Links for 2011-05-02 [del.icio.us]

• The Volokh Conspiracy » The Death of Bin Laden and the Morality of Targeted Killings
  From an international law perspective, it’s worth noting that the operation against Bin Laden is an example of targeted killing. Although we don’t yet know very many details, it’s pretty obvious that the US targeted Bin Laden deliberately, something the President more or less admitted in his speech, where he said that we have been tracking Bin Laden for many months (presumably for the purpose of targeting him as an individual). In the past, such targeted killings have drawn criticism from human rights organizations and others who claim that they violate international law. Co-Conspirator Kenneth Anderson described the debate in this excellent article. It’s unlikely that there will be much criticism of the operation against Bin Laden. However, the broader debate over the law and morality of targeted killings is likely to continue.
• Does that make any sense?: Asking the wrong questions about the minimum wage
  Upon further examination, this isn’t even the right question. Total employment isn’t all that matters—among other things, we want to know who is holding the jobs. In a model of imperfect competition, a minimum wage has two effects. First, it decreases employment by putting a wage floor above some workers’ marginal product of labor; second, it increases employment by inducing more people to enter the labor force. While the aggregate outcome may involve either higher or lower total employment, this will hide important shifts in the composition of the workforce.
• Does that make any sense?: Applies to apples in higher education
  Given these numbers, it’s not clear that for-profit schools are serving their students worse at all. The pool of students attending for-profit colleges is very different from the pool elsewhere—coming in, these students tend to be from less wealthy backgrounds and have weaker academic records. Being older on average, they may have family or other financial obligations that are rarely an issue for 22-year-old students graduating from conventional four year universities. To really understand how these universities compare, we’d need to see how they perform conditional on admitting students with similar backgrounds. Since unobserved factors will always play heavily in both the choice to attend a certain college and performance afterward, it’s impossible to do a perfect analysis, but I’d still like to see us give it our best shot.
• Does that make any sense?: Statistical discrimination
  Yet I think that Caplan’s analysis is fundamentally incomplete, because it’s too quick to equate skills with formal educational credentials. Suppose you’re a student for whom college is out of the question (too much of a financial burden) but completing high school is likely. Even conditional on obtaining a high school diploma, there is plenty of variation in the effort levels you can choose. To the extent that it depresses job prospects for your entire racial group, statistical discrimination may also decrease the returns to verbal and quantitative skills that aren’t captured in a simple diploma, and hence your incentive to acquire them.
• *Pakistan: A Hard Country* — Marginal Revolution
  Pakistan 101.
• Does that make any sense?: I do not understand the public plan
  The economics of the public option, and why it doesnt matter.
• Does that make any sense?: More choice is less choice: The strange economics of a-la-carte cable
  Substitute “niche programming” for “neighborhood parks” and you have the essence of cable economics. I hardly care about MTV; take away Comedy Central, however, and I’ll be steamed. Many viewers feel the opposite. In an a-la-carte world, we’d each choose to buy only our favorite channels. Their prices would skyrocket on a thinner subscriber base, to the point we’d be paying nearly as much as we did before. I’d be just as poor financially, and I wouldn’t even be able to indulge myself with Jersey Shore—surely a bad deal all around.
• Does that make any sense?: Zero marginal cost and Microsoft Office
  This results from a feature common to most kinds of electronic content: zero marginal cost. When you’re buying a bundle of cable channels, you’re not paying for the cost of distributing each channel to you—as long as cable is already installed, that’s virtually zero. Instead, you’re supporting the fixed costs of creating the content in the first place. If a la carte cable leads each consumer to subscribe to only 10% of channels, each channel will be forced to raise its price to support the cost of programming (and quite possibly go out of business in the process). In the end, the funding for the content has to come from somewhere, and a thinner base of subscribers means either less content or higher fees for the same content.

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