Quotes of the day

Consensus isn’t the same thing as excellence.--Andy Greenwald

Roughly a quarter of all hospitalized patients will be harmed by a medical error of some kind. If medical errors were a disease, they would be the sixth leading cause of death in America—just behind accidents and ahead of Alzheimer's.--Marty Makary

The Emancipation Proclamation destroyed the south's best hope for victory – foreign recognition. From then on they would have to look to their own armies for victory.--Joshua Horn

At least when the Pharisees bragged about their piety and how much they gave to the Temple, they actually performed the rituals and gave money. Leftists brag about how compassionate they are and then don’t give much from their own time and pocket books.--Shannon Love

The group that Marx loved, the non-elite working people who create value and have that value transferred to the bourgeoisie, are the main supporters of the Republican Party, and most likely to hate any of the words associated with Marx like “socialism” or “communism” or "Obamacare."--Half Sigma

When an equation is correct, mathematicians call it ‘beautiful.’ A true equation is beautiful because it is elegant and uncluttered with mistakes or unnecessary steps.--John Polkinghorne

Quotes of the day

If you can't sell 'em, rent 'em.--agent Paul Larson of Coldwell Banker Burnet, via Mark Perry

... our own regulatory ingenuity ...somehow or other, always manages to backfire.--Richard Epstein

Bernanke's change of mind reflects his shy personality plus groupthink.--Bryan Caplan

Many mediocre minds are impressed by famous colleagues, graduate degrees, Harvard, or equations. Those people aren't worth impressing. While such signals are correlated with good ideas, they are neither necessary nor sufficient for a good idea. When someone emphasizes these signals, however, that should lower their credibility among thoughtful people because it suggests bad faith, a preference towards pretentious irrelevancies. I've seen this a lot, hiding behind equations. It often works because one does not want to sit down, understand what all the variables mean and how they are measured, etc. I just don't feel impressed at all by such equations because my Bayesian prior is they merely have a bad idea in equation form, so I don't give them the benefit of the doubt even when I'm lazy and have not enough time to evaluate their math.--Eric Falkenstein

We’ve seen from Republicans in–particularly Republicans in the House, but with Republicans generally, that they don’t want to be part of any plan that raises taxes at all. The president’s budget has $1 of revenue for every $2 1/2 of spending cuts.--Jack Lew, White House Chief of Staff and former Budget Director

Contrary to Mr. Lew’s assertion, the President is proposing at least $1.20 of tax increases for every dollar of proposed spending cuts. The President’s budget locks in historically high spending levels and relies more on tax increases than spending cuts for the limited deficit reduction it proposes.--Keith Hennessey

Photo link here.

Happy Birthday, Fischer Black

A typical quote of his:

In the end, a theory is accepted not because it is confirmed by conventional empirical tests, but because researchers persuade one another that the theory is correct and relevant.

I find this relevant to faith (which is also required where confirmation by conventional empirical tests are unavailable). One could also say:

In the end, a theology is accepted not because it is confirmed by conventional empirical tests, but because theologians persuade one another that the theory is correct and relevant.

(NOTE: His actual birthday is tomorrow, but I may not get to the blog then).

Quotes of the day

Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,
Alles schläft; einsam wacht--Joseph Mohr

In the beginning God disclosed himself, and that self-disclosure was with God, and that self-disclosure was God.--Don Carson of John 1:1

If you believe, then unbelievable things can sometimes be possible.--Tim Tebow

Tebow. TEE-bow. Verb. To defeat an opponent while overcoming a major impediment. Ex.: Despite having a 102-degree fever, Lucy managed to Tebow her competition for the Miss America pageant through her great determination.--Peter King

Corn grits, cocoa, condensed milk, white bread and sugar. This was America's menu for the starving millions in Soviet Russia during the 1921-23 famine – one of the greatest human disasters in Europe since the Black Death. The famine relief was spearheaded by Herbert Hoover, whose biographers credited him with saving more lives than any person who has ever lived.--CYNTHIA HAVEN

... to the extent you measure poverty as a relative concept, you ensure that no public policy can eliminate what you call poverty.--Arnold Kling

So much for Obama's endlessly repeated promise that if you like the health insurance you have, you can keep it.--David Henderson

We have 37 Christmas trees here at the White House--37! That's a lot, right? Yes, that's a lot of trees. And we also have a 400-pound White House gingerbread house.--Michelle Obama

There is surely no such gulf between Marx and Keynes as there was between Marx and Marshall or Wicksell. Both the Marxist doctrine and its non-Marxist counterpart are well expressed by the self-explanatory phrase that we shall use: the theory of vanishing investment opportunity.--Joseph Schumpeter

North Korea has warned South Korea of "unexpected consequences" if it lights up a Christmas tree-shaped tower near their tense border.--BBC News

Many [New York Times reporters] them seem to have a congenital inability, or, at least, unwillingness, to distinguish between libertarians and conservatives. The differences are not small.--David Henderson

Everybody was laughing because when I signed my tax returns this year I had to get completely wasted.--Lady Gaga

Liberals are inclined to see progressive policies as the solution to family breakdown. Conservatives are inclined to see progressive policies as the cause of family breakdown. I think that the reaction of libertarians is to squirm with discomfort. You think that the liberals are in a bad position intellectually, but you are reluctant to affiliate with conservatives on an issue where they are so. . .umm. . .conservative.--Arnold Kling

Undergraduate tuition at New York University is around $41,000, but parents can be assured their bright young things are still getting The People’s Education, reports the student newspaper The Washington Square News. NYU plans to offer not one, but two classes on the burgeoning social movement known as Occupy Wall Street, so that the 1 percent may study the 99 at both the undergraduate and graduate levels.--Adrianne Jeffries

... the current price of a college degree is not just the balance of four years’ tuition; one must also consider the cost, to students and employers, of the ambiguity hanging over what the degree actually means.

...

One root of the problem is the fact that the college degree is issued by the same institution that is in charge of setting, and enforcing, the standards of that credential, says [Salman] Khan, who holds four degrees himself. This is tantamount to investment banks rating their own securities, he says. Meanwhile, the accrediting agencies that are in charge of making sure those “ratings” are legitimate do not currently focus on what students coming out of those institutions measurably know.--Steve Kolowich

I heard this morning that the non-euro members who did go along [with the new rules giving the EU greater power] did so mostly because they hope to join the euro. Talk about the triumph of hope over experience! This is like supporting the death penalty because you're hoping to end up on death row.--Megan McArdle

What “Anglo-Saxon economists” are doing is confusing their own ideology with reality. Economists tend to look at economic problems as involving incentives. Align incentives properly, and problems are easily solved. The tricky part is all in the figuring out how to get incentives properly aligned.

...

This turns a blind eye, however, to the role of ideological commitment. The strong commitment on the part of European central bankers to austerity may make the incentives irrelevant. All the incentives in the world might not matter because at some level the central bankers believe that the necessity for expansionary monetary policy is incommensurable with their other ideas about how the world works.

...

To put it differently, the monetary experts in Europe may just be too ignorant of the peril they are in thanks to their world view. We cannot count on Draghi and others suddenly taking a more rational approach to monetary policy. They can remain irrational longer than Europe can remain solvent.--John Carney

Over all the notion that the path to safety for banks is to turn them into a service business seems misguided, coming from a place of consumer-finance rhetoric rather than serious thinking about the purposes of a financial industry. The point of a bank is not to reduce credit card fees and clearly disclose mortgage terms, but to provide credit. And the idea that “focusing on the underlying economics of a transaction” can distinguish between a loan and a bond – or a residential mortgage and an RMBS – severely undersells the ingenuity of the financial sector.

...

Bair is probably right that the distinction between “prop trading” and useful activity drawn by the Volcker Rule does not prevent banks from doing all manner of risky things. It wasn’t really intended to: “prop trading” sounded sort of nasty, and people made money doing it, and we’d had a financial crisis, and a futile and stupid gesture was required, so presto, Volcker Rule. But that’s because clearly drawing that line is really hard, and replacing the line drawn by the Volcker Rule – in one sentence (“no prop trading”) or 300 pages – with another arbitrary one-sentence definition is equally unlikely to work.--Matt Levine

Players of an online video game called Foldit have helped researchers discover the structure of an protein-cutting enzyme produced by an AIDS-like virus found in monkeys. Scientists have struggled with the problem for a decade, but the gamers helped crack it in just three weeks.--Jacob Aron

... the bottom line is the bottom line, and the best way to get your boss to appreciate you more is to help him make more money for the firm.--Eric Falkenstein

In whatever it is that we try to do, grow trees, cure the ill, distribute food, keep the lights on or build houses, we would always prefer to do this in whatever manner it is that uses the least resources.

...

We don't say that using 5 tonnes of copper to wire a house is better than using 500 kg to do the same job. Well, we don't say it is better just because we're using more copper that is. So why would we say that having a retail sector that employed more rather than fewer people would be a good idea?

...

Quite, we shouldn't, for the claim is a claim that we should be using more of a scarce resource, labor, to get a job done, the distribution of consumer items. We should no more want to use more labor here than we should use more copper in wiring a house.--Tim Worstall

Image links here, here, here and here.

Reducing false positives

Razib Khan making sense, including:

• Authors must decide the rule for terminating data collection before data collection begins and report this rule in the article.
• Authors must list all variables collected in a study.
• Authors must report all experimental conditions, including failed manipulations.
• If observations are eliminated, authors must also report what the statistical results are if those observations are included.

Via Tim Harford.  In addition to professors and doctors, perhaps climate scientists will be more, um, scientific about how they do their jobs.

Statistics are like a bikini. What they present is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.--Aaron Levenstein

Photo link here.

Quotes of the day

Will the “Occupy” movement develop into a significant political force? I am doubtful: the movement is already losing supporters in most places where it has been active. Cold weather will accelerate the decline. The movement is losing ground not because the issues it raises are unimportant, but rather because the great majority of Americans and those in other countries with Occupy groups do not sympathize with most of the people doing the occupying.
...
Although, on the whole, I believe that most members of the top 1% provide useful services to society, I share the concern of “occupiers” and Tea Party members about many of the bailouts. The rich bankers and others who took large risks should have taken much larger haircuts. I have also supported from the beginning of the recession higher capital requirements for banks, especially for the large “too big to fail banks” that will be bailed out if they get into financial difficulties.
...
Nevertheless, the overall earnings inequality has far greater relevance for the vast majority of occupiers and Tea Party supporters than do the earnings of men and women at the very top of the financial sector. The most effective way for the US to reduce overall inequality that will help the largest number of young persons is by finding ways to bring American high school and college graduation rates up to the levels achieved by the other nations, such as South Korea and some European nations, that have replace the US as worldwide leaders in education achievements.--Gary Becker

Why are liberals so desperately unhappy with the Obama presidency? There are any number of arguments about things Obama did wrong. Some of them are completely misplaced, like blaming Obama for compromises that senators forced him to make. Many of them demand Obama do something he can’t do, like Maddow’s urging the administration to pass an energy bill through a special process called budget reconciliation—a great-sounding idea except for the fact that it’s against the rules of the Senate. Others castigate Obama for doing something he did not actually do at all (i.e., Drew Westen’s attention-grabbing, anguished New York Times essay assailing Obama for signing a budget deal with cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid that were not actually in the budget in question).
...

Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president—indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious—but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president—either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president.
...
the liberal failures of Obama and Clinton are but tiny potholes next to the vast gulch of failure that was the Carter presidency. Today, Carter is remembered as a president anchored in liberal values, a revision of history both conservatives and Carter himself are happy to leave uncorrected. But the truth is that Carter’s domestic agenda carried only small bits of liberalism, and those small bits (a consumer-protection agency, tax reform) met with total failure in the Democratic Congress.
...

Roosevelt did not run for office promising to boost deficit spending in order to stimulate the economy. He ran castigating Herbert Hoover for permitting high deficits, then immediately passed an austerity budget in his first year. Roosevelt did come around to Keynesian stimulus, but he never seemed to understand it, and in 1937 he reversed himself again by cutting spending, helping plunge the economy into a second depression eventually mitigated only by war spending.--Jonathan Chait

Neither the politics of polarization nor those of noblesse oblige on behalf of the fortunate will serve to protect the interests of the middle class in the post-industrial economy.--Lawrence Summers

The great thing about an experience like this is that you learn who your friends really are.--David Frum

I was happier when I didn’t know.--David Frum's wife

... what seems beyond argument is that the U.S. political system becomes more polarized and more dysfunctional every cycle, at greater and greater human cost. The next Republican president will surely find himself or herself at least as stymied by this dysfunction as President Obama, as will the people the political system supposedly serves, who must feel they have been subjected to a psychological experiment gone horribly wrong, pressing the red button in 2004 and getting a zap, pressing blue in 2008 for another zap, and now agonizing whether there is any choice that won’t zap them again in 2012. Yet in the interests of avoiding false evenhandedness, it must be admitted: The party with a stronger charge on its zapper right now, the party struggling with more self-­imposed obstacles to responsible governance, the party most in need of a course correction, is the Republican Party. Changing that party will be the fight of a political lifetime.--David Frum

In my capacity as an independent candidate for President of the United States, I feel it's my job to offer specific suggestions for getting people back to work. I don't know what those other candidates were doing today, but it probably involved sexual harassment, lobbying while calling it something else, dodging blame, being ineffective, worshipping the wrong god, and that sort of thing. I did most of those things today too, but I also came up with this job bunching idea, and that's not nothing.--Scott Adams

The article quotes Beane as saying that Lewis understood what he was doing within minutes: "You’re arbitraging the mispricing of baseball players". And I don't think that it can be put in fewer words: that's exactly what someone with a Wall Street background would make of it, and it's exactly right. Now to our own business. Can you think of an industry whose assets are mispriced more grievously, and more routinely, than drug research?
...
Think about it. All those preclinical programs that never quite work out. All those targets that don't turn out to be the right target when you get to Phase II. All those compounds that blow up in Phase III because of unexpected toxicity. By working on them, by putting time and effort and money into them, we're pricing them. And too much of the time, we're getting that price wrong, terribly wrong.
...
That's what struck me when I read Moneyball several years ago. The problem is, drug research is not baseball, circa 1985. We're already full of statisticians, computational wizards, and sharp-eyed people who are used to challenging the evidence and weighing the facts. And even with that, this is the state we're in. The history of drug research is one attempt after another to find some edge, some understanding, that can be used to correct that constant mispricing of our assets. What to do?--Derek Lowe

... we are at the dawn of “neuroeconomics.”--Robert Shiller

... the people who do not devote themselves to the words of God eventually lose them. The loss is catastrophic. The only adequate analogy is a desperate famine. It is easy to see how this judgment works out in history. For complex historical reasons, France turned on the Huguenots and persecuted them almost out of existence, so the Bible and the Reformation never took hold in France as it did in England. Sometimes the antipathy toward the Bible has arisen from drift, rather than from persecution. In many Western countries, the public sense of morality was until a few decades ago largely tied to the Ten Commandments. Nowadays very few even know what the Ten Commandments are. The result is not freedom and integrity, but a lilting scorn that flaunts its superiority over something no longer even understood, much less respected—and what shall the end of these things be?--Don Carson

Best brain teaser I've seen in awhile

Via Greg Mankiw.

Quotes of the day

Corporate executives and managers, as well as some economists, like to think that the increasing pay of senior employees has to do with increasing returns for their specialized skills. Over email, [Emmanuel] Saez offered me a much less flattering explanation: it’s not that managers have become more valuable. It’s that, as he puts it, there’s no good way to measure objectively the productivity of an executive. That lends itself to what Saez calls “bubble phenomena” in their perceived value—to put things bluntly, they benefit from being seen as more important than they are.  If that’s the case and managers do not have some special growing value, then the same forces that have put pressure on wages lower down the ladder—labor mobility, ease of hiring and firing—will eventually apply to them, too. We may already be seeing the beginnings of that with CEO salaries. Whether in a slow seep or a big bang, every bubble will deflate.--Mark Gimein

Corporate governance experts should consider whether there should be real mechanisms to throw out and replace bad boards. Perhaps we need term limits for board members? At a minimum, there should be accountability and some metric to determine what constitutes a good board. We are seeing a search for accountability in the criticisms of the Hewlett-Packard and News Corporation boards for poor oversight. Again, though, we have no real systematic way to measure or monitor this conduct. Boards are also not a panacea and have serious institutional failings. Boards appear to be poor at taking decisive action. In the face of crisis, boards tend to resign or be taken captive by their advisers. Think of Dynegy, where the board resigned en masse after two failed sale attempts. And does anyone really think a board can substantively monitor systemic risk at a $2 trillion institution like Bank of America? Not only do boards need to be held accountable, there is the scary question of whether all of this power being provided to them is a good thing. If not, should this power flow back to the chief executive? This is not to say that corporate governance does not have value. It does, and I believe it has increased shareholder wealth. But this is a learning process. There is still a lot of work to do.--Steven Davidoff

I majored in communism and graduated magna cum laude. SO WHAT?--Jim Cramer, on CNBC today, who did this at Harvard

I’m not planning on going home.--Stacy Hessler, Wall Street Occupier, who has 4 children at home

[Herman Cain] is rising as more and more Republicans come to the conclusion that the Republican Party has found its Michael Dukakis, a technocratic Massachusetts governor running on competence, not ideology.--George Will

... when you’re a speaker, in the sense of public speaking, you can pick your topics. When you’re a would-be president, every topic picks you. Whatever happens this morning is the new topic. So, you have to have the ability to get briefed, very fast. Ideally, you should know a fair amount going in. And I think one of the Republican weaknesses has been that we rely too much on consultants and too much on talking points. And we don’t rely enough on actually knowing things. If you’re going to lead the country and change history, you had better know a heck of a lot before you start, because there’s not much time for learning on the job. And as Obama’s proven, youth and inexperience are interesting, but they can also be a disaster.--Newt Gingrich

[New York City Comptroller John] Liu also claims that public-pension funds are a better deal because they can take much more risk in pursuit of higher profits. But he all but ignores the fact that when pension returns fall short, it’s the taxpayer who must make up the difference. Skyrocketing pension costs have wreaked havoc with the city’s budget; they’re the driving force behind budget cuts, including fewer police officers to deal with more protests and gunplay alike. Yet Liu’s report merely says that concerns about higher taxpayer costs are “legitimate” -- and that’s it. Indeed, the report raises a question that the comptroller surely didn’t intend: If big pension plans offer better returns at lower costs, why not let city workers participate in such plans if they like -- but with only a small portion (maybe 20 percent of salary, instead of 50 percent) guaranteed by the taxpayers? Workers who want more money could contribute more and still benefit from scale. But the extra contributions wouldn’t carry a taxpayer guarantee. Anyway, New York City doesn’t have to guarantee such generous pensions to “work” its size. It could still use the leverage to fight for lower fees on 401(k)-style plans for its workforce. Liu’s report doesn’t advance the cause of fixing pensions. But it does remind New Yorkers of the stakes of the next mayoral race. It should remind them, too, that the current mayor is running out of time. If Mayor Bloomberg doesn’t get something done on pensions -- and soon -- he’ll leave behind a legacy of having left untouched a status quo whose costs are eating the city from the inside out. Sadly, plenty of his would-be successors think that’s just fine.--Nicole Gelinas

All models are analogies, and being analogies, they are limited in their scope. In physics you can describe ice, water and steam, and the phase transitions between them, with one unified theory, amazingly, and hence you can handle the extremes of freezing and boiling. In finance or economics we have nothing like that. Even beautiful Black-Scholes-Merton ignores volatility variations, illiquidity, panic, government regulations on shorting, to name just a few things that lie outside it. Therefore, when the world changes dramatically, every single model you can think of is likely to fail. I would like the following principle to be engraved on the foreheads of all financial and economic model users: All models are short volatility. When volatility changes a lot, the model is going to fail.--Emanuel Derman

Quotes of the day

Even leftists believe in property rights ... at least when it comes to their property. --Greg Mankiw

... the Tea Party has a ready and plausible answer as to how to restore self-government and break the grip of the crony capitalism that ties the Obama administration to Wall Street. They want to drastically reduce the size of government. The protesters have no such view. Like their 1960s predecessors, they're chasing their tails trying to imagine procedural reforms that will allow the demonstrators to govern themselves, while also curbing the power of those greedy capitalists.--Fred Siegel

If [Romney's] rivals looked stronger, he might need to play more to “the poor should pay higher taxes and the uninsured should take care of themselves” strand within conservatism. But as it stands, the field’s weakness is letting him get away with rhetoric and positioning that should make the Obama White House very, very nervous.--Ross Douthat

The Obama administration, under fire for not taking a harder line
on China over its currencyon American consumers who stubbornly take advantage of good deals offered by Chinese sellers and, allegedly, made even more attractive by Beijing’s monetary policy appears set to move against
the Asia export powerhouse on other fronts these politically unorganized Americans as next year’s U.S. elections approach.--Don Boudreaux, riffing on Doug Palmer and Glenn Somerville

It’s remarkable to see how similar the arguments being put forward by wind-energy proponents are to those that the Obama administration is using to justify its support of Solyndra, the now-bankrupt solar company that got a $529 million loan guarantee from the federal government. But in some ways, the government support for the Shepherds Flat deal is worse than what happened with Solyndra. The majority of the funding for the $1.9 billion, 845-megawatt Shepherds Flat wind project in Oregon is coming courtesy of federal taxpayers. And that largesse will provide a windfall for General Electric and its partners on the deal who include Google, Sumitomo, and Caithness Energy. Not only is the Energy Department giving GE and its partners a $1.06 billion loan guarantee, but as soon as GE’s 338 turbines start turning at Shepherds Flat, the Treasury Department will send the project developers a cash grant of $490 million.--Robert Bryce

[The Red Sox] needs a statistical agnostic leader. They need a guy who it doesn’t matter if he plays or not. Or it doesn’t matter what he’s hitting or not. He will talk to anybody on the team about them doing something wrong. I’ve said it a couple times. That was Doug Mirabelli. That was Mike Lowell. That was what those guys did. That was Gabe Kapler. None of those guys were leading the team in home runs or RBIs or batting average. The guys in those clubhouses had an immense amount of respect for them. Orlando Cabrera marching back to Manny [Ramirez]‘s locker and demanding that Manny put himself back in the line-up. Guys like that. This team doesn’t have them. This team has a couple of guys like a [Dustin] Pedroia who is going to play his [expletive] off and expect everyone to do the same. I don’t see him as a kid who stands up in front of the locker room and says, ‘This has got to change.’ I’m not seeing that yet.--Curt Schilling

Anyone — Keynesian or otherwise — paying attention to the last thirty years of empirical macro never expected much crowding out of financial capital in the first place.  It simply has not been in the cards.  To put it more bluntly, the “no crowding out” result is not much of a predictive victory for Keynesian economics, IS-LM, the liquidity trap, and so on, even though I have read it claimed as such many times.  It is a strike against some predictors who were wrong in the first place, especially in the right-wing popular press circa 2009-2010, plus some Republicans who jumped ship on the issue, perhaps because they wanted to attack Obama.  What’s a unique prediction we might look at?  It is a common Old Keynesian claim these days, at least from Krugman, that the AD curve is upward-sloping because of a liquidity trap.  That would imply that harsh and binding minimum wage hikes, and other wage-propping mechanisms, should prove expansionary.  That claim, at least for the Great Depression, has been knocked down fairly conclusively by Scott Sumner.  If there is no comparable test on today’s data, it is because we have grown that much wiser.--Tyler Cowen

I’ve argued before that the Mother of All Bubbles may be excess manufacturing capacity in Asia. Decades of above average returns on investment, compounded by a range of state policies aimed at encouraging the development of this kind of enterprise, have led to a massive overcapacity: the world can’t consume as many widgets as manufacturers need to sell.--Walter Russell Mead

... in 1934 the Austrian mathematician Karl Menger wrote a paper that rejected unbounded utility functions. These unbounded functions include, for example, logarithmic utility, a particularly useful one because it corresponds to exponential growth, and thus is a natural for many time series processes (like compounded returns). Because his result is wrong, the motivation for focusing on the ensemble approach is ill founded. And, to make matters worse, in many important cases it is a time series approach that makes the most sense. After all,we only live one life, and we care about what is dealt to us in that life. If we enjoyed (and recognized that we enjoyed) reincarnation so that we could experience many alternative worlds – and better yet,if we experienced them all simultaneously -- perhaps it would be a different matter. What is fascinating is that Menger’s paper has been cited widely by notable economists, including Samuelson, Arrow and Markowitz, Nobel laureates all.--Rick Brookstaber

I have done 1.5 years of research on the type of tumor that affected Steve Jobs and have some strong opinions on his case, not only as an admirer of his work, but also as a cancer researcher who has the impression that his disease course has been far from optimal. Let me cut to the chase: Mr. Jobs allegedly chose to undergo all sorts of alternative treatment options before opting for conventional medicine. This was, of course, a freedom he had all the rights to take, but given the circumstances it seems sound to assume that Mr. Jobs' choice for alternative medicine could have led to an unnecessarily early death. Again, please understand that I have no knowledge of the specific case, I'm just trying to give insights on his a priori odds of cure.--Ramzi Amri

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.

Quotes of the day

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.--Laurence Binyon

There are always groups trying to get America to change the anthem. It's a hard song filled with violence and questions and
exceedingly high notes. But, our anthem tells a uniquely American story. No, it does not go on about fruited plains or home sweet home or Captain Washington on a slapping stallion. It just says very simply that through the night, through the fire, through the bombings, the flag was still there. They won't play games this weekend as New York still burns and America takes tentative first steps back to everyday life. That's OK. The games will be back soon enough. We should still play and sing the national anthem this weekend, loud enough for everyone to hear. Yes, it's a much scarier world today that it was before Tuesday. But it's also been 187 years since Francis Scott Key saw the dawn's early light. The flag is still there.--Joe Posnanski, just after 9/11, 2001

Once upon a time, you see, I lost something, and prayed to get it back, but when I lost it the second time, I didn't, and now this was it, the missing word, the unuttered promise, the prayer I'd been waiting to say a very long time.--Tom Junod

This book haunts me a month after I finished it. I can’t fritter away time on the internet anymore with a clear conscience. I wake up earlier so I can take time to write and focus my thoughts for the day. I find myself trying harder and doing more work at work. It sucks. I miss my life as a slacker.--slamb817

I’m very close to thinking the United States shouldn’t be in Basel any more. I would not have agreed to rules that are blatantly anti-American. Our regulators should go there and say: ‘If it’s not in the interests of the United States, we’re not doing it’.--Jamie Dimon

The board was so spooked by being cast as the worst board in the country. Now they’re trying to show that they’re not the doofuses that they are.--Carol Bartz, former Yahoo CEO

16. Non-Disparagement. You agree, other than with regard to employees in the good faith performance of your duties with the Company while employed by the Company, both during and for five (5) years after your employment with the Company terminates, not to knowingly disparage the Company or its officers, directors, employees or agents in any manner likely to be harmful to it or them or its or their business, business reputation or personal reputation.--Carol Bartz's employment agreement with Yahoo

From the failed Microsoft sale negotiations, to a subsequent bungled and disappointing search deal with Microsoft, through a series of misguided CEO selections, and most recently the Alipay debacle, this Board’s failures have destroyed value for all Yahoo stakeholders. Ms. Bartz’s exit and Mr. Morse’s elevation to interim CEO makes him Yahoo’s fourth CEO in four years and further demonstrates the poor corporate governance Yahoo investors have been saddled with for too long. Even before Ms. Bartz’s hire, Yahoo’s shares materially underperformed the market and their peer group, as graphically evidenced in the Company’s most recent 10-K. Against this background, it is evident that merely replacing the Company’s CEO – yet again – will not be enough to alter the direction of the Company. Instead, a reconstituted Board with new Directors who will bring fresh eyes, relevant industry expertise and increased investor alignment to the table is immediately necessary.--Dan Loeb

I love DSK. I love his wife. They are great people and when they came back to Paris I sent them flowers. But you know, for people in politics, it’s very embarrassing. On the left they had hoped he wouldn’t come back, because I think other people want his job. And on the other side…but even in America, Clinton survived his blow job. But there was not a lot of doubt that that was consensual. They all do it in the political world. They get horny from politics, from power. And he had unbelievable charms. He is really charming. He’s fun, he’s great. He’s a sweet guy—as long as you’re not a woman. That’s the problem.--Karl Lagerfeld

... [JFK] never missed church one Sunday that we were married or all that, but you could see partly — I often used to think whether it was superstition or not — I mean, he wasn’t quite sure, but if it was that way, he wanted to have that on his side. He would say his prayers kneeling on the edge of the bed, taking about three seconds and crossing himself. It was just like a little childish mannerism, I suppose like brushing your teeth or something. But I thought that was so sweet. It used to amuse me so, standing there.--Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

By the end of my two minutes in the private room with the TSA, I was essentially standing in a pool of my own sweat. I’m not sure what you are supposed to call being groped against your will, but somehow I found myself remembering my Crim Law professor lecturing on sexual battery. The thought of my wife going through the same thing made me violently angry, yet I was terrified of even appearing concerned about what was happening, lest they determine that I’m resisting and cast me down with the sodomites. And I had what I think was a pretty standard TSA experience. Consider what happened ... Do you think a TSA administrator would want his wife to go through that? Do you think the Secret Service would allow the President to be touched in that manner by any person other than his doctor or the First Lady?--Elie Mystal

... Greek data are further from the Benford distribution than that of any other European Union member state. Romania, Latvia and Belgium also have abnormally distributed data, while Portugal, Italy and Spain have a clean bill of health. Would a Benford-style analysis have helped spot Greece’s problems? In principle, yes. In practice, one wonders whether politics would have trumped statistics. A shame: according to Benford’s Law, Greece’s data were particularly odd in 2000, just before it joined the euro.--Tim Harford

I have no idea how closely [Moneyball] hews to reality, but ultimately, what I took away from this wasn't a particular feeling this way or that about Beane or the A's or even baseball. I just walked away invigorated by the idea that it pays to gamble sometimes, and that just because something is done a certain way, there's no reason to think it can't be done better. This is a film about faith and risk and the enormous rewards of both, and it is somehow far more commercial and inviting than I would have imagined possible. It's a major accomplishment. Yes… I'd even call it a home run.--Drew McWeeny

[Football] has a role to play, a small role. It's a unifying role. Rich and poor, liberals and conservatives, love football. We just need to show we're all together.--Jason Garrett

... the greatest contests, the ones whose outcomes are most exalting for the winners and most devastating for the losers, are the ones most likely to be decided by infinitesimal turns of luck.--Brian Phillips

The cut in payroll taxes is supposed to have two positive effects on the economy. It would temporarily reduce the cost of labor to companies and thereby encourage them to hire more workers, and it would increase the spending of workers through increasing their take home pay. Such temporary cuts in wage costs to employers will increase employment only a little, and it will be mainly for low skilled low wage jobs that can be easily eliminated after the cuts expire. Since spending by households responds much more to their long term income prospects than to short run changes in their incomes, households would tend to save rather than spend most of their higher incomes due to a temporary cut in social security taxes. Therefore, the employment bang for the buck will be small per dollar of tax cut.--Gary Becker

Quotes of the day

... I had no idea I was landing in Heaven.--Chad Ochocinco

No, college athletics is not ABOUT the players. College athletics is FOR the players, but that's a different thing, and that's a distinction we don't often make. College football only works on this grand scale, I believe, because it's about the colleges. The alumni connect to it. The people in the town connect to it. The people in the state connect to it. People are proud of their connection to the University of South Carolina and Clemson, they are inspired by Alabama and Auburn, Penn State and Notre Dame and Stanford, they identify themselves through Missouri and Wisconsin and Florida and Texas A&M. The players matter because they chose those schools, they play for those schools, they win for those schools and they lose for those schools too. Everyone, of course, wants them to be the best players available, and some are willing to cheat the current system to get those players. But soon the players move on, and the love affair continues, just as strong, just as vital. The CONNECTION is what drives college football. Otherwise, without that connection, it's just football that isn't nearly as well-played as the NFL.--Joe Posnanski

This particular Red Sox roster was already risking a no-win situation with its Yankee-like payroll (north of $163 million), Yankee-like winter splurge (spending $296 million and sacrificing two blue-chip prospects and a first-round pick to acquire Carl Crawford and Adrian Gonzalez) and general resemblance to the Yankees (never a good thing). What's less gratifying than following a woefully underachieving team with woefully overpaid players? (Cut to the Mets fans nodding wistfully.) As if that wasn't enough pressure, with the Bruins and Celtics poised for prolonged playoff runs and the always-competitive Patriots looming in September, the Red Sox were threatening to become the Fredo of the Boston sports family for the first time since 1985. ... This could be the most well-rounded Red Sox team since 1975 in terms of star power, breakout guys, star-crossed guys, whipping boys, washed-up guys, up-and-comers, aging vets, out-of-nowhere guys, offensive explosions and just about everything else you'd want from a 162-game season. There's been real entertainment value in every sense, good and bad. Can you put a price on that? (Thinking.) Oh, wait, you actually can. The price was $163 million.--Bill Simmons

As a general rule, it's bad when a player says he couldn't turn down the money. And then laughs.--Bill Barnwell

The only reason we need to lift the debt ceiling, after all, is to pay for spending that Congress has already authorized. If the debt ceiling isn’t raised, we’ll face an absurd scenario in which Congress will have ordered the President to execute two laws that are flatly at odds with each other. If he obeys the debt ceiling, he cannot spend the money that Congress has told him to spend, which is why most government functions will be shut down. Yet if he spends the money as Congress has authorized him to he’ll end up violating the debt ceiling. As it happens, the debt ceiling, which was adopted in 1917, did have a purpose once—it was a way for Congress to keep the President accountable. Congress used to exercise only loose control over the government budget, and the President was able to borrow money and spend money with little legislative oversight. But this hasn’t been the case since 1974 ...--James Surowiecki

Some economists advocate further large fiscal stimulus packages in order to compensate for what is considered insufficient aggregate demand for goods and services by consumers and investors. Yet we already had close to a trillion dollar badly designed stimulus package, tax credits for first time homebuyers, a senseless “cash for clunkers” program, and other federal programs that have not had any clear sustained effect on moving the economy forward.  It is obvious now that forecasts by some economists in President Obama’s administration that these programs would reduce unemployment to under 8% were far too optimistic. Although little consensus exists on what in fact was achieved by the major $800 billion stimulus package, I do not know of convincing evidence that it accomplished a lot in reducing unemployment and raising employment. So it is hard to be optimistic that an additional stimulus package would be designed better or work any better, and of course, it would add to an already large fiscal deficit.--Gary Becker

 In effect, today’s standard economic methods make the distant future count for almost nothing. And those who always thought this seemed hopelessly naïve turn out to be right.  The important point, Geanakoplos and Farmer emphasize, is that everything about discounting depends on what assumptions you make about how variables fluctuate with time. A fixed interest rate doesn’t work. And neither does the strong exponential discounting to which it leads -- even though most economists continue to use it.--Mark Buchanan

I’m deeply, deeply disappointed with CFL bulbs. I replaced pretty much every regular bulb in the house with CFLs, but they’ve been failing at about the same rate as ordinary long-life bulbs, despite the promises of multi-year service. And I can’t tell any difference in my electric bill. Plus, the Insta-Wife hates the light.--Glenn Reynolds

... in the long run, the India-China relationship will do more to shape our world than virtually anything that happens anywhere else.--Walter Russell Mead

I’m my own worst critic and if I don’t pull off what I think I wanted to do in my head, then I won’t be a happy girl.  I’ve got Tony [Bennett]’s voice right in my ear and that’s so much for me that I can’t look up and see Tony the person as well. I sound so stupid but it’s hard.--Amy Winehouse

Cartoon of the day: Statistics

Source here.

Quotes of the day

Imagine that the arguments triggered by the Hindenberg disaster were about the fire extinguishers and parachutes that airships should carry, rather than about the design flaws that might cause them to ignite. Unfortunately, today’s debates about banking reform have just this character.--Amar Bhidé

A new study by the Cultural Cognition Project, a team headed up by Yale law professor Dan Kahan, shows that people who are more science- and math-literate tend to be more skeptical about the consequences of climate change. Increased scientific literacy also leads to higher polarization on climate-change issues.--Freakonomics

Here is one of my first posts on global cooling, from 4 years ago.--Cav

I recently watched an overwhelmingly liberal audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival shift uncomfortably in its seats as Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia, offered his own explanation. For several years Professor Haidt has probed what he calls the moral intuitions of liberals and conservatives. I find his conclusions compelling. It has come to this: you need a psychologist to make sense of US fiscal policy. Prof Haidt finds that liberals are driven mainly by intuitions about fairness (who gets what) and harm to victims. Conservatives are guided by those intuitions too, but also by intuitions about loyalty, authority, and purity (including bodily purity). These are not views so much as deeply embedded moral impulses. They are often wrapped up in religion, or lack of it. Transgressing them is a kind of sacrilege. In the US, differences in these moral-psychological foundations are very marked. The more progressive you are, the harder you find it to understand the claims of loyalty, authority and purity. The more conservative you are, the more indispensable those claims appear to be. This matters because US politics, especially at the conservative end, is powered by the energy at the extremes. Why did the Aspen audience squirm? Because Prof Haidt also notes that the wider conservative spectrum of moral intuitions is the global norm. Those conservative impulses are nearly universal across world religions and cultures. Secular liberals are the anomaly.--Clive Crook

We have to tell people what is happening here. I’m frankly embarrassed to be a member of a community where 41 percent of pregnancies are terminated.--NY Archbishop Timothy Dolan

Doctors are silly.--Tim Harford's child

Statistics are like a bikini. What they present is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.--Aaron Levenstein

Is there a “shortage” of primary care physicians relative to “shortages” of specialists? I am doubtful for several reasons.--Gary Becker

Miss America is all finished product and no process, and contemporary viewers tend to crave the exact opposite. The pageant ethos of perfectibility seems as quaint, these days, as the “Miss” honorific.   ... for the most part, the young ladies of 2011 played it safe. Contestants barely speak for the first half of the show, and it’s hard to stand out when you’re one of several dozen women grinning silently in taffeta.  The exception was Miss Nebraska, who performed her piano glissandi with some violence, spoke forcefully about WikiLeaks (“When it came to that situation, it was actually based on espionage”), and shared her intention to be a Supreme Court justice. Watching the pageant, I was struck by her attractiveness, quotability, toughness, faith, and ambition. As weird and unfashionable as pageant standards may seem, Scanlan’s ruthless beauty-queen comportment feels immediately familiar in 2011, when political candidates are held to a standard of faultlessness that only a doll might plausibly meet (women candidates in particular). Transport Scanlan from her Miss America context into the political arena and the anachronistic pageant armor seems, suddenly, a shrewdly contemporary asset.--Molly Young

Last Sunday, in the Wimbledon final, the succession happened again. This time, Novak Djokovic did to Nadal what Nadal once did to Federer, taking the match, and the championship, 6-4, 6-1, 1-6, 6-3. After a year of picking the Spaniard off in smaller tournaments1 while piling up an overall record of 47-1, Djokovic finally beat the king. As with Nadal-Federer, the key wasn't just that the younger guy won, but that the loser lost despite playing really good tennis. Over the first hour or so of the match, Nadal's first-serve rate was 91 percent. During the middle phase of the match, when Djokovic started dictating every rally, Nadal sometimes hit three or four shots in a row that could have been winners against any other player. Each time, Djokovic managed to keep the ball in play en route to a winner of his own. Because Nadal was so solid, all the pressure fell on the mind of Djokovic. Could the younger player hold up against the inevitable onslaught from the proven champ? Djokovic's win took tennis to a very high plane — someplace noticeably better than Nadal's near-best. It was as perfect a symbolic coup as you could stage. Not only will Djokovic be no. 1 when the new ATP rankings come out, he validated his astonishing year by seizing the crown from the (former) best player in tennis in the biggest match in the sport. ... the Federer-Nadal rivalry has confounded our normal assumption that greatness, wins, and dominance are all inextricably linked. ... We're looking at the possibility of a greatness equation in which, measured by overall results, Federer > Nadal > Djokovic, but measured by dominance, Djokovic > Nadal > Federer > Djokovic. It's as if math looked at all the talent at the top of the men's game right now and spontaneously burst into flames.--Brian Phillips

Whom do professional athletes deserve to date?--Carles

To me, [Peyton Manning]'s the greatest of all-time.--Tom Brady

Catching up to the reality already faced by many of its members, the nation’s largest teachers’ union on Monday affirmed for the first time that evidence of student learning must be considered in the evaluations of school teachers around the country. ... But blunting the policy’s potential impact, the union also made clear that it continued to oppose the use of existing standardized test scores to judge teachers, a core part of the federally backed teacher evaluation overhauls already under way in at least 15 states.--Sharon Otterman

Interestingly, New York City's per capita transportation emissions are remarkably low among American cities, largely because it has the lowest share of commuters in personal automobiles of any large American city. It would be possible to account for these pollution externalities, to some extent at least, by taxing them. But at the moment, fuel taxes are too low to cover road maintenance, to say nothing of the costs of automobile pollution. As a result, there are too many cars on New York's streets. ... Now, if drivers paid for all the costs they impose on others, then it might be worth asking what the optimal level of bike lanes to have is and discussing whether the lanes themselves are subject to rising congestion and need to be priced. Of course, if drivers paid for all the costs they impose on others, there would be fewer drivers complaining about bike lanes and more people using them. As things stand, given that cyclists help alleviate some of these externalities (a cyclist takes up dramatically less road space than a car, doesn't use on-street parking, does not emit ozone, and does not contribute to climate change) it seems quite sensible to allocate a larger share of New York's roadways to lanes for cyclists. From an economic perspective.--The Economist

Google is fighting a multi-front war with a host of tech giants for control over some of the most valuable pieces of real estate in technology. Whether it’s social, mobile, browsing, local, enterprise, or even search, Google is being attacked from all angles. And make no mistake about it, they are fighting back and fighting back, hard.--Semil Shah

A man and his mega receipt
Gave rumor mills all kinds of heat
Whose eight-figure sum?
He’s kept himself mum
But I think it’s Peterson, Pete.--Kevin Roose

Photo link here, here, here and here.

Quotes of the day

The story of how same-sex marriage became legal in New York is about shifting public sentiment and individual lawmakers moved by emotional appeals from gay couples who wish to be wed. But, behind the scenes, it was really about a Republican Party reckoning with a profoundly changing power dynamic, where Wall Street donors and gay-rights advocates demonstrated more might and muscle than a Roman Catholic hierarchy and an ineffective opposition.--MICHAEL BARBARO

Tracy Morgan recently got in trouble for saying in his act that if his son announced he was gay, Tracy would stab him. If we presume that this was one of fifty outrageously inappropriate things Tracy said on stage that night, all within character as the absurdly ignorant and selfish guy he likes to portray for laughs, it means a comedian was trying to be outrageous and funny and missed the mark. That's all it means, since no reasonable person believes Tracy would stab his own son or love him less if he came out. But reported out of context, as it was, one has trouble seeing the statement as anything but the worst kind of hate speech. I would argue that Tracy was 100% responsible for whatever psychological or social harm he caused to the audience that heard his remark live, and zero percent responsible for the harm that was caused when others spread the story. The spreaders became the authors (as far as responsibility) when they changed the context. They became the Authors by Relocation, a term I just made up.--Scott Adams

The spread of sex-selective abortion is often framed as a simple case of modern science being abused by patriarchal, misogynistic cultures. Patriarchy is certainly part of the story, but as [Mara] Hvistendahl points out, the reality is more complicated — and more depressing. Thus far, female empowerment often seems to have led to more sex selection, not less. In many communities, she writes, “women use their increased autonomy to select for sons,” because male offspring bring higher social status. In countries like India, sex selection began in “the urban, well-educated stratum of society,” before spreading down the income ladder. Moreover, Western governments and philanthropic institutions have their fingerprints all over the story of the world’s missing women. ... The American establishment helped create the problem, but now it’s metastasizing on its own: the population-control movement is a shadow of its former self, yet sex selection has spread inexorably with access to abortion, and sex ratios are out of balance from Central Asia to the Balkans to Asian-American communities in the United States. This places many Western liberals, Hvistendahl included, in a distinctly uncomfortable position. Their own premises insist that the unborn aren’t human beings yet, and that the right to an abortion is nearly absolute. A self-proclaimed agnostic about when life begins, Hvistendahl insists that she hasn’t written “a book about death and killing.” But this leaves her struggling to define a victim for the crime that she’s uncovered. ... the sense of outrage that pervades her story seems to have been inspired by the missing girls themselves, not the consequences of their absence. Here the anti-abortion side has it easier. We can say outright what’s implied on every page of “Unnatural Selection,” even if the author can’t quite bring herself around. The tragedy of the world’s 160 million missing girls isn’t that they’re “missing.” The tragedy is that they’re dead.--Ross Douthat

Bon Temps is a world where it doesn't matter whom you love or how. A fantasy world that we are getting closer to all the time.--Molly Lambert

The process of selecting and securing a partner, whether for conceiving and rearing children, or for enhancing one’s socioeconomic standing, or for attempting motel-room acrobatics, or merely for finding companionship in a cold and lonely universe, is as consequential as it can be inefficient or irresolute. Lives hang in the balance, and yet we have typically relied for our choices on happenstance—offhand referrals, late nights at the office, or the dream of meeting cute.  ... Men want someone who will take care of them, make them look good, and have sex with them—not necessarily in that order. It may be that this is all that women really want, too, but they are better at disguising or obscuring it. They deal in calculus, while men, for the most part, traffic in simple sums. A common observation, about both the Internet dating world and the world at large, is that there is an apparent surplus of available women, especially in their thirties and beyond, and a shortage of recommendable men. The explanation for this asymmetry, which isn’t exactly news, is that men can and usually do pursue younger women, and that often the men who are single are exactly the ones who prefer them. For women surveying a landscape of banished husbands or perpetual boys, the biological rationale offers little solace. Neither does the Internet. ... One woman who has dated fifty-eight men since her divorce, a few years ago, told me that she maintains a chart, both to keep the men straight and to try to discern patterns—as though there might be a unified-field theory of why men are dogs. ... men exaggerate their income (by twenty per cent) and their height (by two inches), perhaps intuiting that women pay closer attention to these data points than to any others. But women lie about these things, too. A date is an exercise in adjustment.--Nick Paumgarten

There is a fundamental imbalance in the social dynamic. The most valuable asset is attractive females. As soon as you get them, you get loads of creepy guys.--Harj Taggar

Our social and sexual patterns have changed more in the last fifty years than in the last ten thousand. Our courtship rituals are rapidly changing, and we don’t know what to do.--Helen Fisher

Don't expect to buy the bottom - expect the market to torture you with some pain, and prepare yourself to deal with it - that way you won't find yourself unprepared and regret it.--Josh Brown's colleague

In raw numbers, New York has the greatest legal surplus by far. In 2009, 9,787 people passed the bar exam in the Empire State. The analysts estimated, though, that New York would need only 2,100 new lawyers each year through 2015. That means that if New York keeps minting new lawyers apace, it will continue having an annual surplus of 7,687 lawyers.--CATHERINE RAMPELL

Some observers are calling for a “repatriation holiday” on profits held by foreign subsidiaries. Some members of Congress, eager to stimulate our fragile economy, are listening. They shouldn’t. A tax holiday on repatriated funds is a proven failure — expensive in both direct and indirect ways. It was already tried in 2004 and didn’t work.--WILLIAM GALE & BENJAMIN H. HARRIS

On economic growth, real GDP has risen 0.8% over the 13 quarters since the recession began, compared to an average increase of 9.9% in past recoveries. From the beginning of the recession to April 2011, real personal income has grown just .9% compared to 9.4% for the same period in previous post 1960 recessions. The standard response from Obama apologists is that recession of 2008 and 2009 was different because, as former Clinton administration economist Robert Shapiro puts it, "this was a financial crisis, and these take longer to recover from." In fact, in most cases, the deeper the recession, the stronger the recovery to make up for lost ground. That was what Ronald Reagan's critics said when the U.S. economy soared during 1983 and 1984 with quarterly growth numbers exceeding 7%. At the time, liberal Keynesians yawned and declared the good times nothing more than a normal snapback from the deep recession.--Stephen Moore

The southern San Andreas fault has not experienced a large earthquake for approximately 300 years, yet the previous five earthquakes occurred at ~180-year intervals.  ... We conclude that rupture of the stepover faults, caused by periodic flooding of the palaeo-Salton Sea and by tectonic forcing, had the potential to trigger earthquake rupture on the southern San Andreas fault. Extensional stepover zones are highly susceptible to rapid stress loading and thus the Salton Sea may be a nucleation point for large ruptures on the southern San Andreas fault.--Daniel Brothers, Debi Kilb, Karen Luttrell, Neal Driscoll & Graham Kent

I'm So Meta Even This Acronym.--Douglas Hofstatder

ISMETA--Cav

Photo links here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.