Bastiat's Bastions

While driving to and from Monroe, listening to National Public Radio about the Conan-Leno war, someone in an interview mentioned that Letterman may end up the loser if Conan moves to Fox to compete in a three-way war with Leno and Letterman straight up.  Letterman may end up the real loser because while Letterman may beat Leno and Conan in head-to-head contests, he may get squeezed out, in a three-way fight.  This is an application of Harold Hotelling’s median-voter work (‘Stability in Competition,’ Economic Journal, 1929).

Conan may be preferred to Letterman, who in turn is preferred to Leno by the young viewers of late night talk television.  At the same time, we see Leno (J)  preferred to Letterman (D), who in turn, is preferred to Conan (C) among older viewers.  Instead of the left to right competition in the spatial competition among candidates, think of viewers, arrayed young to old, and viewers with four types of preference profiles: 1) C>D>J viewers; 2) D>C>J viewers; 3) D>J>C;  4) J>D>C, where “>” means “preferred to.”  If there are more type 1s than 2+3s and more type 4s than 2 +3s but still more 1 + 2 +3s than 4s and more 2+3+4s than 1s, then Dave may dominate each in a head to head but be the loser in a 3 way race.  This is straight from a Hotelling’s spatial competition (along a single dimension), though I do not think Hotelling did the 3 competitor case.

Here is a numerical example with made-up numbers.

Customer types

& market shares

1) C>D>J; 42%                               D v J                  D v C               C v D v J

2) D>C>J; 10%                            62% v 38%           58% v 42%         42% v 20% v 38%

3) D>J>C; 10%

4) J>D>C; 38%

With the distribution of customer types that we have in the example above, Dave Letterman dominates both Leno and O’Brien in head-to-head matchups, with 62-32% with Leno and 58-42%.  However, in a three-way battle for late night talk show viewers, it would be quite possible for Dave to go from first to last if Conan on Fox and Leno on NBC compete in the exact same time slot as Dave.

If these were candidates, then things become very unstable, as the left- and right- wing candidates maneuver toward the middle, making the moderate candidate’s position unsustainable, and she gets driven from the campaign.  Late night comics, though, have a more difficult time shifting positions, changing their appeal to different audiences.

I should mention that it would also be possible for Letterman to continue to dominate the other two, if there were more of the middle two types than the two extremes.

-MC

If you have not heard it yet, Pat Robertson said something that was almost surprising about Haiti’s horrible disaster, that Haiti’s founding fathers made a pact with the devil to help them throw off the bonds of slavery with the French, and so God cursed the Haitian people. I say “almost surprising” because Robertson has said some pretty crazy things in the past, such as calling for the assassination of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez.  Here is a more reasoned discussion of the myth by the Haitian theologian, Jean Gelin.

While thinking about Robertson’s remarks on a drive to north Louisiana, I came to the conclusion that on Haiti, Pat Robertson is correct, figuratively, though not literally. On a disaster that has claimed the lives of thousands upon thousands of mostly good and innocent people of Haiti, that sounds about as outrageous as Robertson’s remarks.

While a Haitian pact with Satan himself is absurd, people often support or at least abide and enable corruption among their public officials. Haiti has long had very corrupt leadership, and corruption in Haiti is widespread. The Haitians may, from time to time, get rid of corrupt leaders, but they have always seemed to replace corrupt leaders with other corrupt leaders. (There is an excellent discussion of this phenomenon in a memorable chapter in Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, “Why the worst get on top.”) While many Haitians are sure to be good, moral people, their feelings of helplessness and fatalism have left them very apathetic, allowing corruption to be pervasive in their society.

In surveys of perceptions of corruption, Haiti ranks near the bottom of all countries as shown by the rankings from Transparency International “Corruption Perceptions Index”, where Haiti ranks 168th out of 180 countries ranked by TI, tying with 5 others. It is also the lowest of the Americas, ranking ahead of only Uzbekistan, Chad, Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Myanmar and Somalia, meaning that Haiti is perceived to be more corrupt than the notoriously corrupt Nigeria.

In a paper that came out in July of 2007 in the interdisciplinary social science journal, Public Choice, Monica Escaleras, Nejat Anbarci and Charles Register examine the interaction of natural phenomenon, earthquakes, with the social phenomenon of public sector corruption and show how when these two occur together, the death tolls are higher. They develop a theoretical model and then examine 344 quakes between 1975 and 2003 and find more deaths from earthquakes that occur in more corrupt countries. Their result holds even after the researchers account for other factors related to deaths from earthquakes, such as the magnitude of the quake, its proximity to population centers, the country’s level of development or how poor people are in the country, and several other factors.  Their main explanation is that inspectors of buildings and other infrastructure are more likely to take bribes in such societies and look the other way with some cash in an envelope. Poorer building code enforcement (for buildings, roads, bridges, port facilities and airports) results in more deaths from a given quake.

So, due to apathy, people allow venality to survive and spread, especially among those in the public sector, Haiti’s pact with or surrender to the devil. The corruption leads to more deaths from earthquakes, just as if there had been some sort of curse. I am not suggesting that Pat Robertson is literally correct, just that venality is to allowed to survive, people curse themselves, their loved ones and their fellow citizens.

Hmmm. I seem to recall voter acceptance and support for corrupt public officials leading to more deaths from a natural disaster somewhere. Could that have been here in Louisiana?

-MC

Opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily represent the views of Nicholls State University.