Free trade: I heard ’em say it was all about the Benjamins

I have a wobbly relationship with Cafe Hayek. Specifically, I’m a screaming leftie tit, and they’re a mite too free trade for my tastes. I’m Austrian only to the extent that governments should be no bigger than they must be to get things done – but we part company on the matter of exactly how much a government should be doing.

That out of the way. They have been discussing the protectionist rhetoric of Presidential candidate-candidates (that seems right) so far. We talked about this in class, back when we looked at comparative advantage and international trade. Having run through the basics of tariffs, quotas, etc., and how protectionism is about restoring Producer Surplus, we consider how much Consumer Surplus is lost in the process. The question is, what price a job saved? Our textbook has a few figures:

Is it worth the loss in Consumer Surplus of this scale? Bear in mind that the cost is spread across the many consumers, but one is hard-pressed to defend USD50-odd million per job in the rice industry.

In class we discussed “dog whistle” politics – the use of coded language that is meaningless to most of us, but appeals directly to a specific sub-set of the electorate. Going to Michigan and talking about bringing back jobs is an example. “We” hear that, laughingly, while poor bastards in Detroit hear it and, not caring at all the cost to the economy as a whole, like what they hear. And so ad infinitum.

Edwards and Kerry caught my attention in 2004, in this regard, as do Obama and Clinton, now – basically all NAFTA-hassling is dog-whistle protectionism: the only way to come good on the rhetoric is to restrict trade; not for the benefit of all (or for the benefit of under-represented workers in our partner-countries in trade), but for the benefit of a few. Remember the quirk of globalisation/outsourcing/etc.: the benefits are spread very broadly, but the costs are felt very acutely. We respond only to the costs at our peril.

Ultimately I do not like Boudreaux’s “letters” – meaning his responses to the issue. I do think they’re worth reading, though: it’s a dialogue not seen elsewhere. Add Cafe Hayek to your bookmarks for the duration of the election campaign.

Reagan Republicism

Still back with Doonesbury Flashbacks, I noticed this gem – from August 19th, 1981 (click for larger version):

One of many rips into former Interior Secretary James Watt (see The Reagan Years, if you’re interested).

Still – prescient, eh? A demonstration that, indeed, Bush the Younger was the Reagan Republican of our times (he will have presided over two recessions, though).

Trust

The latest on trust of the media, via thinkprogress.

From their post:

The Harris results reflect the findings of a Harvard University study conducted last year, which found “nearly two-thirds of Americans do not trust campaign coverage by the news media.” A few other recent surveys offer some explanation for the public’s distrust:

– Two thirds of Americans – 67% – believe traditional journalism is out of touch with what Americans want from their news.

– The harshest indictments of the press come from the growing segment that relies on the internet as its main source for news. The internet news audience is particularly likely to criticize news organizations for their lack of empathy, their failure to “stand up for America,” and political bias.

– Democrats, Republicans and independents have decreased confidence in the accuracy of media reports on the war.

Imagine – people not trusting the media! I notice that, as well as being the least-trusted, “the press” has the least uncertainty. It’s quite possible that this is because it has the greatest exposure: not everyone listens to the radio or uses the internet. Television, not so sure (I don’t own one).

Television and Radio are interesting ones, for trust: given the might of Clear Channel and the rightness (political-wing-wise) of talk-back radio, is this such a good thing? Same for Television news. If this is Fox News and CNN viewers, we’re dead.

Methodologically, according to Businesswire, the numbers are “… the results of a nationwide Harris Poll of 2,302 U.S. adults surveyed online between January 15 and 22, 2008.” Now there are nationwide surveys and then there are nationally representative surveys.

Harris’ responses were as follows (click for larger version):

I can’t say that I’m a fan of the web-use question: that is so far from how the average web/news person actually gathers “news” from the internet that it isn’t funny.

Getting back to survey methodology. According to the company itself,

Figures for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, region and household income were weighted where necessary to bring them into line with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting was also used to adjust for respondents’ propensity to be online.

All sample surveys and polls, whether or not they use probability sampling, are subject to multiple sources of error which are most often not possible to quantify or estimate, including sampling error, coverage error, error associated with nonresponse, error associated with question wording and response options, and post-survey weighting and adjustments. Therefore, Harris Interactive avoids the words “margin of error” as they are misleading. All that can be calculated are different possible sampling errors with different probabilities for pure, unweighted, random samples with 100% response rates. These are only theoretical because no published polls come close to this ideal.

Which is quite responsible of them.

The missing pieces of information (for me): what were the levels of trust/distrust conditional upon use? I.e. if you’re a Rarely/Never kind of user, should your trust/mistrust be jumbled in with the Often/Occasionally people? While it is, of course, entirely likeky that one rarely or never uses a medium because of mistrust (part of my non-tv-ownership, but only part; my mistrust also of newspapers is, of course, no secret), low use also makes one a poor judge – even ignoring the response bias of a non-user.

Odds are that, given you’re here at this blog, you probably don’t see yourself represented in this survey at all. Which is a shame.