The Armchair Economist

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The Armchair Economist

About the Author

Steven E. Landsburg is an American professor of economics at the Un iversity of Rochester in Rochester, New York. From 1989 to 1995, he taught at Colorado State University. His famous books include Price The ory and Applications, Macroeconomics, Fair Play and More Sex is Safer Sex. In his writings, Landsburg has been particularly critical of mains tream environmentalism having devoted both Slate columns and book chapters (in The Armchair Economist) to attack environmentalist principles. As a self described "Hard-core Libertarian", Landsburg emphasizes the importance of individual choice. He supports free trade and opposes protectionism, and his writings in the topic have appeared in various newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. He has also reviewed popular economics books Freakonomics and The U ndercover Economist for the Wall Street Journal.

The Armchair Economist

Overview of the book
The Armchair Economist is divided into five parts: What Life is All About Good and Evil How to Read the News How Markets Work The Pitfalls of Science

Each part is further subdivided into chapters. In this book, Landsburg has applied economic reasoning to a vast array of human behaviour. It talks about the world purely through an economists point of view which makes it very interesting. The underlying theme of the book is that most of ec onomics can be summarized in four words: People respond to incentives. With this observation, Landsburg goes on to discuss the effects of diffe rent policies such as environmental policies. He also talks about budget deficit, unemployment, and cost benefit analysis etc. In short, The Armchair Economist is a fascinating book and it should be read by anyone who wants to know how an economist sees the world.

WHAT LIFE IS ALL ABOUT

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People Respond to Incentives
Most of economics can be summarized in four words: "People respond to ince ntives." The rest is commentary. There is evidence that people respond significantly to incentives even in situ ations where we do not usually imagine their behaviour to be rational. The author sighted a lot of examples in our day to day life to support his view. People drive less carefully when their cars are safer. The government came up with a lot of automobile safety legislations. It did this with the intention of bringing down a ccident rates. But people became less cautious. Do harsh punishments deter criminal activity? Yes murderers do respond to i ncentives. When economists applied Econometrics in examining the effects of death penalty they came to the following striking conclusion: During the 1960s, on average, each execution that took place in America prevented approximately 8 murders. In economics it is assumed that people always behave rationally. But it is not always true. When we assume that people are rational, we emphatically do not assume anything about their preferences. There is no accounting for tastes is one of the economist's slogans. People have different attitudes toward risk, and their behaviour appropriately differs. There are a lot of riddles that leave us wondering about how rational people really are. Whenever there is a rock concert starring major attractions, the tickets sell out well in advance. W e see teenagers camping out to ensure their places in the long queue. Then why dont the promoters sell the tickets at a higher price. Well, there is a logical and rational explanation to this query. Teenage concert goers tend to follow up by buying records, T -shirts, and other paraphernalia. Adults don't. Therefore their main aim is to target these teena gers. So they keep the prices low. People are often rational, but not always. Economics applies to some behaviour, but not to all behaviour. Mainly there are two kinds of people in this world -cautious and reckless. Smokers give the impression that they fall in the latter category. Therefore insurance companies offer lower premiums to non-smokers. Hence smoking helps keep insurance rates low. So if cigarettes were banned, your insurance rates would fall. 3

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As a voluntary non-smoker, you implicitly notify your insurance company that you are probably cautious in a lot of ways they can't observe. As a non -smoker in a world without cigarettes, you might be indistinguishable from everybody else, and be charged accordingly. But once the people are insured they are likely to take more risks. One altern ative is for the insurance company to help its customers avoid risk. Your car i nsurance company might be willing to subsidize your purchase of an antitheft d evice; your health insurance company will undoubtedly provide you with free i nformation on the benefits of diet and exercise; your fire insurance company can give you a free fire extinguisher. But there are limits to what can be acco mplished. According to the author except when people have unusual tastes or unusual ta lents, all activities must be equally desirable . Consider the case of a person who has no particular skills and he takes up the job of a gold engraver anticipating great wealth. If gold engravers lead better lives than street sweepers then even they will leave the job of a street sweeper and become gol d engravers. Gradually this will drive down the wages and working conditions of all gold engravers. The process will continue till both the jobs become equally desirable. All economic gains accrue to the owners of fixed resources. If there is an i ncrease in the demand of actors then it will not benefit the actors because more people will be attracted to this profession. But an increased demand for some particular actor like Shahrukh Khan can benefit him because no one else can substitute him. Here his personality is the fixed resource. But when a fixed r esource is not owned by anyone economic gains are discarded.

THE COMPUTER GAME OF LIFE: Learning What It's All About

Steven E. Landsburg mentions about the students learning behaviour and intr oducing fictitious business as a computer game. In this game of economic life, success is measured in the same way economists measure success in the Game of Life Itself, not by asset holdings or productivity but by the amount of fun you have along the way. Students would learn a lot from this game. They would learn that your success in life is measured not by comparison with others' accomplishments but by your private satisfaction with your own. They would learn that in the Game of Life 4

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there can be many winners, and one p layer's triumphs need not diminish an ybody else's. They would learn that hard work has its rewards, but that it also takes time away from other activities, and that different people will make diffe rent judgments about what to strive for. Most important, they would learn that consumption and leisure, not accumulation and hard work, are what Life is really all about.

GOOD AND EVIL

Telling Right from Wrong: The Pitfalls of Democracy
There are number of policies present in system but very difficult to choose which one is right, even if you apply policy to people one will apply contradictory results so one can imagine how much it is difficult to apply on Millions of people. To defend a policy he suggests that our task is not to demonstrate that it does some good, but that it does more good than harm. In the real world any mea ningful policy proposal must entail a huge number of trade -offs involving innumerable gains and losses to innumerable people. For policy makers, it is easy making long lists of pros and cons, but they forget that we must decide how many cons it takes to outweigh a particular pro. A number of concepts have been proposed telling what is right and wrong and each has Paradox attached with it. For example, make policy to make least ha ppy man happy will contradict if that man doesnt want the policy, in the same way if we argue to increase sum of happiness so what about maximising it, so it is better to leave on shoulder of economics, it is better explained with help of Economic efficiency or cost benefit analysis.

Why Taxes Are Bad: The Logic of Efficiency

Taxes are bad for someone and good for others but it is very difficult to say whether the transfer of taxes is desirable or not. Economists agree that taxes are bad because they are avoided, which results in economic losses. Taxes nearly always do more harm than good. To collect a dollar, you need to take someone's dollar; almost inevitably, in the process, you discourage somebody else from buying. When a policy does more bad than good, then we call it inefficient and tend to deplore it. This mode of analysis is

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called characteristic of economists, who doesnt consider ledger and accounts but considers only the impact on individuals, whether they gain or loss. Best conclusion to find it is good or bad is to collect votes from every one with interest in outcome ,efficient decision is what who win the vote, Alternate ruling is also there that both sides would have been preferred. The logic of efficiency and why economists tend to favour it is discussed as it is the only alternative to inefficiency and mentioned that general level of prices is determined by supply of money, Efficiency criterion treats everybody equal. A cost is a cost no matter who bear it. Calculation is always leads to conclusion that feel right but distinction would be very hard to justify philosophically.

Why prices are good: Smith Versus Darwin

Author make comparison of Darwinian evolution which allows only the fittest to survive, with Adam Smiths economic actor who intends only his own gain but is nevertheless led "by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention," that end being the welfare of society, which economists call eff iciency. Economist describes inefficient outcome with an example of comparing birds of paradise with students and employers with female birds. Rational behaviour of humans is compared with herd of cows, as it is not a vaccine to inefficiency. Invisible hand theorem is now called the First Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics, and it states Competitive markets allocate resources efficiently. The Second Fundamental theorem says No matter which of the many efficient allocations you want to achieve, you can always achieve it by first redistributing income in an appropriate way and then letting competitive markets function freely. The critical feature in the formulations and proofs of these theorems is the e xistence of market prices. W ithout prices, there is no reason to expect efficient outcomes. This was explained considering the Czar of American culture (wheat market). The Invisible Hand theorem tells us that if we seek the source of inefficiency, we should look for markets that are missing, but not for markets that exist. We

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should look for goods that are not priced, which often means that we should look for goods that are not owned.

HOW TO READ THE NEWS

Steven E Landsburg's most interesting declaration in this book is that "economics in the narrowest sense is a science free from values"; but I'm not sure that it's exactly true. Free from certain kinds of values perhaps. Landsburg's oppos ition to environmentalism, for instance, just involves different values : environmentalists want to ban pesticides, he says, but the economics of such a ban would mean that "fruits and vegetables become more expensive, people eat fewer of them, and cancer rates consequently rise". W hat Landsburg argues is that a world run solely on an economic basis would produce some bad things, some good things, but that the good or the bad outcome is incidental. (The use of pesticides isn't, in the end, to prevent cancer, but to increase profits.) In the Sound and Fury file, he explains that Government spending plays a major role in driving the economic engine as he relates it to the recession in univers ities and scientific research resulting due to cutbacks in government programs. He concludes that the Government programs have directly led t o our economic downturn. Here he mentions that Economics has its own conservation laws similar to that of the energy conservation laws. He states that none of the models is consistent with Professor Breslow's si mplistic analysis, which consists of blatantl y ignoring the government's source of funds. Here, he speaks about pantyhose manufacturers who deliberately create pro ducts that self-destruct in a week leading to a serious crimp in their sales. He a lso relates the economic concept to that of artists who do not collect royalty on their artworks, leading to poor artists getting poorer and rich artists getting ric her. He also disagrees with James K. Glassmans statement about stock and real estate by stating the fact that if stocks and real estate appreciate d at the same rate, nobody would own stocks. In How Statistics Lie Unemployment can be good for you he explains about the way the government reports inflation statistics by relating it to the sale pri ces offered by grocery stores in Washington. He says that every product he buys, 7

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the price would have increased the next time he visits the store, due to which he ends up buying another product. He puts across a very important point in terms of the consumer price index, very interestingly by stating that Th e Consumer Price Index reports price changes not for the mix of goods that people buy today but for the goods that people used to buy. That mix tends to over represent the goods that were bargains in the past and to underrepresent the goods that are bargains today. As a result it overemphasizes the biggest price increases and makes overall changes appear worse than they are. He also emphasizes on the fact that how CPI concentrates only on the rise in prices and not on the fall in prices. Also, he relates inflation with CPI by stating an example to drive in this point beautifully, A person whose income goes up at the same annual rate as the CPI generally experiences an increase in buying power each year, and b ecause the CPI always makes inflation look worse than it really is. He says that Unemployment is good for you. He explains it by saying that Eco nomy wide unemployment can be a sign that times are getting worse or a sign that times are getting better. The same is true at the level of the individual. In The Policy Vice he puts across a very beautiful point to bring to light an economists view The economist's greatest passion is not to change the world but to understand it, which is very true in general terms. He explains that while economists take up positions on nearly every side of every issue, they share certain perspectives. The economic way of thinking emphasizes the importance of incentives, the gains from trade, and the power of enforceable property rights as forces for good. It embraces the conf idence that perfect markets generally yield desirable outcomes and an instinct to make outcomes more desirable by making markets more nearly perfect. Here, he explains that economists recognize the gains from trade. He says that trade separates our consumption choices from our production choices. He inte lligently puts across the point that we can build cheap cars and drive expensive ones, if we build the cheap ones profitably. But he very intently concludes with a warning that an economist who has abandoned his resistance to policy analysis is liable to fall prey to the even more seductive and dangerous vice of policy formulation. In, Some Modest Proposals- The end of Bipartisanship, he makes a very inte resting observation on the very basic economic situat ions. The experience with 8

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competitive markets tells us that there is no end to the bidding war until all e xcessive profits are competed out of existence. When an industry is dominated by two highly profitable firms, theory tells us that if there is no pric e war then there is probably collusion. In the case of the Republicans and Democrats, the requ isite collusion is on display for all to see. It is called bipartisanship. Steve Landsburgs attention for detail is highlighted when he compares the bi dding wars between the Republicans and the Democrats who outrun each other to gain votes. He also explains the fact that Economists know that there are many circumstances in which governments could benefit if their promises were enforceable. Theory and evidence suggest that when an expected inflation fails to materia lize, aggregate output can fall. A government that could credibly promise not to follow inflationary policies could prevent costly expectations from forming in the first place. He concludes this chapter with the fact that there is nothing in ec onomic theory to suggest that existing political institutions are even close to o ptimal, in any sense of the word. If the best policy proposal seems bizarre, it might be only because we are unused to seeing anything like the best policy proposal in action. In a wide-ranging, easily digested, unbelievably contrarian survey of everything from why popcorn at movie houses costs so much to why recycling may actually reduce the number of trees on the planet, the University of Rochester professor valiantly turns the discussion of vexing economic questions into an activity that ordinary people will enjoy. This book might have offered a more intriguing arg ument, though, at least to me, but for Landsburg's fondness for the kind of propositions (if three men carry five bags in four hours, how long will it take five men to carry 10 bags?) I used to loathe in school exams.

HOW MARKETS WORK

Why Popcorn Costs More at the Movies and Why the Obvious Answer Is Wrong
"Why popcorn costs more at the movies and why the obvious answer is wrong." In this chapter author tries to explain price discrimination: the serious cinephiles like the movies-and-popcorn experience and they can be made to pay a differe ntial price via expensive popcorn. Finding a way to extract higher prices from

those with higher reservation prices is the name of the game.

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But the author lets this explanation go because no movie theatre is a monopoly; any price discrimination profits made would be competed away. In Landsburg's brief discussion of price discrimination, he mentions "monopoly" twelve times. The obvious answer is that the cinema has a monopoly and can charge what it likes. But the real reason is that it could charge less for the popcorn and more for the tickets, or less for the tickets and even more for the popcorn; the actual pricing attracts the most money from different customers, based on hard-won experience Students, children, and people with large families are usually more price sensitive, and not likely candidates to spend money on snacks. What we are really buying when we purchase a movie ticket is an o pportunity: a chance to enjoy the movie, or to enjoy it with popcorn. Economists call this a two-part tariff, defined as a pricing strategy in which the customer must pay a fee in exchange for the right to purchase the product. This is not to imply price discrimination based on race, gender, religion, or ethnicity, but rather based u pon ability and willingness to pay. Landsburg ends the chapter with his popcorn riddle left hanging in the air. He leaves the discussion where it is because he is seemingly att ached to the standard model (where price discrimination is only practiced by "monopolists").

Courtship and Collusion: The Mating Game

In the markets for sex and marriage, men compete among themselves for wo men and women compete among themselves for men. But men compete differently than women do, in part because men are more inclined to seek multiple par tners. There are, of course, many people of both genders who fail to fit the pa ttern, but more often than not, there is a germ of truth in the observation that "a woman seeks one man to fill her every need, while a man seeks every woman to fill his one need." The author envisages collusion like sex as ancient and ubiquitous. He also states that there is no surprise in the fact that these two so popular ente rprises have been pursued in tandem. Taking the example of sex and marriage as a market, the author is trying to lay emphasis on the fact that mutual agreements and conspiracies though intend to do good to the end consumers, they seldom work and are sometimes more harmful.

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The mating game is a game that everyone can win. Even so, there is room for conflict about how to divide the spoils. With so much at stake, it is not surprising that coalitions form, break apart, and call on governments to resurrect them. Games breed strategic behaviour. That includes the game where some believe that every strategy is fair.

Cursed Winners and Glum Losers: Why life is full of disappointments

Economic theory Under certain reasonable assumptions and as a matter of mathematical fact, all of the auction rules I've mentioned yield the same revenue to the seller on average over many auctions. When you are the high bidder, you can be certain of one thing: Nobody else in the room thought the item was worth as much as you did. That observation alone implies that you've probably overe stimated its true worth. Most things in life don't turn out as well as you thought they would. W hile psychologists, poets, and philosophers have often remarked on this phenomenon, few have recognized that it is a necessary consequence of informed, rational decision making. The logic of probable disappointment haunts every aspect of life in which we choose among alternatives. Even when your judgments in general are free of bias, your judgments about those ac tivities that you choose to engage in are usually too optimistic. He also concludes with the fact that honesty has been the best policy and sellers by being honest not only help the buyers but help themselves. The wi nners curse is initially the buyer's pr oblem but becomes the seller's problem also because buyers defend against it by shading their bids downward. It is therefore a good idea for the seller to help buyers ward off the curse. A history of honest dealings can be an effective talisman.

Ideas of Interest: Armchair Forecasting

According to author if we lend at 8% in a time of 3% inflation, our buying power grows not by 8% each year but by 5%; the first three cents that we earn on ev ery dollar goes just to maintaining the real value of our principal. Money growth affects nominal interest rates, but it affects them in quite the o pposite direction from what the financial pages typically suggest. The trade -off between current and future consumption is a matter of personal taste, but it pays to understand the terms of trade .Each profession has its drawbacks. Do ctors get emergency calls in the middle of the night. Mathematicians spend

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months stuck in blind alleys .Poets worry about where their next check is coming from. And economists get asked to predict interest rates. The author here tries to talk about what actually is the rate of interest and its impact on consumption of goods by the people in general. The authors theory here is that the interest rate is the price of consumption, and consumption refe rs to real tangible goods and services, not some abstract entity like money. So with this basic understanding a person can actually predict the future rates of interest and adjust accordingly. He can actually end up getting rich. But can this knowledge alone make you rich cause the general consensus is that interest rates adjust to news in effectively no time at all. Hence a person will actually have to have a high sense of instincts to predict what the government will a nnounce to actually take benefit of the outcome.

Random Walks and Stock Market Prices: A primer for investors

The author says that the random walk theory is not a theory of prices but a the ory of price changes. With a random walk everything is permanent. Today's price is the sum of all the (positive and negative) changes that have come before. A lso present value of a random walk foretells a lot about the future; its past values are of no additional use. Hence the future price of a stock is not related to what is its price today or in the past. Therefore the report that because a particular stock, or the market as a whole, has recently fallen, it is likely to undergo a "correction" upward in the near future. The strategy of dollar cost averaging and the general notion to buy more stock when the price is low is also rejected by the author. The arguments he provides are again related to a roulette wheel where he says that will anyone bet more when he is running low on balance. There is good empirical evidence for the random walk hypothesis as a description of most stock price behaviour most of the time. For over 25 years, the ec onomics and finance journals have overflowed with articles reporting unsucces sful attempts to reject the random walk hypothesis. The vast majority of econ omists find this evidence overwhelming, and among this vast majority there are some who are smart, sceptical, and not easily bamboozled.

Iowa car crop

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This chapter explains the way an economist thinks how incentives are a good way to produce new and successful theories. He explains a way to find a path between the two existing paths so that an efficient solution may be generated. His explanation is supported by these lines If you protect Detroit carmakers from competition, then you must damage Iowa farmers, because Iowa farmers are the competition. The task of producing a given fleet of cars can be allocated between Detroit and Iowa in a variety of ways. A competitive price system selects that allocation that minimizes the total production cost. It would be unnecessarily expensive to manufacture all cars in Detroit, unnecessarily expensive to grow all cars in Iowa, and unnecessarily e xpensive to use the two production processes in anything other than the natural ratio that emerges as a result of competition.

THE PITFALLS OF SCIENCE: Was Einstein Credible?

With a simple example of selection of a black sock from two different drawers the left drawer containing one-half black and the right drawer without a black sock - the author tries to explain the difference in the impact cr eated by finding evidence to support an existing fact and making unexpected predictions. He says that the psychological influence in both the cases, are different. To explain this he cites the example of Albert Einsteins Theory of relativity and its imp lications which presented the reason for the aberration in the Mercurys orbit and the bending of light in front of the whole world. Though the cause behind both the phenomenon was the same i.e. gravity, the bending of light was more sens ational than the Mercurys orbit as it was an unexpected prediction, while the la tter was an already known fact and the theory just strengthened the fact with proper evidence. Thus, he says that the novelty in prediction of scientific the ories is more important. He questions the credibility of Einstein had the facts been discovered before the theory was presented. Had the facts of bending of light been established well in advance, then Einstein would have lost the psychological impact that comes from predicting the unexpected. He says that novel prediction is a mechanism for revealing information. He says, Talented scientists are both more likely to construct true theories and more likely to be successful in their novel predi ctions.

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According to the author, theorizing first is a wasteful act as scientists would d evote resources to construct those theories which might be rejected by the facts ultimately. Rather, by gathering facts in advance, scientists have more time to produce good theories and avoid all unnecessary mi stakes. But one issue with producing good theories after gathering resources is that there is no way to di fferentiate between the good and bad theories. The optimal solution would be to distinguish the scientists into two groups, namely, theorizer -first and look-first, each one with different pay-scales. The former group has a higher pay than the latter. The work of each of the groups has both advantages in the sense that it can be a basis of deciding who are good and who are bad. Thus balanced system can be made between the two groups on the basis of novelty.

NEW, IMPROVED FOOTBALL: How Economists Go Wrong

As the title suggest, the chapter points out the mistakes committed by an eco nomist while analysing a situation, in predicting the future happening and the solution to the problem. He takes the example of an economist who tries to pr ovide solutions in two different situations. One is the example of punting in a football match and the other is to increase the consumption of corn flakes by the American citizens. In the case of analysing the trend of punting in a football match, the economist finds that punting nearly always took place on the fourth down. When asked to come up with a solution for this problem, he suggested that there could be only three downs from now on in every football match. Though this solution was gi ven after thorough analysis by simulating in the form of a computer program, it failed. This was because of the fact that the football players started punting in the third round itself. In the second case when the US government asked the economist to come up with a strategy to increase the agricultural production, he started off by collec ting data about the consumption pattern of individuals. He found that on an ave rage, a family would consume two boxes of corn flakes every month. He for ecasted that the families would continue to consume the same quantity of corn flakes despite small fluctuations in their income. Hence, he suggested the go vernment that they provide two boxes of corn flakes eve ry month to every American family. This suggestion was made on the assumption that the families would continue buying two boxes of corn flakes in spite of getting two boxes from the 14

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government. But, the outcome was totally opposite to what was expected. The families stopped purchasing corn flakes from shops and were quite contended with what was provided by the government. The economist failed again as he did not analyse the solution correctly. An economist will succeed only if he has a theory and not just statistical extrapolations. The relationship between employment and inflation also has been mi sunderstood. Inflations fool workers into accepting more jobs and employers into hiring more workers. In such a situation, the government tries to take advantage and manipulates the inflation rate. When the workers and employers notice what the government is doing, they cease being fooled and hence the correlation b etween inflation and unemployment breaks down. Had the economist predicted that in a football match t eams punt in the last round rather than telling that they punt in the fourth round; families eat two bo xes of corn flakes each month and not families buy two boxes of corn flakes ev ery month; and that unanticipated inflation puts people to work and not inf lation puts people to work, would have been more appropriate and the analysis of the situations more fruitful. The author says, An economist who understands why teams punt knows what will happen if you change the rules; an economist who understands why people buy cereal knows what will happen if you give out free corn flakes; an economist who understands why people accept certain job offers knows what will happen if you manipulate the inflation rate. To understand peoples behaviour, economists must tell stories and spend a lot of time worrying about whether their stories are plausible, and how they can tell better ones.

THE PITFALLS OF RELIGION: Why I Am Not a n Environmentalist The Science of Economist versus the religion of Ecology
The author says that the naive environmentalism of her daughter's preschool was a force-fed potpourri of myth, superstition, and ritual that has much in common with the least reputable varieties of religious Fundamentalism. He says, The antidote to bad religion is good science. The antidote to astrology is the scientific method, the antidote to naive creationism is evolutionary biology, and the antidote to naive environmentalism is economics. Economics is the science of competing preferences. Environmentalism goes beyond science when it elevates matters of preference to matters of morality. 15

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There is always a clash between what environmentalism wants and what ec onomics wants. Both try to allocate the s ame resources in two different ways. The author quotes, The hall-mark of science is a commitment to follow arguments to their logical conclusions; the hallmark of certain kinds of religion is a slick a ppeal to logic followed by a hasty retreat if it points in an unexpected direction. He argues that suggesting an actual solution to an environmental problem is a poor way to impress an environmentalist, unless that solution happens to feed his sense of moral superiority. The author claims that Economics in the narrowest sense is a science free of values. But economics is also a way of thinking, with an influence on its pract itioners that transcends the demands of formal logic. W ith the diversity of human interests as its subject matter, the discipline of economics is fertile ground for the growth of values like tolerance and pluralism. The most interesting part of this chapter is a letter written by Steven Landsburg to the teacher of his daughter making a plea for the level of tolerance that eco nomists routinely grant and what they expect in return. It is as an example of how the economic way of thinking shapes an economist's thoughts. He starts the letter with an instance in his daughters Colorado school where the teachers forgot about the religion diversity in the class and made remarks that were only appropriate for a particular religion . He wrote, We are not environmentalists. We ardently oppose environmentalists. We consider environmenta lism a form of mass hysteria akin to Islamic fundamentalism or the W ar on Drugs. We do not recycle. We teach our d aughter not to recycle. We teach her that people who try to convince her to recycle, or who try to force her to recycle, are intruding on her rights. He expresses his worry about his daughter becoming an environmentalist than bout her becoming a Christian. Finally the author ends the letter by giving his views on responsibility. He doesnt agree that with great privilege come s responsibility. He believes that responsibilities arise when one undertakes them voluntarily and also that in the absence of explicit contracts, people who lecture other people on their "responsibilities" are almost always up to no good.

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