The Economist on the End of Cars as We Know Them

Google’s autonomous car. Image source.

Google’s autonomous car. Image source.

On August 1, 2015, the Economist’s “The World If” column was titled “If Autonomous Vehicles Rule the World: From Horseless to Driverless.” Because I have had at the back of my mind the intention of writing a column on the coming transformation of automobiles, I could appreciate just what a wonderful article this is. I highly recommend it. Its thesis statement is:

… self-driving vehicles that can be summoned and dismissed at will could do more than make driving easier: they promise to overturn many industries and redefine urban life.

In bullet points, the support for this thesis statement is as follows (with a few comments of my own added in italics):

  • Cars are expensive, but people use them only about 4% of the time. Google estimates that driverless cars that can be called at will might be in use as much as 75% of the time. Therefore, Stanford University computer scientist Sebastian Thrun predicts: “There will be fewer cars on the road—perhaps just 30% of the cars we have today.” Other estimates predict as few as 10% of the number of vehicles per person as now.
  • Car makers will be selling mostly to commercially owned fleets, not individuals, and will be selling fewer cars than now. 
  • Car insurers will make less money as fewer cars, better driven, have fewer accidents. This possibility has been officially recognized by insurers in SEC filings.  
  • Fewer accidents also means fewer car parts will be sold. 
  • Robot taxis are a lot cheaper to use than human taxis–humans are expensive. Uber’s head Travis Kalanick said “When there is no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle.” Note also that without a driver, a robot taxi can be smaller. And it is easy to let people order the size they really need–a one-seater for simple trips; something bigger when they have luggage.
  • Self-driving trucks will make trucking cheaper; they also will reduce demand for motels and restaurants along the road. 
  • An estimated 4.2 million car accidents and 21,100 deaths from car accidents will be avoided every year.
  • “A study by the University of Texas estimates that 90% penetration of self-driving cars in America would be equivalent to a doubling of road capacity and would cut delays by 60% on motorways and 15% on suburban roads.”
  • People will be able to get more done when they are in a car. (Some designs have people seated around a table.)
  • Kids, senior citizens and the blind will gain independence. Parents will no longer spend such large chunks of time shuttling their kids to various classes, practices and other events.   
  • Much of the 24% of urban space devoted to parking will be available for repurposing. And most of the 30% of urban miles devoted to looking for a parking space can be saved.
  • While the city centers can get denser without the need for so many parking spaces, the ability to sleep during one’s commute will also spur the growth of exurbs.
  • Fear of driverless cars as dangerous has been much less than some have predicted. Indeed, some stuck behind them are already complaining that driverless cars drive too carefully and timidly. In the future, we may be (appropriately) afraid of having human drivers on public roads.   
  • Overall, the addition to growth and human welfare will be enormous if the technical challenges can be met.
  • Boosting economic growth in the long-run typically requires making expensive things cheaper. And things are typically expensive because someone is earning money doing them. So making things cheaper inevitably means that some people will need to shift to other jobs from the jobs they are used to. But these adjustment costs are worth it for the benefits. It would be a big mistake to obstruct the transformation of cars.

Samantha Shelley: Why I'll Never Regret Being Mormon →

“[The story of Socrates] has defined for twenty-four centuries the essential components of the life of the mind: to wit, the ability to give a reasoned basis for belief and the quest to find the truth that lies behind appearances. His practice of asking embarrassing questions, even at the risk of personal loss, and even without hope of an immediate answer, is fundamental to what we are.”

– Harold Attridge, as Dean of the College of Arts and Letters University of Notre Dame. As quoted in Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of a Liberal Education, by Martha C. Nussbaum, p. 266.

Eric X. Li: Is Democracy Necessary?

In the comment section of “Why Thinking about China is the Key to a Free World,” Kierto Duong claims that I underrate the Chinese government. The video above was a key part of his defense.

The video is somewhat off target for what I was saying in “Why Thinking about China is the Key to a Free World.” I never said that democracy was crucial to prosperity but that freedom is crucial to prosperity. The following passage in “Why Thinking about China is the Key to a Free World.” gives the working definition of freedom I am using:

When Dan Benjamin, Ori Heffetz, Nichole Szembrot and I surveyed more than four and a half thousand Americans about what they viewed as the most important objectives for public policy, the top two (of 131 choices) were “freedom from injustice, corruption, and abuse of power in your nation,” and “people having many options and possibilities in their lives and the freedom to choose among them.”

This pairing of responses shows an awareness of the danger to freedom from those who would organize the institutions of a nation to serve the interests of an in-group at the expense of an out-group. At the beginning of the struggle toward freedom, the in-group is very small and the out-group large. At later stages of the struggle toward universal freedom, the in-group will be large and the out-group small. But adding up across the world, it is not at all clear that a majority of the people in the world today can be called truly free.

This kind of freedom is not synonymous with democracy. In particular, I think the kind of counter-majoritarian rules in the Bill of Rights (including the 9th amendment to the US Constitution that suggests there are many, many other rights not explicitly listed) take freedom a long way beyond where it would be from democracy alone. And indeed, the US is now much less free than it might be because over time, majoritarian forces described in Barry Friedman’s excellent overview of Supreme Court history The Will of the People: How Public Opinion Has Influenced the Supreme Court and Shaped the Meaning of the Constitution have eroded some of the freedom-enhancing principles in the constitution. 

Also, the United States would now be significantly more prosperous than it is if Franklin D. Roosevelt had not pushed the Supreme Court to abandon key principles of economic freedom. (The gold standard and other bad monetary policy ideas thus not only contributed greatly to Hitler’s rise to power but also to the erosion of key US constitutional principles.)

At the end of “Why Thinking about China is the Key to a Free World,” I give two examples of how freedom might be supported that are not about ordinary democracy: 

So, as I advocated here in “Yes, There is an Alternative to Austerity vs. Spending: Reinvigorate America’s Nonprofits,” it is enough to use the arm of the government to require more substantial charitable contributions, while giving people wide latitude to decide which particular causes they want to support. This can both assist in things the government is now doing, such as taking care of senior citizens and supporting medical research, and begin to take care of things that should be done, but aren’t. With millions of people each required to do something, but allowed to think and decide for themselves what most needs to be done, the odds that the benefits of freedom and prosperity extend into all the nooks and crannies of society improve dramatically.

Finally, though efforts to measure national well-being in ways that respect the full range of things human beings care about are still in their infancy, there is hope that developing such measures as counterpoints to GDP can guide public policy toward ways of improving the quality of life in nations that use them in unexpected ways. Such measures of national well-being might also be used by autocrats to keep those they rule over just happy enough to forestall rebellion, but those rulers would be faced with this truth: people love freedom, and will never be content for long without it.

There is a lot to think about in trying to define freedom, but it is not synonymous with democracy.

I stand by my prediction that greater freedom in China would ultimately lead to more prosperity. But many of the key dimensions of freedom that would help China the most are not about democracy per se.

Larry Summers: The Fed Looks Set to Make a Dangerous Mistake by Raising Rates this Year →

I find Larry Summers’ argument in his latest Financial Times column linked above quite persuasive: that the Fed should wait until at least the beginning of 2016 to raise rates. In addition to assessing the economic situation, he points to a possible reason for bias in the Fed’s decision making that rings true to me. Larry writes:

I doubt that, if rates were now 4 per cent, there would be much pressure to raise them.

Although positive versus negative would be more salient than it rationally should be in any case, I think the zero lower bound makes a rate of zero seem more special than it really is. Knowing that the zero lower bound is a policy choice rather than a law of nature makes monetary policy choices at an interest rate more obviously like choices at a 4% interest rate. In either case, the decision should be made based on the behavior of inflation, output, and labor market measures, not on whether the interest rate seems high or low in an absolute sense. I don’t agree with Larry Summers’ take on what interest rates are likely to be once the economy has fully recovered, but his take point to the truth that there is great uncertainty about exactly what the medium-run natural interest rate and the long-run natural interest rate are. 

And since there is still in all likelihood an output gap, the short-run natural interest rate could be quite a bit lower. See my posts 

Another Argument for Waiting to Raise Rates: Interest Rate Smoothing Should Be a Thing of the Past

In addition to Larry Summers’ arguments for holding off on raising rates, I have a conceptually quite distinct argument: the Fed can afford to wait to raise rates, because it can always raise rates very fast if it needs to later on.

Contrary to what optimal control models suggest, monetary policy committees around the world tend to believe the fallacy that (although events can sometimes overrule this) it is a good thing to raise and lower rates slowly. This belief shows up as policy rate movements being predictably in one direction for a long time, with small steps along the way. Optimal control models suggest that instead a policy rate should look a lot more like a random walk modified by some drift and mean reversion. That means that optimal monetary policy should have lots of reversals and dramatic movements in the interest rate when there has been relatively big news since the last meeting. 

Let me address one myth: that Mike Woodford has shown that interest-rate smoothing makes sense. I would be glad to be corrected, but I think this myth arises because Mike talked about the Fed carrying about affecting the bond markets (and more generally macroeconomic) expectations of future rates. Just as backward-looking state variables have forward-looking costate variables, bond market expectations are like a forward-looking state variable for the Fed; those bond market expectations have a corresponding backward-looking costate variable. 

As an analogy, in working toward my dissertation, I did an unpublished efficiency-wage model (which you can see and freely download here) in which, to motivate workers with an expectation of future pay making a job valuable, there is a backward-looking costate variable that can be interpreted as “seniority.”

Such backward-looking costate variables giving guidance about doing the right thing in relation to bond-market expectations contribute additional drift terms to the optimal policy rate, but it still seems to me that over a six-week span of time between FOMC meetings, the variance of news is sufficient that the effect of news should typically be substantially larger than the sum of all drift terms on the policy rate. Hence the metaphor of a muddy random walk.

John Stuart Mill on Freedom of Contract

Allowing freedom for an individual to do as she or he chooses within a certain sphere suggests also allowing freedom for groups of individuals to interact with one another as they all choose within a certain sphere of actions. (I wrote about this before in The Free Market and Collective Liberty.) Several issues arise:

  1. protecting people from being sold out by their past selves

  2. social enhancement of people’s ability to make commitments

  3. protecting people from mistakes of their past or current selves

  4. the temptation to obstruct freedom for the sake of pecuniary externalities

John Stuart Mill’s touches on many of these issues in paragraph 11 of On Liberty “Chapter V: Applications”:

It was pointed out in an early part of this Essay, that the liberty of the individual, in things wherein the individual is alone concerned, implies a corresponding liberty in any number of individuals to regulate by mutual agreement such things as regard them jointly, and regard no persons but themselves. This question presents no difficulty, so long as the will of all the persons implicated remains unaltered; but since that will may change, it is often necessary, even in things in which they alone are concerned, that they should enter into engagements with one another; and when they do, it is fit, as a general rule, that those engagements should be kept. Yet, in the laws, probably, of every country, this general rule has some exceptions. Not only persons are not held to engagements which violate the rights of third parties, but it is sometimes considered a sufficient reason for releasing them from an engagement, that it is injurious to themselves. In this and most other civilized countries, for example, an engagement by which a person should sell himself, or allow himself to be sold, as a slave, would be null and void; neither enforced by law nor by opinion. The ground for thus limiting his power of voluntarily disposing of his own lot in life, is apparent, and is very clearly seen in this extreme case. The reason for not interfering, unless for the sake of others, with a person’s voluntary acts, is consideration for his liberty. His voluntary choice is evidence that what he so chooses is desirable, or at the least endurable, to him, and his good is on the whole best provided for by allowing him to take his own means of pursuing it. But by selling himself for a slave, he abdicates his liberty; he foregoes any future use of it beyond that single act. He therefore defeats, in his own case, the very purpose which is the justification of allowing him to dispose of himself. He is no longer free; but is thenceforth in a position which has no longer the presumption in its favour, that would be afforded by his voluntarily remaining in it. The principle of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free. It is not freedom, to be allowed to alienate his freedom. These reasons, the force of which is so conspicuous in this peculiar case, are evidently of far wider application; yet a limit is everywhere set to them by the necessities of life, which continually require, not indeed that we should resign our freedom, but that we should consent to this and the other limitation of it. The principle, however, which demands uncontrolled freedom of action in all that concerns only the agents themselves, requires that those who have become bound to one another, in things which concern no third party, should be able to release one another from the engagement: and even without such voluntary release, there are perhaps no contracts or engagements, except those that relate to money or money’s worth, of which one can venture to say that there ought to be no liberty whatever of retractation.

A good reason to let people change their minds on most things is to avoid letting their past self either sell them out or deliver them into a predicament through a mistake. One way of viewing this is as I did in my post “Drug Legalization and Time Slices of People as Ethical Units”: if we consider the ethical unit to be a time-slice of an individual, then there is not full consent to an engagement if the current time-slice does not consent. 

From that point of view, one should only allow previous time-slice of a person commit the current time-slice if, to the individual, the ability to commit is quite valuable to that individual. In particular, in cases where person B will only incur a significant cost if able to rely on a commitment from person A and person A following through on that commitment has a corresponding cost that is of the same order of magnitude as the cost incurred by person B, it may seem reasonable to allow people to commit their future selves. 

Nevertheless, if, say an early time-slice of person A borrows to spend on wild carousing that leaves no memories at all because of drunkenness, leaving the later time-slice of person A with nothing, why should the earlier time-slice of person A be able to sell out the later time-slice in that way? The basic answer would be that normally person B doesn’t know whether person A will use the borrowed money well or badly, and it is in A’s interest to encourage B to be willing to lend if most likely the money will be used well. But when it becomes apparent that the early time-slice of person A most likely is selling out the later time-slice of person A, in a way that is easily observable to person B, then the case for society enforcing the sell-out of the later time-slice of person A to person B by the earlier one becomes much weaker. 

Notice that this principle that an early time-slice of a person shouldn’t ordinarily be able to sell out a later time-slice gives a much different argument for people not being able to sell themselves into slavery than the one John Stuart Mill gives–and an argument that applies to much less extreme circumstances. 

Paternalism is an attempt to save people from the mistakes of their current and future selves. Behavioral Economics has enlarged our awareness of all the ways that people might not guard their own interests very well, either through ignorance, through cognitive processing limitations, or through internal conflict that can happen even within a particular period of time.

But the simple principle of letting people back out of most things because it takes some time to figure out what is going takes care of a lot of situations. One place where this is particularly important is in sexual situations that college students get themselves into. One can see from, for example, the results of this survey of University of Michigan students that there are many cases of nonconsensual sexual activity. From the experiences of a professor at another university who is on the committee worrying about such things, I have heard that a large part of the problem is that, say, a man thinks a woman doesn’t have the right to change her mind once she has gone along with things long enough to get him really going. But of course a woman always has the right to change her mind and decide to stop all sexual activities cold at any point, regardless of how encouraging she was before that. Every moment of an interaction brings her more information, and every minute allows an all-too-often alcohol or drug-addled brain to process that information. Even if one sometimes allows earlier time-slices of an individual to commit later time-slices, in this case, one can trust the later time-slice of that individual who decides to switch to non-consent much more than the earlier time-slice that had much a much more limited perspective on the erstwhile partner now forcing himself on her. 

The moral of the story is that one thing all incoming college students need to taught is that a sexual partner has not only a reasonable likelihood, but an inalienable right to change her or his mind and switch to nonconsent at any time. 

An inalienable right is one that an earlier time-slice of an individual cannot sell off. The concept of an inalienable right helps with many of the issues addressed here. 

The opposite of inalienable rights–“alienable rights”–should be those rights where allowing an individual sell off a right by committing a future self to something (such repaying a college loan) that is quite valuable to a typical person’s welfare by convincing others to do something (such as to extend the loan). 

I have focused most on freedom of contract that has an important intertemporal dimension, since many contracts do, and this raises some of the thorniest issues. When a contract involves what happens over a relatively short span of time, then the case for treating the earlier and the later time-slice of an individual almost as if they were separate people is much less. So ordinarily people should be allowed to commit themselves for short spans of time, if we have reason to believe that the slightly early time-slice of that individual is well-informed. 

An interest relatively pure case, where there is very little intertemporal aspect is when a day-laborer wants to work for less than the minimum wage. Why should the law say that if the day laborer can’t find a good job, he or she is not allowed to take a bad job? Just because someone is poor and deserves a handout doesn’t mean they are stupid about a basic job decision like that. 

Even unions often don’t want minimum wages to apply to their own members. Here from a recent Wall Street Journal article:

In at least a half-dozen of those communities, the pay-floor ordinances include a provision allowing unions to waive the wage mandates as part of a collective-bargaining agreement. Labor groups often seek the exemptions because they say they provide the flexibility to negotiate better benefits for all union members or raises for more senior workers making more than the minimum. …

The carve-outs are increasingly drawing the ire of business groups representing the hotel and tourism industries, among others. They say such exemptions are a way for unions to organize or gain negotiating power by using the ability to opt out of the wage law as leverage to achieve other goals.

For instance, business groups say, unions could advise companies that if they agree to labor representation, they can avoid paying the minimum wage, spending less on wages overall. The strategy could let unions bolster their ranks at a time when union membership is falling, business groups say.

Although minimum wages are often harmful to the individual they apply to, they may sometimes help certain other people who would otherwise have to compete with the individual who is kept out of the labor force by the minimum wage. Of course, there is always the case of someone whose firm has paid enough of a sunk cost in the employment relationship that he or she will not be fired but will instead take a bigger share of the surplus from the employment relationship by getting a higher wage. Even this person would only want the minimum wage for him or herself to apply to the current job, not to the next job. 

Thus, facing a minimum wage oneself in future jobs is a harmful restriction on one’s freedom to benefit certain other people. It is a restriction on freedom to generate a pecuniary externality. But as I wrote in John Stuart Mill on Legitimate Ways to Hurt Other People, a pecuniary externality is a legitimate ways to hurt another person. Why? In part because in every pecuniary externality, whenever someone on one side of a transaction out there is hurt by a change in the price, the other party to the transaction benefits by that change in the price. This may sound boring, but it means that the good results one get from the free market depend crucially on not trying to stop pecuniary externalities. Ordinarily, when two individuals both want to do a trade and other people care mainly because prices are affected, society is ahead overall by going ahead with the trade and letting the chips fall where they may for everyone who cares about the price, since those chips will fall in a positive and negative way that should add up to zero in dollar terms. 

And it is a myth that raising the minimum wage reduces inequality–the inequality that matters far more than any other kind of inequality is the desperation of the people at the very bottom, which is worsened by the minimum wage. The minimum wage is a way to help people one rung up on the ladder–who are more likely to vote–at the expense of people at the very bottom. (On some of the scientific issues about the minimum wage, see my recent post “The Economist–Destination Unknown: Large Increases in the Minimum Wage Could Have Severe Long-Term Effects.”) 

The Supreme Court justices who upheld freedom of contract (before the “New Deal Settlement” transformed the official interpretation of the constitution without going through the amendment process) were actually fairly sophisticated about making some of the distinctions above. They upheld many regulations that could be viewed as helping the individuals the regulations were imposed upon. In the most famous “freedom of contract” case of all, Lochner vs. New York, the US Supreme Court was taking the side of poor bakers of bread who were recent immigrants being given a hard time by richer, longer-established bakers of bread. The poor bakers knew they weren’t being “protected” by the regulations at issue, they were being pushed out of business. The book I show at the top of this post is an excellent treatment of the history.

Wall Street Journal Off Track: Jon Hilsenrath and Nick Timiraos Report As If the “Effective Lower Bound” Were a Law of Nature

To their credit, in their August 17, 2015 Wall Street Journal article “U.S. Lacks Ammo for Next Economic Crisis” Jon Hilsenrath and Nick Timiraos talk about negative interest rates as a potential policy tool, writing at different points: 

  • The Fed, for example, could experiment with negative interest rates.
  • Mr. Bernanke said he was struck by how central banks in Europe recently pushed short-term interest rates into negative territory, essentially charging banks for depositing cash rather than lending it to businesses and households. The Swiss National Bank, for example, charges commercial banks 0.75% interest for money they park, an incentive to lend it elsewhere. Economic theory suggests negative rates prompt businesses and households to hoard cash—essentially, stuff it in a mattress. “It does look like rates can go more negative than conventional wisdom has held,” Mr. Bernanke said.

Yet although they reflect the evolution of the zero lower bound (still a handy name) into what many central banks are now calling the “effective lower bound,” which is somewhat below zero, Jon and Nick do nothing to inform their readers that cash hoarding can be avoided by the simple expedient of a time-varying paper currency deposit fee at the cash window of a central bank that creates an exchange rate between paper currency and electronic money, which can then lower the yield on paper currency by allowing it to very slowly depreciate against electronic money. (As a terminological note, I should say that most of the time I will continue to use the phrase “zero lower bound” rather than “effective lower bound,” since I think the big shift is to break through the zero lower bound on the nominal interest rate for paper currency–which then removes any effective lower bound on other interest rates as long as the full set of interest rates the central bank then controls are moved in tandem.)

The article also gives a misleading impression with its subtitle, “Policy makers worry fiscal and monetary tools to battle a recession are in short supply” and an unnuanced picture caption saying

U.S. Defenses Down: The Federal Reserve will have fewer monetary weapons in the next recession. It has less room to cut rates, and its swollen portfolio will make it harder to launch new rounds of bond buying.

If the Fed has fewer monetary weapons in the next recession, it will be only because either legal barriers or timidity leave it fewer monetary weapons. The Fed knows how to break through the “effective lower bound” ever since my seminar there on November 1, 2013. (I also gave a seminar at the New York on October 15, 2014 and I am slated to give a seminar at the Chicago Fed at the beginning of September 2015.)

Of course, Jon and Nick are not the only ones off target. I am sure that they are correct in reporting

Others, including Sen. Bob Corker (R.,Tenn.), see only the Fed’s limits. “They have, like, zero juice left,” he said.

Many economists believe relief from the next downturn will have to come from fiscal policy makers not the Fed, a daunting prospect given the philosophical divide between the two parties.

But I am confident that many more economists (as well as senators) would realize how much more the Fed and other central banks can do if the Wall Street Journal would report on the work being done on ways to break through the “effective lower bound.” To that end, I sent an email to Jon (whom I have corresponded with on occasion in the past) that I am copying out here as an open letter, after very light editing: 

Dear Jon,

I wanted to write because I think the title of today’s column is simply false–and the real story is much more interesting. I said much the same thing about a recent Economist column in Quartz:

Radical Banking: The World Needs New Tools to Fight the Next Recession

You have probably been following my work on negative interest rates to some extent. I have the things I have written on that collected here, 

How and Why to Eliminate the Zero Lower Bound: A Reader’s Guide

and my academic paper with Ruchir Agarwal on it is coming soon.

Central banks are well aware of the fact that it is not that hard to break through the zero lower bound, if only because of my extensive travels to tell them about it, listed in my post

Electronic Money: The Powerpoint File.

Thinking about this sort of thing is what is happening under the surface at many central banks.

A Wind-Powered Birthday Rhinoceros

image source

image source

My daughter Diana gave me this Jr. Scientist Series Mini Rhinoceros (serious assembly required). The box says it is for ages 8+. At 55 years old, I qualify.

The Mini Rhinoceros owes its design to Theo Jansen, an artist who makes giant versions of such wind-powered mechanical animals. You can see an interview with Theo Jansen here. (That link also leads to many other related videos.)

I like the fact that whichever way the wind blows, the rhinoceros always moves forward.

Are Sports Arena Subsidies the Membership Fee in a Two-Part Tariff?

My brother Joseph points me to this piece on the perennial issue of whether sports arenas are bad deal for cities that chip in for them: “Is a sports arena an investment or a subsidy?” by Gigi Douban on Marketplace. This article is sparked by presidential candidate Scott Walker’s signing off on $250 million in public money for a new Milwaukee Bucks arena.

The thing I am wondering about is whether calculations of the benefits of subsidizing sports arenas takes into account the full measure of sheer consumer surplus of people who attend and would be willing to pay much more than the ticket price.

Plausibly, the taxes might come from primarily from the relatively rich to benefit the relatively rich, so think of this as distributionally neutral, to a first approximation. Because the average dollar benefit goes up with income, the labor supply distortion may also not be a major issue. See Louis Kaplow’s “On the (Ir)Relevance of Distribution and Labor Supply Distortion to Government Policy.” To look at it another way, the fact that people might want to make enough money to be able to afford to live in an area with the amenity of having a sports team helps avoid labor supply distortion.

The total consumer surplus from having a sports team in an area could be quite high because the benefit could be extremely high for the ultra-rich. Indeed, I would expect the benefit to go up more than proportionately with income, since sports attendance should be a luxury good. Functional forms not reflecting the extent to which sports attendance is a luxury good would underestimate the consumer surplus.

In other words, sports arenas don’t necessarily need to bring jobs and economic development for subsidies to be worthwhile–they can be worthwhile simply because people like having sports teams in their local area so they can attend in person–beyond what they pay in the ticket price.

To put it another way, arena subsidies are part of a two-part tariff pricing: because having the sports arena in the local area is a public good, the “membership fee” of being in the class of cities with a sports team in a given league is paid for by the government. Then the per-use fee is paid by those who actually attend.

Am I missing something?

Rodney Stark’s Contrarian Assessment of the Crusades

I find Rodney Stark’s positive take on Christianity’s historical effects refreshing. (Type in “Rodney Stark” into the search box on my sidebar to see other posts inspired by Rodney Stark’s books.) This has extended to rebuttals of claims of negative historical effects, as in his book God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades. Here is a passage rom pages 8 and 9 summarizing the argument of the book:

To sum up the prevailing wisdom: during the Crusades, an expansionist, imperialistic Christendom brutalized, looted, and colonized a tolerant and peaceful Islam.

Not so. As will be seen, the Crusades were precipitated by Islamic provocations: by centuries of bloody attempts to colonize the West and by sudden new attacks on Christian pilgrims and holy places. Although the Crusades were initiated by a plea from the pope, this had nothing to do with hopes of converting Islam. Nor were the Crusades organized and led by surplus sons, but by the heads of great families who were fully aware that the costs of crusading would far exceed the very modest material rewardcs that could be expected; most went at immense personal cost, some of them knowingly bankrupting themselves to go. Moreover, the crusader kingdoms that they established in the Holy Land, and that stood for nearly two centuries, were not colonies sustained by local exactions; rather thay required immense subsidies from Europe.   

In addition, it is utterly unreasonable to impose modern notions of proper military conduct on medieval warfare; both Christians and Muslims observed quite different rules of war. Unfortunately, even many of the most sympathetic and otherwise sensible historians of the Crusades are unable to accept that fact and are given to agonizing over the very idea that war can ever by “just,” revealing the pacifism that has become so widespread among academics. Finally, claims that Muslims have been harboring bitter resentments about the Crusades for a millenium are nonsense: Muslim antagonism about the Crusades did not appear until about 1900, in reaction against the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the onset of actual European colonialism in the Middle East. And anti-crusader feelings did not become intense until after the founding of the state of Israel. These are principal themes of the chapters that follow. 

Two other notes are in order. To begin with, the Byzantine emperors really were quite treacherous. The First Crusade began on the presumption that once Jerusalem was taken by the crusaders that the Byzantine Empire would take care of keeping it. The crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem arose from the fact that the Byzantine emperors didn’t care much about keeping Jerusalem. And the later “sack” of Constantinople in a later crusade had a large element of putting valuables in sack to collect on a debt incurred by a Byzantine emperor who had promise to pay the crusaders for help in a civil war.

Also, the deaths when Jerusalem was taken by the crusaders in the First Crusade need to be kept in perspective. Rodney writes on pages 157-158:

First of all, it is not only absurd but often quite disingenuous to use this event to “prove” that the crusaders were bloodthirsty barbarians in contrast to the more civilized and tolerant Muslims.Dozens of Muslim massacres of whole cities have been reported in previous chapters, and the crusaders knew of such occurrences. Second, the commonly applied “rule of war” concerning siege warfare was that if a city did not surrender before forcing the attackers to take the city by storm (which inevitably caused a very high rate of casualties in the besieging force), the inhabitants could expect to be massacred as an example to others in the future. That is, had the Muslims surrender Jerusalem on June 13 when the towers were ready to be rolled against the walls, they would no doubt have been given terms that would have prevented a massacre.

Our own secular, liberal culture owes a lot historically to Christianity, so it is good not to overdo the criticism of our cultural forebears. It isn’t easy to struggle up toward the level of enlightenment we have now. They helped us get there. We should try to bring compassion and empathy to our understanding of history–even to the brutal elements of history. Where we should be intolerant is of evil in the present day, regardless of its source.