it isn't your money now, is it?"

SCMTim: I think you're right on about the press outfits you mentioned: the NYT doesn't seem to be "the paper of record" anymore to anyone but the NYT and maybe NPR and, of course, like-minded folk in Manhattan and their spiritual brethren and sistern. (Obscure reference to Cole Porter musical. Sorry.) Time is less newsworthy than Newsweek. Et cetera.

Jadagul: referring to the original research on jam choices and such, do you recall whether this tendency toward being a satisficer (what a great term!) or a maximizer was determined/hypothesized to be innate or learned or a combination? That's key, isn't it? Schwartz's statistic about a 2 percent reduction in participation in employer-sponsored retirement plans for every 10 new funds added: could this reduction be explained by crossing some threshhold at which the maximizers suddenly quail? One of the traits that first attracted me to my husband was that he was content with what he had: back in our penniless college days, he was deeply satisfied by his little pickup truck, his TV, his boom box, his CDs, etc. But since that time, he seems to have crossed what I hereby dub the maximizer threshhold, and now he's mildly to very anxious about every choice we make, which does indeed tend to slow up the decision-making process for new purchases a whole lot. However, I've never once heard him say he wishes we were back in the days when the biggest choice we had was "bottle or box of wine?"

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