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

Quote of the day

Yeah, [I like Obama:] I’m living in London and I’m socialist. What do you expect?--Elle MacPherson, former supermodel, and current policy expert

Every large public school system has many excellent and good teachers. Unfortunately, every public school system also has really bad teachers who cannot be fired. Some miss many classes, others do not know the materials they teach, while others do not really try to teach, and prefer to joke around or mainly give their opinions. They should be fired, but they cannot in part because of the tenure system. Having the power to get rid of the bad teachers would improve everyone’s teaching, partly by raising the incentives and morale of other teachers.
...
Teachers’ unions are the major force opposed to abandoning the tenure system, as they are the major opposition to pretty much every major school reform that has ever been suggested- including charter schools, school vouchers, and evaluations of teacher performance. They are an important hindrance to improving the quality of teaching and the performance of students.
...
I oppose teachers unions and the tenure system for teachers (including university teachers) partly because they are especially detrimental to the education received by students from low income and more disadvantaged backgrounds.--Gary Becker, some dude that is much less famous than supermodels

How can the same paper that complains about

this:

publish this?

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Via Glenn Reynolds.

Quotes of the day

[HP] looks cheap, but the future of the PC is a very, very difficult business to handicap.--Bill Ackman

One of the interesting things that we’ve noticed is that companies correlate on decision making and speed of decision making. There are basically no companies that have good slow decisions. There are only companies that have good fast decisions. I think that’s also a natural thing as companies get bigger –they tend to slow down decision making. And that’s pretty tragic.--Larry Page

... even though a computer can execute millions of instructions in a microsecond, the furthest light can travel in that time - even in a vacuum - is just 300 meters.--Jeff Hecht

The world has experienced five major technical-economic cycles:
(1) 1771 - , The First Industrial Revolution in Britain, based on mechanization of the cotton industry.
(2) 1829 - , The Age of Steam and Railways
(3) 1875 - , The Age of Steel and Electricity
(4) 1908 - , The Age of Oil, the Automobile, and Mass Production
(5) 1971 - , The Age of Information and Telecommunications
--Leonard Wilson, on Carlota Perez's Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital

Proposed List Of Demands For Occupy Wall St Movement!--LloydJHart

I think we are between the last cycle and the next cycle, the latter of which will hopefully improve the intellectual capacity of people who make lists like the one above.--Cav

The midsection of a 67-year-old is not a pretty sight.--Bill Gross

For centuries, parents have given their kids the awkward “birds and the bees” sex conversation. But we are the first generation of parents in the history of mankind who must have a “digital footprint” conversation with our kids. We are the first generation that has to sit our kids down and say, “Let’s talk about Facebook and Twitter and Youtube.”--Jon Acuff

Koch Industries has spent more than $50 million to lobby in Washington since 2006." My reaction to reading this was, "$50 million? That's it?" That might sound like a lot, but let's compare that to, say, General Electric. Over the same period, GE has spent more than $136 million lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. ... I don't know the Koch brothers; I've never met them. I can't tell you if they're saints or sinners. But at least from this Bloomberg article, their company doesn't appear to be especially destructive or immoral. That much is crystal clear through some perspective. But maybe the reporters can prove me wrong about their bias by their next article detailing the many alleged misdeeds of a company with political ties to the left, like GE.--Daniel Indiviglio

Ms. [Betty] Liu deserves some credit for being a rare interviewer of Mr. Buffett who, rather than simply fawning, challenges him. Other journalists sought out by Mr. Buffett would do their profession and the country a favor by following suit. Some possible follow-ups for next time: “What’s your justification for making your tax apply only to “people who shuffle money around all day” but not to athletes or CEOs? Would it apply to CEOs of banks, insurance companies, or other publicly traded financial firms? Are there any other precedents for taxing income differentially by occupation rather than by source? Is that something we want to encourage in the tax code? Wouldn’t it just make things more complex?--Ira Stoll

Obama has basically confirmed the worst fears about regulators (and himself) which is that business shouldn't be regulated based on any predictable rules, but rather the whims of people who might in their gut just feel that something is wrong. In this instance, people who scream about "uncertainty" may have a point.--Joe Weisenthal

Gibor Basri, Berkeley’s vice chancellor for equity and diversity, could have served a valuable role here by pointing out that the [affirmative action] bake sale was obviously a parody of racial and gender preferences, not a criticism of students themselves. Whatever one thinks about the issue of preferences, he might have said, such political theater belongs to Berkeley’s once-revered tradition of free speech. Instead, Basri chose to stoke the melodramatic self-pity of today’s college students. “A lot of students, especially students of color, read [the bake sale] as placing a higher value on white students,” Basri told the New York Times. Basri, in other words, obeyed the ironclad script for all such minor perturbations in the otherwise unbroken reign of campus political correctness. That script requires that the massive campus-diversity bureaucracy treat the delusional claims of hyperventilating students with utter seriousness. Students in the ever-expanding roster of official campus victim groups flatter themselves that by attending what is in fact the most caring, protective, and opportunity-rich institution in the history of the world, they are braving unspeakable threats to their ego and even to their physical safety. (Indeed, so desirable is this alleged threatened status that a gender and women’s studies major held a sign during Tuesday’s protest of the bake sale decrying the exclusion of “queer people” from the Republicans’ pricing structure.) ... If he really is incapable of understanding such a simple satire, he does not belong in an institution of higher learning—or at least what used to pass for one. --Heather MacDonald

Eight new Dodge Grand Caravans, purchased 10 months ago with $186,192 in federal stimulus funds, are sitting unused in storage at a county park because Waukesha County has found no takers for its proposed workers' van pool program.--Laurel Walker

Photo link here.

Chart of the day: Ageism via the movies

Source here.

Quotes of the day

[The film Atlas Shrugged] was made for a trifle by Hollywood standards. The same critics that, if this tiny amount of money was spent on a poorly produced and acted "Indie" film, that happened to be about a hermaphrodite Palestinian boy who after escaping fascist Israeli persecution moves to Texas to face fascist American persecution (and isn't immediately granted his full "right" to all the healthcare the USA can afford), would sing it's praises and laud it's signs of a tight budget as "authentic." I'm not sure if we have art imitating life or the other way around, but the critics are themselves Randian characters. They have an agenda—punish those who love liberty and have the temerity to defend it, then go to parties and be lauded by their friends for their heroic progressivism. And if they can make some snobby lies about cinematography along the way, more the better.--Cliff Asness

I was what you call the buzz kill. ... I could be the ultimate cliché and age first.--Val Kilmer

I don't know if a 6'2 woman gets as much flak as a 5'2 man--but the difference is in degree, not in kind.--Megan McArdle

The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.--Frederick Buechner

Even though their state voted to remain in the Union, about 20,000 Marylanders fought for the South, while about 30,000 fought for the North.--Joshua Horn

We're seeing core consumers under a lot of pressure. There's no doubt that rising fuel prices are having an impact.--Mike Duke, Walmart CEO

I’m shocked that progressive bloggers that are so dismissive of know-nothing conservatives are themselves so ignorant of public finance 101. Tax incidence is all about expected future consumption streams, as is pretty much all of economics. I thought people knew that.--Scott Sumner

So the Obama position seems to be that a) the rich ought to meet obligations over and above what the current tax code requires; b) the Obamas are rich, and c) the Obamas choose to meet no obligations over and above what the current tax code requires. It’s almost enough to make you begin to doubt his sincerity.--Steve Landsburg

Whether or not he was right, the “investigation” of Ackman was a costly and embarrassing error. Without a doubt, it discouraged others from addressing problems at other financial companies—which allowed those problems to grow unchecked. The moral of the story: empowering regulators can result in a less transparent, more dangerous financial system.--John Carney

Having a monarch as the symbolic head of state keeps elected officials in their place, provides an apolitical outlet for popular hero worship and the cults of celebrity, and satisfies the human hunger for ceremonial authority. If it’s an affront to democratic sensibilities, it’s also a safeguard for democratic institutions. Better a real king, crowned and powerless, than the many pseudo-kings who have strutted (and still strut) so destructively across the modern stage.--Ross Douthat

Image link here.

Quotes of the day

Free and competitive markets aren't thought of as promoting tolerance and reducing bigotry, yet they do so far more effectively than ever-more-detailed civil rights regulations. Writing in the 1730s, Voltaire famously described the London Stock Exchange as a place "where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mohammedan, and the Christian transact together, as though they all professed the same religion, and give the name of infidel to none but bankrupts." Gary Becker earned the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics in part for demonstrating that discrimination is economically detrimental -- free markets penalize an employer who discriminates for reasons unrelated to ability and productivity. Freedom of association is indispensable to making a free society work. No culture is without unfairness. But where men and women are unfettered in their freedom to form or avoid relationships with others -- socially and economically -- tolerance and cooperation increase, and ugly prejudice recedes.--Jeff Jacoby

The story does not say that "responsible lending" produced a housing bubble and a crash, resulted in millions of foreclosures, and wiped out the savings of millions of other borrowers who did not turn in the keys to their lenders.--Arnold Kling

Why do we allow the exceptions of school nurses and military doctors, but no other exceptions? One obvious common element here is that most medics and school nurses are government employees. This seems to be part of a more general pattern, whereby we often relax regulations for the government. For example, the military is also not subject to OSHA rules on workplace safety, and the worst asbestos and hazardous waste sites have been on government property. Congress has also exempted itself from rules against workplace discrimination and stock insider trading.--Robin Hanson

Suppose that in a mere three years your family’s spending – spending, mind you, not income – jumps from $80,000 to $101,600. You’re now understandably worried about the debt you’re piling up as a result of this 27 percent hike in spending. So mom and dad, with much drama and angst and finger-pointing about each other’s irresponsibility and insensitivity, stage marathon sessions of dinner-table talks to solve the problem. They finally agree to reduce the family’s annual spending from $101,600 to $100,584.--Don Boudreaux

The White House said Monday that President Barack Obama regrets his vote as a senator in 2006 against raising the debt limit — a vote he's now pressuring Congress to take.--ERICA WERNER

Leaders eat last.--military correspondent

I know, as you must know, that SecDef Gates recently spoke at West Point and expressed his view that the personnel system must be reformed. I was gratified by that. But I've also heard in the months since my article first appeared too many voices making noise to hide the signal. The nation we have sworn to protect deserves better.--Tim Kane

... I do realize that we in sportswriting and sports broadcasting set the genius bar pretty low for coaches and athletes. The only people who set it lower are the people at Apple, who essentially take a bunch of ordinary people, have them take two Macbook Pro classes and one on the iPhone, and then immediately graduate them to geniuses. These geniuses even get their own bars. But I still maintain that Manny Ramirez was a hitting genius. ... In my own romantic view of baseball and the world, I tended to see Manny as baseball’s Mozart — an often vile personality who did one thing so beautifully that you could not turn away.--Joe Posnanski

How many times have you been told to start with a little stretching? Yet multiple studies of pre-workout stretching demonstrate that it actually raises your likelihood of injury and lowers your subsequent performance. Turns out muscles that aren’t warmed up don’t really stretch anyway, and tugging on them just firms up their resistance to a wider range of motion. In fact, limbering up even has a slackening effect on your muscles, reducing their stability and the amount of power and strength they’ll generate. ... If you’re in the fitness-equipment business, free weights are a loser. The 2010 model looks too much like the 1950 model, and they both last forever. Far better to create gleaming $4,000 contraptions that can be reinvented every two years, and then hire a PR firm to promote some made-up training theory claiming that machines are the answer ... Commercial health clubs need about 10 times as many members as their facilities can handle, so designing them for athletes, or even aspiring athletes, makes no sense. ... It can be hard to believe a true strength coach the first time he tells you that by pressing and dead-lifting on even days, squatting and doing chin-ups on odd days, avoiding all other exercises, and adding a little to the bar each time, you’ll be stronger than you’ve ever been in only a month’s time.--Daniel Duane

... parents under 30 are decidedly less happy than their child-free peers. Then, once parents hit 40, the relationship reverses and people with children are cheerier than those without.--PAMELA PAUL

Photo link here.

Quotes of the day

The young woman just told the plain, straight, truth: I want to be her friend but she doesn’t want to be mine. She went on, I’d like her to be my friend. I think I’m a good friend. Talk about the real language of a real heart. Talk about truth telling. I don’t know where my heart learned to translate it’s sentiments into such false sophistication, but after hearing this conversation, I think false sophistication is akin to lying, and I don’t think lying is the right way to get what you want.--Don Miller

It's almost as if the muni salesmen are reading from the script written by the mortgage bond guys in 2005. Remember them? They were the people who insisted that all the "talk" of a housing bubble was irresponsible.--John Carney

Two things I would strongly suggest the [Securities and Exchange] Commission look at is the 500 shareholder rule and the requirements to be a qualified and/or accredited investor to invest in privately held companies. Both of these rules directly or indirectly keep small investors, ie the general public, from investing in privately held companies. Most people do not qualify as accredited or qualified investors so their ability to invest in privately held companies is significantly restricted. And because privately held companies cannot have more than 500 shareholders, most companies prefer institutional investors who can invest large sums of money to small investors who cannot. Some of the most exciting companies to emerge in the past decade have decided to stay private for longer periods of time. There are many reasons why that is the case, but one of the reasons is that founders, Boards, and senior management realize that being public and having your employee equity go up and down every day has a cultural impact that is not always good for the organization.--Fred Wilson

Ryan has moved us off Unreality Island. He is forcing Americans to confront the implications of their choices. With a few straightforward changes, his budget could be transformed into a politically plausible center-right package that would produce a fiscally sustainable welfare state while addressing the country’s structural economic problems. I suspect the process Ryan has started will take us back toward the moderate framework the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission proposed a year ago. Great journeys begin with one bold step.--David Brooks

I don’t want to be alarmist but it is important to be sensitive to cracks in your paradigm. If you wait until it is obvious that you are wrong then it is too late.--Karl Smith

... nobody who writes what Krugman wrote should be mistaken for a person who is being reasonable.--Steve Landsburg

An Oxfam study found that when carpet makers in Bangladesh were pressured to fire their child laborers, the kids went to their next best alternatives: prostitution or starvation.--Bryan Caplan

War: What is it good for? Well, minority rights for one thing. Regardless of what you think of America’s overseas military adventures during the last century, they’ve all had positive domestic outcomes: Minority groups that have contributed to war efforts have been rewarded with expanded rights.--Robert Saldin

A longitudinal analysis suggested that shifting into more committed relationships was followed by improvements in subjective well-being. Little support was found for the assumption that people with a high level of well-being select themselves into more committed relationships.--Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

The slums of Chicago are full of first-round leaders.--Peter Jacobsen

On the train ride home—with the bailout check in your pocket—you think about how the hot tears scalded your cheek when you had to explain to your parents how bad things had gotten. You tell yourself it was all for theatrics: Crocodile tears for their sympathy. But in your most secret heart you know you weren't lying to them: You were only lying to yourself.--Ash Bennnington

Who’s going to get butt-naked right now and stand on a stool and start clapping their hands? I don’t know. Do they have that guy?--Kevin Millar

We’re going to get home right now and my wife’s going to look at me and say [Expletive], you’re 0-6. You guys stink. We all bring this [expletive] home with us, man. We care. We’ll figure it out. We have to. We don’t want to let anyone down. That’s it.--Dustin Pedroia

“I want to feel everything,” Nick [Charles] told me, and I thought I knew what he meant. I thought he meant that he wants to breathe in the mountain air, and really taste the calamari, and take in every reaction from his beautiful little daughter Giovanna. And I know that he did mean all those things and more. But I also think that he means he wants to feel EVERYTHING. He does not want to lie to himself. He wonders if he has spent too much time lying to himself. He does not want to withdraw even for moment. He knows that people are watching, and they can be inspired. He knows that his wife and daughter are with him, and every moment is precious. He knows that he has so few good days left, and as he told me: “I don’t have time for the BS. I just don’t. I’m dying.” And if we are honest with ourselves, truly and devastatingly honest, maybe we should ask: Is it really so different for any of us?--Joe Posnanski

Quotes of the day

A light bulb sits on a store shelf for several weeks, is bought, taken home, and put in the cabinet for months and months. Alone and in the dark, in a way, it could feel that life, alone and in the dark, is a stupid, futile, pointless exercise. When, however, it is taken out of the cabinet and plugged in to the socket, all of a sudden it becomes useful; it serves a purpose, and all of the parts and pieces work together harmoniously to serve as a conduit for light. It is now doing what it was designed for, it is performing the job it was built for. This might be the same as what can happen with human beings. If this is the case, then the whole aspect of "creating" meaning does not work. It would be like the lightbulb taking up yoga or canvas painting in an effort to "create" meaning. While this might work for a little while as a temporary distraction and amusement, the light bulb would not experience permanent relief until it became plugged into the socket, or performed the exact function it was built for.--LiveReal

Psychologists at Boston University paired paintings by famous abstract expressionists with paintings by a child, monkey, chimpanzee, gorilla, and elephant. They presented the images side by side and asked students to judge which painting was of higher quality. One-third of the time, the art students chose the work of children and animals.--Maureen O'Connor

The NBA is a star-driven game unlike any other in American sports. Teams have won Super Bowls with Brad Johnson and Trent Dilfer at quarterback. Teams have won World Series with Jose Rijo as a No. 1 starter, and with Jorge Orta hitting cleanup. But to build a championship NBA team, with almost no exception, you must have an all-time great player. It’s not ENOUGH to have an all-time great player — Utah didn’t win a title with John Stockton and Karl Malone; Charles Barkley and Reggie Miller did not win one; Dirk Nowitzki is a great player who so far has been unable to take his team to a title — but an all-time great player is the admission price.--Joe Posnanski

Women want independence but we are all hard-wired into wanting to be into relationships. The paradox of the post-feminist position is how we create a social system in which both independence and interdependency can flourish.--Roger Dobson and Maurice Chittenden

A chap with a high IQ is going to get a demanding job that is going to take up a lot of his energy and time. In many ways he wants a woman who is an old-fashioned wife and looks after the home, a copy of his mum in a way. “The bright girl, on the other hand, remembers that old saying that at first she sinks into his arms only to spend the rest of her life with her arms in his sink.--Clare Rayner

Intelligent men are able to increase their chances of marriage because they are willing to date outside of their IQ cohort. Intelligent women, it appears, are either unwilling to date and marry outside of their IQ cohort or are unable to do so. ... when a publication like TheGloss asks “why smart men date dumb women,” it is asking the wrong question. It should be asking why smart women refuse to reciprocate. --John Carney

More intelligent American boys are more likely to grow up to value sexual exclusivity in early adulthood than less intelligent boys. So the unwillingness of women to date less intelligent men is rational if they are seeking a mate who values monogamy and sexual exclusivity. But if intelligence and sexual exclusivity go hand in hand, why are men willing to date less intelligent women? Well, it turns out Santoshi's study proved something very interesting: for women, there is no statistically significant correlation between intelligence and valuing monogamy. Smarter women are no more likely to value sexual exclusivity than less intelligent women. Or, to flip it around, less intelligent women do not place a lower value on monogamy than more intelligent women. In other words, when women date less intelligent men they pay a cost: a diminished interest in sexual fidelity. Men don't pay this cost, making dating across the intelligence curve easier.--John Carney

... the U.S. effective corporate tax rate on new investment was 34.6 percent in 2010, which was the highest rate in the OECD and the fifth-highest rate among 83 countries. The average OECD rate was 18.6 percent, and the average rate for 83 countries was 17.7 percent.--Duanjie Chen and Jack Mintz

Within a decade after the Community Reinvestment Act was enacted, many banks created separate "community reinvestment" divisions that were often staffed by liberal individuals who sympathiszed with the aims of the community reeinventment movement. Indeed, some of these individuals had themselves been cummunity activitists who were recruited by banks to serve as liaisons with community groups. Activists pressured banks to invest more money in specific urban neighborhoods. Banks forged partnerships with community development corporations. See an Urban Studies professor's fawning praise for this result back in 2003 when it seemed like the model of good governmental activism. The result was a disaster. Not that this was a sufficient condition, but it surely contributed to the debacle in a bad way. The lesson is yet another example of the law of unintended consequences. Trying to do good via indirect methods is very dangerous because the economy is a complex system, and when bad things happen as they often do, there's no accountability, no one in the political system got booted out of office for championing NINJA loans, while investors took it on the chin.--Eric Falkenstein

Quotes of the day

... it’s not fair to lump all banks together. I don’t lump all media together….There’s good and there’s bad. There’s irresponsible and ignorant and there’s really smart media. Well, not all bankers are the same. I just think this constant refrain [of] ‘bankers, bankers, bankers,’ — it’s just a really unproductive and unfair way of treating people….People should just stop doing that.--Jamie Dimon

About 5 years ago I noticed something wrong with white people, ... If those with stricter parenting styles than us are bad people, and those with less strict parenting styles are also bad people, then doesn’t this imply that we also used to be bad people? After all, weren’t our ancestors much stricter with kids a few hundred years ago? And aren’t our descendants also likely to be bad people too, after all (extrapolating current trends) they are likely to be much less strict than we are. ... Just as white folks don’t like parenting styles that are more or less strict than their own; Hollywood doesn’t like films that are more or less “artistic” than their own. BTW, when I say “artistic” in scare quotes I don’t mean having aesthetic merit. Lord knows that’s not what determines which films get nominated for best picture. If you don’t believe me, just look at a list of films directed by Hitchcock in the late 1950s, and then look at the films nominated for best picture in the late 1950s. No, Hollywood equates “artistic” with films about the way we live. And by “we” I mean English-speaking people. More specifically, white English-speaking people. Movies with which ”we” can identify.--Scott Sumner

We are looking for students who wonder, students who are reading widely, students of passion who are driven to make a difference in the lives of those around them and in the broader world through enlightened and effective leadership. The undergraduate education they are receiving seems less and less suited to that purpose. An outstanding biochemistry major wants to be a doctor and supports the president's health-care bill but doesn't really know why. A student who started a chapter of Global Zero at his university hasn't really thought about whether a world in which great powers have divested themselves of nuclear weapons would be more stable or less so, or whether nuclear deterrence can ever be moral. A young service academy cadet who is likely to be serving in a war zone within the year believes there are things worth dying for but doesn't seem to have thought much about what is worth killing for. A student who wants to study comparative government doesn't seem to know much about the important features and limitations of America's Constitution. When asked what are the important things for a leader to be able to do, one young applicant described some techniques and personal characteristics to manage a group and get a job done. Nowhere in her answer did she give any hint of understanding that leaders decide what job should be done. Leaders set agendas. ... We are blessed to live in a country that values education. Many of our young people spend four years getting very expensive college degrees. But our universities fail them and the nation if they continue to graduate students with expertise in biochemistry, mathematics or history without teaching them to think about what problems are important and why. --Heather Wilson

[Paul] Samuelson’s involvement with Commodities Corp. was known around the department, but it became no part of his legend in the outside world. When Weymer took the stage at Samuelson’s memorial service last year, along with MIT president Susan Hochfield and eight well-known economists, his presence surprised more than a few in the audience. The answer seems to be that Samuelson’s low profile as an activist investor made it easier to gather information.--David Warsh

Hope, Change, Affirmative Action

Via Mark Perry.

Quotes of the day

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.--Albert Einstein

Either we can maintain that there’s some flaw in [math and logic] — some way in which it fails to capture the “right” meaning of rationality — or we can conclude that we don’t always make good decisions, and that meditating on our failures can help us make better decisions in the future.--Steve Landsburg

Hayek condemned scientism–the use of the tools of science to give a field such as economics the aura of science without it’s predictive or descriptive power. He didn’t just say this was a waste of time, he said it was dangerous because it led to a false sense of precision and understanding. The way I understand this (and I agree with Hayek) is that the tools of physics–advanced dynamic equations that treat the economy as a planetary body or even a group of planets interacting, is not just wrong, but deeply misleading. ... none have a unified, consistent model that can explain the movements of macroeconomic aggregates. They also are unable to convince people in the other camps nor is it clear that any data or empirical test would lead to ideological or methodological conversions. This is not comforting for those who claim any sort of scientific mantle for macroeconomics. ... Is economics a science because it is like Darwinian biology? Darwinian biology is very different from the physical sciences. Like economics it is a very useful way to organize your thinking about complex phenomena. But it is not a predictive or very precise science or whatever you want to call it. Before seeing any direct fossil evidence, no biologist can tell you how long the giraffe’s neck was ten million years ago. They cannot make accurate backcasts of any precision such as the year that the forerunner of the giraffe began to lengthen its neck through natural selection. It cannot model why the giraffe’s neck isn’t longer. Darwinism, like much of economics, exploits tautological reasoning. If the fossil record is incomplete or shows no change or vast periods or the pace of change is inconsistent with the fossil record, the theory is not discarded but modified with the concept of punctuated equilibrium. Is punctuated equilibrium true? There is no real way of knowing. It is our best hypothesis given very limited data. Is it a science? Sure. But it is a science that is unlike physics.--Russ Roberts

Joseph Schumpeter coined the phrase "creative destruction" to describe the process of churn whereby old companies, technologies, and industries die, to be replaced by new ones. This process has brought us today's prosperity, and is a massive force for good in human history. But it is not without its sadness. You don't have to want to stop the process, to mourn for the real losses it entails.--Megan McArdle

The Medicare program chief actuary predicted last spring that 375,000 would sign up for the new risk pool insurance in 2010. But by the end of November, only 8,000 had done so.--John Goodman

The main thing [Ed Price] wrote, in my mind, is that he believes that the Baseball Hall of Fame’s voting instructions — to choose players based on their “record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character and contributions to the team” — demand that he not vote steroid users into the Hall. I think that is a fair interpretation of the Hall of Fame’s charge. I also happen to think that those words are absurdly outdated, and bizarrely vague, and there is absolutely no hint that the Hall of Fame voters have EVER taken them seriously, based on the fact that the very first person voted in was Ty Cobb. But I cannot disagree with Ed for taking the words literally. I think every voter has to make that judgment. ... I think it’s kind of tragic to hear anyone say that. “Innocent until proven guilty” is not simply a standard for a court of law … it is a fundamental right of society. ... some think that a secret ballot is pure because you won’t vote based on public pressure. But I think all that’s kind of a copout. I have been led to believe — and probably will always believe — that some of the Buck O’Neil voting was political and petty and mean-spirited … and it’s a lot easier to be petty and mean-spirited when you don’t have to stand publicly behind your vote. I guess my point is that I believe in light.--Joe Posnanski

The Constitution, curiously enough, always seems to get most convoluted when the wording is most precise. As you know, the First Amendment is fine if the result is "fair" and not too hateful. The Second is dangerous and misunderstood. To support the Tenth is to pine for slavery. The Fifth is vitally important — unless the environmental good is threatened. ... So, because the Constitution has become too complex for many of us to decipher, and thus irrelevant, its time to boil the whole thing down to its troglodytic and/or graceful basics and engage P.J. O'Rourke's rules of governance in a free society:

1. "Mind your own business."

2. "Keep your hands to yourself."--David Harsanyi

Quotes of the day

Some people use half their ingenuity to go into debt, with the intention of using the other half to avoid paying it.--George Dennison Prentice

We don’t plan to vote for any candidate who first exploited an immigrant for nine years and now wants to deport her.--Bill Easterly

According to some estimates, one in five Facebook employees have ties back to Google, including COO Sheryl Sandberg and CTO Bret Taylor. Google has over 23,331 employees according to company’s recent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Facebook has about 2,000 employees.  Rasmussen explained in his interview that getting things done (GTD) was a big problem at Google, and shutting down his project, Google Wave, a year after it was made available as a beta is a sign it was becoming difficult to get things done at the search giant. ... I don’t think rivals (including upstarts) have the ability to stop Google’s financial steamroller. It will continue to be a dominant force in search and online advertising for years to come. But if it doesn’t reign in its talent problem, the company will have a long-term crisis on its hands. It was exodus of talent and inability to get things done that has brought giants of the past — Yahoo for example — to their knees.--Om Malik

Deer-vehicle accidents resulted in more than $3.8 billion of insurance claims and driver costs in the year ended June 30, according to State Farm Insurance. Such collisions resulted in about 140 human deaths, according to statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Serious stuff. We're not even including the financial and social cost of deer-tick-spread Lyme disease, the expense of hauling away deer carcasses, or the cost in money and time of protecting vegetation and crops from deer predation.--Allan Sloan

Quotes of the day

The World Bank has apologized for displaying damning images of Ghana at its recent annual meeting in Washington DC. Some of the pictures have half-naked women breastfeeding their kids and portray a country high on poverty levels.--Joy News

One night in 1902, an ambitious young American engineer named Willis Carrier was waiting for a train, watching fog roll in across the platform, when he had a sudden flash of insight: he could exploit the principle of fog to cool buildings. He patented the idea, protected it fiercely, put his new invention into production, and made a fortune. In 2007, the still-surviving Carrier Corporation generated sales worth $15bn. As eureka moments go, even Archimedes might have had to concede that Carrier's was impressive. For [Steven] Johnson, though, what's really interesting about that story is how unusual it is: although the eureka moment is such a cliche, big new ideas almost never get born like that.--Oliver Burkeman

There is not a single example of a nonrenewable resource that has run out. Nobody ran out of stone in the stone age, iron in the iron age, or bronze in the bronze age. That's not why these ages peter out, it's rather because we move on to something else ..whereas renewable resources tend to run out, like whales, passenger pigeons, and white pines.--Matt Ridley

When movies are made, especially today, they eliminate the risk factors to such a great extent by predigesting the movie and applying what they think are rules learned from successful films. The investor dominates the process. And so the films don't have complexity and depth. Clearly [Apocalypse Now] went off on its own to explore the themes of what was a very unusual, maybe unprecedented, war on many levels. So when the film came out, it shocked people at first and almost defied them, because it was so different then what had been considered a war film. When that happens—when risk is taken and the filmmakers dive into the subject matter without a parachute—very often what you get it something with those qualities that make it age well with the public. Risk is a factor in making art, making films. But because films are, of course, an industry, and so many people are making a living from it, they have really learned over the last twenty years to make risk-free projects. Although I don't know that they've succeeded. Films still lose a lot of money.  ...  You never stop learning about film. I plan to just keep doing my own little films. If I have to finance them, that's fine. I was trained by Roger Corman so I know how to make a low-budget film if I have to. It's more important for me to make the films that only I can make, which is that of my own feelings or what I think is the meaning of life or chip away at it rather than to go get a job and have a bunch of thirty-two-year-old executives give me their theory of what they think the box office requires. --Francis Ford Coppola

Sure, school pays at the individual level. But from a social point of view, Thiel's right: The world would be a better place if smart, motivated kids tried to please billions of consumers instead of a few dozen professors. As expected, Thiel's audacity provoked a lot of venom - a.k.a. "the kind of publicity that money can't buy." I bet that Thiel will have thousands of awesome applicants... largely thanks to criticism like this.--Bryan Caplan

It’s true that Obama has suffered politically because of economic trends beyond his control. But those same economic trends are what delivered him huge congressional majorities in the first place! It’s true that his supporters on the left and center-left alike had unreasonable expectations for this presidency. But (as Baker’s piece points out) it was Obama’s grandiose rhetoric and sweeping promises that helped create those unreasonable expectations to begin with! And it’s true that the partisan, superficial, Politico-ish culture of Washington makes effective governance extremely difficult. But the Obama administration has spent two years empowering Washington to an unprecedented degree! Again, it’s not that Obama’s inner circle doesn’t have anything to complain about. But they have less to complain about than they seem to think — and their self-pity, at this stage, is more than a little bit unseemly.--Ross Douthat

If you're looking for a great example of a negative externality, an act, remember, that comes about because the decision maker doesn't bear a large percent of the cost of his decision, look no further than Bush's Iraq invasion or Obama's "stimulus" package.--Arnold Kling

Since the financial crisis began, I have been inclined to think that we need to go back to traditional mortgage lending and stop trying to use government policy to sustain the securitization model. Each month, the principal-agent costs seem to mount, adding to the disadvantage of securitization. To me, it is obvious that the overall costs of the securitization model are high relative to the costs of traditional lending. But what is obvious to me is unthinkable in the two places that matter--Wall Street and Washington.--Arnold Kling

Quotes of the day

Film people, actors, are puppets. We are silly. We are silly folk.--Christiane Kubrick

I am not remotely an expert in complexity theory, but for the past week I have been largely glued to my screen reading these comments, understanding some of them, and learning a lot of mathematics as I struggle to understand the others. It’s been exhilarating. Why is this momentous? In some ways, there’s nothing new about any of this. It’s not terribly uncommon for a serious looking paper to address a major outstanding problem, and it’s de rigeur for experts to comb through those papers, searching simultaneously for new paradigms, irreparable flaws, and salvageable insights. We call it peer review. But what’s new is that this played out in public, and that it took a week instead of the usual months or years, and that the dozens of conversations taking place all over the world were melded into one giant conversation where every idea was available for everyone to hear—and for everyone to shoot down. Many very smart people said very smart things that turned out to be wrong, and in the world before the Internet, they might have gone on believing those things for weeks or months. The Net made it very difficult to believe wrong things for more than an hour.--Steve Landsburg

The map is not the territory. The map — the set of axioms — is either consistent or it’s not. If it’s inconsistent, there’s no corresponding territory. If it’s consistent, there are many corresponding territories and the map can’t tell you which one you’re in.--Steve Landsburg

Unlike industrial policy, government provision of infrastructure and education does not override consumer choice in order to promote favored industries. Unlike industrial policy, the provision of public goods does not protect firms or industries from competition. Unlike industrial policy, the provision of public goods is not part of a government plan to achieve specific, foreseeable, and targeted patterns of investment and employment. The fact that government supplies a blank canvas does not imply that it is an artist capable of painting a pretty picture.--Don Boudreaux

[Eckhard] Höffner has researched that early heyday of printed material in Germany and reached a surprising conclusion -- unlike neighboring England and France, Germany experienced an unparalleled explosion of knowledge in the 19th century. German authors during this period wrote ceaselessly. Around 14,000 new publications appeared in a single year in 1843. Measured against population numbers at the time, this reaches nearly today's level. And although novels were published as well, the majority of the works were academic papers. The situation in England was very different. "For the period of the Enlightenment and bourgeois emancipation, we see deplorable progress in Great Britain," Höffner states. Indeed, only 1,000 new works appeared annually in England at that time -- 10 times fewer than in Germany -- and this was not without consequences. Höffner believes it was the chronically weak book market that caused England, the colonial power, to fritter away its head start within the span of a century, while the underdeveloped agrarian state of Germany caught up rapidly, becoming an equally developed industrial nation by 1900. Even more startling is the factor Höffner believes caused this development -- in his view, it was none other than copyright law, which was established early in Great Britain, in 1710, that crippled the world of knowledge in the United Kingdom. Germany, on the other hand, didn't bother with the concept of copyright for a long time. Prussia, then by far Germany's biggest state, introduced a copyright law in 1837, but Germany's continued division into small states meant that it was hardly possible to enforce the law throughout the empire.--Frank Thadeusz

The aberration in Japan’s recession was not the behavior of growth, which is best seen as a series of recoveries aborted by policy errors – a sawtooth, not a flat line. Rather, the surprise was the persistent steadiness of limited deflation, even after recovery took place. This strikes me as a more fundamental challenge to our basic macroeconomic understanding than is commonly recognized, and we need more research on it. The UK and US economies are at low risk of turning Japanese in the sense of having recurrent recessions through macroeconomic policy mistakes - but deflation itself cannot be ruled out. The UK worryingly combines a couple of financial parallels to Japan with far less room for fiscal action to compensate for them than Japan had. More active investors and greater openness in the UK than in Japan may be able to. One major problem which Japan did not face during its Great Recession was poor prospects for external demand and the need to reallocate productive resources across export sectors. The UK, US, and many Euro Area economies do now face this challenge simultaneously, which may limit the pace of, and our share in, the global recovery.--Adam Posen

In stressed times after a bubble (eg, the 'after' line above), the private sector tries to run a big surplus as it pays down debt. This causes recessions, which can be mitigated if not eliminated via countercyclical budget deficits by the public sector. This argument would be tenable if it were 1936 and people never tried it, but it has been tried over and over and if a government could spend itself to prosperity and stability, a couple such countries would demonstrate this. Instead, we have the examples of the contrary, where fiscal restraint and modest automatic stabilizers were consistent with the wealthier countries post WW-II. But what I love is the way Krugman totally ignores the heterogeneity of investment and employment, and simply thinks that people and companies are saving 'too much', and so anti-savings by the government would offset this, leading to full-employment bliss. That kind of thinking is profoundly misleading.--Eric Falkenstein

To get the housing finance system out of intensive care, short-term policies need to be implemented that promote deleveraging. Perhaps some of the excess supply of foreclosed properties should be sold to buyers who agree to put 40% down and use the properties as rentals. Josh Rosner, managing director of the research firm Graham Fisher, has suggested that homeowners who voluntarily pay down a portion of the principal on their underwater mortgage receive a tax credit also applied to their mortgage principal. In return, they would forgo future tax deductions of their mortgage interest payments. While the road to housing hell may have been paved by the government, the road back will be built by the private sector.--Edward Pinto

Chinese Exclusion stayed in effect de facto until 1965, when the racist provisions of US immigration law were removed, liberalizing immigration by all non-European groups. Only 5 years later in 1970, Chinatown had already expanded greatly. Italians and Jews had already left for middle-class and upper-class neighborhoods elsewhere. ... Today Chinatown is one of Manhattan’s most thriving neighborhoods. Other East Asian immigrants also congregate there. The ladder out of poverty continues for today’s immigrants, following the Italians and Eastern Europeans, who in turn had followed the Germans and Irish.--William Easterly

Maybe if you don't talk to me, I can help you lose your job.--Spencer Rich, Washington Post reporter

Quotes of the day

[Music] artists don't put out albums anymore, they put out single hits, so they have reasons to tour. Hits and tours make you relevant, and they get you sponsorships, and earn you money from merchandise.--Zack O'Malley Greenberg

Having a sense of the rhythms and emotions of music helps poetry, and so to does the logic of mathematics help economics. But good economics, like good poetry, almost always stands by itself without the adjunct. Just as we should beware of poetry that only sounds good when there's music playing, we should distrust economic analysis that only seems profound within mathematical models. There's the hope that if we use some rigorous method of reasoning economics will avoid the stagnation of ideas we see in politics or journalism. Would that it were true.--Eric Falkenstein

The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, was on to something when he said he was worried about the shift towards ‘self-hatred’ within French society and its potentially destructive impact. Unfortunately, his call for a debate about ‘national identity’ has been as clumsy as that initiated by British politicians, while his decision to stop Muslim women wearing the burqa in public suggests that France really has lost its understanding of what it means to be a secular, liberal nation rooted in Enlightenment values. Gainsbourg appears to be influenced by these contemporary tensions in French society. While on the one hand it happily plays on the Gallic stereotypes of freedom-loving aesthetes with a liberal attitude towards sex, it also morbidly dwells on the Nazi occupation and residual racism across French society. Appealing to past glories and abasing past disgraces, however, won’t help resolve the question of French national identity today. The French only need to look across the Channel to see the folly in that strategy.--Neil Davenport

So why not alert listeners that you might be getting a “liberal” or “leftist” perspective from those two sources, just as you warned them that the Cato Institute was speaking from a fiscally conservative perspective? Back on March 23, I noted but did not blog about references on “Morning Edition” to “the libertarian Cato Institute,” the “conservative American Enterprise Institute,” and “the Brookings Institution.” No label needed for Brookings, of course. Just folks there.--David Boaz

Words I never thought I’d write: I pine for George W. Bush.--Peter Beinart

Except for George Washington, all of the presidents have lived in the White House. They’ve all taken the same oath to uphold the same constitution. But the modern presidency—Barack Obama’s presidency—has become a job of such gargantuan size, speed, and complexity as to be all but unrecognizable to most of the previous chief executives. The sheer growth of the federal government, the paralysis of Congress, the systemic corruption brought on by lobbying, the trivialization of the “news” by the media, the willful disregard for facts and truth—these forces have made today’s Washington a depressing and dysfunctional place. They have shaped and at times hobbled the presidency itself. ... Like many changes that are revolutionary, none of Washington’s problems happened overnight. But slow and steady change over many decades—at a rate barely noticeable while it’s happening—produces change that is transformative. In this instance, it’s the kind of evolution that happens inevitably to rich and powerful states, from imperial Rome to Victorian England. The neural network of money, politics, bureaucracy, and values becomes so tautly interconnected that no individual part can be touched or fixed without affecting the whole organism, which reacts defensively. --Todd Purdum

I punted all these balls to my successor and discovered I was the receiver.--Robert Gates

U.S. troops were fighting and dying in two foreign wars, but the Pentagon bureaucracy was shuffling through its peacetime paces. The Army and the Marines, for example, had a new armored vehicle, the MRAP, which could provide greater protection against Iraqi roadside bombs and save many troops' lives. But the brass were doing nothing to accelerate production. Similarly, the Air Force had a new generation of unmanned aerial vehicles, "drones" equipped with real-time video cameras and remote-control-fired missiles; troops in the field were clamoring for more, but Air Force leaders were not stepping up deployment. [Defense Secretary Bob] Gates quickly intervened, taking both programs outside normal channels. He added $16 billion to build more MRAPs on a crash schedule. And he fired the Air Force's chief of staff, Gen T. Michael Moseley, in part for negligence with the nuclear command, but mainly, according to knowledgeable officials, for his sluggishness on the drones. Gates replaced him with Gen. Norton Schwartz, head of the Air Force's unglamorous Transportation Command. He picked Schwartz because he had tirelessly worked out a way, at Gates's request, to speed the air delivery of MRAPs to Iraq; that is, he'd acted as if a war was going on. (Schwartz's promotion made him the first Air Force chief of staff to come up through the ranks as neither a bomber pilot nor a fighter pilot; the move marked the beginning of a huge cultural shift in that branch of the military.) Gates also noticed that the Army's most innovative colonels -- brigade commanders who not only understood counterinsurgency theory but practiced it in Iraqi cities and villages -- were getting stalled in their careers by generals with much less battlefield experience and who were wedded to Cold War precepts of combat. So, near the end of 2007, Gates called on Gen. David Petraeus, then the U.S. commander in Iraq and the architect of the counterinsurgency strategy there, to chair that year's Army promotion board, which would advance 40 colonels to the rank of brigadier general. More than a dozen of the Army's promising colonels, at least one of whom had been passed over twice, got their stars. With this single stroke, the Army's culture -- the signals sent to the troops of what kind of soldiers get promoted and what kind don't -- changed dramatically. ... When Gates submitted his budget to Congress, the president attached a message that he would -- not "might," but "would" -- veto the bill if it contained money for even one more F-22. It was the only veto threat in the president's first budget, and it worked. By then, it was clear -- to the surprise of many -- that the two men had hit it off. Their biographies were very different, but their executive sensibilities were nearly identical: pragmatic, problem-solving, averse to ideological formula and cliché, inclined to give everyone involved a say and then make a crisp decision. Several officials said that Obama had asked Gates to stay on as defense secretary mainly to provide continuity in the management of the wars -- and cover for any resulting controversies, owing to his credibility with the Joint Chiefs and with both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill. But it was soon evident that Gates had become, as one official put it, "a core player on the team." --Fred Kaplan

After much self reflection, I have decided to retire from managing client funds and I wanted to give you prompt notice of my intentions and explain the reasons for this. I have had to recognize that competing in the markets over such a long timeframe imposes heavy personal costs. While the joy of winning for clients is immense, for me the disappointment of each interim drawdown over the years has taken a cumulative toll that I cannot continue to sustain. This is true even though to date we have delivered an unbroken record of positive annual performance which I hope will continue for 2010 as well. And while our clients were certainly pleased that we achieved positive results for 2008 and 2009 in a challenging environment, as you may have surmised I was dissatisfied with those results because they did not match my own, internal long-term standard. You may remember that I chose to leave Soros Fund Management ten years ago because the challenge of managing an enormous amount of capital was having a clear impact on my ability to perform, as well as my state of being. Unfortunately, as Duquesne has grown, these factors have again emerged.--Stanley Druckenmiller

It turns out that sex often triggers a large stress response, leading to a spike in glucocorticoid levels. The good news, though, is that this stress is good for us. While chronic stress normally leads to a dramatic reduction in neurogenesis, or the birth of new brain cells, the stress produced by sex has the exact opposite effect, at least in the dendate gyrus.--Jonah Lehrer

Quotes of the day

... even with the best of responses the recovery probably would have been slow and uneven. But both the Congress and the administration of President George W. Bush, and especially the Congress and President Obama since his election in 2008 made the main mistakes after the crisis hit. Instead of concentrating mainly on fighting the recession and promoting faster economic growth, the Congress elected in 2008 believed they had a mandate to radically remake the American economy. Aside from repeated attacks on American business, especially banks-some of them deserved- they not only passed various stimulus packages (that did not stimulate much), but also tried to promote a vast legislative program that had nothing to do with fighting the recession.--Gary Becker

George W. Bush left a big growling bust of Churchill near his desk in the White House, in an attempt to associate himself with Churchill’s heroic stand against fascism. Barack Obama had it returned to Britain. It’s not hard to guess why: his Kenyan grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was imprisoned without trial for two years and tortured on Churchill’s watch, for resisting Churchill’s empire. ... In the end, the words of the great and glorious Churchill who resisted dictatorship overwhelmed the works of the cruel and cramped Churchill who tried to impose it on the world’s people of color. [Richard] Toye teases out these ambiguities beautifully. The fact that we now live at a time where a free and independent India is an emerging superpower in the process of eclipsing Britain, and a grandson of the Kikuyu “savages” is the most powerful man in the world, is a repudiation of Churchill at his ugliest — and a sweet, unsought victory for Churchill at his best. --Johann Hari

Australia posted 7.5% after-inflation returns per year during that time, with a standard deviation of 18.2%, according to a study from Credit Suisse. Those returns are the highest and the volatility the second lowest of the 19 major markets the researchers studied. During that time, U.S. stocks made a 6.2% return, with a standard deviation of 20.4%.--Howard Gold

From prostitution scandals to corruption allegations to the steady drumbeat of charges against corporate executives and world-class athletes, it seems that the headlines are filled with the latest misstep of someone in a position of power. This isn't just anecdotal: Surveys of organizations find that the vast majority of rude and inappropriate behaviors, such as the shouting of profanities, come from the offices of those with the most authority. Psychologists refer to this as the paradox of power. The very traits that helped leaders accumulate control in the first place all but disappear once they rise to power. Instead of being polite, honest and outgoing, they become impulsive, reckless and rude. In some cases, these new habits can help a leader be more decisive and single-minded, or more likely to make choices that will be profitable regardless of their popularity. One recent study found that overconfident CEOs were more likely to pursue innovation and take their companies in new technological directions. Unchecked, however, these instincts can lead to a big fall.--Jonah Lehrer

Car owners may not want to hear this, but we have way too much free parking. Higher charges for parking spaces would limit our trips by car. That would cut emissions, alleviate congestion and, as a side effect, improve land use.--Tyler Cowen

Masticate. Meditate. Masturbate.--Lauren Winner, summarizing Eat, Pray, Love

Biologists have been long perplexed by the peacock’s tail, economists by the use of advertising. In both cases the struggle has been to understand why something so self-evidently pointless and potentially damaging can survive in a vicious world of winner-takes-all, loser-goes-extinct natural selection. Meanwhile researchers from both worlds have been closeting themselves ever deeper in an arcane world of computer modelling, where truth can be validated only by mathematics. Hints of answers to these puzzles have come not from number crunching but from fuzzy human intuitions about the way the world actually works. Peacocks and advertisers have something in common – in both cases it turns out the handicaps they place themselves under send signals to their potential suitors. Behavioral advertisers, who aim to remove these handicaps, take note: a peacock without a stupid tail won’t get a mate and an ad that’s easy to deliver won’t get a customer.--Psy-Fi Blog

Aid recipients understand unconditional conditions all too well. Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai knows that USAID will have to spend its Afghanistan budget no matter what, so he makes some token commitment, does nothing, and indeed the aid keeps flowing. I can certainly understand why USAID would prefer not to talk about this unsavory equilibrium. But the stakes are far higher in Afghanistan than in the usual aid recipient. As the war there drags on, we have to ask the following question: Is U.S. aid winning hearts and minds? A U.N. survey taken in January found that 52% of Afghans believe aid organizations "are corrupt and are in the country just to get rich." I don't know much about waging a counterinsurgency, but it seems to me that we're getting very little for our money.--William Easterly

Chart of the day: Acting white

The US government says, if the blind can't use Kindles

no one can.

Maybe the mute could put in a good word?

Via Mark Perry.

One reason why I'm not a Democrat

They remind me of Republicans.