Paul M. Jones

The city left more than a dozen generators desperately needed by cold and hungry New Yorkers who lost their homes to Hurricane Sandy still stranded in Central Park yesterday.And that’s not all -- stashed near the finish line of the canceled marathon were 20 heaters, tens of thousands of Mylar “space” blankets, jackets, 106 crates of apples and peanuts, at least 14 pallets of bottled water and 22 five-gallon jugs of water.This while people who lost their homes in the Rockaways, Coney Island and Staten Island were freezing and going hungry.Warzer JaffTHE GOODS: Would-be marathoners who circled Central Park yesterday were the reason given for not moving some crucial supplies.THE GOODS: Would-be marathoners who circled Central Park yesterday were the reason given for not moving these crucial supplies above.THE GOODS: Would-be marathoners who circled Central Park yesterday were the reason given for not moving these crucial supplies above.see more videosMichael Murphy, of Staten Island, who had no power and no heat, said yesterday, “We needed 100 percent of the resources here.”

This is the most that the best and brightest are capable of? Via New York City Marathon canceled but still has generators and supplies unused in park in spite of Hurricane Sandy recovery needs - NYPOST.com.

The agency appears to have been completely unprepared to distribute bottled water to Hurricane Sandy victims when the storm hit this Monday. In contrast to its stated policy, FEMA failed to have any meaningful supplies of bottled water -- or any other supplies, for that matter -- stored in nearby facilities as it had proclaimed it would on its website. This was the case despite several days advance warning of the impending storm.

FEMA only began to solicit bids for vendors to provide bottled water for distribution to Hurricane Sandy victims on Friday, sending out a solicitation request for 2.3 million gallons of bottled water at the FedBizOpps.gov website.

Hey, instead of bidding on a federal contract, how about you suspend "anti-gouging" laws and let people charge what they want for water? The price incentives will cause people to truck it in by the ton, in hopes of making a profit. Via FEMA Taps Private Vendors to Meet Sandy Victim's Needs.

The basic imperative to allocate goods efficiently doesn’t vanish in a storm or other crisis. If anything, it becomes more important. And price controls in an emergency have the same results as they do any other time:  They lead to shortages and overconsumption. Letting merchants raise prices if they think customers will be willing to pay more isn’t a concession to greed. Rather, it creates much-needed incentives for people to think harder about what they really need and appropriately rewards vendors who manage their inventories well.

...

Indeed, many of the problems associated with weather emergencies are precisely caused by the fact that we can’t count on shops to “gouge” their customers. I live in a neighborhood with buried power lines in a building that contains a supermarket on the ground floor. But I nonetheless found myself stuck in line Sunday evening at the Safeway stockpiling emergency supplies just in case something went badly wrong and knocked power out throughout the city. The issue wasn’t that I wouldn’t be able to get to the store in a worst-case scenario, as that I was afraid other people would already have bought up all the stuff. And indeed, by the time I made it, the shelves had been largely denuded of essentials such as bottled water, canned soup, batteries, and Diet Coke. Greater flexibility to raise prices would not only tend to curb overconsumption directly by encouraging people to buy less, it would inspire confidence that shortages wouldn’t arise, reducing the tendency toward panicky preemptive hoarding.

Last but by no means least, more price gouging would greatly improve inventory management. There is a large class of goods--flashlights, snow shovels, sand bags--for which demand is highly irregular. Maintaining large inventories of these items is, on most days, a costly misuse of storage space. If retailers can earn windfall profits when demand for them spikes, that creates a situation in which it makes financial sense to keep them on hand. Trying to curtail price gouging does the reverse.

Some sense from Slate. Via Sandy price gouging: Anti-gouging laws make natural disasters worse. - Slate Magazine.

Residents with license plates ending in an odd number can make gas purchases on odd-numbered days of the month Residents with plates ending in an even number will be able to buy gas on even-numbered days, the governor said.

Specialized plates or those not displaying a number will be considered odd numbered plates, a release from the governor’s office stated.

Instead, let sellers raise prices to something more in line with supply/demand curve. If that means $20/gallon, so be it. The pricing will make sure people know how valuable the resource is, and cause them to re-evaluate their use of gasoline. Then everybody gets at least some of what they *actually need*. Heartless? Hardly.

Via Christie Orders Odd-Even Rationing System For Filling Up Gas Tanks « CBS New York.

Men should not be making health care decisions for women, right?

The life of an 11-week-old unborn baby and the future of his or her 32-year-old mother hang in the balance as a judge considers whether or not to order the woman to undergo an abortion and sterilization against her will.

Elisa Bauer, who suffers from severe mental and physical disabilities attributed to fetal alcohol syndrome, is currently in the final weeks of her first trimester. The second-oldest of six children adopted by William and Amy Bauer in 1992, Elisa has epilepsy and is said to have the mental and social capacity of a 6-year-old.

The circumstances surrounding her pregnancy are unknown. Her family suspects she may have been raped, but it’s possible the sexual encounter that led to her pregnancy was consensual.

via Court May Force Mentally Disabled Nevada Woman to Have Abortion | LifeNews.com.

Tom Nelson: Do NOT miss this Joe Bastardi information about U.S. hurricanes, 1951-1960, back before CO2 allegedly started causing hurricanes. Note six hurricanes in two years, including five majors.

Disney used to be a wonderful organization itself.  Now it is the evil vampire squid of the entertainment world, mindlessly devouring and excreting out the stinking remnants of one entertainment franchise after another.  It was never going to happen, but imagine how much creativity could have been unleashed if George Lucas had released Star Wars under the LGPL.  Instead, we're going to get gay Ewoks singing musical numbers and Hispanic princesses wielding lightsabers and going on intergalactic voyages with sparkly alien vampires where they defeat the evil Ritt Momney and Pand Raul in the process of learning the important lesson that the ultimate truth in life is to be tolerant of others who are different... unless they are Republicans.

via Vox Popoli: Star Wars is dead.

A superstorm requires supersmart government. But making wise decisions from a distance is hard. Economists call this the problem of local knowledge. The information needed for making rational plans is distributed among many actors, and it is extremely difficult for a far-off, centralized authority to access it. The devil really is in the details. (This is why the price system, which aggregates all that dispersed insight, is more economically efficient than a command-and-control system.)

So emergency and disaster response should be, as much as possible, pushed down to the state and local level. A national effort should be reserved for truly catastrophic events. Indeed this preference for "local first, national second" can be found in the legislation authorizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The number of federal emergencies has soared, stretching capabilities. Increasingly state and private resources are overlooked.

But just the opposite has been happening in recent decades. There were, according to a Heritage Foundation analysis, 28 FEMA declarations a year during the Reagan administration, 44 during Bush I, 90 during Clinton, 130 during Bush II, and 153 so far during Obama's term. The result is federal emergency response effort stretched thin in its capabilities to deal with major disasters.

via FEMA Response, Once Rare, Is Now Routine and Overused - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com.

I limited myself to full-year private sector workers with a bachelors degree who were ages 21 to 26 in 2009-2010. Within this group I controlled for age, race, Hispanic and immigrant status, detailed geographic location, weekly work hours, college major and occupation. Controlling for college major accounts for the fact that men tend to choose majors that lead to higher earnings later in life. Controlling for occupation captures “compensating wage differentials” for positive or negative aspects of the job. For instance, dangerous or unpleasant jobs may pay more, while jobs offering flexible hours or more generous benefits might pay less. Including all these controls, the gender pay gap for young college grads drops to around 1 percent.

Even then, do my results mean that discrimination reduces pay by 1 percent? Hardly. It’s well known that women negotiate over pay less aggressively than men. Better negotiating tactics could easily generate a 1 percent pay difference. More broadly, the 1 percent figure denotes the unexplained pay difference – simply because the data we have can’t explain it doesn’t mean the difference is due to discrimination. Better data might explain even more of the difference. Moreover, even if discrimination exists – and it surely does, even if its overall effects aren’t huge – the cure of greater government control over the labor market might be worse than the disease.

via The gender pay gap is a media myth | AEIdeas.

Tuition would be lower for students pursuing degrees most needed for Florida's job market, including ones in science, technology, engineering and math, collectively known as the STEM fields.

The committee is recommending no tuition increases for them in the next three years.

But to pay for that, students in fields such as psychology, political science, anthropology, and performing arts could pay more because they have fewer job prospects in the state.

An interesting thought: if you want more science/technical/engineering/math majors, charge them less. Conversely, charge more for the easier, softer majors. Via A Bunch of Arguments in Favor of Regressive Tuition, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty.