If I wasn’t an economist, I’d almost certainly be a graphic designer; of course, for every Karim Rashid, there are a dozen guys doing work for hack, tasteless clients. So I settle, then, for making my graphs of lagged cross-correlations between GDP and a constructed measure of speculative housing starts as attractive as possible. Not quite the same, I know. In any case, there’s a film coming out this week about typography called “Helvetica”, and a preview has this fantastic quote from a German designer:  “Like people look at bottles of wine or, whatever, girls’ bottoms, I get kicks from looking at type.  It’s a little worrying, I admit.”  Gold.

Now, aesthetics haven’t really been on the mind of many people out here in Virginia this week after what happened down at V Tech.  You know, people are wondering now what should be done in response.  I don’t know that anything should be done: one very disturbed young man committed a once-in-a-decade crime.  But you certainly have heard a lot (particularly in the foreign press) about gun control in America, which is an area about which I’m conflicted.

First, any discussion of gun control ought begin with the Constitution, which I see as an absolutely inalienable force guiding American laws.  “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” is not particularly vague; it clearly means that the government, without changing the Constitution, is very constricted as to what level of gun control they can adopt.  Keeping the 2nd Amendment in mind, but assuming the Constitution could be amended, what ought be the gun law in America?

Certainly, the reason to bad guns is that there is an enormous amount of gun crime, including suicide and murder, that conceivably would be rarer and more difficult to carry out if guns were illegal.   I’m unconvinced that serious criminals would find themselves unable to carry guns of some kind, but perhaps crimes of passion, or spur-of-the-moment rash gun play could be curtailed, and that’s not a small amount of violence.

The tradeoff, though, is threefold.  One, in principle, I’m not enthusiastic about the government being able to arbitrarily ban private citizens from owning things in their own home, whether the “thing” in question is a gun, a tagless mattress, a bag of pot, or whatever.  Individuals obtain enjoyment from shooting skeet, or going to the range, or going hunting.  Firing a gun is, well, pretty cool.  So we oughtn’t entirely discount the utility people get from using firearms in legal ways.  Two, the original intent of the Second Amendment, that armed private citizens provide a check against a tyrannical government, is perhaps less relevant today when armies have nuclear bombs and fighter jets, but I don’t discount this entirely.  Though it seems that dictatorship is impossible in America, the cyclical nature of history is abundantly clear.    Last, firearms certainly do provide a deterrent for some types of crime.  As far as I know, the number of burglaries that occur while occupants are home is much, much higher in the handgun-free UK than in the US.

Now does a reduction in gun crime unquestionably outweigh those three benefits?  I’m not so sure that it does.  I’m also not really convinced that banning handguns would reduce crime that much anyway; look at the low crime rates in Switzerland and Canada, which are as heavily armed as America, or the high suicide rates in more-or-less gun-free East Asia.  Just something to think about…

Now, it’s no secret that my opinion on immigration into the United States is “the more, the merrier.” We’re really defined by the Enlightenment-era values we commonly possess than by any racial or tribal connection. We go for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, the Canadians go for “peace, order and good government.” So certainly the freedom of the individual is an important defining characteristic.

What I’m not so sure about is immigration in places like Europe. There’s something about the UK or Sweden or Holland or Moscow that is dependent on the people and their unique culture. Let me hit you with some knowledge: 20% of Muscovites are Moslem. 45% of Amsterdam residents are foreign born. Chicken tikka masala is now the most popular dish in England. When we go to Stockholm, we want to go to Stockholm, not “unnamed multicultural city” that could be LA, Toronto, Sydney, Singapore or wherever else.

But…I kind of see the same problem with that argument that I see in the “undeveloped third-world countries should stay that way because it’s more interesting to visit them.” A travelogue post by Kate Harris (more on her in a second) notes that

This kora took us through both a wilderness and a cultural landscape, and through it all I couldn’t help but marvel at how disconnected we were, they were. Not for long though, with the framework for roads being established everywhere - at least a few kilometers of the kora have been widened and paved with gravel in anticipation of building a road. While I must admit that I’m an incurable romantic, and that side of me deplores the dissolution of traditional ways of living in close communion with the land, the realist in me recognizes I’m among the minority in thinking that having to hike for six days to reach the nearest excuse for a road is pretty damn cool. It’s fine to lead a simple, defined life so long as you are content within those definitions - when such a life is sought, not imposed. The kids we met in these villages hunger for Britney and Backstreet and blue jeans, for neatly paved roads leading directly to cities, where all their dreams can surely come true. And even if I don’t share their longings, I am in no position to blame them.

(Incidentally, the girl that wrote that…whew. I saw a link to her site at a travel blog I read, and she’d just got back from a four month bike trip through Xinjiang, Tajikistan and Tibet. Mind you, this was after biking coast-to-coast here in the States, and doing research for a semester in Antarctica. She’s also pretty cute. Oh, and she’s off to Oxford, because she has a Rhodes Scholarship. I gotta get down to Carolina for these girls more often, right?)

This idea is related to what we mean by diversity. There’s diversity in place, a diversity that exists only for travelers. There’s no question that, strictly for those of us rich enough to be able to travel, this diversity is very important. Which Middle East would you rather go: the Dubai of Hiltons and Sheratons, or the Kuwait of Wilfred Thesiger (this was in 1949, not 1749!)?

The diversity we ought care about, though, is the diversity seen from the perspective of the individual.  Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, right?   In Kuwait in 1949, the potential hobbies, potential careers and potential experiences of an individual Kuwaiti were very limited.  The very same process that makes places around the world more alike has also vastly expanded the diversity of possibilities open to each individual.  Should I be worrying that Europe’s “national” cultures are disappearing, then?