Quote of the day

There is little evidence that high levels of income inequality lead down a slippery slope to the destruction of democracy and rule by the rich. The unequal political voice of the poor can be addressed only through policies that actually work to fight poverty and improve education. Income inequality is a dangerous distraction from the real problems: poverty, lack of economic opportunity, and systemic injustice.--Will Wilkinson

Two outstanding stories about New York City at City Journal

The Reinventive City by Ed Glaeser

How New York Became Safe: The Full Story by George Kelling

The possible successor to Kim Jong Il

plays hoops and went to school in Europe for a bit.

Sonia throws Sandra under the bus

The ever excellent William Jacobson reporting on the Sotomayor hearings:

Sotomayor's construct, that O'Connor could not have meant that there were gender differences in judicial decision-making, was double-talk since O'Connor's words could not possibly be construed in such a way. Sotomayor took a clear rejection of the "new feminism" by O'Connor, used those words to portray O'Connor in just the opposite manner, and then purported to salvage O'Connor's words by insisting that O'Connor could not possibly have meant what she said.

The whole explanation was a dodge. Why didn't, and doesn't, Sotomayor simply explain what Sotomayor meant, rather than twisting O'Connor's words to create a convenient foil? Or as they say in the law, a "red herring."

Nelson Lund has a nice series here.

DISCLOSURE: I am long these:

Quotes of the day

... there is no such thing as coherent, logical, orderly, causally structured human history. Instead, all there is, is a congregation of separate threads, processes, contingencies, actions, choices, ideologies, and freakish accidents that ultimately do not add up to a coherent whole.--Daniel Little

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Florence, Genoa, and Venice were the financial capitals of the Western world. When they declined, financial leadership shifted to Amsterdam, then to London, and finally to New York, whose supremacy went unchallenged from 1945 until the end of the twentieth century. ... The Founding Fathers wisely decided that the nation’s political capital should be separate from its financial capital (in both senses of the word). Now this splendid segregation has ended. If the outcome of the Chrysler bankruptcy is any indication, Washington is willing to flex its muscle in financial decisions, altering the substance of contracts freely agreed to by private parties. In so doing, the national government has undermined the certainty of the rule of law, which was the American capital market’s strongest asset.--Luigi Zingales

Don't look now, but the Red Sox may have themselves the best lefthander in baseball.--Tony Massaroti

Light blogging

No wireless access here, as far as I can tell, for the next week.

Quote of the day

Science isn’t a show of hands. Politics is.--Don Surber

The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them. --Thomas Kuhn

This is Obama's Katrina

You heard it here first (via Don Surber).

I don't think this will hurt Obama in 2009. But if employment doesn't improve by 2011, yes, reelection may be difficult.

Trading Palin

Keith Thomson's take here (via Chris Masse).

Jesse Livermore's take here.

Camille Pagila's take here.

Healthcare quotes of the day

Because so many young leftists do not seem to know their own history, they are doomed to repeat it. Literally. They make arguments that were common in socialist circles a century and a half ago--for the popular version, try Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. Those arguments utterly failed to rescue other nationalized markets.--Megan McArdle

Of course some of the people covered by the [healthcare] mandate would otherwise end up showing up at emergency rooms. Treating them that way would get tacked on to my medical bills, one way or another. With a mandate they are no longer my financial headache. With this new change, who's better off? Me. Who's worse off? The previously uninsured poor person. You might say: "We are covering more people, at a lower price, than we had thought possible." That sounds like a kind of triumph. But if you cut through to the actual analysis, your paternalism has to be a lot stronger than your egalitarianism for you to support this kind of measure.--Tyler Cowen

Look at that real-life example of Congress's inability to run its own cafeteria. List for us all the specific examples of "government failure" that contributed to and caused this inability -- you know, like in an exam question. Then tell us how and why these very examples of "government failure" won't apply to the government's management of national health care to create the exact same screw-ups on a trillion-dollar rather than cafeteria scale. Be specific.--Jim Glass

Both the private health insurance industry and the music industry are operating business models that to me appear to be unsustainable and anachronistic. The music industry developed in a world of vinyl records. Our health insurance industry and Medicare developed in an environment in which most major diseases were untreatable and the most exotic diagnostic tool was the X-ray. Now, we do 50 million CT scans and 25 million MRIs per year. Now, people with cancer or heart disease expect to survive. As weekend athletes, we expect our knees, shoulders, and hips to be reconstructed by the same technologies that keep Tiger and A-Rod playing. I do not think we know for sure what a sustainable music industry will look like ten years from now. Similarly, I do not think we know what a sustainable health insurance industry will look like ten years from now. The one thing I can predict is that because government will be less involved with the music industry, over the next ten years the music industry will evolve more rapidly than health insurance. We claim to want reform, but in fact we are terrified of change.--Arnold Kling

What America is best at is delivering a lot of complicated care in extremis, and "quality of life" treatments. What European countries are best at is delivering a lot of ordinary care for the sorts of things that afflict people from 0-50, which is why most of the Europhile journalists writing about Europe genuinely have very good experiences to report. I'd rather be here to have a hip replacement, but I might rather be in the Netherlands to have a baby.--Megan McArdle

Cartoon of the day

Link here. Holman Jenkins had made the similar point last year, here.

Enhancing the case for "uncorporations"

Larry Ribstein is an extraordinary blogger and law professor. I've been reading him for a few years now, and one of his more radical (and radical is sometimes good) ideas is that "uncorporations"--such as partnerships and hedge funds--are far superior to corporations in performance and accountability.

He extends this principle in the context of the recent Michael Lewis article in Vanity Fair about AIG:

Hedge funds have to “schlep around and raise money all the time” because their investors, unlike corporate shareholders, do not give them permanent capital. While corporate shareholders can sell their shares to other investors at current market prices, sale prices are discounted by the market’s evaluation of current management. Hedge fund investors, by contrast, have rights to get their money back from the company.

In other words, it’s the “capital lock-in” of the corporate structure – which some commentators have credited for the rise of modern capitalism, that is to some extent responsible for its recent fall. For better or worse, corporate cash is stuck for all time, as the AIG ad suggests.

So what should happen now? Should all financial institutions be uncorporations (or owned by the government)? No, but markets have now learned more about the risks of having traditional corporations manage complex financial instruments. And, yes, markets do learn. Consider why, as Lewis observed, hedge funds have to post collateral for trades with their brokers: because they did learn a lesson from Long Term Capital Management.

Of course a new round of SOX-like financial regulation is likely to short-circuit that learning process. But that's another story.

Graph of the day

Link here.

Quotes of the day

Do I belong in an insane asylum? Or should I be on the FOMC (with Hall, Thompson and Svensson?) Damned if I know. This blog is either grossly overrated or grossly underrated, but it ain’t average.--Scott Sumner

People low in Stability, on the other hand, habitually blow minor problems out of proportion. Even when they live in First World countries, they manage to convince themselves that the sky is falling. Their typically neurotic response is to beg for Big Brother to save them from their largely imaginary problems. When government solutions don't work out, they misinterpret it as further proof that life is hopeless - not that their "solutions" were ill-conceived.--Bryan Caplan

Slavery has never had a very good record of producing wealth. Think about it. Slavery was all over the South. Buying into the reparations nonsense, you'd have to conclude that the antebellum South was rich and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth of the matter is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our country were places where slavery flourished: Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia while the richest states and regions were those where slavery was absent: Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts. --Walter Williams

From 2003 to 2008,the aggregate gross domestic product (GDP), in constant, chained 2000 dollars, for the states with the lowest share of workers under union monopoly control increased by a healthy 17.3%. In these 10 states, as of 2003 4.7% or less of private employees were forced to accept a union as their monopolybargaining agent. Meanwhile, the real GDP of the country as a whole grew by just 12.7%. And in the 10 states with the highest private-sector unionization, aggregate output grew by just 9.9%.--Mark Mix

Note to Greg Mankiw: when Larry [Summers] comes back to Harvard, you should invite him to take ec 10. He seems to have no concept of how the multiplier is supposed to work.--Arnold Kling

A question for Paul Krugman and other stimulus proponents: would you rather have a second stimulus, or health care? I know that in an ideal universe you wouldn't have to choose, but assume that the worrywarts are right, and you do. Which should Obama get done?--Megan McArdle

On Sept. 26, 2008, Barack Obama knocked John McCain for singing, “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.” Now Vice President Joe Biden told Israel, go ahead and bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.--Don Surber

Lack of war is a major reason for Sweden's remarkable economic advance. In a matter of 100 years it moved from being one of the poorest parts of Europe with a massive exodus of near-starving people to America to being one of the two richest countries in Europe (the other was Switzerland.) It has produced more world-class industrial giants than any other country of its size. (At 9m, its population is less than that of the state of Michigan.)--Jonathan Power

I've heard it said that "socialism is the religion of the Swedes." This is not quite correct, though it hints at an important truth. I think of "being Swedish" as the religion of the Swedes. And the more cosmopolitan they behave, the more they are partaking in this religion; don't be fooled! This "being Swedish" business is a wonderful religion for Sweden. It is not a good or possible religion for most of the rest of the world. And it is not a religion to which I have been or could be invited.--Tyler Cowen

If you define sexual freedom as being able to do whatever you want with whomever you please, then (except in very rare cases of perfect compatibility with one's partner at every moment) one man's freedom is another woman's compulsion. Women in traditional harem cultures languished in a condition of de facto slavery, where they had no right to determine anything about their own lives, let alone their sexual partners and activities. Their very survival was predicated on pleasing men. They were treated for the most part as animate commodities, like livestock, to be bought, sold and discarded at will.--Laura Miller

If the latest federal tax legislation raises taxes on households earning over $200,000

will President Obama veto it, in accordance with his campaign promises?

That creative destruction thing

is more destructive than the promises of retraining in advertisements lets on.

Alex Tabarrok's nice definition of Deadweight Loss

... suppose that we documented exactly how everyone spent their yearly income. Now we tax everyone 100 percent and provide them with exactly what they were buying before. Nothing changes, right? Wrong. At 100 percent tax there is no longer any incentive to work - thus no one works and nothing is provided. Everything changes.

Blogging will be light this week

Lots going on. Major work being done in the apartment, and a couple of major presentations over the weekend.

Quotes of the day

The incentive system at A.I.G. F.P., created in the mid-1990s, wasn’t the short-term-oriented racket that helped doom the Wall Street investment bank as we knew it. It was the very system that U.S. Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, among others, had proposed as a solution to the problem of Wall Street pay.--Michael Lewis

I can do this and probably not make an ass of myself. But I can do nothing and not make an ass of myself. I’ll stick with that.--Jake DeSantis

If unpredictability, incalculable details, and unintended consequences threaten to make a mess of interventions abroad, surely the same stubborn aspects of reality threaten to make a mess of centralized, genius-planned interventions on the home front such as those that aim to supply universal health care and to create a "green economy."--Don Boudreaux

Palin is known for hunting moose. McNamara is known as the architect of the Vietnam War. The op-ed writers generally take a more respectful tone toward McNamara. ... I worry that today's equivalent of Robert McNamara is Peter Orszag, who I fear is poised to do for our health care system what McNamara did for Vietnam.--Arnold Kling

Rather, smart socialists thought that they could overcome these [incentive] problems with a combination of status competitions (Hero of the Soviet Union, Second Class) and massive efficiencies gained by wringing all that fragmented, wasteful competition out of the system. Economists who would be ashamed to make these sorts of arguments about Proctor and Gamble or the used car market suddenly start parroting these things as if they hadn't been thoroughly discredited by the last seventy years.--Megan McArdle

Expressing administrative costs as a percentage of total costs makes Medicare's administrative costs appear lower not because Medicare is necessarily more efficient but merely because its administrative costs are spread over a larger base of actual health care costs.--Robert Book

Rather, private insurers have costs that Medicare doesn't have within the agency. Private insurers bill. Medicare does too, but the IRS has its own budget--hell, its own courts--which don't show up on Medicare's balance sheet. Private insurers negotiate with suppliers. Medicare does too, but most of the negotiation takes place between lobbyists and Congressmen who again, do not show up on Medicare's balance sheet. The Federal government has all sorts of these little items which relieve government agencies of reporting certain costs. But the costs remain.--Megan McArdle

When I've heard [President Obama] talk about economic issues--with the exception of NAFTA, where I just hope he doesn't believe what he says--he seems intelligent and serious. I wouldn't say I'm bowled over by the brilliance of anything I've heard, but everything has a kind of thoughtfulness to it that's sort of impressive.--Larry Summers

If Summers put these sentences into a letter of recommendation for a job market candidate, he probably couldn't get an interview, much less a job.--Bryan Caplan

I can see why the left would not want me to be able to experiment with a non-statist society. From their point of view, it would be immoral for me to secede from their utopia.--Arnold Kling

I suspect Secretary Geithner is sleeping well these days

My long is underwater:

What each NFL Team spent, per win

here (via Mike Reiss). Best and the worst:

Team		Wins		Committed Cash		Cost Per Win
1.) Patriots		63		512.31M		8.14 M
2.) Colts		63		532.77 M		8.44 M
3.) Chargers		54		485.46 M		8.99 M
30.) 49ers		25		486. 40 M		19.45 M
31.) Lions		21		505.04 M		24.04 M
32.) Raiders		20		513.21 M		25.66 M

Quotes of the day

The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools.-- Herbert Spencer

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money.--Margaret Thatcher

If you tax carbon, you tax fertilizer and pesticides. If you tax these things, you tax food, and by no small amount. A $15/ton CO2 tax would increase fertilizer production costs directly by about $60/ton, with the cap-and-trade bill’s increased transport costs inflating the burden still more. That’s enough to make many farmers use less fertilizer, and less fertilizer means less food. To get a sense of what it would mean for farmers to abandon fertilizer, it is only necessary to go to the supermarket and compare the price of the “organic” produce, grown without chemical fertilizer, to the regular produce, which, while just as nutritious, typically costs less than half as much. It is one thing for wealthy organic food buffs to voluntarily pay such high prices for their food — that is their right. But to impose such costs for basic groceries on everyone else, and particularly the poor, as part of a largely symbolic effort to try to change the weather, is self-indulgent in the extreme.--Robert Zubrin

So the marines in Iraq called these all-female teams (3-5 women) Lionesses. Again, no shortage of volunteers, as female marines, even more than their sisters in the army, were eager to get into the fight. But that's not what the lioness teams were created for. What the marines had also noticed was that the female marines tended to get useful information out of the women they searched. Iraqi women were surprised, and often awed, when they encountered these female soldiers and marines. The awe often turned into cooperation.--Strategy Page

Publicly, the politicians are split as to why the Fed irritates them. But I suspect a hidden agenda: politicians wish they had more control over the Fed -- but they don't, and that's why they were acting like spoiled kids last Thursday. Bernanke handled his grilling with admirable composure, and as I watched a recording of the session, I thanked my lucky stars that our country is, so far, still following Alexander Hamilton's advice to be sure that control of the central bank is kept AWAY from the politicians. If that condition changed and our esteemed politicians somehow gained a much larger measure of control over monetary policy, I'd have to triple or quadruple the odds of a deflationary depression or of high inflation — or both of those disasters taking turns in a perpetual cycle.--Skeptical Optimist

Political rivalries there are honestly more like sports rivalries than anything else, deeply felt but not deeply thought. It allows the illusion of flourishing, passionate democracy while concentrating actual power in the hands of a few wealthy familes. Honestly, I didn't see much difference between modern Honduras and the plantation system at higher levels of political organization.--Jesse Livermore

Some economists are much more polite

and less fallacious than others.

How China's preference for sons affects America's ability to borrow

here (via Freakonomics):

Chinese parents’ preference for sons has given rise to a brewing social problem. With the advent of inexpensive ultrasounds, far more boys than girls are born in China – which has in turn given rise to a growing number of rootless, unmarried men.

The “missing women” problem may have also contributed to the U.S. housing and credit bubbles, new research suggests.

...

One possible reason for the jump in savings: The dearth of women is making China’s marriage market extremely competitive, and families with boys are accumulating wealth to make their sons more attractive matches.

In a paper recently posted to the National Bureau of Economic Research’s website, economists Shan-Jin Wei, at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Business, and Xiaobo Zhangk, at the International Food Policy offer evidence why this might be so. They find that in areas where the male-to-female sex for young Chinese is high, savings rates are higher, too. And they find that households with sons save more in high male-to-sex ratio regions.

If this is true, then when the majority of the these boys are married off, the in-laws receiving these dowries may be less apt to save, and US borrowing costs could zoom.

Quote of the day

The whole point about Ponzi schemes is that there is not enough money to make anybody whole — they were robbed, pure and simple, and the government is not in the business of reimbursing for robberies. Not even when the cops stumble across the robbers and then mistakenly let them go.--Joe Nocera

When you have neither science nor consensus to support your mythology

what's left to do:

The number of skeptics, far from shrinking, is swelling. Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe now counts more than 700 scientists who disagree with the U.N. -- 13 times the number who authored the U.N.'s 2007 climate summary for policymakers. Joanne Simpson, the world's first woman to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology, expressed relief upon her retirement last year that she was finally free to speak "frankly" of her nonbelief. Dr. Kiminori Itoh, a Japanese environmental physical chemist who contributed to a U.N. climate report, dubs man-made warming "the worst scientific scandal in history." Norway's Ivar Giaever, Nobel Prize winner for physics, decries it as the "new religion." A group of 54 noted physicists, led by Princeton's Will Happer, is demanding the American Physical Society revise its position that the science is settled. (Both Nature and Science magazines have refused to run the physicists' open letter.)

The collapse of the "consensus" has been driven by reality. The inconvenient truth is that the earth's temperatures have flat-lined since 2001, despite growing concentrations of C02. Peer-reviewed research has debunked doomsday scenarios about the polar ice caps, hurricanes, malaria, extinctions, rising oceans. A global financial crisis has politicians taking a harder look at the science that would require them to hamstring their economies to rein in carbon.

DISCLOSURE: I am short this contract.

If it doesn't work well for cancer research

it may not work well for other research, either.

Arnold Kling spanks President Obama pretty good

on healthcare and doublespeak:

There is a disconnect in the Obama administration’s rhetoric on health care. On the one hand, the administration points out that our current health care financing system, particularly for government-funded programs, is unsustainable. This suggests an urgent need for major reform.

On the other hand, the administration is quick to reassure Americans that they will be able to keep the same insurance and maintain the same relationships that they have with their doctors now. As individuals, most Americans are happy with the status quo, and the Obama administration does not want to appear to threaten their satisfaction.

The administration is trying to position Obamacare as solving problems in our health care system that are real and fundamental while allowing individuals to continue with business as usual. The administration has decided that the best way to appeal to voters is to offer hope without change.

Bryan Caplan spanks Paul Krugman

pretty good on healthcare and market principles.

UPDATE: Bryan also thinks Fed Chair Bernanke should be canned. Is this what a rational voter would think?

UPDATE: Greg Mankiw lays on some gentle slaps of his own:

The Obama administration says it wants a public insurance plan that will compete on a level playing field with private plans (that is, without taxpayer subsidies). Is there any cogent economic analysis that suggests that such a policy addresses problems of adverse selection and moral hazard? None that I know. If it has to stand on its own financially, the public plan has no special advantage in addressing these issues.
...
On the issue of tone, I again think I understand Paul's point of view. He likely believes that civility is overrated. He seems to think that in the blogosphere, and perhaps in the public debate more generally, you score points simply by insulting your intellectual adversaries. Sadly, I am afraid he may be right.

The Merrill/Bank of America material adverse clause

was actually airtight and not invokable by Lewis, so reports Derek Thompson using a source from the Merrill camp. Interesting stuff.

Quotes of the day

Here is a handy-dandy way to determine whether the failure to order some exam or treatment constitutes rationing: If the patient were the president, would he get it? If he'd get it and you wouldn't, it's rationing.--Michael Kinsley

The pattern that I see [from the Obama administration] is one of following the path of least political resistance, even if it means failing to make any significant contribution to solving the actual public policy problem. I cannot say that I am completely shocked by this. It is sort of Public Choice 101. But there are a lot of bright, highly-educated people in the Obama Administration who, if they were to step back and evaluate what is happening, would see the pattern for what it is. They believe that they inherited such bad policies that they could not possibly do worse. That belief is starting to look shaky.--Arnold Kling

It is one thing to have different views from those of the Fed Chair on particular decisions that have been made-- I certainly have plenty of areas of disagreement of my own. But it is another matter to question Bernanke's intellect or personal integrity. As someone who's known him for 25 years, I would place him above 99.9% of those recently in power in Washington on the integrity dimension, not to mention IQ. His actions over the past two years have been guided by one and only one motive, that being to minimize the harm caused to ordinary people by the financial turmoil. Whether you agree or disagree with all the steps he's taken, let's start with an understanding that that's been his overriding goal. These interrogations reveal more about those doing the grilling than they reveal about Bernanke. I see this as pure political theater, and I don't like it. If Congress wants to explore more usefully the wisdom and motives behind some of the decisions that have been made, it might want to investigate why some legislators are now pushing for Fannie and Freddie to guarantee a riskier category of mortgage condo loans.--James Hamilton

Some hope for restoring faith in the effectiveness of democracy has come from the idea that while voters may not be all that big on ideas and words, they may be able to judge the competence of politicians.The idea is that they know enough to tell when incumbents are doing a good job by not screwing things up and throwing out those who are. Unfortunately, effectively judging the competence of politicians requires citizens to be able to tell the difference between conditions caused by incumbents' policies and those that merely happened to occur on their watch without any such causal connections. In short, voters may be fooled by randomness into thinking that skillful politicians are improving things rather than simply enjoying lucky timing.--John Carney

... growth isn't a mystery. By and large, we know what works and what doesn't. Corruption doesn't work well, property rights do. Globalization is working everywhere it is allowed. Protectionism is a disaster, in the long term and usually before. Democracy, unfortunately, seems insignificant in promoting growth, but free markets are essential.--Bryan Caplan

Economic laws can either enhance or undermine the vibrancy of an economy, helping or hurting individual incentives and the flow of creative ideas. Policymakers everywhere need to keep this in mind. There are $100 bills on sidewalks all across the world. What matters is whether people have the incentive to pick them up.--Brian Wesbury

Transformers 2 more than $200 million in opening. Incredible somebody finally found a way to make money using American cars.--Jimmy Fallon

Just how bad is the new Cap and Tax bill? Greenpeace is against it.--Stephen Green

The biggest doozy in the CBO analysis was its extraordinary decision to look only at the day-to-day costs of operating a trading program, rather than the wider consequences energy restriction would have on the economy. The CBO acknowledges this in a footnote: "The resource cost does not indicate the potential decrease in gross domestic product (GDP) that could result from the cap."--WSJ Editorial Board

The [Community Reinvestment Act] did not singlehandedly cause the meltdown. But the relaxation of credit standards that allowed the meltdown did start, as far as I can tell, with the CRA. And perhaps more importantly, the CRA, and the mentality behind the CRA, made regulators extremely unwilling to intervene. Everyone wanted to make credit more widely available to the poor. Well, the poor aren't good lending risks. So if you want to give them access to credit, you need to relax your lending standards. Any attempt to tighten lending standards on the part of the government would have resulted in a massive contraction in the credit available to core Democratic constituencies. Meanwhile, the Republicans were hoping that turning poor people into homeowners would make them more Republican.--Megan McArdle

In any case, the biggest danger of a Consumer Financial Protection Agency is not that it will artificially limit risk-taking. Rather, it’s that giving products a government imprimatur can make people feel safer than they really are. (The economist Kip Viscusi has termed this type of problem “the lulling effect.”) Regulation can help protect people from fraud and trickery, but finance will still be a place where ill-informed or reckless decisions can wreak havoc on people’s lives. A consumer-finance agency is a good thing, but it would do well to teach consumers a simple lesson: if you don’t understand the deal you’re making, don’t make it.--James Surowiecki

He thought he could dodge his way through life, but he couldn’t dodge death. ... I was tremendouly upset when he died. You’re stuck with friends after a while, and I realised he was part of me.--Martin Amis

[Socrates] said that death is one of two possibilities. Either it is a long dreamless sleep and really rather pleasant, or it is a passage to another place, namely Hades, and there we’ll be able to hang out with Homer, Hesiod and rest of the Greek heroes, which sounds great. Socrates’ point is that we do not know whether death is the end or some sort of continuation. He concludes by saying only God knows the answer to this question. Of course, this makes it a little tricky if you don’t, like me, have the good fortune to believe in God.--Simon Critchley