Margaret Thatcher passes away

Andrew Sparrow with (decidedly mixed) round up.

London is the financial capital of Europe, thanks to Maggie.  Perhaps her fellow citizen detractors would prefer it be Frankfurt.

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

The world is not organised along rational lines.--Matthew Engel

Regardless of your thesis about what a victory or defeat for Greek leftists would do in the financial markets, having better information about the electoral outcome is sure to be valuable. Someone might just make “the best trade ever” in the next two weeks—all thanks to Greece’s restriction on freedom of the press.--John Carney

It is easy to sympathize with the hostility to the many banks that behaved (in retrospect) so foolishly in ways that damaged everyone else as they took on excessive risk in their quests for greater profits. One can understand also the general reaction against capitalism and “market failures” since commercial and investment banks were in the past a leading example of capitalism at work. Yet anyone concerned about the welfare of the poor and middle classes should resist the temptation to attack competitive private enterprise and capitalism- monopoly or crony capitalism should be deplored. This is only partly because “government failure” also contributed in an important way to the financial crisis as regulators did not rein in the asset explosion of banks and households. Indeed, regulators often encouraged lending to lower income families to buy houses with low down payments, large mortgages and ballooning interest payments.  The main reason to be concerned about the attacks on competitive capitalism is that it has delivered during the past 150 years so much to all strata’s of society, including the poor.--Gary Becker

Every technology has its own logic. Facebook “wants” us to log in a lot and to interact with each other – hence the ability to “like” posts, to comment, to “like” comments, and the constant stream of notifications about all of this. This is sinister, but less insidious because it is so brazen. Facebook the technology has metaphorical wants that reflect the entirely non-metaphorical strategy of Facebook the company.--Tim Harford

What fails more than markets? How about regulations ...

John Carney reports:

Friedman and Kraus argue that regulation—especially regulation of bank capital under Basel II and similar rules in the U.S.—led to a homogenization of balance sheet assets across the banking system. Risk weighting loaded the dice in favor of buying the assets regulators viewed as safe—especially mortgage backed securities—and as a result the banking system as a whole was over-exposed to mortgages and lacked diversity.
...
This last point is especially crucial and not well understood. One of the advantages of a free market system is that different businesses can adopt different business strategies. In fact, competition encourages diversity as executives attempt to gain advantage over rivals in the face of an uncertain future. Disagreement among capitalists strengthens the system because it reduces the cost of errors. Some firms win, others lose, and the damage of bad bets is contained and balanced by the benefits of good bets. Regulations that impose one view on business create systemic risk, Friedman and Kraus argue.

Naughty Christmas card of the day

"Pride before a fall" comes to mind.

Image link here, via Henry Blodget.

Quotes of the day

Public-sector unions and other interest groups wrap their causes in the rhetoric of equality. Often, what they’re really protecting are privileges that raise the cost of public services to everyone else — including citizens who earn a lot less than civil servants. Yes, Wall Street’s bonuses are stratospheric. But the New York Times recently reported that Medicaid was paying nine executives $500,000 or more per year to operate nonprofit homes for the mentally disabled. Okun’s message is that equality is a public good, whose benefits — social cohesion, political stability and the like — are worth paying for. The trick is not to overpay.--Charles Lane

I spent hours upon hours toiling away at a register, scanning, bagging, and dealing with questionable clientele. These were all expected parts of the job, and I was okay with it. What I didn’t expect to be part of my job at Wal-Mart was to witness massive amounts of welfare fraud and abuse.

...

I understand that sometimes, people are destitute. They need help, and they accept help from the state in order to feed their families. This is fine. It happens. I’m not against temporary aid helping those who truly need it. What I saw at Wal-Mart, however, was not temporary aid. I witnessed generations of families all relying on the state to buy food and other items. I literally witnessed small children asking their mothers if they could borrow their EBT cards. I once had a man show me his welfare card for an ID to buy alcohol. The man was from Massachusetts. Governor Michael Dukakis’ signature was on his welfare card. Dukakis’ last gubernatorial term ended in January of 1991. I was born in June of 1991. The man had been on welfare my entire life. That’s not how welfare was intended, but sadly, it is what it has become.

...

Other things witnessed while working as a cashier included people ignoring me on their iPhones while the state paid for their food. (For those of you keeping score at home, an iPhone is at least $200, and requires a data package of at least $25 a month. If a person can spend $25+ a month so they can watch YouTube 24/7, I don’t see why they can’t spend that money on food.)--Christine Rousselle

At 25 I made the naïve mistake of getting an MFA in Creative Writing at a private college in New York City.

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I hadn’t done any research on schools with funding or really given it much thought at all. I thought when I graduated I’d just sell my novel and pay my student loans with the book advance. Needless to say that didn’t happen and when I graduated in 2005, I had $37,000 to pay back. Not only that but the MFA program was super unsupportive—both the faculty and students. Despite doing well in the program and really trying to connect with people I finished feeling no better off than when I’d started. A few years later when applying to residencies and then PHD programs I couldn’t even get letters of recommendation from most of my former teachers.

... 

I felt like the school had taken advantage of my naiveté by charging all this money for essentially a useless degree.

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I started to realize the least common denominator in all of my problems was me and my thinking. I needed to stop feeling sorry for myself for all the things life wasn’t giving me and start being grateful for what I had. As for my job I was clearly in this dog walking profession for a reason and maybe instead of thinking it was beneath me, I’d just try to do the best at it I could. I finally grew up and accepted life on life’s terms and decided to go out there and do the best I could with what I had. This is when things really started to change for me.

...

When I’d have fear about money I’d pay more on my loans, or give an employee a raise, or contribute a little to a charity. I call this daring God to financially take care of me—faith in action. I wanted proof that I’d be taken care of. Initially, I’d do it and sort of cover my eyes afterwards waiting for the ceiling to fall in. It never did. Inevitably, I’d get a new client or business would pick up with training or pet sitting.--Susie DeFord

Occupy, are you listening to this?--Cav

Christopher Hitchens and I were friends for 40 years, plus another five when we were enemies. He took ideas so seriously that if he disagreed with you on a matter that he deemed important, he’d literally throw you in a ditch. It was 1972, the height of our mutual virility. He and I went to a pub to celebrate his most recent intellectual victory over the establishment press. I intimated that sometimes women could be funny on purpose. Even back then, the thought enraged him. Hitchens threw a drink in my face, pressed a lit cigarette into my neck, and hit me over the head with a barstool. The next thing I knew, it was two days later and I was lying hogtied and naked beside the M5. Hitch had already severely damaged my reputation in a vicious essay in the Guardian. But that’s how he operated, and that’s why we loved him.--Neal Pollack

Washington state’s creation of the ferry monopoly is what governments have increasingly done since courts misconstrued the Constitution in a way that licenses governments to dispense particular economic favors by restricting general economic liberty. It is now routine for government to have transactions with rent-seekers — private interests who want public power used to confer advantages on them, or disadvantages on competitors.--George Will

Even though the average congressperson might have more information than the average taxpayer...the cumulative information held by 150 million taxpayers far exceeds the cumulative information held by 538 congresspeople. When it comes to the efficient allocation of public goods...we need to consider sums...not averages. It's interesting to consider though just how many average taxpayers it would take to equal the amount of information held by the average congressperson.--Xerographica

In a market -- one of your beloved markets -- an entrepreneur who presents the same product over and over, deriding customers for not buying it, would be the real fool. You'd laugh at such a fellow and tell him he deserves what he gets -- bankruptcy. Yet, you never view your political program that way, do you?--David Brin

Behind Door #1 are people of extraordinary ability: scientists, artists, educators, business people and athletes. Behind Door #2 stand a random assortment of people. Which door should the United States open? In 2010, the United States more often chose Door #2, setting aside about 40,000 visas for people of extraordinary ability and 55,000 for people randomly chosen by lottery. It's just one small example of our bizarre U.S. policy toward high-skill immigrants.--Alex Tabarrok

We talk about the right to free speech, the right to bear arms, the right to assembly. The right to rise doesn't seem like something we should have to protect. But we do. We have to make it easier for people to do the things that allow them to rise. We have to let them compete. We need to let people fight for business. We need to let people take risks. We need to let people fail. We need to let people suffer the consequences of bad decisions. And we need to let people enjoy the fruits of good decisions, even good luck.

...

That is what economic freedom looks like. Freedom to succeed as well as to fail, freedom to do something or nothing. People understand this. Freedom of speech, for example, means that we put up with a lot of verbal and visual garbage in order to make sure that individuals have the right to say what needs to be said, even when it is inconvenient or unpopular. We forgive the sacrifices of free speech because we value its blessings. But when it comes to economic freedom, we are less forgiving of the cycles of growth and loss, of trial and error, and of failure and success that are part of the realities of the marketplace and life itself.--Jeb Bush

Evaluate ideas by their consequences (consequentialism)
Be aware that your ideas may be wrong and may fail (fallibilism)
Don’t be hypercritical (anti-skepticism)
Try out, debate, and evaluate alternatives (experimentalism).--Elmar Wolfstetter

Quotes of the day

Ludwig van Beethoven, widely considered one of the greatest composers in history, died on this day in 1827. Beethoven moved to Vienna from Germany in his early twenties where he became a virtuoso pianist, before beginning to lose his hearing. Some attributed his loss of hearing to his habit of lowering his head into ice-cold water in order to stay awake and continue practicing, though today this theory is dismissed. Despite the composers failed hearing, Beethoven remained committed to the creation of his art. He stayed sane, and even warded off thoughts of suicide, through devotion to virtue and to becoming accepted as an artist amongst the other musical craftsman of his day. It is widely believed that in the age of television and consumer distractions, another Ludwig van Beethoven will not develop.--Don Miller

Smart lad to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.--A.E. Housman

I try not to lose too many yards on sacks. When you realize that you don’t run very well, you try to get the ball out of your hands as fast as you can. Because when the ball’s in my hands, nothing good is happening. But other players have different strengths.--Tom Brady

"Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed. Simon and his companions went to look for him, and when they found him, they exclaimed: 'Everyone is looking for you!' Jesus replied, 'Let us go somewhere else — to the nearby villages — so I can preach there also. That is why I have come.'"--Mark 1:35-38

In other words, sooner or later, everyone gets tired of his own hype.--Charles P. Pierce

I can't begin to tell you the impact [Tebow]'s had on my daughter [Kelly Faughnan, who has a brain tumor]. She's very positive, and she tries so hard, but she's had a struggle. Tim Tebow has built her self-confidence up so much -- taught her to believe in herself -- that when I see people criticize him, I'm just dumbfounded. I don't get it. It's almost incomprehensible to me. I don't understand why anyone wouldn't want to see an athlete use his position and platform to do good for people.--Kelly's dad

Mrs. Thatcher was the first and only woman ever to have led a major British political party, and remains so to this day. She was the first woman prime minister in the English-speaking world and the longest-serving British prime minister of either sex since universal suffrage.

...

Even in 2011, only one important Western country—Germany—is led by a woman. Whatever the sterling qualities of Chancellor Angela Merkel, one must judge it highly unlikely that she will be the subject of a major feature film 20 years after she retires. Mrs. Thatcher was, in effect, the one and only woman. That unique status still fascinates.

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And this Lady was first called "Iron" not by her admirers but by her enemies. After becoming leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, Mrs. Thatcher opened a new, controversial front in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. She questioned the then fashionable idea of "detente." Soviet communism, she argued, should not be accommodated. It should be overcome—by repairing the defensive military strength of the NATO alliance and by holding out to the subjugated peoples of the Soviet bloc the promise of Western liberty.

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Not many people in the West agreed with her at the time, except one Ronald Reagan, and he was just an ex-governor of California with a dream of running for president.

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After Mrs. Thatcher had made a couple of stirring speeches on this theme, the Soviet Red Army newspaper Red Star christened her "The Iron Lady." In doing so, it intended to make a satirical comparison with Otto von Bismarck, the 19th-century "Iron Chancellor" of Germany and to paint her as rigid and harsh.

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And since 2010, as the debt problem gradually mutated from individuals to banks to entire countries, one of Margaret Thatcher's loneliest battles—her effort in the late 1980s to stop the integration of the European Community (subsequently given the grander title of the European Union)—has begun belatedly to win respect.

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Indeed, it was Mrs. Thatcher herself, a couple of years after she left office, who identified the problem with European construction. It was, she said, "infused with the spirit of yesterday's future." It made the "central intellectual mistake" of assuming that "the model for future government was that of a centralized bureaucracy." As she concluded, "The day of the artificially constructed megastate is gone."

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There is precious little sign that today's European leaders want to listen to what Mrs. Thatcher said. The manic building of a continental megastate continues apace. But Margaret Thatcher's legacy will never be one of elite consensus. As the Western world sinks deeper into obfuscation, it is her habit of tackling the hard bit of every question that continues to look good and to seem more relevant than ever.--Charles Moore

In my opinion, they’ve turned the NYU graduate film degree into swag for James Franco’s purposes, a possession, something you can buy.--Professor José Angel Santana, who gave Franco a 'D' and then was fired

[Homeless couple Scott and Whitney] have the spending power of a couple earning nearly $50,000 each year, without the burden of having to work. They wake up around 9 a.m. each day, an hour when most New Yorkers are at their desks after a long commute over the subways. In short, this is not a sad story about an impoverished duo. It’s the romantic story of a couple who have figured out that they can live quite well without jobs or a home.--John Carney

Wilpon asked Selig to strike the provision requiring him to enable and assist David Einhorn in his pursuit of majority ownership, if Wilpon couldn’t repay him. The idea would be that Selig would play the bad cop. When Major League Baseball put the kibosh on Einhorn, Wilpon would have plausible deniability, and could throw up his hands and say, ‘What can I do? This is how MLB works.'--Howard Megdal

Our union members and staff have participated in many OWS actions, and we have endorsed OWS’ important message that corporate greed and economic inequality are wrong. So we were disappointed to learn that last week people associated with Occupy Wall Street disrupted the set of an episode of Law & Order: SVU, written and produced by members of the WGAE, and crewed by other entertainment industry union members. The demonstrators’ actions were as misguided and inappropriate as the City of New York’s response – revoking Law & Order’s permit for the shoot and directing the dismantling of its set. Presumably the protesters and police did not set out to achieve a common end but together they prevented the scene from being filmed and the story from being told. Freedom of speech is freedom of speech, whether it is the OWS demonstrators’ right to peacefully assemble and protest without fear of retribution or Law & Order’s ability to film in the streets of New York and tell its stories without fear of vandalism from protesters or overreaction by the police.--The Writers Guild of America

Even before the protesters were displaced on Nov. 15, Trinity gave many of them hot chocolate, blankets and a place to rest at a space owned by the church. But when the Occupy movement expressed an interest in setting up an organizing camp on vacant Trinity property at Canal Street and Avenue of the Americas, the church said no. The Occupy Wall Street forces then directed their skills at the church: They took their arguments to the streets. In familiar fashion, police officers converged on the area, standing around the perimeter. A flier distributed by protesters summed up their mood: “While the event may include a reoccupation, the event itself is a broader celebration and expansion of Occupy Wall Street,” it said. It also advised people to bring backpacks, warm clothes and sleeping bags. About 3 p.m., several hundred people began to slowly march along the blocks around the park. They went about five blocks north, then circled back. They were carrying homemade wooden ladders, draped with yellow banners. At Grand Street, the protesters made a move: They threw a ladder fashioned into a portable staircase against a chain-link fence separating the sidewalk from the church’s property. Many people went over the fence that way. Others lifted the fence from the bottom, allowing protesters to squeeze into the space.--AL BAKER and COLIN MOYNIHAN

[If you want to benefit from the seven fat years] you must suffer the seven lean years too, even the catastrophically lean ones. We need free markets, but we need them to be principled.--Emanuel Derman

And now nobody remembers from where Christmas comes
All the festivals and cultures and praise for the sun
Or the charity or giving, how it spread through the land
Then was rightly taken up by our Lord, the Son of Man
Now it’s all about the Benjamins, Bentleys, and bling
And how much in revenues each store can bring.--J.G.C. Wise

Image links here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

Quotes of the day

Unemployment represents a crisis of imagination, a failure to figure out how to make potential workers productive in the modern economy. The people who make creative leaps to solve that problem are entrepreneurs. If we want to bring America’s jobs back, our governments—federal, state, and local—need to tear down barriers to entrepreneurship, create a fertile field for start-up businesses, and unleash the risk-taking innovators who have always been at the heart of our economic growth.--Edward Glaeser

Yeats was right from the beginning: Everything does fall apart. Margaret Thatcher once said that the problem with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. The Greeks have followed that aphorism to its logical terminus, but we ourselves have not, not yet. The Grecian formula could be instructive to the Occupy Wall Street loons, whose policy preferences, to the degree that they can be discerned at all, are to reject the qualities which once made this nation great in favor of those which are tearing Greece apart. A good lesson indeed, if only they had the wit to attend. They don’t, of course. Which is why the grown-ups will have to do the thinking for them, while there is still time.--Neptunus Lex

... it's time that Americans who lament the loss of that which wasn't so great see what the prevailing wage - once again provided by investors - is for manufacturing. Considering average income in the rising country itself, that works out to $2,000/year (as of 2007), according to The Elephant and the Dragon author Robyn Meredith. Even the poorest of the working poor in the U.S. don't earn so little. And what about factory wages in China? According to Meredith "Chinese factory workers, whether making light bulbs, talking toys, or tennis shoes, earn each day about what Americans pay for a latte at Starbucks." These are the kinds of jobs we want to lure back to the U.S.? The simple and happy truth is that there are no jobs without investment, and factory worker pay in China reveals, investors have no interest in paying anywhere near the wages Americans have grown accustomed to. So assuming we resumed manufacturing light bulbs and tennis shoes stateside thanks to some benevolent investor, the wages that support this activity are so low that no Americans would apply for the work. Extremely low pay in China supports the positive pronouncement that we long ago left low value factory work in the rearview mirror, and with good reason. One can't get by on one Starbucks latte per day. In The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton warned his readers about falling for the "deceitful dream of a golden age." Manufacturing is just that. Once the employer of many at high wages, those days are long past, so to dream of a manufacturing future for the United States is to pine for excruciating poverty.--John Tamny

... the percent of Americans’ personal consumption expenditures used to buy Chinese-made goods and services in 2010 was 2.7 percent. And if we exclude expenditures on food and energy, the percent of our 2010 personal consumption expenditures spent on goods and services from China rises to only 3.1 percent. In contrast, the percent of Americans’ personal consumption expenditures spent on goods and services made in America in 2010 was 88.5 (and 88.0 percent if we look at personal consumption expenditures excluding those on food and energy).--Don Boudreaux

Who was in charge of regulating MF Global? Everybody and nobody, it seems. In the days since that midsize brokerage company filed for bankruptcy, officials at many regulatory agencies have defended their actions, all the while explaining that they had narrow, limited roles. At MF Global, there were at least six different agencies and industry groups minding separate parts of the store.--LOUISE STORY and ERIC DASH

Illinois is like the Bears after Walter Payton, the Bulls after Michael Jordan. Except that it's been even longer since the state could claim it had a championship season. As Josh Barro showed in a City Journal article earlier this year, the state has long tried to deliver services without having the revenues to pay for them. It essentially wanted to be a low-tax (or at least a moderate-tax) state with high services and rich employee pensions. One result has been that the state hasn't really balanced its budget for a long time. Instead, even during the national good times earlier this decade, Illinois used borrowing and gimmicks to create the appearance of fiscal propriety, though few people were fooled. As Indiana's Gov. Mitch Daniels likes to say whenever he talks about his own state, it's easy to look good when you have Illinois for a neighbor. But late last year it seemed as if Illinois had finally reached the limit of its shenanigans. Investors balked at buying the state's bonds except at a significant premium over what other states had to pay investors.--Steven Malanga

... the thing that will always be most unfathomable about [Kareem Abdul Jabbar aka Lew] Alcindor was his very first game, played when he was an ineligible freshman: UCLA was coming off back-to-back national championships. As an exhibition, the Bruin varsity — ranked no. 1 in the nation — opened the season by scrimmaging the freshmen team. Alcindor had 31 points, 21 boards, and eight blocks. The freshmen hammered the varsity by 15 points; the no. 1 team in the country could not beat a player who could not yet play. As an ineligible 18-year-old, Alcindor was (at worst) the fourth or fifth-best basketball player in the world. So I guess talent does matter, sometimes.--Chuck Klosterman

Participants were more likely to make memory errors after they'd passed through a doorway than after they'd travelled the same distance in a single room. Another interpretation of the findings is that they have nothing to do with the boundary effect of a doorway, but more to do with the memory enhancing effect of context (the basic idea being that we find it easier to recall memories in the context that we first stored them). By this account, memory is superior when participants remain in the same room because that room is the same place that their memory for the objects was first encoded.--Radvansky, G., Krawietz, S., and Tamplin, A.

No matter how stable you think your time machine is, your first jump should always be into the future. It’s a mistake to visit President Lincoln on your maiden voyage. The past is loud, smelly and dangerous. And without at least one pit stop in the future, the road backwards is a million times more difficult.--Jim Behrle

Quotes of the day

The first Adam was the death-bringer, the second Adam is the death-cheater, and now here are you and me, each of us faced every moment with the choice about which we will be, who we will be. I sped down a country road with these life-bringing, death-cheating boys of mine, and I understood, maybe for the first time ever, that my cup overflows in the valley of the shadow. It’s not an empty promise. Look into your own cup and see. Taste, and see.--Tony Woodlief

America's future depends on others following the example Bill Niskanen set for us.--Gene Healy

I'd like the people teaching my kids to be good enough that they could get a job at the company I work for, making a hundred thousand dollars a year. Why should they work at a school for thirty-five to forty thousand dollars if they could get a job here at a hundred thousand dollars a year? Is that an intelligence test? The problem there of course is the unions. The unions are the worst thing that ever happened to education because it's not a meritocracy. It turns into a bureaucracy, which is exactly what has happened. The teachers can't teach and administrators run the place and nobody can be fired. It's terrible.--Steve Jobs

There are no "rules," and even if there were, you don't get an extra pat on the head for playing by them. Your "Debt Jubilee" will not be a party, unless your idea of a wild time is to eliminate consumer credit as we know it. And if you have any intention of building up a political case for bailing out your bad decisions, you might start with taking even one percent responsibility for them.--Matt Welch

The modern Malthusians were looking very foolish in the 1990s: the price of skilled labour was rising inexorably and the price of most commodities, notably oil, was low. But in recent years there’s been a distinct rise in these prices. Perhaps this is a temporary thing: the rising prices could spur energy-saving innovations. Or perhaps Malthus’s ghost will come back to haunt us, even if not this Halloween. It’s hard to say: population growth is a funny thing. Malthus himself had three children – but no grandchildren.--Tim Harford

Instinctive dislike of markets extends far beyond long-haired dropouts in St Paul’s Churchyard or Zuccotti Park. An intellectual class tends to feel that, if acquiescence in the unpleasantness of market economics is the price to be paid for the comforts of modern life, one must hold one’s nose. The apparent practical success of capitalism is matched only by the failure of its public relations. ... The inventors of social networking sites resemble the occupiers of St Paul’s Churchyard tents more than the occupants of boardrooms. The besuited Winkelvoss twins, lobbying and litigating for a share of Mark Zuckerberg’s business, embody the deformed view of market economics which confuses business interests with free enterprise. Perhaps the “something nicer” which should replace capitalism is a more nuanced – and more accurate – account of capitalism itself.--John Kay

Both the left and the right have been consistently peddling the wrong prescriptions for our economy. Most liberals are focused on the need for additional fiscal stimulus, and dead-set against any premature moves toward what they consider “austerity.” Spending cuts, they say, would weaken the economy. Most conservatives are equally insistent that spending cuts need to begin now—and claim that by reducing expectations of future tax increases these cuts would help the economy. At the same time, they consider monetary policy dangerously inflationary and want the Federal Reserve to tighten it, or at least not loosen it any further. Both sides are mistaken: the right on monetary policy, the left on budget policy, both on the relationship between them. What the economy needs now, contrary to the right, is a permanent monetary expansion. If the Federal Reserve delivers one, the economy, contrary to the left, won’t need new federal spending—and won’t suffer from spending cuts.--David Beckworth and Ramesh Ponnuru

Rivaled only by the ‘get tough on Netanyahu’ fiasco and the Gunwalker scandal, the ‘Green Jobs’ meltdown is the most comprehensive and conspicuous policy failure of the Obama administration to date. What three months ago was widely hailed by the establishment press as a sign of the futurism and forward-thinking of the Obama Administration now, post-Solyndra, is increasingly seen for the bone headed blunder it was. ... A lot of money was spent; precious few jobs were created and the failure damages the Obama brand in three distinct. First, poor jobs growth is the root of all the administration’s other woes. Second, the story undercuts the idea that the stimulus was a good idea and supports the narrative that special interests hijacked it for a porkfest. Third and most deeply, the story reinforces the belief that government planning and industrial policy don’t work. The administration needs to come to grips with this policy failure; when something isn’t working it is time to change course.--Walter Russell Mead

I found that the House Members are routinely less intelligent than the Senate and they were much more kneejerk to their constituencies -- which I found initially quite offensive but came to understand later to be a really good idea. Maybe that's what the framers wanted. They weren't supposed to think too much, they were supposed to represent. The Senators are supposed to think a little more. The Bill passed the House with the largest favorable majority of any tax bill in the history of this country. What happened was it was in during Carter's lame duck session and Bob Dole who was then Speaker of the House killed it. He would not bring it to the floor and we ran out of time. We would have had to have started the process over in the next year and I gave up. However, fortunately something unique happened. California thought this was such a good idea they came to us and said "You don't have to do a thing. We're going to pass a bill that says 'Since you operate in the State of California and pay California Tax, we're going to pass this bill that says that if the federal bill doesn't pass, then you get the tax break in California'. You can do it in California, which is ten thousand schools". So we did. We gave away ten thousand computers in the State of California. We got a whole bunch of the software companies to give away software. We trained teachers for free and monitored this thing over the next few years. It was phenomenal. One of my great experiences and one of my biggest regrets was that really tried to do this on a national level and got so close. I don't think Bob Dole even knew what he was doing but he really unfortunately screwed up here.--Steve Jobs

Memo to Fed: Your job isn't to change your forecast, it's to change your policy in such a way that you don't need to change your forecast.--Scott Sumner

The idea that the space is suffused with unobservable dark matter fixes this problem, but it's a fudge, because it 'appears' only as a solution to this problem. Perhaps gravitation doesn't scale at that dimension.--Eric Falkenstein

Quotes of the day

What I want to do now is to prevent another me. Last thing I want to happen is for someone to replace me as a cautionary tale.--Ryan Leaf, former NFL QB

Success is the result of randomness, effort, and ability.--Eric Falkenstein

Poverty isn't about money; it's a state of mind. That state of mind is low conscientiousness.--Bryan Caplan

Two powerful forces are threatening to drive America from a meritocratic equilibrium to a nonmeritocratic one. Recall that to survive in a democratic country, a meritocracy must enjoy a welcoming culture and offer large, widespread benefits to citizens. In the United States, both of these factors are being challenged: the first by a spreading belief that markets are a bad method of rewarding the meritorious; the second by a reduction of the benefits that most people derive from those markets.--Luigi Zingales

Bud Selig: Tear down this intentional walk.--Joe Posnanski

When he took office, Barack Obama promised "an unprecedented level of openness in Government." As a major part of that commitment, he pledged fidelity to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which he called "the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open Government." It is hard to reconcile these lofty memos with the Justice Department's proposed rule instructing federal agencies to falsely deny the existence of records sought under FOIA. But at least the Obama administration is open about its desire to mislead us.--Jacob Sullum

The President’s argument is, in effect, “We can’t wait for democracy.” The Constitution gives the power of the purse to the Congress, not the President. If the Congress doesn’t want to enact his proposals, then it shouldn’t, and that’s how the system is supposed to work. I am not surprised that the President is using the legislative flexibility he has to maximum effect. I am a bit surprised that he sees a political benefit in framing himself as an Imperial leader who can and should ignore democratic processes. This seems inconsistent with Democratic party rhetoric in recent years. Democracy is so inconvenient when your party controls the Presidency and the opposition can block your legislative agenda.--Keith Hennessey

It was not the banks that created the mortgage crisis. It was, plain and simple, Congress who forced everybody to go and give mortgages to people who were on the cusp. Now, I'm not saying I'm sure that was terrible policy, because a lot of those people who got homes still have them and they wouldn't have gotten them without that. But they were the ones who pushed Fannie and Freddie to make a bunch of loans that were imprudent, if you will. They were the ones that pushed the banks to loan to everybody. And now we want to go vilify the banks because it's one target, it's easy to blame them and congress certainly isn't going to blame themselves. At the same time, Congress is trying to pressure banks to loosen their lending standards to make more loans. This is exactly the same speech they criticized them for.--Mayor Bloomberg

The Olympus scandal exposes the all-too-cozy nature of Japanese business that was subject to so much praise in the 1980s. Japanese corporations are dominated by insiders, and companies are often run for the benefit of these insiders rather than shareholder interests. Because of the keiretsu and cross-holdings, shareholder pressure and oversight have traditionally been minimal. Hostile takeovers are almost nonexistent, as is shareholder activism. Though there has been increased government scrutiny of business practices, Japanese regulators have been slow to force changes. ... the fact that United States authorities rather than Japanese regulators appear to be taking the lead in investigating the Olympus transactions speaks volumes. ... Right now, the discourse is about Chinese domination. The Chinese economy is what economists term command and control. The state directs industry and has profited greatly by doing so. In the United States, meanwhile, there is an outcry over a relatively small loan guarantee to Solyndra, the solar company. China has clearly benefited from its cheap labor and huge investment. But it also has cronyism, state protectionism and hidden debts at the local level. This sounds like Japan in the 1980s.--STEVEN M. DAVIDOFF

Occupy Wall Street has raised more than $500,000 in New York alone to support anti-greed demonstrations and, seven weeks into the movement, protesters are finding that having money creates headaches. The challenges have included how to become a non-profit entity, how to deal with credit card companies withholding donations, choosing a bank that shares the movement's philosophy and budgeting what to spend cash on. The totals raised -- more than $500,000 in New York and around $20,000 in Chicago, Richmond and other cities -- have surprised everyone from the protesters to those overseeing their finances.--Ben Berkowitz and Chris Francescani

... the NBA is a monopoly and operates in a manner (it monopolizes!) that would be illegal outside the sports world. Unlike in Silicon Valley, there are no NBA “start-ups.” You cannot create a new NBA team without permission of the incumbent owners. The league also has to approve changes in teams’ location and ownership. What does this mean? The owners can get together and agree to jointly cut expenses, that is, the player salaries. Players have limited opportunities to play professional basketball in other countries, but realistically, if you are a world-class professional basketball player, you probably want to be in the NBA. ... As human beings, we are programmed to reject one-sided deals, even when surrender might be the rational choice.--Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier

The person who wants to get you fired is not your friend.--David Henderson

If multiple people can't reproduce what's supposed to be a scientific result, then there may well be something wrong with it. And if someone that you're working for or with won't show you raw data, then head for the door, because nothing but trouble can ensue. The alarm bells have at that point gone off, whether you can hear them or not.--Derek Lowe

Even when science shows time and again that it’s not so, we continue to persist in believing that sugar causes our kids to be hyperactive. That’s likely because there’s an association. Times when kids get a lot of sugar are often times when they are predisposed to be a little excited. Halloween. Birthday parties. Holidays. We may even be causing the problem ourselves. Some parents are so restrictive about sugar and candy that when their kids finally get it they’re quite excited. Even hyper. This does not mean that there aren’t a ton of great reasons why our kid should not ingest large quantities of sugar. As almost any parent knows, sugar has been linked to cavities and the obesity epidemic. Just don’t blame it for your child’s bad behavior.--Aaron Carroll

It’s not just that Jobs’ refusal of treatment is “crazy,” as former Intel chief Andy Grove put it to Isaacson. This tragedy sprung from the very thing that made him so great: his unwillingness to believe that technology needed to be clumsy, ugly, or difficult. In consumer products, this led to the MacIntosh and the iPhone. In animation, it created the Pixar canon. But biology and medicine are messy, and demanding a magic solution doesn’t always produce one. ... I’m haunted by a story I heard once about a biotech industry lobbyist who went to see a congressman and was told, “You guys don’t do innovation. The iPad. That’s innovative.” As a society, it seems to me, we say that a lot. We value the magic box built out of many more basic innovations much more than what came before – and as a result, we overlook the work that is actually foundational. And I worry that were this less true, medicine could have done even more for Steve Jobs.--Matthew Herper

But if the apparently timeless appeal of Disney World is symptomatic of the spiritual malaise of contemporary culture, it is also an important indicator of its spiritual hunger. Disillusioned by the lies of our culture, millions choose to escape to a kinder and more magical facsimile of hope at Disney. As C.S. Lewis once observed, the potency of fantasylands are their ability to break the "evil enchantment of worldliness" and arouse a dim longing in us for something unreachable within the drab flatness of wonton perception. Millions visit Disney World for a chance to walk through the looking glass, to be transported to another, more whimsical world where our imaginations take flight. While the happiness it offers is ephemeral, the profound feeling of disenchantment that draws visitors to momentarily withdraw is not.--Chris Cuthill

Surprisingly to me, but maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, [film documentarian Ken] Burns is quite confident that he would not have been successful without government funds. I think this could be an example of a phenomenon that Milton Friedman often noted: that people who are used to something have trouble imagining the world without that thing, in this case, government funding of Burns's documentaries.--David Henderson

I never saw this side of Ken when we were in our kids' classroom.--Cav

Quotes of the day

Nature, like an enemy, seemed intent on concealing from us its master plan. At the same time, we did have a valuable key to nature’s secrets. The laws of nature evidently obeyed certain principles of symmetry, whose consequences we could work out and compare with observation, even without a detailed theory of particles and forces. There were symmetries that dictated that certain distinct processes all go at the same rate, and that also dictated the existence of families of distinct particles that all have the same mass. Once we observed such equalities of rates or of masses, we could infer the existence of a symmetry, and this we thought would give us a clearer idea of the further observations that should be made, and of the sort of underlying theories that might or might not be possible. It was like having a spy in the enemy’s high command.--Steven Weinberg

What my mother could envision was a future in which I made my own choices. I don’t think either of us could have predicted what happens when you multiply that sense of agency by an entire generation. But what transpired next lay well beyond the powers of everybody’s imagination: as women have climbed ever higher, men have been falling behind. We’ve arrived at the top of the staircase, finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up—and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don’t want to go out with. ... Just as I am fully aware that with each passing year, I become less attractive to the men in my peer group, who have plenty of younger, more fertile women to pick from. But what can I possibly do about that? Sure, my stance here could be read as a feint, or even self-deception. By blithely deeming biology a nonissue, I’m conveniently removing myself from arguably the most significant decision a woman has to make. ... When Gloria Steinem said, in the 1970s, “We’re becoming the men we wanted to marry,” I doubt even she realized the prescience of her words. ... Increasingly, the new dating gap—where women are forced to choose between deadbeats and players—trumps all else, in all socioeconomic brackets. ... It appears that the erotic promises of the 1960s sexual revolution have run aground on the shoals of changing sex ratios, where young women and men come together in fumbling, drunken couplings fueled less by lust than by a vague sense of social conformity.--Kate Bolick

Roubini Global Economics, the economics research firm begun by noted economist Nouriel Roubini, is for sale, according to sources who have been approached by an investment bank conducting an auction for the firm. RGE, as it's known, has grown quickly since its founding by Roubini, who is its chairman. It has over 85 employees, and is still losing money.--David Faber

The top 1% of New Yorkers pay over 40% of all income taxes, providing huge benefits to everyone in our city and state. Paulson & Co. and its employees have paid hundreds of millions of dollars in New York City and New York State taxes in recent years and have created over 100 high paying jobs in New York City since its formation. New York currently has the highest income taxes of any state in the country and thousands of businesses have fled New York to states with no income taxes such as Florida, Texas and Nevada, or moved offshore. Instead of vilifying our most successful businesses, we should be supporting them and encouraging them to remain in New York City and continue to grow.--Paulson & Co.

We are legion ... for we are many.--Occupy Wall Street protestor

We are legion for we are many.--possessive demons begging Jesus not to deport them

Capitalism might not run on greed, which may only be a lubricant

I think it runs on envy. Eric Falkenstein has a great writeup here.

Quotes of the day

[Rogue traders] need to come to terms, personally, with what happened, with their own dishonesty. If you can't accept that you can't move on. If I had put my hand up at the end of the first year, I'd have received a slap on the wrist. By the end of the second, I'd have lost my job. By the end of the third, it had become criminal. I am a criminal, by the letter of the law, but there was no criminal intent there. You don't go into these things intending to become a criminal. You want to make money for the bank, be a good trader and get a big bonus. The criminality is always with the individual trader, but the bank, with its incompetence and negligence in controlling what is going on, is complicit. In all those cases there are strange similarities: the length of time that passes before they reveal themselves, the amount of money involved, the age of the trader.--Nick Leeson

... the “tournament” problem ... comes up in any market that’s potentially dominated by “superstars”. Athletic competitions, for example, are prone to drain more resources than they’re worth. (See previous blog posts here and here.) Major league baseball is a good thing — it entertains the fans. But if we could randomly eliminate half the players, we’d lower the quality of competition just a little, while freeing up a lot of ex-ballplayers to start businesses, drive cabs, or write sports blogs. The market fails to find that outcome. The fact that it’s so easy for markets to fail is part of why we should be so astonished, and so thankful, that they typically succeed.--Steve Landsburg

This is no market for young men.--Jeremy Grantham

Attention all you hedge fund readers: if [the Swiss] can arbitrage and convexify their guinea pig market, you’d better not bet against their currency peg.--Tyler Cowen

... unless you get rid of the tax-free status of muni bonds, Theresa Heinz-Kerry will continue to have the effective tax rate of a probationary janitor.--Megan McArdle

It appears Team Obama wants you to conclude that there is no difference between the President and Congressional Republicans on the amount of proposed deficit reduction, and that the President wants a prospective deficit reduction approach balanced between spending cuts and tax increases. Both conclusions are false. The policy changes the President is proposing are significantly less deficit reduction than that proposed by (House) Republicans, and almost all of the President’s new proposed deficit reduction comes from tax increases. To put the second point in schoolyard terms, President Obama is in effect saying to Republicans, “We did it all your way (spending cuts) the last two times, so this time we should do it almost all my way (tax increases). That’s balanced.” It’s a legitimate liberal policy position to propose new net deficit reduction of about $1.4 T over the next ten years, almost all of which comes from tax increases on the rich. That is the President’s policy. I think it’s terrible policy, but that’s a judgment for the Congress and ultimately for American voters to make. Team Obama knows they will lose the public debate if they actually say that, so they are helping you to draw mistaken conclusions about what they are actually proposing. They are instead pretending to propose $4T of deficit reduction over the next ten years, balanced between “real, serious spending cuts” and tax increases. That is a fundamentally dishonest presentation of the policies the President is actually proposing.--Keith Hennessey

You can get a sweet deal if you are the customer who gets marginal cost pricing. Medicare does this--reimburses hospitals at above their marginal cost, but below their average cost, so that private insurers have to pick up most of the hospital overhead. European countries do this with prescription drugs: reimburse above the marginal cost of producing the pills, but below the total cost of developing the pills, so that the US has to pick up most of the tab for drug development. The problem is that as voters and as customers, we often get the notion that this can be extrapolated to everyone. So liberal policy wonks want to save money by putting everyone on Medicare, or some equivalent program that uses the government's monopsony pricing power to get lower prices for everyone; thrifty customers think that everyone should drop cable and just pay $14.95 for streaming plus DVDs.--Megan McArdle

... the President’s definition of “shared sacrifice” exempts the largest entitlement spending program (Social Security), his biggest legislative achievement (the new health entitlement created two years ago), and tax increases for more than 99% of the population. That is an odd definition of “shared.”--Keith Hennessey

I never put on a pair of gloves again [after the Leonard fight]. Never had one gym workout. If you get that taste in your mouth, it never goes away.--Marvin Hagler

Marvin [Hagler] was more a traditionalist and a purist. The money was great, but he didn't fight for the money. For Marvin, the belts came first, the history came first, the legacy came first. He was a boxer-businessman. [Sugar] Ray [Leonard] was a businessman-boxer.--Seth Abraham

On This Day. 1862: President Lincoln issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, setting a date for the freedom of 3 million slaves.--WestWingReport

I want to give my kids just enough so that they would feel that they could do anything, but not so much that they would feel like doing nothing.--Warren Buffett

"I thought they did a great job with the movie.  Let's be honest: Did I think they could make a movie out of 'Moneyball?' No. Never. I even told the studio that. And when they did make it, I thought it would suck.--Michael Lewis

The movie did not suck, not at all, that's the wrong word and that's a story for tomorrow. The story for today is how we even got here. It is about a man who is not really in the movie. No actor plays him. He's mentioned in the movie here and there, but only for a a few seconds. Still, without him, there is no Moneyball. There is no Sabermetrics, at least not under that name. Certainly people would still be looking for objective knowledge in baseball -- people were looking long before Bill James and they will look long after.  But without the life's work of Bill James, they sure as heck would not have made a movie out of it.--Joe Posnanski

Before a decade’s worth of steroid revelations made their glowing press coverage seem like an exercise in self-deception, people liked to say that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa “saved baseball” in 1998 — that their extraordinary home run surge revived fan enthusiasm and restored America’s interest in the sport after the ugliness of the World Series-canceling 1994 strike. Maybe that was true for others. For me, the player who saved baseball was Tim Wakefield.--Ross Douthat

Photo links here and here.

Things Apple Inc is worth more than

here.  My favorite:  10 years worth of silver production.

Via Catherine Rampell.  Photo link here.

Quotes of the day

When you wallpaper over termites, at first it looks good for awhile.--Rick Santelli, on CNBC a few moments ago, on the European economy and the markets

... she continues screaming, "Oh God, we're going to die." So the people on the plane are looking around. "Nobody's saying we're not going to die; maybe we are going to die." And so finally we land and they come off, and she gets off and she's very shaken. And she was sitting next to this kid who was just staring out the window the whole time, like, oh God, please don't. And so I say to that kid, I said wow that was some flight, huh? And the kid said, "This was my first time on an airplane. Is it always like this?" And I realized after three years in DC, I was that kid.--Austan Goolsbee, on his time as President Obama's chief economist

SAGAL: One last question, before we go to the game. How does it feel to be one of the men that salon dot com named one of the 15 sexiest men of 2010?
Mr. GOOLSBEE: I said at the time I didn't even know Salon was printed in Braille.
SAGAL: Very good.
SAGAL: That may be the funniest thing a government economist has ever said on this show.

Spending money on such boondoggles to create jobs relies on a faith in the fiscal multiplier, and the magic of spending to reduce debt. Bush II spent like a drunken sailor (wars, medicare) and this ended with a disaster even though it should have been no worse than the alien invasion expenditures suggested by Keynesian economists. It should be remembered that after independence India focused on jobs and the poor, as opposed to free trade and property rights, and they stagnated for decades. If governments could boost the economy spending on big top-down projects, countries like India would have done much better than countries that were less hands-on in their management.--Eric Falkenstein

... as Larry Summers famously described it, Keynesian countercyclical policy is "temporary, targeted, and timely." The Reagan tax cut was certainly not temporary. And it wasn't targeted either; it was across the board. And it wasn't timely because it lasted well beyond the recession and the recovery. In fact, it is just the kind of "permanent, pervasive, and predictable" policy that we need now.--John Taylor

One obvious step would be a cut in the taxation of income from corporate capital. According to a 2008 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, “Corporate taxes are found to be most harmful for growth.” Tax reform that reduced the burden on capital income and shifted it toward consumption would improve prospects for long-run growth and, in so doing, encourage greater investment today. Yet it would be overly optimistic to think that any single public policy, by itself, could lead to the kind of robust investment spending seen in previous recoveries. Myriad government actions influence the expected future profitability of capital. These include not only policies concerning taxation but also those concerning trade and regulation. For example, passing the free trade agreement with South Korea, which has languished in Congress more than four years after first being negotiated, would be a step in the right direction. So would reining in the National Labor Relations Board; its decision to block Boeing from opening a nonunion plant in South Carolina may have been hailed by organized labor, but it surely did not hearten investors. Economists often rely on the convenient shortcut of separating long-run and short-run issues. Recessions are then viewed as short-run problems that require short-run solutions. That approach, however, may be simplistic. Lack of investment spending is a large part of the economy’s current difficulties, but capital investments are always made with an eye toward the future. The best fix for our short-run problems may be to focus on policies that will foster long-run growth as well.--Greg Mankiw

As I sat in my first Harvard economics lecture, listening to Greg Mankiw introduce himself to his new graduate class, my head was in a spin.  Could he really be a Republican Keynesian? And a Keynesian disciple of Milton Friedman? For a young Brit, just graduated from Oxford, this was revolutionary; what I thought was the conventional economic wisdom was being turned upside down.  ... Keynes himself must be turning in his grave. For – as that Greg Mankiw class highlighted to me, and has now been fully documented in Lord Skidelsky's biography – the real Keynes was no profligate tax-and-spender. His seminal 1930 Treatise on Money was as hawkish on inflation as Friedman decades later. His attitude to irresponsible wage bargaining in the 1920s was as unforgiving as Thatcher in the 1980s.--Ed Balls, Great Britain's shadow chancellor

If you have a luxury sports car, you don't put 87 in it. You put in 93. So why would I put 87 into my body? I want my body to run as efficiently as possible, so let me put good stuff in it and go out here and exercise. That's the key, and it's been working.--Damien Woody

I'm so proud of [Tom Brady] and what he’s done -- and the way that he’s done it. He's not only been one of the very best players in the league now for a long time, but he’s continued to handle himself with class, on and off the field. I’m really just proud of what he’s done and the way he’s led this team.--Drew Bledsoe

It's possible to overthink things. But thinking is what makes life interesting. It's why pure talent isn't necessarily as entertaining as doing more with less. ... We live in a celebrity culture, and that collective ideology drives sport as much as anything else. When we turn on the TV, we want to see famous people. Yet every athletic superstar is just another stand-in (both for the player who came before him and the player who'll come after). Life is a game, and we are the pawns. The only thing that matters is how the pieces move.--Chuck Klosterman

Physical courage is admirable, but in modern society it simply isn't as important as it was when philosophy developed 2500 years ago. Intellectual courage, the readiness to risk humiliation, is much harder, precisely because it is more ambiguous. Only with the virtue of hindsight of generations do we see intellectually courageous stands for what they were, what distinguishes the Churchills from the Maos, the Galileos from the Lysenkos. It is courage combined with prudence, not mere zealotry. Having something terrible happen to you generates instant sympathy. Our culture has moved from from celebrating accomplishment (Eisenhower) to suffering (McCain), where suffering has been expanded to include the indignity of growing up a non-asian minority. Thus, Obama's rather cushy Hawaiian life was transformed in his autobiography into something subtly oppressive because his biological father was African.--Eric Falkenstein

Readers of history may call to mind the Roman Empire, the Russian years under Communism, certain local churches, Christian universities, confessional seminaries, and on and on. They know that human institutions can never be so safely constructed that outcomes are guaranteed. For the heart of the human dilemma is so deeply rooted in personal sin that no structure can finally reform it. The lament for Israel’s princes becomes a lament for the human race, which desperately needs a solution far deeper and more effective than princes, presidents, and structures can ever provide.--Don Carson

Quotes of the day

A Craigslist search shows women aren't after the bankers.--John Carney

[Sallie Krawcheck] should really be an insurance or financial industry expert and talking-head on CNBC—like Dick Bove. She hasn’t got the operational leadership chops to lead the IT unit that manages Merrill’s Thundering Herd Desk-Top. Would Ike have put a Company Commander in charge of the pivot to Bastogne? Hell no! He asked Patton to do it!--unnamed commenter

I raised $30 million and if you’re saying I can be bought for $5,000, I’m offended.--Rick Perry

I’m offended for all the little girls and parents who didn’t have a choice.--Michelle Bachmann

What does it mean to be a man? No one really knows, but it makes for some damn good television. In the first decade of the 21st century, a critical consensus formed that we're currently living in the golden era of television. ...When you list out the great shows that make up this television renaissance, certain commonalities emerge: high production values, a greater investment in acting talent, and complex plotting that assumes an audience that never misses an episode. But with the sole exception of True Blood—which has camp enough to put it into a genre of its own—all these shows share something else. Every other non-vampire show centers around a modern man struggling with the limitations of his outlook in a world full of complexity and changes that prevent survival through simple reliance on old gender norms. If you want to make a critically acclaimed drama, you need to build up a patriarch, preferably in a highly masculine environment, and then start to peel away his certainty about the way the world works and what it means to be a man in this world. ... Americans can't get enough of watching powerful men run into walls created by the limits of narrow, traditional masculinity. ... The irony is that these new shows about men mine territory familiar to feminism, and could even be described in many cases as explicitly feminist. But for all the feminism on TV, high quality dramas about women haven't taken off. Women get plenty of meaty, complex roles in these top tier shows, but only as supporting characters in shows centered around men's gender drama. ... I blame the nation's inability to deal directly with women engaged in complex, dramatic struggles that call gender roles into question. We are, after all, a country where people can go on TV and call Sarah Palin a feminist without choking on their own tongue. Perhaps the absurdities of being female in this modern era don't lend themselves well to drama, but have to be approached sideways, through comedy. Women do very well heading up some of the best comedy on TV--Amanda Marcotte

Champagne Super Novak.--Brian Phillips

... approximately 40 percent of sunlike stars have at least one low-mass planet orbiting around it. On the other hand, the majority of alien planets with a mass similar to Neptune appear to be in systems with multiple planets, researchers said.--Denise Chow

... how did [analysts] get the 50,000 [additional jobs from the White House plan] number? A preliminary analysis. By whom? When? Using what assumptions? And where did the [New York] Times get that estimate? From the White House press team? But the number 50,000 is treated as something like a fact. One reason it’s not close to a fact is that there’s no way of verifying whether this “estimate” is accurate after the fact. So what’s the meaning of this estimate? None. It’s a meaningless statement. But the media treats it like it’s science. It’s not science. It’s fake science. It’s scientism.--Russ Roberts

... there probably is no market for unbiased media. There is definitely a market for hard-core right-wing opinions. There is definitely a market for what we call mainstream media, where both the opinions and the reporting are biased to the left. There is also a market for something like the Washington Post, where the editorials are pretty centrist while the reporting strikes me as showing zero understanding of anything right of center. --Arnold Kling

Modern research on teacher quality makes clear that the factors used to determine a teacher’s compensation tell us little to nothing about how well the teacher will perform in the classroom. That consistent finding has (or should have) enormous implications for the future of the current system. The results of an employment policy based entirely on credentials uncorrelated to student achievement are obvious: we see wide variation in the quality of public school teachers.--Marcus Winters

The argument for large and expensive efforts to prevent or reduce global warming has three parts, in principle separable: Global temperature is trending up, the reason is human activity, and the consequences of the trend continuing are very bad. Almost all arguments, pro and con, focus on the first two. The third, although necessary to support the conclusion, is for the most part ignored by both sides.--David Friedman

It is a crisis of capitalism because our economic model and policy settings cannot produce sustainable growth, adequate income formation or employment creation. We have lost the housing, financial services and credit creation growth drivers and been left with excessive levels of personal and government debt to unwind, a dysfunctional financial system, and weak labour markets. The capacity to produce and sell goods and services has outstripped that of consumers to borrow and spend. Without credit and jobs, other fault lines have been exposed, including the long stagnation of real wages and extremes of inequality. It is truly a crisis of aggregate demand.--George Magnus

Diversity undermines solidarity. People don't mind paying high taxes to support people "like them." But free money for "the other" leads to resentment and political pushback. If you're a social democrat, this implies a tragic trade-off between social justice for natives and social justice for potential immigrants. But if you're a libertarian, the opposite is true. The welfare state doesn't make open borders impossible. It's open borders that makes the eventual abolition of the welfare state imaginable.--Bryan Caplan

My philosophy is that losers have goals and winners have systems.--Scott Adams

Quotes of the day

Many ask whether high-income countries are at risk of a “double dip” recession. My answer is: no, because the first one did not end. The question is, rather, how much deeper and longer this recession or “contraction” might become.--Martin Wolf

Money, it turns out, is incredibly hard to reason about in a systematic and rational way (even for highly educated individuals). Risk is even harder.--Dan Ariely

In poker, volatility is a weapon. It can be an especially powerful weapon in the hands of the deranged. The ones who wield it most effectively either 1) have a very large stack relative to yours, or 2) have minimal personal regard for their own financial well being. To wit, if your opponent doesn’t care about fragging his own chip stack in pursuit of yours, he can use that as an advantage. Even insanity can be an edge — temporarily at least.--Jack "Mercenary Trader" Sparrow

A massive refinancing effort is likely to have little impact on the economy or foreclosures or housing prices. What it would do, however, is hurt our government’s already precarious balance sheet by reducing the payments on its vast mortgage portfolio. Fannie and Freddie should focus on reducing public losses with sensible, limited mortgage modifications and by selling foreclosed homes reasonably slowly.--Edward Glaeser

... Obama and his advisors predicted the economy would do better — much better — than it has, and those predictions were wrong. The president blames events: the European debt crisis, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, the political tsunami of the 2010 elections. Some of that is plausible, but the two years of anemic job and economic growth that preceded those events can hardly be blamed on them. And it's that economic performance that has scuttled Obama's plans for an easy reelection in 2012. That sluggish growth seemed to catch a lot of people by surprise. ... prediction is hard. Experts — in politics, economics, climate — are very, very bad at telling people what will happen tomorrow, let alone next year or the next century. How many of the economists who tell us what to do now failed to see the mortgage debt crisis coming? Nearly all of them. ... The cult of experts has acolytes in all ideological camps, but its most institutionalized following is on the left. The left needs to believe in the authority of experts because without that authority, almost no economic intervention can be justified. If you concede that you have no idea whether your remedy will work, it's going to be hard to sell it to the patient. Market-based ideologies don't have that problem because markets expect events in ways experts never can. No president since Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt has been more enamored with the cult of expertise than Obama. That none of his economic predictions have panned out is not surprising. What is surprising is that so many people are surprised.--Jonah Goldberg

The context is Eric Cantor’s demand that any federal disaster relief in the wake of Irene be offset by spending cuts elsewhere. Krugman thinks this is silly, and proves his point with an appeal to the standard Ricardian theory of public finance. According to that theory, which all economists understand and accept, if you’ve got to bear a cost, it’s best to spread that cost out over as many activities as possible. So ideally, you’d pay for disaster relief partly through spending cuts, partly through (current) tax increases, and partly through an increase in the deficit. Therefore says Krugman, “the bottom line is that basic, regular economics says that Cantor isn’t making sense.” ... Unless you believe that everything is perfect to begin with, the Ricardian argument fails, leaving you with no reason to believe that the cost of new spending should be spread widely. Instead, you should start by cutting back on your least wise activities. Cantor and Krugman probably have some legitimate disagreement about what those least wise activities are, but neither of them has any reason that I know of to believe that all activities are currently equally wise at the margin. I’m guessing that if Cantor had proposed paying for disaster relief entirely through an tax increase on the very rich, that Krugman would not have been so quick to dissent with an appeal to Ricardian public finance. (Come to think of it, if Krugman took his own point seriously, he’d be forced to conclude that every tax increase should be spread across all income groups, and accompanied by cuts in all expenditure categories. This would mark yet another radical change in several of his previous positions.) Then there’s the separate point that comes from public choice: Sometimes it’s a good idea to constrain people from doing things they want to do until they improve their behavior elsewhere. Even if you approve of the Congress’s intention to provide disaster relief, it can still make sense to hamstring that intention until they get some other stuff right — just like with the kid whose prom plans you approve, but who is still required to finish his chores first.--Steve Landsburg

A recent abortion kerfuffle occurred when Virginia's Department of Health proposed regulations for abortion clinics that consistent with the construction of new hospitals and all the sudden liberals realized how insanely onerous these regulations are. The bottom line is that regulations are very costly, and they are growing, as Obama is pushing for more EPA regulations based on fanciful savings to health care costs. Unfortunately, for Keynesians there's no interest in the effects of regulations on aggregate demand.--Eric Falkenstein

It’s not clear what we’ve “won” in Libya. But it is clear what we’ve lost: whatever’s left of the quaint notions that America should wage war only in defense of our vital interests and that presidential uses of military force can and should be constrained by law.--Gene Healy

... outside the academy, theory encounters a little something called the marketplace, where it turns out that courses like “Queering the Alamo,” say, can’t compete with “Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition.” ... the educational market works very differently inside the academy and outside it, and the consumers of university education are largely to blame. Almost no one comparison-shops for colleges based on curricula. Parents and children select the school that will deliver the most prestigious credentials and social connections. Presumably, some of those parents are Great Courses customers themselves—discerning buyers regarding their own continuing education, but passive check writers when it comes to their children’s. Employers, too, ignore universities’ curricula when they decide where to send recruiters, focusing only on the degree of IQ-sorting that each college exercises sub rosa. Universities are certainly doing very well for themselves, despite ignoring their students’ latent demand for traditional learning. But they would better fulfill their mission if they took note of the Great Courses’ wild success in teaching the classics. “I wasn’t trying to fix something that was broken in starting the company,” Rollins says. “I was just trying to create something beautiful.” Colleges should replicate that impulse.--Heather MacDonald

If there is indeed a market in sexual favors—where sex is exchanged for economic support, emotional commitment, and the like—then it is by definition a two-way market. Assume, for a minute, that women are the “producers” in this market, and men are the “consumers.” (We all know what the product is.) Assume, as well, with Ms Hakim that there is an artificially restricted supply of this product. In aggregate, demand exceeds supply. To whose benefit does this market imbalance accrue? Cui bono?   Why, the producers, of course. Women. Duh.  To whose benefit would a removal of these restrictions accrue? The consumers. Men. A complete liberalization of the market for erotic capital—deregulation, in other words—would lower the scarcity, price, and value of sexual favors across the entire market. Men could presumably purchase or acquire by other means all the sexual satisfaction they desired at a going rate likely to be well below the standard price exacted today. At the margin (and perhaps well beyond that), marriage, committed fatherhood, and men’s financial and emotional support to their women and children would likely decline materially. Is that what women want? Really?   I will presume to speak for the fairer sex now: Of course not.   This is why the argument that sexual repression of women arises solely from patriarchy makes no sense to me.  ... consciously or not, I believe most women understand [that women’s erotic capital depreciates over time] extremely well. In fact, it has been my experience that women are the primary carriers of cultural and social values in this sphere. You don’t usually hear men or fathers making a big deal about loose women, adultery, prostitution, and the like; it is the wives and mothers. Why? Because it affects them directly. Patriarchal socioeconomic structures or not, it is usually women who set, monitor, and enforce basic social and sexual mores and expectations.  It’s in their own self interest. --TED

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.  ... Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.--Steve Jobs


... suicide is more than twice as common as homicide.--Stephen Dubner