Quotes of the week

There’s such a direct correlation between how much money you have and what you’re able to do or not do with your budget parameters. We’re better off as indie filmmakers studying South Korean filmmakers or Eastern European filmmakers — artists who have to do a lot with little. I admire the aesthetic of, say, the Duplass Brothers’ movies, but there are ways to bring bigger production value to indie movies without having gobs of money.--Steve Taylor

I fear that in the current climate the goal of "women's rights," with the compliance of politically motivated government policy and the tacit complicity of college administrators, runs the risk of grounding our most cherished institutions in a veritable snake pit of injustice—not unlike the very injustices the movement itself has for so long sought to correct. Unbridled feminist orthodoxy is no more the answer than are attitudes and policies that victimize the victim.--Judith Grossman

There is one thing present: That powerful human need to help. That is our hope -- in Boston, in Newtown, in Oklahoma City, in Columbine. People run toward the danger. People apply pressure to stop the bleeding. People send money they need. People pray for men and women and children they never met. People do stop attacks before they unleash and notice bombs before they go off.
...
Yes, this is our hope. All through the night, people in Boston wrote and talked about the terror and the pain, of course, but what was so striking is that they also wrote and talked about small kindnesses and large ones. They wrote and talked about the spirit of their city, and how it can never be broken. It was haunting and beautiful. And it was deeply true. This is something we hold on to in the moments of darkness.--Joe Posnanski


Rest in Peace Pat Summerall. You let sports breathe. You let Madden talk. And in an age where we so often use too many words to say too little, you let our imaginations fill in the gap.--Joe Posnanski

Ross Douthat on "Journalists leading the conversation"

Consider, for instance, the Washington press’s tendency toward what critics have dubbed “bipartisanthink” — in which journalists fetishize centrism and deal making, and assume that the best of all possible legislation, regardless of its actual content, is the kind that has both parties’ fingerprints on it. By conflating the march of progress with the march of legislation through Congress, bipartisanthink allows journalists to take sides and root for particular outcomes without having to explicitly choose sides.
...

 “Leading the conversation” is how you end up with the major Sunday shows somehow neglecting to invite a single anti-amnesty politician on a weekend dominated by the immigration debate. It’s how you end up with officially nonideological anchors and journalists lecturing social conservatives for being out of step with modern values. And it’s how you end up with a press corps that went all-in for the supposed “war on women” having to be shamed and harassed — by two writers in particular, Kirsten Powers in USA Today and Mollie Ziegler Hemingway of GetReligion — into paying attention to the grisly case of a Philadelphia doctor whose methods of late-term abortion included snipping the spines of neonates after they were delivered.

As the last example suggests, the problem here isn’t that American journalists are too quick to go on crusades. Rather, it’s that the press’s ideological blinders limit the kinds of crusades mainstream outlets are willing to entertain, and the formal commitment to neutrality encourages self-deception about what counts as crusading.

Read the whole thing. 

James Taranto on nature and nurture

He writes:

Here's our hypothesis to explain the Hart-Risley findings [on academic success in young children]: The variables they studied--again, the parents' loquaciousness and the children's IQ and school performance--were all effects. The main causal factor was something the researchers apparently didn't think to measure: parental IQ.

Steven Pinker, the Harvard cognitive psychologist, seems to be thinking along similar lines. This morning in response to the Rosenberg post he tweeted: "The Blank Slate lives: Yet another story on parent-child correlations that dares not mention the g-word."

"The g-word" is "genetics," and "the Blank Slate" refers to the view that human beings are essentially fungible--that all differences between individuals and groups, or at least all those that have important social consequences, are the product of nurture rather than nature. It follows from this view that inequalities between individuals or groups can be eliminated by social engineering--by changing the environment in which individuals develop.

Race bias? Nahhh

Chuck Culpepper has it.

What’s interesting is the fact that somehow, folks were missing [Jeremy Lin's basketball talents] in practice, and that’s what’s interesting, because you’ve got to assume that during scrimmages, he was running that pick-and-roll pretty well ... --President Obama

And one of the better SNL cold opens:

Quotes of the week

As soon as you crack your knuckles and open up a comments page, you just canceled your subscription to being a good person.--Louie C.K.

Manipulated by the media, voting their pocketbooks, supporting sectional interests or monofocal issues, voters in America and other Western democracies do not show very great signs of transcendent wisdom. Worse, we labor under the delusion (indeed, we foster the delusion) that somehow things will be all right provided lots of people vote. Our system of government is our new Tower of Babel: it is supposed to make us impregnable. The Soviet empire totters; other nations crumble into the dust, Balkanized, destroyed by civil war, tribal genocide, grinding poverty, endemic corruption, Marxist or some other ideology. Not us. We belong to a democracy, “rule by the people.”--Don Carson

Monetarism is not — nor did it appear to policy makers in the 1970s to be — a laissez-faire program.  Rather, it is a program for government control of economic volatility.--Michael Clune

Devote your life to something you love — not like, but love.--Gene Siskel

Easter weekend quotes

... we note that the founder of Christianity was a rule breaker. There wasn’t a PC bone in his body. He hung out with prostitutes, thieves, terrorists and collaborators with Rome.  He was notorious for shoving the rulebook aside when it got in love’s way.--Walter Russell Mead

People moving to the city have been illogical risk takers from the beginning. and the key is probably they like the sexual or mating opportunities inherent in large groups. Playing to that angle would bring in hipsters and gays. As to whether that's the key to the health of cities or our nation, I doubt it, but it won't hurt, especially because one of the best ways of making a city fun to go out in is that it's safe for young women.--Eric Falkenstein

The longer the road from sexual maturity to marriage, the more complicated the underlying cost-benefit calculus in any given relationship becomes, and the more difficult it becomes for people with fewer resources to figure out the wisest course to take. So while the new romantic landscape doesn’t offer automatic benefits to the upper class and automatic costs to everyone else, it does create a situation where the people who need the least help figuring out the wisest life course have multiple clear paths to take, and the people who would most benefit from a simple map to responsible adulthood can easily end up in a maze instead.--Ross Douthat

... all economists are, definitionally, very good at college.  Not all economists are good at marriage.  Saying that more people should go to college will make 0% of your colleagues feel bad.  Saying that more people should get married and stay married will make a significant fraction of your colleagues feel bad.  And in general, most people have an aversion to topics which are likely to trigger a personal grudge in a coworker.--Megan McArdle

History scorns the people who lived outside Auschwitz and Treblinka, with their weak protests of ignorance. How will history treat us, I wonder?--Tony Woodlief

My homeowner insurance doesn't cover the cost when my gutters need cleaning, and my car insurance doesn't cover the cost when I need to fill the tank with gas. Instead, the policies cover only catastrophic events, like my house burning down or a major accident. Now that the Obama administration has fixed the health insurance system, I trust they will soon move on to solve these other problems.--Greg Mankiw

I wonder if [Paul Krugman] (and all the others who are pushing for more controls) are not having a “Smoot-Hawley Moment”. In 1929 tariffs and other restrictions on trade were established. A global depression followed. In 2013 the tariffs and restrictions are on money, not goods. But if the result of those controls is a reduction (or even stability) of the external debt numbers, then the global economies will fall with it.--Bruce Krasting

Military and economic catastrophes are, by their nature, unpredictable. While we can’t plan on one, prudence requires that we take their possibility into account. In normal times, when we are lucky enough to enjoy peace and prosperity, the debt-to-G.D.P. ratio shouldn’t just be stable; it should be falling. That has generally been the case throughout our history, and it should become the case again as we look forward.   The bottom line is that President Obama is right that sustainability is a reasonable benchmark for evaluating long-run fiscal policy. But the standard he applies when evaluating it appears too easy. It will leave us too vulnerable when the next catastrophe strikes.--Greg Mankiw

Bitcoin isn’t tied to any commodity—besides trust. As a statement on the global economy, Bitcoin is hilarious. As a currency for the disenfranchised and distrustful, it’s as serious as can be.--Paul Ford

... a firm basis for religious freedom would be found in the Bible, supremely in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. "I did not come to judge the world," Jesus told his followers, "but to save it." Here is an Easter story—a message of the grace of God toward every human soul—for believers and doubters alike.--Joseph Loconte

Quotes of the day

Economics evolved as a more moral and more egalitarian approach to policy than prevailed in its surrounding milieu. Let’s cherish and extend that heritage. The real contributions of economics to human welfare might turn out to be very different from what most people — even most economists — expect. --Tyler Cowen

In the longer run, the solution to the economic plight of high school dropouts and other low skilled persons is, as I have argued in previous blog posts, to ease the obstacles to boys and girls from poorer backgrounds that prevent them from finishing high school and getting additional training after high school, such as learning to drive trucks or work with computers. In the shorter run, it would be desirable to replace the welfare benefits that discourages many low skilled individuals from working with an expanded earned income tax credit that does the opposite and encourages them to work.--Gary Becker

In Ms. Sandberg's ideal world, "half our institutions are run by women and half our homes are run by men." Until this utopia comes to pass, it might be wise to take another look at "society." Society is, after all, a fancy word for other people. And what is society actually telling women these days? It is telling them that they ought to go out and earn a string of degrees qualifying them for hard-charging careers that the majority of them eventually discover that they don't actually want. As a result, many of them quietly cut back their hours and do what they actually want to do and do very well: make homes for their families. Sheryl Sandberg isn't one of them, and more power to her. But she is likely to find that nagging men and women to change their natures is a more daunting task than anything she does at her day job.--Charlotte Allen

Because pursuit of the truth is often irrelevant in evolutionary competition, humans have an evolved tendency to hold self-favoring priors and self-deceive about the existence of these priors in ourselves, even though we frequently observe them in others.--Eli Dourado

The minimum wage is far from the most harmful regulation on the books.  Why then do I make such a big deal about it?  Because it is a symbol of larger evils.
...
From the standpoint of public policy, the minimum wage is a symbol of the view that "feel-good" policies are viable solutions to social ills: "Workers aren't paid enough?  Pass a law so employers have to pay them more.  Problem solved."  From the standpoint of social science, the minimum wage is a symbol of the myopic view that you can become an expert on X by reading nothing but the leading research that explicitly addresses X: "Does the minimum wage reduce employment?  Read the top papers on the minimum wage.  Problem solved."
...
We need to get rid of the minimum wage.  But that's only a first step.  Our ultimate goal should be to get rid of the errors that the minimum wage has come to represent.--Bryan Caplan

Quotes of the day

We're still building, then burning down love.--U2

Why is productivity important?--zeroHedge

The Teletubbies will begin airing in Burma in January. Call me crazy, but this does not seem like a great way to incentivize other authoritarian regimes to liberalize.--Katie Cronin-Furman

... in 2011, there were 323 murders committed with a rifle but 496 murders committed with hammers and clubs. --Awr Hawkins

When a judge describes his own conclusion of law as “surely” correct, but then offers no legal authority to back it up, the validity of the judge’s conclusion is almost always very much in doubt.--Orin Kerr

Quotes for life

The ONLY disability in life is a bad attitude.--Matthew Jeffers via Peter King

Totalitarianism didn’t come quickly, it took 5 years from 1938 until 1943, to realize full dictatorship in Austria. Had it happened overnight, my countrymen would have fought to the last breath. Instead, we had creeping gradualism. Now, our only weapons were broom handles. The whole idea sounds almost unbelievable that the state, little by little eroded our freedom.--Kitty Werthmann 

When we try to eliminate bad things via more laws and top-down policies, it just creates a more capricious and unjust world. The solution is not more laws, but fewer. --Eric Falkenstein

Quotes of the day

... common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down in the mind before you reach eighteen.--Albert Einstein

Yeah, [life before winning a record lottery jackpot] was a lot easier then.--Jack Whittaker

The comfortable society is not necessarily the good society, and while a future that promises mass idleness and mass isolation might be more stable than demographic pessimists suspect, that doesn’t make it a future where I’d particularly want to live, let alone one I’d feel happy bequeathing to my daughters and generations after them.--Ross Douthat

Five years ago, the United States' budget deficit equaled 1.5 percent of GDP and its national debt stood at 36 percent of GDP. This year, the deficit will exceed $1 trillion, or seven percent of U.S. GDP. Over the same period, the debt ratio has doubled to 73 percent of GDP. --Martin Feldstein

Quotes of the day

Showtime does not exist to make shows you want to buy on iTunes; it makes shows you want to watch in order to get you to buy a subcription to Showtime.--Megan McArdle

 A ... key to understanding [Nassim] Taleb is that he has a French post-modern tendency to write to impress rather than explain. He provides hundreds of loosely related anecdotes, reminding me of the Talmud quote that 'when a debater’s point is not impressive, he brings forth many arguments.'--Eric Falkenstein

Most of the D.C. boom is from lobbyists and PR people, and others who are retained to influence what the government does. It's a cold calculation: You're likely to get a much better return from an investment of $1 million on lobbying than on a similar investment in, say, a new factory or better worker training. So Washington gets fat, and it does so on money taken from the rest of the country: Either directly, in the form of taxes, or indirectly in the form of money that otherwise would have gone to that factory or training program.--Glenn Reynolds

... prior to 1993 Asian enrollment had often changed quite substantially from year to year. It is interesting to note that this exactly replicates the historical pattern observed by Karabel, in which Jewish enrollment rose very rapidly, leading to imposition of an informal quota system, after which the number of Jews fell substantially, and thereafter remained roughly constant for decades. On the face of it, ethnic enrollment levels which widely diverge from academic performance data or application rates and which remain remarkably static over time provide obvious circumstantial evidence for at least a de facto ethnic quota system.--Ron Unz

You have the life that has unfolded for you, and I the life that has unfolded for me, and all of us have a very simple and terrifying responsibility, which is simply to answer the question, as Victor Frankl would say, that our lives are asking us.--Tony Woodlief

Tony Woodlief has a point

Once people get worked into a frenzy about the goodness of their leader—be he a former oil man who promises to whip the daylights out of the terrorists, or a former community organizer who promises free medical care—they get impatient with people who question their man, and impatient with restraints on his power.

Thus do so-called conservatives back radical expansions of federal power in wars against drugs and terrorists, and thus do so-called liberals restrict the meaning of the word “choice” to the extraction of unwanted fetuses. We’ll do so much good for you, each tribe tells us, if we can just have some running room.

To which the Founders would reply: we shot and bombed and bayoneted a whole pile of guys for talking that way.

Read the whole thing here.

NAACP leadership finally supporting Dubya

... Washington Bureau director of the NAACP Hilary Shelton sees it differently. Mr. Shelton says the lower standards for minorities reflect what President George W. Bush once dubbed the "soft bigotry of low expectations": "It's, what do they say? 'Soft bigotry of low expectations," said Shelton. "They're really letting the educators off the hook playing it this way. We have to challenge our educators to meet the standards of every child."

Source here, via Ed Driscoll.

Quotes of the day

Who would have thought that Hollywood environmentalists would find themselves aligned with Persian Gulf oil barons? --John Carney

The [Iranian] Fars News Agency, which is close to Iran’s powerful Republican Guard Corps, posted its version of the report on its English-language Web site under the same headline used by The Onion for the original four days earlier: “Gallup Poll: Rural Whites Prefer Ahmadinejad To Obama.”--Robert Mackey

[Warren Buffett] thinks of cash as a call option with no expiration date, an option on every asset class, with no strike price.--Alice Schroeder

Quotes of the day

... if a male writer wanted to “analyze” gender differences by using a combination of misleading statistics about women, unscientific snapshots of particular men who seem like real go-getters, and musings about how men are adaptive and resilient and possess greater vision, he’d rightly get slapped down for shoddy thinking and poor journalism. What say in the interest of gender equality we hold Rosin to the same standard?--Tony Woodlief

Medical care is famously immune to the usual market incentives; the patient has little reason to make a cost-benefit tradeoff. Doctors and hospitals hardly do either; indeed the opposite seems to be the case. Matters are made all the worse, ironically, by the continual improvements in medicine – improvements which often treat what was previously untreatable, and which improve on existing treatments but at a higher cost.--Rick Brookstaber

I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing. The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best ideas look initially like bad ideas.--Paul Graham

In his State of the Union address earlier this year, President Obama declared, “I will not cede the wind or solar or battery industry to China . . . because we refuse to make the same commitment here.” Given what’s really happening in China, he may want to think again.--PATRICK CHOVANEC

I was asked whether the new Fed policy will enable Obama’s big spending plans for his second term.  I doubt it.  The policy initiative is too small to decisively impact growth or the deficit, but large enough to take away support for further fiscal stimulus.  Obama will be forced to adopt Simpson/Bowles-style austerity during his second term.  There’s no longer any point in even wasting keystrokes on Mitt’s plans.  He’s done—put a fork in him.--Scott Sumner

Iceland did almost everything right

They stiffed the bank creditors to avoid aggravating the moral hazard problem, just like the textbooks recommend.  In the eurozone the bank creditors are being bailed out.  They relied of fiscal policy to address S/I and debt issues, and let monetary policy address AD, just as the New Keynesians were recommending in the 1990s.  In the eurozone they combined tight money with reckless deficits.  And now Iceland is growing fast and the eurozone is stagnating.

I do realize there are tricky issues involved when analyzing the GDP of a country with 310,000 people.  One big aluminum smelter could probably have an impact on GDP.  I’d focus on the fact that their GDP is up about 12% from 7 years earlier.  That’s not great, but they clearly aren’t in a depression.  I seem to recall that Britain’s GDP is flat over the past 7 years, and some of the weaker eurozone members have done even worse.

I realize that people will say that Iceland is special, it doesn’t count,  Just as Australia doesn’t count and Sweden doesn’t count and Poland doesn’t count and Israel doesn’t count and Argentina doesn’t count, and all those countries in the 1930s that just happened to start recovering after they left the gold standard don’t count.  But still, it’s one more data point.

That's Scott Sumner.

Quote of the day

People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck—especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don’t want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either.--Michael Lewis

The cliche is that the ninth inning has the three toughest outs in baseball

And when you look at the numbers you see it: The cliche is absolutely, undeniably, absurdly wrong. They are the easiest three outs.

Getting things straight

Native American:

African Americans:

Any questions?

Eric Falkenstein is so right and so funny

[Jonathan] Haidt ends this book where he notes he read a book by Jerry Muller titled Conservatism, and the author noted that conservatism was not based on mere orthodoxy, but rather, the idea that encouraging respect, self-reliance, and loyalty were actually a reasoned method to help communities prosper, and their individuals to obtain more satisfactory lives. This reasoned defense of conservative values floored him, because he saw it was, at the least, intellectually defensible and could be argued in good faith. That he came to this conclusion in 2008 highlights the bubble the poor guy was in.--Eric Falkenstein