Roommates as Citizens

I must be a crazy liberal or something. I constantly feel that individual citizens deserve privacy and respect inside their homes. I do, however, feel that a well regulated public sphere is needed out in the world where people interact with each other everyday.

I feel this way because I live with roommates.

For the better part of the last few years I have shared living spaces with people who I am in no way related or barely know. For the most part these sorts of situations are not too bad. There is always some common ground for us to connect on, and because we all have been students, we really don't have to interact with each other that much.

When I am not interacting with my roommates, it is because they are usually in their bedrooms with the doors shut. I do not go in their rooms unless I am trying to be friendly or inform them of something going on outside that is of relevance to them. This is because I do not care what they are doing in there, from watching TV to any number of unspeakable things. As long as they are being fairly quiet and not causing any kind of hindrance or annoyance to me or anyone else they can turn their rooms into altars to Cthulhu for all I care.

The problems between roommates come in then when dealing with the idea of common spaces: the kitchen, the bathroom, and the living room. Each of these we all use in close to equal amounts, or at least in amounts that are too close to really be able to measure. But we cannot treat these places like we treat our rooms. If I leave a dirty dish in the sink I am not the only one who has to deal with that dish. The time cost to me of cleaning it after I dirty it might be more than if I waited until the next morning to clean it, but this ignores extrenalities. The cost of waiting to clean a dish is also shared by the rest of the roommates, who likely get less than zero benefits from it being dirty. This less than zero comes from having to clean another's mess or worse yet (in extreme cases) not feeling as if the kitchen is at all usable to them.

This creates a benefit deficit for the entire apartment!

In a political system, to solve this problem individuals and companies are denied by law to take the option that creates the most cost to the public. This is why littering has a fine. This changes the decision to litter from one of little cost to the bug to one of a much higher cost than finding a trash can.

To solve this in an apartment, the person who makes a dirty dish must not be allowed to deviate from a reasonable amount of time between making a mess and cleaning it us. This means that it is understandable that the a meal should be enjoyed warm or that the stove must cool down before being cleaned, but beyond the time of these mostly practical things cleaning should be done.

Sure there are roommate contracts and personal agreements that can be made, but who is going to follow these things? The problem here in an apartment is what is lacking from a political system, enforcement. The trick to regulating room mates is something that has yet to really be mastered by anyone without getting too far over the top in terms of the costs of the enforcement apparatus. There are no cops, no fines, and no good punishments for causing problems in the public sphere. Instead individuals must become vigilantes, reminding everyone to do their part in keeping the public spaces clean. No one likes this role though. It makes you annoying and it shouldn't fall to you to tell a roommate that what they are doing is a bad thing.

So this is where I am. Looking for some kind of legal enforcer for my apartment. It must be cheap, and not be the responsibility of just one person. By this I mean that it must also enforce its own enforcements by making sure people not only stay within the system but also help to maintain the system.

I will let you know when I have the answer.

The Dismal Science

Stephen Moore was on Colbert tonight to talk about his new book. This guy is, what many like economists refer to them selves as, a neoclassical economist. He wants little to no government intervention to allow markets to make function the way that they can (in theory) work best. The problem is that he is living in a bubble if he really wants to apply his theory to the real world.

Economics is a very interesting school of thought. I hesitate to call it a science because while it tries to make predictions about the world, it more often looks at what outcomes should be based on assumptions about the people making the choices. I was attracted to this study of choice because many of its assumptions about people are actually the way I go about life. I try to be rational about everything. I always choose the path that will most benefit me in my life. And I often like to think that I have perfect information. Unfortunately, neither I nor anyone else has that last one.

Now, perfect information, or at least as close as we will ever get without being able to totally predict the future, is coming. I am sure of that, but as of right now we have to factor in that people are ignorant when talking about economic models. Notice: I say "ignorant," not "stupid."

This is why we still need government intervention in our economy. I know that this sounds paternalistic when I say it alone so let me clarify. Right now we have such a lack of information, in some places that the only way to prevent the most heinous things from happening is to have rules against it. For example, social security, one of the most Big Brotherly things we have in the US. It is a system that forces people to save money. There are many people who would just assume that we get rid of it because it causes some economic inefficiencies. These people would much rather let everyone do exactly what they want with their money in order to save for retirement. There is a problem though. No one saves money! In a culture that has been told that a dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow, we are going to want to spend spend spend. Like our great grandparents who didn't save enough to have money when they needed (thus causing the need for social security), we are to ignorant to be able to see a time when we might need it. We (wrongly) expect to have a constant flow of income, even when we get too old to work, thus we need a mechanism that will not disappoint us, like social security.

Wealth

A little over a week ago I got an iPhone. I have to say that I love it. As an avid Apple user it meets all the demands I have for a phone that wants to connect me to the Internet. While there are complaints about it from some slightly more hardcore users, I find it fits my needs fairly well.

As I was getting my iPhone activated I noticed a skuzzy looking guy who was probably some sort of manual laborer getting an iPhone as well. That said I recently saw an article on /. that said that even lower-middle class people are getting the iPhone. Now this makes sense seeing as how the plan it only slightly more than what most people are paying for cell service now and the phone itself is not to prices. This bit of news and the economy have got me to thinking about money and buying power.

The day I bought my iPhone we had a discussion about the idea of wealth in my economics class. One student said that thanks to the market "crisis" he didn't feel that wealthy. To this I and a few others tried to correct him by suggesting that he has yet to worry about getting food or anything else despite the slowdown with the professor chiming in, "The US, where a problem is that the poor people are fat." Our point was that we are so wealthy that we feel poor even when we are able to be overweight if we so please.

This is such a stark contrast to a few generations ago. My grandparents, all of whom have passed, were all never high ranking people. They all came from modest backgrounds where they all made decent livings and knew how to save and make a dollar into more than it was when they first got it. These were people who live through the Great Depression, went to war, and worked until they were able to retire comfortably. For them by the time they were ready to retire they were wealthy.

Now, they were not wealthy in the way that they could have gone out and bought manor houses and rare art. They were wealthy in that they could buy large meaty meals every day and feed me just about anything I could have wanted whenever I was over. They loved watching me eat. They also liked giving me nice things like clothes and toys, but it was being able to see me provided with a thick juicy steak that really made their hearts sing. Not that I am blaming them for my being a bit overweight for a good part of my life. I am just saying that they saw intense value in food and wanted me to have it.

My brother has a kid now, making my parents grandparents. However, I don't think that they will get the same sort of joy out of feeding my niece as my grandparents had for me. This is because they have never felt like food wasn't something people simply just have without much question. Now the quality of food, that will always be something to want to improve, but food itself...

I say this because in our troubled economic times when we are riding a roller coaster of an economy trying to find its way in a post-housing bubble world, we need to have some perspective. We need to appreciate that we are so comfortable with our food supply that even the proletariat can buy what might be considered high technology. We don't have to decide between iPhones and butter. We have both, and by most people's standards we here in the US are pretty wealthy.