James Taranto on nature and nurture

He writes:

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

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

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

The godfather of global warming is emancipating himself

It just so happens that the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion.  I don’t think people have noticed that, but it’s got all the sort of terms that religions use … The greens use guilt. That just shows how religious greens are. You can’t win people round by saying they are guilty for putting (carbon dioxide) in the air.--James Lovelock

Take out your sociological goggles and look around

In our society, smart, hard-working, conformist kids go to old-fashioned brick-and-mortar colleges. Their elders expect them to do so. Their peers expect them to do so. They feel like losers in their own eyes if they don't go.

The normativity of conventional education isn't a passing phase. College attendance is a central tenet of our society's secular religion. A student who scoffs at all these expectations probably has a serious problem with authority. Would-be employers treat him accordingly.

That's Bryan Caplan. And this is a doozy:

Middle class jobs will no longer require college only after middle class kids can no longer afford college.

A really smart scientist is probably also a really awful

venture capitalist.

Right, Dr. Stevie?

Photo link 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.

Beware the Ph.D's

Bourree Lam talks about how China got it's problematic One Child Policy.

Quotes of the day

The great value investor Benjamin Graham suggested that investors should never have less than 25% or more than 75% of their money in stocks.--Jason Zweig

I realized technical analysis didn’t work when I turned the charts upside down and didn’t get a different answer.--Warren Buffett

I’m already highly irritated. What makes this canuck think that “the simplest model you can imagine” has any bearing on whether NGDP targeting is a wise policy for our highly complex economy? Theoretical macroeconomists love to play with their little toy models, but unfortunately these models don’t actually describe the world we live in. In their models the IS curve slopes downward. Output depends on real interest rates. Inflation depends on output gaps. I don’t know about you, but that’s not the world I inhabit.--Scott Sumner

Well, you're gonna be dead a long time. Might as well have fun when you're alive.--Rex Ryan

In terms of guardrails in the financial system, I think automatic saving for me is the best example for this. You know the rational thing to do is to look at the end of each month and see how much money we had, how much expenses we had and then at the end of each month decide how much to send for our long-term savings. But I think we all intuitively realize that if this was the case we would not save as much. American savings rates are nothing to be proud of, but they will probably be even lower. And it clearly doesn’t make rational sense because we have different levels of expenses in the winter and in the summer. There are fluctuations. There are things that come as emergencies. Saving should not be the same every possible month. But we know that if we relied on our mediocre cognitive ability and thinking and demanded that every month we make this decision, the odds are we will never make this decision. Or at least we’ll make it very infrequently. So by creating a system that takes this decision out of our hands we actually do much better.--Dan Ariely

[At Goldman, Jon Corzine] was called ‘Fuzzy’ because he’s a sloppy thinker.  You can never really figure out what he’s doing because he doesn’t know. He just kind of wings it.--Goldman Sachs executive

I suggest that a rich person can consistently favor taxes on the rich without volunteering to pay such taxes him or herself. The argument is simply that the world in which every rich person pays is preferable to me to the world in which no rich person pays which is preferable to me to the world in which only I pay.--Karl Smith

... I learned far more from 3 months with the Assimil self-study course than from 5 years of school French. The absurdity of that comparison only grows upon comparing the hours spent. The Assimil method took 0.5 hours per day for about 90 days: That’s 45 hours. The 5 years of school French happened every school day for roughly 50 minutes. A school year has roughly 180 days, for a total of 750 hours over the 5 years. Including homework, the total is probably 900 hours. That’s a time-invested ratio of 20 to 1. Thus, despite spending 5 percent of the hours that I spent in school, with the self-study method I became far more competent in the language.--Sanjoy Mahajan

The history of English’s global diffusion is littered with important dates: the planting of the Jamestown colony in 1607; Robert Clive’s victory at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, which ushered in the dominion of the British East India Company; the creation of the first penal colony in Australia in 1788; the British settlement at Singapore in 1819 and establishment of a Crown Colony in Hong Kong in 1842; the formal beginning of British administration in Nigeria in 1861; the foundation of the BBC in 1922 and the United Nations in 1945; the launch by AT&T of the first commercial communications satellite in 1962. This list is condensed. It takes no account, for instance, of the various waves of Anglomania that swept much of Europe in the eighteenth century. But it will be apparent that the diffusion of English has had a lot to do with material reward, the media, and its use as a language of instruction. A fuller list might intensify the impression of a whiff of bloodshed. Wherever English has been used, it has lasted. Cultural might outlives military rule.--Henry Hitchings

Retractions of research papers have soared in recent years, which demonstrates how unethical scientists, like financial criminals, cut corners to tell people what they want to hear.--Edward Tenner

Together with a string of other recent cases, the Bronx case suggests that a culture of corruption and entitlement has spread through the ranks of the thin blue line. Worse, it is clear that police union officials are the mainstay of the illegal ticket fixing enterprise, so much so that prosecutors considered indicting the union as a corrupt organization under racketeering laws. The police demonstration in the Bronx was apparently orchestrated by the union, which sent text messages to officers urging that they show up to support colleagues involved in ticket fixing. “It’s a courtesy, not a crime,” was the slogan.
...
This of course is what everybody thinks of special privileges. That’s what doctors and lawyers think when they cover up professional wrongdoings by their guild brethren. It’s what investment bankers think when they pass on inside information to favored clients — a courtesy not a crime. It’s what politicians think when they do favors in exchange for money and it’s what Don Corleone and Tony Soprano think when they do favors for their friends. The essence of privilege (private law, etymologically speaking) is exactly that: exemption from the laws that govern other people. The police union in New York believes that based on longtime practice it possesses certain unique rights to circumvent the written law.
...
What that Bronx courtyard shows us is a political culture in decline and a development model on the brink. New York’s dependence on Wall Street and the federal government is becoming more acute by the year. Post bubble and post stimulus, neither source of revenue can be expected to grow at an adequate rate, and it is not unlikely that both will be shrinking for years. The pieces of the coalition are venting their rage and hostility, and new supplies of money are nowhere in view.--Walter Russell Mead

But if we are headed toward collapse, what would an American “Oh sh*t!” moment look like? An upsurge in civil unrest and crime, as happened in the 1970s? A loss of faith on the part of investors and a sudden Greek-style leap in government borrowing costs? How about a spike of violence in the Middle East, from Iraq to Afghanistan, as insurgents capitalize on our troop withdrawals? Or a paralyzing cyberattack from the rising Asian superpower we complacently underrate? Is there anything we can do to prevent such disasters? Social scientist Charles Murray calls for a “civic great awakening”—a return to the original values of the American republic. He’s got a point. Far more than in Europe, most Americans remain instinctively loyal to the killer applications of Western ascendancy, from competition all the way through to the work ethic. They know the country has the right software. They just can’t understand why it’s running so damn slowly.
...
What we need to do is to delete the viruses that have crept into our system: the anticompetitive quasi monopolies that blight everything from banking to public education; the politically correct pseudosciences and soft subjects that deflect good students away from hard science; the lobbyists who subvert the rule of law for the sake of the special interests they represent—to say nothing of our crazily dysfunctional system of health care, our overleveraged personal finances, and our newfound unemployment ethic. Then we need to download the updates that are running more successfully in other countries, from Finland to New Zealand, from Denmark to Hong Kong, from Singapore to Sweden.
...
And finally we need to reboot our whole system. I refuse to accept that Western civilization is like some hopeless old version of Microsoft DOS, doomed to freeze, then crash. I still cling to the hope that the United States is the Mac to Europe’s PC, and that if one part of the West can successfully update and reboot itself, it’s America.
...
But the lesson of history is clear. Voters and politicians alike dare not postpone the big reboot. Decline is not so gradual that our biggest problems can simply be left to the next administration, or the one after that. If what we are risking is not decline but downright collapse, then the time frame may be even tighter than one election cycle.--Niall Ferguson

The one thing that we absolutely know for sure is that if we don’t work even harder than we did in 2008, then we’re going to have a government that tells the American people, ‘you are on your own. If you get sick, you’re on your own. If you can’t afford college, you’re on your own.--President Obama

Roosevelt transformed millions of Americans from citizens into clients. The direct effect of this was evil, and the indirect effect was even worse, for all these people were robbed of their self-respect.--H.L. Mencken

A president’s approval rating at the beginning of his third year in office has historically had very little correlation to his eventual fate. In January 1983, Reagan had an approval rating of just 37 percent, but he won in a landslide. George H. W. Bush had a 79 percent approval rating in January 1991 and was soundly defeated. But voters start to think differently about a president over the course of his third year; they view him more on the basis of his performance and less on the hopes they had for him. These perceptions are sharpened by the beginning of the opposition party’s primary campaign, which, of course, accentuates the negatives.  A president’s approval rating toward the end of his third year, therefore, has been a decent (although imperfect) predictor of his chances of victory. Reagan saw his approval rating shoot up to 51 percent in November 1983 amid the V-shaped recovery from the recession of the previous year — the first sign that he was headed for a big win. Obama’s approval rating may have rebounded by a point or two from its lows after the debt-ceiling debacle — but not by much more than that. In late October, it ranged between 40 and 46 percent in different polls and averaged about 43 percent.  There have been two presidents stuck with similarly low approval ratings a year in advance of the next election. Gerald Ford had a 44 percent approval rating a year before his loss to Carter. Johnson had a 41 percent approval rating in November 1967, and although he was eligible for another term, he opted not to run. His vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, did, and he lost.--Nate Silver

Chart of the day: Inconvenient Truth Squared

Source here.

Quotes of the day

No matter what technology and science bring us, the dystopias of our future will always be of our very own, all-too-human design.--TED

And as long as we continue to pay attention, we lose. Because we all tuned in to her stupid wedding special and allowed her to be a star, Kim Kardashian is the 1 percent and we are all bottom-feeders.--Molly Lambert

Finally, I am part of a 1%!--Cav, who did not nor does not pay attention

The President has imposed on himself a ban on taking contributions from lobbyists.--David Axelrod, President Obama's close advisor

No the President has not done this. He still takes contributions from lobbyists. He still has lobbyists raising money for him. A few examples: Lawrence Rasky and Joseph Baerlein, Chairman and President of the lobbying firm Rasky Baerlein, are Obama donors. Google public affairs manager Ginny Hunt and Blue Shield public policy VP Tom Epstein are Obama donors. Obama donors Mark Boatwright, James O'Neill and Soyla Fernandez list themselves on Obama's FEC filings as "lobbyists." There are plenty more. What Obama has done is tried to exclude registered federal lobbyists from donating. Of course, lobbyist registration is basically unenforced on the federal level, so that's a cosmetic rule.--Tim Carney

He doesn't, uh, hire lobbyists.--David Axelrod

The most accurate description for this Axelrod statement --  a colloquial term for the manure of a male cow -- is not fit for a family-friendly blog.  At least 50 former lobbyists have taken senior positions in the Obama administration. This includes multiple cabinet secretaries. The former lobbyist for the Swiss Bankers Association is Obama's general counsel at the IRS. A former lobbyist for Goldman Sachs is Obama's Treasury Department Chief of Staff.  I think Axelrod knows everything I've blogged above. That's why it's hard to avoid the conclusion that David Axelrod is lying.--Tim Carney

Defense attorneys, embracing the new rights, did not bring forward evidence of their clients' innocence but instead sought to suppress evidence of their guilt. Whatever the other merits of the procedures, they were bound to make the justice system do a worse job of separating defendants who deserve punishment from those who don't.  Mr. Stuntz powerfully argues that such decisions have perversely worsened inequality in the criminal-justice system. The Miranda rule, for example, gives sophisticated suspects—mainly recidivists and white-collar defendants—the ability to "lawyer up" and avoid questioning altogether. Many other suspects—including the innocent but poor—waive their rights and receive less protection than they did before Miranda.--PAUL G. CASSELL

The scandal isn’t what’s illegal -- but what’s legal.--Nicole Gelinas

Being a former Goldmanite [like Jon Corzine] has long been considered the ultimate calling card. But, in some cases, it has proved to be a liability: A series of blunders by former senior Goldman executives raises questions about whether Goldman’s secret sauce can actually be exported. Think John Thain. Or Robert Rubin. Or J. Chris Flowers.--Andrew Ross Sorkin

If the practical effect of any rescue proposed by Greece is to force Greece to "live within its means," the logical response is to repudiate debt. If you are living within your means, you don't need access to global credit markets. Still differently: If you owed $40,000 in credit-card debt you could not afford to pay and decided to swear off ever incurring more debt, why not declare bankruptcy? You don't need good credit if you aren't going to use it.--John Carney

Credit-rating companies routinely award higher rankings to debt issued by banks and corporations that pay them the most, a conflict of interest that may escape Congressional efforts to change the way they do business. Bonds from countries and cities that pay about half as much as issuers of less creditworthy debt are “rated more harshly,” according to a study by scholars at Indiana University in Bloomington, Washington, D.C.-based American University and Rice University in Houston. Sovereigns rated A had no defaults over a 30-year period, compared with 1.8 percent of corporate bonds and 27.2 percent of securities backed by debt such as mortgages and loans assigned that ranking, the study of Moody’s Investors Service data said.--John Detrixhe

Businesses give back to society every day by pleasing their customers and employing their employees. There's nothing business owes other than selling the best product at the best price.--William Frezza

With a long early is just early. With a short early is plain wrong.--John Hempton

Dangers lurk, no question about it. The thing we just stress is keep climbing; we don't want to hang on. Like a rock climber, it takes more energy to hang on than to keep climbing.--Jim Harbaugh

We are atoms connected to create big, awkward, intelligent animals, animals complex in construction, equipped with minds, hearts, and the like. Spinning secretly around us is an intricate system of interconnected physical laws, completely dependent upon one another for effectiveness. And we are in the middle of it; actors on Shakespeare’s stage, madmen in Nietzsche’s streets, accidents in Sagan’s universe, children in God’s creation.--Don Miller

Information is cheap; meaning is expensive.--George Dyson

Scott Adams humbles me

Here's the conversation:

Personally, I'm quite comfortable paying taxes at the highest rate. It's like paying protection money to the Mafia, and I mean that in the best possible way. High taxes reduce the odds that jealous mobs will kill me for succeeding in my chosen field. Oh, and my taxes are also helping fund national defense, education, social program, and other good stuff. That's a win-win. But please don't insult me with arguments of fairness. Save the fairy tales for your kids. I know some of you will leave comments about your own fairy tales of Laffer Curve economics, in which lower tax rates stimulate the economy and fill the treasury with free money. And then someone will point out that economic growth in the Unites States has often coincided with higher tax rates. Can we agree that the Laffer Curve has been debunked everywhere but on Fox News?--Scott

Scott, are you saying that an economy with a 98% tax rate will outperform an economy with a 2% tax rate, in refuting Laffer? That seems a bit unlike you. But I get your point.--Cav

If you're looking at the two end points of the Laffer curve to decide if it's valid, your brain is broken.--Scott

I was a little surprised by his Dilbertian response. For some reason, I read his blog very differently than his comic strip. Maybe that was wrong of me.

Here are a few links as to why he might want to think about this more.  There's a lot out there worth considering, some from surprising sources.

Well, I suppose any type of marginal humility increase is a good thing.  Hopefully, I am little bit ahead of Adams at this juncture.

Quotes of the day

Dirty tricks were not invented by Nixon; they stretch back to the Fall. Blessed is the Christian whose life is so transparent, who is “trustworthy and neither corrupt nor negligent” (Dan. 6:4), so that the only way he or she can be destroyed is by making Christian conduct and conviction a crime. ... no legal system can ensure consistent justice. Corrupt people will always find ways of exploiting the system to oppress others and advance themselves. Hidden behind the slogan is a deeper issue. Historically there has long been a tension between positive law theory, in which the only law to be obeyed is that enacted by government, and natural law theory, in which some fundamentals are thought to be discoverable by human beings. In the name of equity and justice, British courts, until fairly recently, would sometimes set aside positive law in favor of natural law where it was pretty obvious an injustice was otherwise being committed. Both in Britain and in the United States, such considerations are now rare. In Britain, what must be obeyed is what Parliament says; in the United States, what must be obeyed is what the Supreme Court says. In both instances, positive law largely prevails, as in ancient Persia. The matter has become increasingly difficult here since Western states have come to think they have a therapeutic role in society, defining the “illnesses” that must be confronted and the “therapies” that must be imposed as they go along. The potential for injustice and inequity multiplies.--Don Carson

Our tax dollars at work… a half-billion dollar loan (actually $529 million) from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop a hybrid toy for the wealthy and/or celebri-licious (like Leonardo DiCaprio, one of the first customers) that, in real world driving, won’t get much better mileage than your average crossover utility vehicle. Not only that, but the cars are manufactured in Finland — that’s right, Finland – and shipped here for sale, where their purchasers will then receive a $7,500 tax credit for buying one (the “cheap” base model starts at $96,895, with the full-zoot Eco Chic model going for a bargain $108,900). ... Those Occupy Wall Street-types in their tents at MacPherson Square? If they really, truly are bugged by corporate welfare, they need to schlep their signs and their chants and their anger over to the Mandarin Oriental Hotel. Right now. Because the Fisker Karma is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to corporate welfare. I have no problem with a group of entrepreneurs raising money from private investors to build a hundred thousand dollar toy for rich folks who want to flaunt their eco-consciousness. When and if that’s the case, may they have all the mazel in the world. But damn, it steams me up when my family and every family in America are forced to pay for it.--Andrew Fox

The more people helping each other out, the better.--Pietro Poggi-Corradini

Earlier this year, a report from Standard and Poor’s indicated that of the 1,485 stocks making up the S&P 1500 index, not a single one had a consensus sell recommendation from Wall Street analysts. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t the odd sell recommendation, it just means that there were no stocks that most analysts agreed had less than rosy prospects. Meanwhile, the S&P 1500 is down 2.77 per cent including dividends to Oct. 19, with the financials sector down 19.97 per cent. --Preet Banerjee

One of the running jokes of Mr. Chandor’s [Margin Call] script  is that the higher a person’s [corporate] rank, the less he is likely to understand what the firm is actually doing. This ignorance is almost a point of pride. “I don’t get any of this stuff” — this line is repeated about Peter’s discovery by Will, then Sam, then Sam’s boss, Jared Cohen (Simon Baker) and then Tuld. In a further absurdity, one person who does get it, Peter’s mentor, Eric Dale (Stanley Tucci) has just been downsized out of the company. As a security measure his cellphone has been disconnected, which means that his increasingly desperate former colleagues are unable to find him when he might be of most use.--A. O. SCOTT

I thought, This is a very dangerous person.--Sidney Lumet, on meeting Pauline Kael

Parents, you may be onto something: A small new study suggests that teens' intelligence, as measured by the IQ test, may fluctuate throughout adolescence. The changes -- in both verbal and nonverbal IQ -- ranged to as much as 20 points and were correlated with specific brain areas. IQ has long been thought to remain stable over a person's lifetime.--Amanda Gardner

[Steve Jobs] tries to treat [his pancreatic cancer] with diet. He goes to spiritualists. He goes to various ways of doing it macrobiotically and he doesn't get an operation. ... I think that he kind of felt that if you ignore something, if you don't want something to exist, you can have magical thinking .... We talked about this a lot.--Walter Isaacson, Jobs' authorized biographer

Ohhhh. That cake looks so good.--Kim Kardashian

Italy is house rich, somewhat cash poor, and has a miserable recent history of growth. If you look at the wealth side of the balance sheet, you can easily work up a heady optimism for Italy. If you study public choice theory, it is harder to do so. How many people in that country are either paid to do the wrong thing, or paid to do not so much at all? [The Great Stagnation] reigns. Italy’s privileges and distortions are so often so local, and so concentrated in inefficient professional services, that it is hard to imagine clearing them up quickly in the form of a big bang, in the way that say New Zealand or Chile or Thatcher’s England did. And even those successes took some time to pay off and underperformed for years. Note that if Italy could credibly be expected to grow a mere 2 pct. a year — maybe less — the entire eurozone crisis probably would be messy but manageable. It’s not.--Tyler Cowen

Brian Moynihan is here tonight. He’s the C.E.O. of Bank of America. As many of you know, Brian’s brother Patrick runs a Catholic boarding school in Haiti. Their parents must be so proud to see two of their boys running an underfunded, nonprofit organization.--Steve Schwartzman

Quotes of the day

Barack Obama's jobs plan may be one of the worst policy proposals I've ever seen.--John Carney

Let me get this straight: American companies can go overseas to China and create jobs, but they can't go to South Carolina and create jobs? Is this the kind of government we have?--John Boehner, on CNBC a few moments ago

In the American Physics Society it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this 'warming' period.--Ivar Giaever, Nobel Laureate 1973

Wow, a Nobel winner AND a true scientist? Pretty rare these days.--Cav

There are a lot of lessons to be learned [from the Magellan Fund], the first is that stepping into someone like Peter Lynch's shoes is basically a no-win situation, even after a decade or two have transpired. Lynch is Hercules and Michael Jordan and the Beatles all rolled in one when it comes to stock-picking and the mutual fund format, no one even touches him.--Josh Brown

It is essential to have the right connections when you have a good idea, more so the bigger the idea.--Eric Falkenstein

Jumping the shark, Bachmann style

Preying on the fears of the 95% of the electorate who never studied science beyond a freshman college course is not cool.

Unless she's got a statistically significant double blind clinical trial up her sleeve.  I don't even think she has peer review (which doesn't really do much) on her side.

Her peers are now Jenny McCarthy and Fonzie.  Photo link here.

Quotes of the day

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

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

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

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

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

Champagne Super Novak.--Brian Phillips

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quotes of the day

Private equity firms do create value, albeit with a heavy assist from financial engineering. Mr. Lee himself marveled on his blog at the ultimately successful restructuring Silver Lake undertook at Skype.  The perception is otherwise. Imagine if Lawrence H. Summers had joined Blackstone or Carlyle instead of recently becoming an adviser to the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He would be called a sellout akin to Peter Orszag, who left government service to become a vice chairman at Citigroup.  This brings us back to l’affaire Skype. Mr. Lee can be blamed, but instead it is Silver Lake that is vilified. The reason is that Silver Lake is not playing by venture capital rules.  Yet the private equity firm is being blamed for doing exactly what private equity firms do and what is expected of them. In this light, Silver Lake is not “evil. “ Silver Lake is not even acting illegally or immorally. If Mr. Lee had hired a lawyer for an hour, he would have learned of his dilemma.  Name-calling aside, this is all about all about what people think of the industries and venture capital’s innate fear of private equity methods. V.C. and P.E. just may not be right for each other.--Steven Davidoff

It can be cathartic to witness somebody powerful throw a big tantrum, but it's also deeply embarrassing. It becomes even more embarrassing when that person is no longer powerful.--Molly Lambert

You should go work for a real bank.--Jamie Dimon, to a Citigroup banker at the World Economic Forum in Davos

In a post-industrial economy, drug dealing is not the only occupation where wages disproportionally skew towards the top 1%. The odds are stacked against Millenials, whether they strive to be football players or lawyers. Admittance into a top-14 law school, like a scholarship from a top-10 college football program, is the culmination of a lifetime of striving. Of the over 100,000 high school seniors who play football, fewer than 3,000 sign Division I letters of intent. Similarly, the top 25% in Harvard Law’s 2009 class had an average GPA of 3.95 and a LSAT score of 175, which puts them in the 99th percentile of the over 100,000 test takers each year. Yet, despite overcoming nearly impossible odds, each group still has the toughest test of their lives ahead of them — each other. NFL teams rarely draft players not at the top of the depth chart, even at powerhouses like Texas or Oklahoma. And even at Harvard or Columbia Law, “Big Law” firms — those with the coveted $160,000 starting salaries — don’t reach too far below the median class rank when selecting first-year associate. As you go down the ranks, the odds only decrease. NFL players from non-BCS conferences were usually top-tier starters in college, while top-50 law schools typically send only 10-25% of each class to “Big Law”. And just as there are always a few DII and DIII players in the draft each year, students from tier 2 and tier 3 law schools occasionally beat out graduates of elite schools for jobs. But “small school” success stories are the best of the best — collegiate All-Americans, the top 1% of their class in law review.--Jonathan Tjarks

There are almost no Americans left who have either the painfully developed musculature or the painstakingly acquired knowledge to rapidly harvest a field without damaging the crop. To my mind, that's a good thing: Americans don't have these skills because they have better alternatives. But really, it doesn't matter whether it's good or not. The people who blithely assert that we could always get Americans to do this job by paying a higher way are wildly underestimating what's involved in becoming a skilled picker. It is not something you learn to do of an afternoon. If we shut out the immigrants, we will see a lot more ruined crops.--Megan McArdle

Andrew Gelman, a statistics professor at Columbia and an amateur name-ologist, argues that many parents want their boys to seem mature and so pick classic names. William, David, Joseph and James, all longtime stalwarts, remain in the Top 20. With girls, Gelman says, parents are attracted to names that convey youth even into adulthood and choose names that seem to be on the upswing.--DAVID LEONHARDT

... [Chris Mooney] spun the survey to focus on the fact that the disagreement polarized the hierarchical-individualists and communitarian-egalitarians alone, and concludes that 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing'. Yes, Mr. tendentious English major without an understanding of standard errors, it is.--Eric Falkenstein

Across Atlanta Public Schools, staff worked feverishly in secret to transform testing failures into successes. Teachers and principals erased and corrected mistakes on students’ answer sheets. Area superintendents silenced whistle-blowers and rewarded subordinates who met academic goals by any means possible. Superintendent Beverly Hall and her top aides ignored, buried, destroyed or altered complaints about misconduct, claimed ignorance of wrongdoing and accused naysayers of failing to believe in poor children’s ability to learn. For years — as long as a decade — this was how the Atlanta school district produced gains on state curriculum tests. The scores soared so dramatically they brought national acclaim to Hall and the district, according to an investigative report released Tuesday by Gov. Nathan Deal.--Heather Vogell

The story of the person who kills for love is almost always more compelling than the person who kills for money. I didn't write about the Mafioso in [Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence] because that's a different phenomenon. Those are people who entered a lifestyle where killing people is just a necessary part of what they do. ... "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" is very, very interesting. It's false, and extremely arrogant, and very dangerous. That's not a real way to think about the world. This concept of eliminating the impossible — we could never do that. The whole idea of Sherlock Holmes is dangerous because it encourages people to think that — if they're intelligent enough — they could put all the pieces together in absolute terms. But the human mind is not sophisticated enough to do that. People are not that smart. It's not that Sherlock Holmes would need to be twice as smart as the average person; he'd have to be a billion times as smart as the average person. ... We continually become less tolerant of actions that lead to death. The human race has been in a long struggle to eliminate murder. And we will succeed. ... There will always be occasional exceptions, but we're involved in a long struggle against murder, war, famine, disease — and we move forward more than we move back. And you can only understand this if you look over the sweep of centuries.--Bill James

President Lyndon Johnson and the “best and the brightest” who staffed his administration led this country into three quagmires. By far the most famous, but perhaps not the most expensive and dangerous resulted from LBJ’s escalation of the Vietnam War. More than 50,000 Americans and many more Vietnamese died as a result of that policy; our country was bitterly divided in ways that still weaken us today, and the economic cost of the war was immense. It contributed to the wave of inflation that shook the country in the 1970s and in addition to the interest on the debt from this ill-starred venture we are still paying (as we certainly should) pensions and medical costs for the vets and their spouses. The Second Great Johnson Quagmire now destroying the nation is the Medicare/Medicaid complex. These entitlement programs are the biggest single financial problem we face. They dwarf all the Bush-Obama wars; they make TARP look like small change. They not only cost money we don’t have — and are scheduled to cost inexorably more until they literally ruin the nation — they have distorted our entire health system into the world’s most bloated and expensive monstrosity. Thanks to these programs, we have a health system that marries the greed of the private sector to the ineptitude of government, and unless we can somehow tame these beasts America and everything it stands for could be lost. (Note, please, that by comparison Social Security can be relatively easily reformed to be solvent for the next 75 years. The New Deal, whatever its shortcomings, was almost infinitely more realistic and sustainable than the Great Society.)--Walter Russell Mead

This NFL lockout is so much fun!--Bryan Allain

The way I see it, if the fans vote for Charlie Sheen to start in the outfield, Michele Bachmann at short and Rupaul at first base, then baseball should do its best to make that happen. I think the game is for the fans, completely and entirely, and I wish they would have fans vote DURING THE GAME on who to pinch-hit, who to bring in from the pen, when to hit and run and so on. The complaint I've heard that the fans should have voted Jhonny Peralta over Derek Jeter at shortstop because he had a much better first half feels to me like arguing that a kid should serve broccoli at a birthday party instead of cake because broccoli is s better for you. Jhonny Peralta has been a mostly dreadful player for three years. It's wonderful he had a great 76 games this year. But why does that obligate me to vote him into the All-Star game? Arguing that fans were somehow misguided for choosing the most popular player of the generation to start at shortstop over Jhonny Peralta seems to me like an anti-argument, like arguing that the All-Star Game should not be fun at all. ... Andrew McCutchen isn't in the All-Star Game and I can't even say why. Michael says it best: It feels like a clerical error or something. Clerical errors are no fun at all ... which gets us back to the All-Star Game problem in the first place.--Joe Posnanski

Photo link here and here.

Quotes of the day

... the Supreme Court has agreed to review United States v. Jones, the DC Circuit’s “mosaic theory” case on whether and when use of a GPS device installed on a car is a Fourth Amendment search.--Orin Kerr

Even in a crowd of rising food and commodity costs, corn stands out, its price having doubled in less than a year to a record $7.87 per bushel in early June. Booming global demand has overtaken stagnant supply. But rather than ameliorate the problem, the government has exacerbated it, reducing food supply to a hungry world. Thanks to Washington, 4 of every 10 ears of corn grown in America — the source of 40 percent of the world’s production — are shunted into ethanol, a gasoline substitute that imperceptibly nicks our energy problem. Larded onto that are $11 billion a year of government subsidies to the corn complex.  ... Because of the subsidy, ethanol became cheaper than gasoline, and so we sent 397 million gallons of ethanol overseas last year. America is simultaneously importing costly foreign oil and subsidizing the export of its equivalent.
That’s not all. Ethanol packs less punch than gasoline and uses considerable energy in its production process. All told, each gallon of gasoline that is displaced costs the Treasury $1.78 in subsidies and lost tax revenue.--Steven Rattner

After earning my PhD, in chemistry, I worked in drug-discovery research for more than 20 years. Aside from being a fascinating profession, it was pretty secure -- until the last decade. Then it became anything but. Why the change? Well, it costs about $1 billion to bring a new drug to market. Blockbuster drugs that bring in multiple billions in profits, such as Lipitor, are needed to support the R&D costs of all other drugs -- ones that don't pan out, and ones that just can't help enough people to justify the investment before the patent expires. And the patents of almost all current blockbusters are expiring about now, cutting drug companies' revenues drastically. Adding to the problem is the Food and Drug Administration, which has become overly restrictive and risk-averse, has made it very difficult (and even more expensive) for companies to bring replacement drugs to market. To trim expenses, companies began to outsource research to India and China. It started as a trickle, but soon became a tsunami, leaving many thousands of highly intelligent and well-trained professionals with nothing to do -- a shameful waste of talent.--Josh Bloom

Combined with central government debt and other liabilities such as bad bank loans, analysts estimate China’s overall explicit debt load is about 70 per cent of gross domestic product. But some analysts believe the contingent liabilities of the government are much higher, once debts on the books of state-owned enterprises and other entities implicitly backed by the state are included. “If you take a very broad view of the Chinese government’s contingent liabilities rather than explicit debt on the books then the number comes to well over 150 per cent of China’s GDP in 2010,” according to Victor Shih, a political economist at Northwestern University in the US. The US has a debt-to-GDP ratio of 93 per cent, while Japan’s ratio is over 225 per cent.--Simon Rabinovitch and Jamil Anderlini

... I do not believe that China’s high savings and low consumption rates are a function of any remarkable preference on the part of Chinese households for savings over consumption. They are simply the automatic consequence of a system in which increases in GDP growth are subsidized by transfers from the household sector, which effectively constrains the relative growth of household income and, with it, household consumption. In that case the only way for China to rebalance would be for Chinese household income to grow faster than GDP. This requires three things above all. It requires that wages grow faster than productivity, that the currency appreciates, and that real interest rates rise. This does not seem to be happening in China, as I discussed in a blog entry last month. Wages have been rising quickly in the past year, but the currency is barely appreciating in real terms against the dollar (and is probably depreciating on a trade weighted basis), and of course real interest rates are declining sharply.--Michael Pettis

In Does Education Matter?, [Alison] Wolf illustrates the absurdity of the increase-the-graduates/increase-the-growth logic by reference to the high remuneration of lawyers. That is, given lawyers’ high wages, having more lawyers would surely mean that there are more and more people earning more and more dough, and therefore in total, society is becoming more and more wealthy. ‘[This] would suggest’, she writes, ‘that the fastest way to boost growth would be to send everyone to law school’. Which is clearly ridiculous. In fact, what the high remuneration of lawyers tells us is that we live in a highly regulated society – as opposed to a productive one – which consequently values lawyers. It doesn’t mean that churning out an ever-increasing number of law graduates is the elixir of economic growth. Likewise, Wolf writes, ‘it is no more self-evident that since some education makes some of us richer, more would make more of us richer, than it is that “two aspirin are good” means “five aspirin are better”’. The wrongheaded belief that you can generate growth simply by increasing the number of graduates has led to the effacement of the structural problems of the economy. In other words, seeking the wrong answers has generated the wrong questions. For example, ‘there tends to be an obsession with how many engineers the UK produces, when the real question ought to be why haven’t we got more engineering industry?’, says Wolf. You don’t have to be a fully signed up economic determinist to recognise that our economic travails cannot be solved through education, education, education.--Tim Black

Al Gore’s lifestyle is a test case for the credibility of his gospel — and it fails. The tolerance of Al Gore’s lifestyle by the environmental leadership is a further test — and that test, too, the greens fail. The average citizen is all too likely to conclude that if Mr. Gore can keep his lifestyle, the average American family can keep its SUV and incandescent bulbs. If Gore can take a charter flight, I don’t have to take the bus. If Gore can have many mansions, I can use the old fashioned kind of shower heads that actually clean and toilets that actually flush. Al Gore looks to the average American the way American greens look to poor people in the third world: hypocritically demanding that others accept permanently lower standards of living than those the activists propose for themselves. ... The Vice President thinks he can square this circle, but he can’t. Sometimes the truth is inconvenient. Mr. Gore must find either a new cause or a new way to live. ... I don’t judge, dear reader, and neither should you. May we all find mercy when we stand alone, naked and ashamed before the judgement seat of God. ... If Al Gore really wants to understand why the global green movement has tanked, he should start by taking a long hard look in the mirror. Gaia, too, can be betrayed by a kiss.--Walter Russell Mead

Gore’s failures are not just about leadership. The strategic vision he crafted for the global green movement has comprehensively failed. That is no accident; the entire green policy vision was so poorly conceived, so carelessly constructed, so unbalanced and so rife with contradictions that it could only thrive among activists and enthusiasts. Once the political power of the climate movement, aided by an indulgent and largely unquestioning press, had pushed the climate agenda into the realm of serious politics, failure was inevitable. ... Like war, global warming may well be real — but that doesn’t mean a treaty can help. The green movement’s core tactic is not to “hide the decline” or otherwise to cook the books of science. Its core tactic to cloak a comically absurd, impossibly complex and obviously impractical political program in the authority of science. Let anyone attack the cretinous and rickety construct of policies, trade-offs, offsets and bribes by which the greens plan to govern the world economy in the twenty first century, and they attack you as an anti-science bigot.--Walter Russell Mead

Today, heterosexual marriage is frequently depicted as a site for domestic violence and child abuse. A review of academic literature on the subject would indicate a preoccupation with the damaging consequences of heterosexual marriage. Terms such as the ‘dark side of the family’ invoke a sense of dread about an institution where dominating men allegedly brutalise their partners and their children. This preoccupation of professional victimologists is reflected in popular culture. Cinema and television constantly give us stereotypical stories about unhappy, failed and dysfunctional heterosexual marriages. In contrast, same-sex unions are treated with reverence in popular culture, depicted as mature relationships between loving equals. Of course, heterosexual couples continue to get married, but there has been no time in history when the institution of heterosexual marriage has enjoyed such feeble affirmation. Indeed, these days heterosexual couples are often likely to hear the refrain ‘Why get married?’ or ‘Why wait for marriage before having children?’. Paradoxically, in some quarters the idea that marriage for heterosexuals is no big deal coincides with the cultural sacralising of same-sex unions. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that behind the gay-marriage discussion there lurk some profound questions about how to endow intimate relationships with meaning today. And in such circumstances, elite-sanctioned snobbish intolerance is really no more acceptable than anti-gay prejudice.--Frank Furedi

Image link here. Photo link here.

The Earth ... is actually headed into a mini Ice Age

... heavyweight US solar physicists announce that the Sun appears to be headed into a lengthy spell of low activity.

UPDATE: The indefatigable Steve McIntyre makes another point (for science):

Returning now to the original lead to the IPCC Press Release on renewables:

Close to 80 percent of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies a new report shows.

The basis for this claim is a Greenpeace scenario. The Lead Author of the IPCC assessment of the Greenpeace scenario was the same Greenpeace employee who had prepared the Greenpeace scenarios, the introduction to which was written by IPCC chair Pachauri.

The public and policy-makers are starving for independent and authoritative analysis of precisely how much weight can be placed on renewables in the energy future. It expects more from IPCC WG3 than a karaoke version of Greenpeace scenario.

Photo link here.

Quotes of the day

Seldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised or a little mistaken.—Jane Austen, Emma

This is why I like reading about science and epistemology in general because it's all well and good to say science is all about the evidence and people being 'reality based', and only idiots or bigots are prejudiced. Everyone only sees what they believe, and beliefs are not easily moved by contrary data: observations are theory-laden.--Eric Falkenstein

There is no way around phenomenology one way or the other; it is the necessary connection between theory and experiment.--Sabine Hossenfelder

Google’s frame is the browser window. Apple’s frame is the screen. That’s what we’ll remember about [yesterday's Steve Jobs] keynote ten years from now.--John Gruber

... under the likely scenario that healthcare spending keeps rising faster than GDP, the Center for American Progress would give government the power to prohibit people from buying expensive health plans with their own money. That is not my idea of progress.--Greg Mankiw

I have concluded at my late age that, sadly enough, women are no better than men. Different, to be sure, but no better. Men, consider your opinion of what men are like. A sobering reflection. Then consider that that's what women are as good as too. Appalling, but there it is. Many men are creeps and many women like those creeps. Look at the garden of Eden. Eve was talked into eating the apple by a snake, so she was stupid enough to believe a snake. But then Adam was stupid enough to believe Eve. What if Eve had not been there? I'm no theologian, but I believe Adam would have tried to have sex with the snake. It's that bad. The only innocent in this whole mess is that poor housekeeper in Manhattan who fled to New York from whatever African hellhole it was, not any, please observe, primitive paradise, only to be attacked by Le Scumbaguette, the very pinnacle of French Civilization. The Calvinists have this doctrine called total depravity which avers that well, we're all just totally depraved, unless saved (I think). As a Catholic, I do not subscribe to this doctrine but I admit they have the makings of a pretty strong case.--Tom Smith

Paul Ryan's proposed "premium support" structure is in some ways similar to the plan put in place under President Obama's healthcare reform law. In both cases, an individual would shop among competing private insurers, on an exchange overseen by the government regulators. In both cases, the government would provide financial support for the "needy" (low-income households in the case of Obamacare, the elderly in the case of Ryancare). Why don't we see this parallel pointed out more often? The left wants to demonize Ryan, and the right wants to demonize Obama. Pointing out the similarities of their plans might make each of them seem, well, reasonable.--Greg Mankiw

The long-standing myth of a wildly activist, reactionary Supreme Court imposing a grossly unpopular laissez-faire ideology on the American people on behalf of large corporate interests—with little concern for precedent, constitutional text, or individual or minority rights—is far removed from historical reality. The academics who invented the prevalent mythology likely sought, consciously or not, to justify their preferred political outcomes.--David Bernstein

George Orwell wrote that to control the past was to control the present, and the future. The false narrative of Lochner has controlled the past for decades, but Bernstein’s clear and incisive work may wrest that control away and move us back to the truth. And if readers recognize that much of what they have been told about Lochner is wrong, perhaps they will employ an informed skepticism toward many other things in constitutional law that “everyone knows.” Such skepticism, it seems, is entirely warranted.--Glenn Reynolds

But while some Democrats are touting the ethics probe as a bold and significant step, one Republican source calls it "hollow." The GOP source said it is noteworthy that Pelosi called for an investigation but did not demand Weiner step down -- as happened with former Rep. Chris Lee. The married Republican from western New York resigned in February, following a report that he had tried to meet a woman on Craigslist.--CNN Wire Staff

Unlike Maddow, many journalists, including the politically liberal, were not surprised at all. They had gradually become skeptical of Weiner’s innocence as the days passed because they could recognize the fluttering of a politician in trouble. It was Weiner’s bizarre response that led them to suspect the truth. When the moment of confession came it did not come as total shock to everyone except the true believers. Those journalists were cumulating the facts. Whatever their political inclinations were, these had not yet completely overwhelmed their logical faculties. Whether they were willing to admit it or not, they knew which way the story was tending. The one person who had more facts than anyone else except Weiner — was Andrew Breitbart — and he used it to great advantage. He selectively timed the release of information in his possession in order to force his opponent into terrible dilemmas. His Big Government site provided a Chinese water torture of gradual disclosure, each more tantalizing than the last. The problem Weiner’s defenders faced was simple: how much did Breitbart ultimately know? When it became clear that Breitbart knew enough to show that the tweets had been sent by Weiner, then the confession was forced to create a stop line. Weiner held a defense line until it was obvious that Breitbart could flank him. Then he fell back to the next position. The trouble is, Breitbart may not yet be done. But that’s for Andrew to know and for Anthony to find out.--Richard Fernandez

Maybe taking full responsibility is, in the end, about making amends. While Weiner's constituents were certainly ill-served by all this, what amends can be made to them? Never lie again? Does choosing not to lie when you weren't supposed to do it in the first place constitute making amends? For Weiner, full responsibility seemed to mean apologizing profusely, declining to qualify his regret or explain away his behavior, and answering the same questions until the press finally began to tire of asking them. But really being fully responsible is difficult. It's not as if Weiner can redirect the consequences to himself, like a criminal who takes the fall so the innocent man can go free. Responsibility and consequences are severed here: His wife, his family, and his staff have no responsibility at all, but there are consequences for all of them anyway. This won't change that. Maybe "I take full responsibility" is ultimately something that's said simply because it must be said. Maybe it's an incantation. Maybe it's a vow to do better. Maybe it just means: I'm sorry, and when I say I'm sorry, I don't mean I'm sorry if you were offended. I don't mean I'm sorry but someone drove me to it. I don't mean I'm sorry but I was in pain, but I was drunk, but I was angry, but I was taken out of context. Maybe "I take full responsibility for my actions" is an add-on we only need because of the poor-quality apologies we so often get in public that have transformed the concept of contrition into something that can be used to subtly deflect attention away from yourself. Maybe if public apologizers were better at just being sorry, we wouldn't need "I take full responsibility for my actions" in the first place.--Linda Holmes

If there is one thing that confuses me the most about scandal coverage, it’s how the media pretend that there are only like three sins in the world and the chief one is hypocrisy. Come on, people.--Mollie Hemingway

According to The Washington Post article on the Bush loan, the incoming president called Bush’s action a “necessary step . . . to help avoid a collapse of our auto industry that would have had devastating consequences for our economy and our workers.” Under the administration’s math, the U.S. government will receive $11.2 billion back from Chrysler, far more than the $8.5 billion Obama extended. Through this sleight-of-hand accounting, the White House can conveniently ignore Bush’s loan, but even the Treasury Department admits that U.S. taxpayers will not recoup about $1.3 billion of the entire $12.5 billion investment when all is said and done. The White House justifies not counting the Bush money because, it says, that money was completely spent when Obama was making a tough political decision on whether to extend another loan. In other words, a decision to do nothing at the time would have resulted in the immediate loss of the $4 billion that Bush had extended. This is chicanery. Under the president’s math, Chrysler paid back 100 percent of Obama’s loan and less than 70 percent of Bush’s loan. A more honest presentation would combine the two figures to say U.S. taxpayers got back 90 percent of what they invested. In fact, that is how the Treasury and other administration officials frequently portray it; it is just when Obama speaks that the numbers get so squishy.--Glenn Kessler

Image links here, here and here.

The data will fit whatever worldview you bring to it

Here is a clever test from Scott Adams:

Boston Consulting Group reports that millionaires own 39% of global wealth. That is up from 37% in 2009. When you see that statistic, which way do you interpret it?

1.       The rich have transferred more wealth from the non-rich to themselves.

2.       The rich have created more wealth and kept it all.

3.       The rich have created more wealth for everyone and kept most of it.

4.       More people have achieved millionaire status.

5.       There is not enough information to form an opinion.

6.       Asset values went up as the economy improved. Rich people own most assets.

Call it what you will; just not 'science'.

Quotes of the day

The U.S. spent $10,498.66 on each public school student in 2009, according to the U.S. Census. The figure is a high as $18,126 in New York and as low as $6,356 in Utah. Surprisingly, Utah’s high school graduation rate is higher than New York’s.--Michael B. Sauter, Charles B. Stockdale, Douglas A. McIntyre

Not surprising to a parent in New York. Have you ever taken a close look at schools here?--Cav

Because big-time college football and basketball are so entertaining, most people prefer to ignore the cesspool that recruiting has become, and could care less about the academic abilities of the players who represent what we like to refer to as institutions of higher learning. It's the hypocrisy of it all that is nauseating.--Jim Donaldson

Unfortunately, Medicare illustrated an immutable law of economics: Cut the marginal price and demand will skyrocket. With Medicare services seemingly free, the elderly used far more services. Costs raced upwards. In 1967 Medicare debuted with a cost of $2.5 billion. The same year the House Ways and Means Committee predicted that Medicare would cost $12 billion in 1990. Alas, that turned out to be an $86 billion underestimate. Medicare first exceeded $12 billion in 1975.--Doug Bandow

If the minimum wage is a good idea, shouldn't unpaid internships be illegal as well? If not, why not? Name the main arguments in favor of the legality of unpaid internships. Aren't all of them equally good arguments for allowing people to work for wages greater than zero and less than the minimum wage?--Bryan Caplan

If ticket scalping laws that make it illegal to sell a ticket to a concert or sporting event above face value are a good idea, shouldn't selling a coin, bond, car, or house above face value, sticker price or list price also be illegal as well? If not, why not? Name the main arguments in favor of selling a coin, bond, car or house above face value/list price. Aren't all of them equally good arguments for allowing people to sell tickets above face value?--Mark Perry

[Steve] Jobs is inflicting his own version of personal revenge by causing major nightmares for traditional PC vendors with the new products and services that he has brought to market since he returned to Apple in 1997. While his moves are all business, his intentions are clearly to make sure that this time he wins the battle for producing the next big thing in personal computers.  ... he realized that just creating a hardware device and a great OS is not enough. In his long-range planning way of thinking, he spent the last decade building out a rich service component that includes iTunes, the App Store, and the soon to be announced cloud service. These services combined with the new personal computing device give users a richer experience. To Jobs, perhaps the more important aspect of this is that the whole package is hard to replicate.--Tim Bajarin

There's one problem with this global-warming chicken little-ism. It has little to do with reality. National Weather Service data on weather-related fatalities since 1940 show that the risks of Americans being killed by violent weather have fallen significantly over the past 70 years. The annual number of deaths caused by tornadoes, floods and hurricanes, of course, varies. For example, the number of persons killed by these weather events in 1972 was 703 while the number killed in 1988 was 72. But amid this variance is a clear trend: The number of weather-related fatalities, especially since 1980, has dropped dramatically.--Don Boudreaux

Harold Camping — what an idiot! He predicted the end of the world on May 21. Last week, the Christian radio station owner said he was kind of right, though no one else noticed, and anyway the judgin’ will continue until (new date!) Oct. 21 of this year, when the world really and truly will be destroyed, probably. What you didn’t know is that after his loony prediction, Camping was promoted to full professor at Stanford and rewarded with adoring mainstream press coverage, more than a dozen appearances on “The Tonight Show,” prestigious awards and praise from the Obama administration’s chief science advisor. Sorry, I got one detail wrong. It wasn’t Camping who reaped those earthly rewards for his cosmic wackiness. It was Paul Ehrlich. In his psychedelically doomy 1968 catastrophe tract, “The Population Bomb,” Ehrlich argued that birthrates were out of control and would cause worldwide crisis. ... Ehrlich has groused that he was kinda sorta right, and the worst you can say is that, like preacherman Camping, he was a little early. President Obama’s point man on science, John Holdren, is an Ehrlich man. A text version of a speech Holdren gave in 2006 was accompanied by a footnote in which he praised Ehrlich’s call to end population growth “a key insight . . . the elementary but discomfiting truth of it may account for the vast amount of ink, paper and angry energy that has been expended trying in vain to refute it.” There are Ehrlich-men everywhere, and that ehrlich is German for honest just makes it so much richer, doesn’t it? ... All Harold Camping has to do to be treated as a genuine visionary is to change the words at the beginning of his doom sermons from “the Bible says” to “science says.”--Kyle Smith

I was shocked by Ms. Warren’s blatant sense of entitlement. She was apparently under the assumption that she could dictate a one-hour time limit for her testimony to Congress, and that we were there at her behest instead of the other way around. This is just further example of her disregard for Congressional oversight.--Patrick McHenry

... telecoms are capturing most of the wealth being generated from the Internet. For all the new world hype, the old world has a major role to play. And sometimes focusing on what is not changing help us figure out how to best master changes. We still need to find, delight, and excite customers. We need business models that pay people fairly for their work. Businesses must make a credible case to government that they act in the public interest. And the best asset for mastering change is still that old classic: leadership.--Rosabeth Moss Kanter

Email is a task list created for you by someone else.--Chris Sacca

... the other day I decided to try a game called Angry Birds just to see why it's so popular. I wasn't expecting to like it. I was wrong. The game is instantly addictive. But why? Or more generally, what makes one game a hit and another a dud? My hypothesis is that we humans have a dozen or so natural impulses that evolution has provided. When we exercise any of those impulses, we feel most alive. For example, a first person shooter game primarily appeals to males, probably because it taps into a man's most primitive urge to eliminate other males as reproductive competition. And more generally, we males have a natural impulse to fight. A well-designed shooter game allows males to spend hours per day unleashing the urges that are socially inappropriate. You can see in almost any successful game the elements needed for hunting, gathering, self-defense or reproduction. Puzzles probably use the part of our brain designed to figure out where the food is. Lots of games require us to gather up resources. And any game that requires you to quickly spot abnormality is the same skill you need to identify healthy mates. I would argue that Tetris and Mahjong are good examples of games where you have to quickly spot abnormality. And it is no surprise that both games have attracted female gamers.--Scott Adams

The Mets came up with a buyout plan: Beginning on July 1, 2011, they would pay Bonilla $1,193,248.20 per year for 25 years, or $29.8 million. The payment was based on the return Bonilla would've received had he invested the $5.9 million at an interest rate of 8% (which was just below the 8.5% prime rate at the time). Why would the Mets make such a deal? The Bonilla money would be invested with Madoff, from whom the Mets expected the usual 10 to 12% return, or two to four percentage points above the rate they guaranteed Bonilla. "We were going to make money on Bobby Bo's $30 million," says one official who was at the meeting. "I remember the chuckling in the room." By deferring the money to Bonilla, the Mets freed cash to fortify their roster for the 2000 season. On Dec. 23, 1999, they traded for pitcher Mike Hampton and outfielder Derek Bell in a deal that added $8.1 million to the payroll. Eleven days later they officially released Bonilla. The 2000 Mets would win the NL pennant. The Madoff fund made the roster moves possible.--Tom Verducci

Photo links here, here, and here.