What’s interesting is the fact that somehow, folks were missing [Jeremy Lin's basketball talents] in practice, and that’s what’s interesting, because you’ve got to assume that during scrimmages, he was running that pick-and-roll pretty well ... --President Obama
Blessed are the poor in spirit,Photo links here and here.
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.--Jesus Christ
I’d like to thank all the rich people for donating tonight. And when I say rich, I mean rich in spirit.--Lady Gaga
People in New York are nice too -- many of the nicest people I know are New Yorkers -- but in New York there isn't often TIME to be nice. If you're nice and let people in at the Holland Tunnel you will NEVER get where you're going. In Kansas City, people have the time t0 be nice.--Joe Posnanski
While entrepreneurs are grasping for venture capital, the nation's leading firms seem puzzled about how to spend their money. Their lack of imagination stunts economic growth. A big problem is that these companies tend to treat nascent opportunities the same way that they approach established businesses. They want data, even though data on non-existent markets is inherently fictional.--Stephen Wunker
... the number of young women (ages 20-24) joining the financial industry every year is about 22%. However, this number is actually much lower than it was a decade ago. Approximately 141,000 women or 2.6% have left Wall Street in the last ten years. To give you some context, 9.6% or 389,000 men have started working in finance in the same period. What is the reason for this exodus?--Meredith Lepore
As my colleague David Leonhardt pointed out recently, in 1954, about 96 percent of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. Today that number is around 80 percent. One-fifth of all men in their prime working ages are not getting up and going to work. ... We’re locking in the nation’s wealth into the Medicare program and closing off any possibility that we might do something significant to reinvigorate the missing fifth. Next time you see a politician demagoguing Medicare, ask this: Should we be using our resources in the manner of a nation in decline or one still committed to stoking the energy of its people and continuing its rise?--David Brooks
Palin entered the national consciousness more suddenly than most high-level politicians do, and she did it in the intense final stretch of a presidential campaign, which had a kiln-like effect of hardening the initial impression—depending on your point of view, of the provincial half-wit portrayed by Tina Fey or the plain-sense Mama Grizzly proudly leading her army of culture warriors. In modern politics, your “brand,” once established, is almost impossible to change. Only a handful of politicians have changed theirs (Hillary Clinton is one), and then only through tireless perseverance. Palin has shown little inclination to revise or deepen these impressions—she didn’t respond to my requests to discuss her record—and she hasn’t designated anyone else to do it for her. (Mama Grizzlies claw; they don’t contextualize.) ... As governor, Palin demonstrated many of the qualities we expect in our best leaders. She set aside private concerns for the greater good, forgoing a focus on social issues to confront the great problem plaguing Alaska, its corrupt oil-and-gas politics. She did this in a way that seems wildly out of character today—by cooperating with Democrats and moderate Republicans to raise taxes on Big Business. And she succeeded to a remarkable extent in settling, at least for a time, what had seemed insoluble problems, in the process putting Alaska on a trajectory to financial well-being. Since 2008, Sarah Palin has influenced her party, and the tenor of its politics, perhaps more than any other Republican, but in a way that is almost the antithesis of what she did in Alaska. Had she stayed true to her record, she might have pointed her party in a very different direction.--Joshua Green
A lot of people on the East Coast, when they think of Sarah Palin now, some five-letter words come to mind: Scary. Crazy. Angry. Maybe some others. But the five-letter word that people in Alaska associated with her name was clean.--Cliff Groh
One of the ways in which government is able to operate unaccountably—that is, outside of democratic checks and balances—is by facilitating public ignorance about its activities. The debt ceiling vote helps raise public awareness about the costs of government, keeping government accountable and increasing democratic participation. Lawmakers must go on record as approving an increase in the debt limit. They must confront, in a very public manner, the costs of the programs they have enacted. This is inconvenient for lawmakers and a great many of them would probably like to escape this burden. Which is all the more reason to keep the debt ceiling process around.--John Carney
There’s nothing like a little dust-up between millionaires and billionaires to start us thousandaires yawning. And when the upcoming pro football season is in danger of being cancelled because of it, we’re likely to say: a plague on both your mansions. Too bad, because the current struggle between labor and management in the National Football League not only reflects the current attacks on unions across the country but conjures up, even if in cartoon fashion, some crucial American issues: racism, classism, sexism, recreational violence, and the health-care gap. No wonder football seems to have replaced baseball as the national pastime.--Robert Lipsyte
The U.S. Postal Service continues to hemorrhage money, with a loss of $2.2 billion in the most recent quarter.--Ben Rooney
What Ron Schiller said wasn't good for NPR's bottom line. Whether or not it's permissible to believe that a large segment of the country are racist troglodytes, when someone expresses that view during the performance of his official duties, then you can see how said racist troglodytes might not want to give that organization any more of their money--whether that's as customers, donors, or taxpayers. The normal organizational imperative is to fire that person, and this doesn't strike me as outrageous. That's how organizations communicate an important message in situations like this: this person's views are not ours, and we reject them.Funny how neutrality doesn't come up at times like this. All of a sudden, Sarah Palin doesn't seem to be so bad.
The real problem is a quirk of timing: the video came out just as Schiller had left NPR for the Aspen Institute. Thus, NPR couldn't fire him. So they had to look for someone else to fire, and unfortunately, that was Vivian Schiller, the CEO, whose only crime was being in charge of the organization when this happened.
I think the scapegoating is problematic (though given the circumstances, I'm not sure I'd have done differently--many NPR affiliates feel that they're very much in danger of extinction). But I don't think it's a problem that companies fire people for expressing nasty views that can threaten their bottom line. That's just survival--and I think that NPR is too valuable to lose.
... as the Economist reports in a feature titled "The 70-30 Nation," the Pew Research Center asked respondents whether they were better off in a free market rather than a socialist economy "even though there may be severe ups and downs from time to time." Seventy percent said yes. So why are the 30% in charge of the 70%? According to American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks, the "game changer" was the economic crisis. As he writes in his book "The Battle," "the opportunity to expand the 30 percent coalition was not the Democratic sweep in 2008. It was the financial crisis of 2008-2009, which was used as a tool to attack the free enterprise system ..."--Gregg Sherill
... if you live long enough you'll see everything, including Alan Greenspan getting religion on the federal deficit.--Pete Davis
If gallons-per-mile laws don’t induce people to choose different vehicles, then we need higher gas taxes. If telling people how much electricity their neighbors use doesn’t cause them to turn out the lights, then we need a carbon tax. To be fair, these cases may involve genuine externalities -- which are recognized as a problem in traditional economics -- rather than the “internalities” of behavioral economics. But Loewenstein and Ubel don’t mention that distinction. The behavioral goals of policy are taken as given; only the means get scrutiny. In our first paper on paternalist slopes, Mario Rizzo and I warned about precisely this kind of process. When a policy is enacted to achieve a specific goal and then fails to achieve it, further policies are justified on grounds of achieving the goal that “we” have already agreed upon. In Loewenstein and Ubel’s op-ed, I believe our prediction is vindicated.--Glen Whitman
I have a warning for Republicans: Don't underestimate Barack Obama. Consider what he has already achieved. Obamacare alone makes his presidency historic. It has irrevocably changed one-sixth of the economy, put the country inexorably on the road to national health care and, as acknowledged by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus but few others, begun one of the most massive wealth redistributions in U.S. history. Second, there is major financial reform, which passed Congress on Thursday. Economists argue whether it will prevent meltdowns and bailouts as promised. But there is no argument that it will give the government unprecedented power in the financial marketplace. Its 2,300 pages will create at least 243 new regulations that will affect not only, as many assume, the big banks but just about everyone, including, as noted in one summary (the Wall Street Journal), "storefront check cashiers, city governments, small manufacturers, home buyers and credit bureaus." Third is the near $1 trillion stimulus, the largest spending bill in U.S. history. And that's not even counting nationalizing the student loan program, regulating carbon emissions by Environmental Protection Agency fiat, and still-fitful attempts to pass cap-and-trade through Congress. But Obama's most far-reaching accomplishment is his structural alteration of the U.S. budget. The stimulus, the vast expansion of domestic spending, the creation of ruinous deficits as far as the eye can see are not easily reversed. These are not mere temporary countercyclical measures. They are structural deficits because, as everyone from Obama on down admits, the real money is in entitlements, most specifically Medicare and Medicaid. But Obamacare freezes these out as a source of debt reduction. Obamacare's $500 billion in Medicare cuts and $600 billion in tax increases are siphoned away for a new entitlement -- and no longer available for deficit reduction. The result? There just isn't enough to cut elsewhere to prevent national insolvency. That will require massive tax increases -- most likely a European-style value-added tax. Just as President Ronald Reagan cut taxes to starve the federal government and prevent massive growth in spending, Obama's wild spending -- and quarantining health-care costs from providing possible relief -- will necessitate huge tax increases.--Charles Krauthammer
The risk to Goldman was that more of its dirty laundry would be exposed. As we learned David Viniar’s testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the company remains in lockdown mode. And once again, the S.E.C. shows little appetite for digging deeper, especially since its new COO of the Enforcement Division is a 30-year-old kid from Goldman.--David Fiderer
And what [Apple] did was provide information. They told us about their own investigations, data from AT&T and so on. Pretty much all of the information is verifiable and the verification process will be public. But not to admit fault was no longer an option for Apple. And not to be ahead of the game — to some extent — on data provision was not an option for them. The new media has brought with it, the end of stealth and patience as a business strategy in the face of a quality issue. But what is interesting is that their competitors are now on the back foot. They were silent and now Apple has challenged them with their own antenna issues that others will verify. In the past month, they could have come out with this first and preempted Apple but they did not. And what is more, I reckon iPhone cases sell more than other smart phones. I’ve never see a Blackberry with a case. What bodes for them now? I think a bit of ‘raising rivals costs’ has occurred.--Joshua Gans
... there is a complex issue of the allocation of space as well as the queuing problem in bathrooms. From experience, we know that women have to queue more than men and so incur waiting costs. These waiting costs are different from those incurred by the men outside waiting for the women as we already have done our business; for instance, men could avail themselves of this iPhone app while they wait. A straight economics perspective would suggest that there is an imbalance in the allocation of facilities between men and women and Banzhaf’s mission is to restore some fairness. Now it turns out that the issue of fairness is complex here. First of all, Banzhaf cites research (and by the way, this is not Banzhaf’s research or mine for that matter — and for those who are surprised that I am stressing this see here and here) that women, when they actually get to a stall, take about twice as long as men. Now it is pretty clear that this argument is unfair because it lumps individual behaviour with a group stereotype. You would not want to look at averages but at individual distributions otherwise what you are doing is profiling. The point is that, from a fairness perspective, a woman should not have wait longer than a man just because she is stuck in a line behind slow people. That said, it does raise the issue of what type of tax we should put on the externality caused by slow people.--Joshua Gans
I was an angry young man. We were all angry. But we had a job to do, and we did it. My personal thoughts were that I knew things would get better, and I’m glad to say that I’m here to see it.--Vernon Baker, only living black Congressional Medal of Honor winner
Everyone wants to think they’re smarter than the poor souls in developing countries, and smarter than their predecessors. They’re wrong. And we can prove it.--Carmen Reinhart
Should you value moment-to-moment happiness more than retrospective evaluations of your life?--Tom Gilovich
Before urbanization, children were viewed as economic assets to their parents. If you had a farm, they toiled alongside you to maintain its upkeep; if you had a family business, the kids helped mind the store. But all of this dramatically changed with the moral and technological revolutions of modernity. As we gained in prosperity, childhood came increasingly to be viewed as a protected, privileged time, and once college degrees became essential to getting ahead, children became not only a great expense but subjects to be sculpted, stimulated, instructed, groomed. (The Princeton sociologist Viviana Zelizer describes this transformation of a child’s value in five ruthless words: “Economically worthless but emotionally priceless.”) Kids, in short, went from being our staffs to being our bosses. ... [Kei Nomaguchi and Melissa A. Milkie] found that the most depressed people were single fathers, and Milkie speculates that perhaps it’s because they wanted to be involved in their children’s lives but weren’t. Robin Simon finds something similar: The least depressed parents are those whose underage children are in the house, and the most are those whose aren’t. This finding seems significant. Technically, if parenting makes you unhappy, you should feel better if you’re spared the task of doing it. But if happiness is measured by our own sense of agency and meaning, then noncustodial parents lose. They’re robbed of something that gives purpose and reward.--Jennifer Senior
The 5.5% of disposable income that Americans spend on food at home is less than half the amount of income spent by Germans (11.4%), the French (13.6%), the Italians (14.4%), and less than one-third the amount of income spent by consumers in South Africa (20.1%), Mexico (24.1%), and Turkey (24.5%), which is about what Americans spent DURING THE GREAT DEPRESSION, and far below what consumers spend in Kenya (45.9%) and Pakistan (45.6%).--Mark Perry
Keynesians believe in the paradox of thrift. Saving never increases investment. Instead, if any sector of the economy tries to increase saving, the result is to reduce income. From this perspective, any sector that increases its saving is doing harm, and often Keynesians will go so far as to attribute sinister motives. This means that when the balance of savings shifts, the Keynesians attribute sinister motives to the savers. Keynesians are inclined to blame savers for changes in identities. ... However, one might tell the story differently. That is, one could choose to blame the spenders. It could be that the U.S. trade deficit is caused by the lack of U.S. national saving, rather than excessive saving by China and Germany. It could be that the high government deficit causes savings to rise elsewhere (including in China and Germany, as well as private sector saving in the United States). It could be that massive spending by households during the housing bubble caused savings elsewhere to rise (including in China and Germany, as well as the corporate sector in the United States). Then when massive spending by government kicked in during the last two years, savings elsewhere had to rise, including the corporate sector. I do not like these latter interpretations any better.--Arnold Kling
Yet there was one group of businessmen that succeeded where Wall Street failed, beating back regulation and insuring that Congress would let them carry on with business as usual. These unexpected masters of Capitol Hill? The nation’s auto dealers. The reform bill was potentially alarming for auto dealers because they’re major players in the consumer-credit business. There are close to eight hundred and fifty billion dollars’ worth of auto loans outstanding in the U.S.—about as much as our total credit-card debt—and car dealers broker about eighty per cent of them.--James Suroweicki
In short, without looking carefully at the whole production chain of intelligence information, it makes no sense to snigger at the significance of this excellent US power-play against a laboriously established Russian network.--Charles Crawford
... one of the senior engineers at Facebook responsible for SRE (site reliability engineering) challenged Facebook employees to try to compromise him and gain access to Facebook’s administrative system via information obtained from him. They succeeded. It took a couple of weeks though. Employees supposedly got in via his home WiFi network, says our source. The details aren’t entirely clear, and Facebook isn’t talking. What I’ve heard is that they were able to intercept data from his home network after capturing his WPA password by luring him into logging into a rogue WiFi SSID that appeared to be his own router.--Michael Arrington
David [Brooks] represents to [the Obama White House] the sensible Republican. If David is convinced, they regard that as a real bi-partisan triumph.--Gail Collins
Low wages are not the result of arbitrary company decisions; they are the result of low worker productivity. A pen even as mighty as that of Pres. Obama cannot miraculously invest low-skilled workers with greater skills.--Don Boudreaux
... I argued that the “operating system” used by the current international aid agencies is stuck using IBM punch cards while the rest of the world has moved on to cell phones, laptops, and iPhones. In the old system, you had to type programs into a stack of hundreds of punch cards, walk them down to the computer center, hand them to an operator, and wait in line for them to be processed. The lower you were in seniority, the longer you had to wait. Contrast that with today, when hundreds of millions of people have their own computers, and several billion people have access to cell phones. iPhone and Android platforms now provide a way for hundreds of thousands of individuals to create and distribute new software. That software may or may not succeed in the marketplace, but it can be downloaded and used, and the most popular new apps get flagged to other users. What would an analogous distributed operating system look like for the aid business?--Dennis Whittle
According to Bill Clinton (HT: Drudge) Robert Byrd wasn’t a racist, he just played one on the campaign trail. He was just pretending to be a racist. To get elected. So he wasn’t a racist. Just unprincipled. That’s a relief. Thanks, Bill.--Russ Roberts
... leaving the maximum number of dollars in the possession of those who earned them is an exercise in enlarging freedom. I do this little game sometimes if I’m in a high school classroom. I walk around and ask innocently, ‘Does anyone have a dollar bill?’ – and some kid will produce one and I just stuff it in my pocket and walk on. After the consternation and the giggling stop, I say, ‘What, What?’ Then I go into a little rap and I say, ‘Oh, Jonathan wants his money back – notice that he is a dollar less free than he was a minute ago; if he had that dollar he could decide, he could choose’. Then I talk about how inevitably we have to coerce money out of people to do necessary and important public business. But if we believe in freedom and liberty than we ought to do that only for necessary purposes. Then I go on to talk about competence and the fact that it becomes an equally solemn duty to never misspend a dollar. Maybe that’s not the right response but when I’m asked about governing as a libertarian, I would say that’s one way I do it.--Mitch Daniels
When you see other people doing something that really offends you, are you willing to see the state allow that behavior to continue? Only if you can answer "yes" are you a natural libertarian. I think that there are very few natural libertarians.--Arnold Kling
This excerpt starts with her quoting of Lewis:
For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all of my life--namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things. Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.Things have gotten better, and continue to do so. But even though most blacks and whites do not consider themselves enemies, the two communities often do not consider each other as being part of the same "self". If a white clerk is rude to you, maybe it's racism; if a black clerk does it, she's just having a bad day. If a black kid sells drugs, he's a dangerous felon; if a middle class white kid does it, he's a good kid going through a phase.
The truth, which is hardly original to me, is that we are all racist, in that we still think of race as an important difference. Which of course, it is, if only by virtue of the fact that we all think so. But I don't think that Obama meant to be insulting, and I don't even think he is elitist in the way that his critics believed. The fact is that Obama does know more about race than most of us, because he actually knows what it's like to be inside, and outside, of both communities. That's worth listening to even if it doesn't always come out quite right.
