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Easter weekend quotes

... we note that the founder of Christianity was a rule breaker. There wasn’t a PC bone in his body. He hung out with prostitutes, thieves, terrorists and collaborators with Rome.  He was notorious for shoving the rulebook aside when it got in love’s way.--Walter Russell Mead

People moving to the city have been illogical risk takers from the beginning. and the key is probably they like the sexual or mating opportunities inherent in large groups. Playing to that angle would bring in hipsters and gays. As to whether that's the key to the health of cities or our nation, I doubt it, but it won't hurt, especially because one of the best ways of making a city fun to go out in is that it's safe for young women.--Eric Falkenstein

The longer the road from sexual maturity to marriage, the more complicated the underlying cost-benefit calculus in any given relationship becomes, and the more difficult it becomes for people with fewer resources to figure out the wisest course to take. So while the new romantic landscape doesn’t offer automatic benefits to the upper class and automatic costs to everyone else, it does create a situation where the people who need the least help figuring out the wisest life course have multiple clear paths to take, and the people who would most benefit from a simple map to responsible adulthood can easily end up in a maze instead.--Ross Douthat

... all economists are, definitionally, very good at college.  Not all economists are good at marriage.  Saying that more people should go to college will make 0% of your colleagues feel bad.  Saying that more people should get married and stay married will make a significant fraction of your colleagues feel bad.  And in general, most people have an aversion to topics which are likely to trigger a personal grudge in a coworker.--Megan McArdle

History scorns the people who lived outside Auschwitz and Treblinka, with their weak protests of ignorance. How will history treat us, I wonder?--Tony Woodlief

My homeowner insurance doesn't cover the cost when my gutters need cleaning, and my car insurance doesn't cover the cost when I need to fill the tank with gas. Instead, the policies cover only catastrophic events, like my house burning down or a major accident. Now that the Obama administration has fixed the health insurance system, I trust they will soon move on to solve these other problems.--Greg Mankiw

I wonder if [Paul Krugman] (and all the others who are pushing for more controls) are not having a “Smoot-Hawley Moment”. In 1929 tariffs and other restrictions on trade were established. A global depression followed. In 2013 the tariffs and restrictions are on money, not goods. But if the result of those controls is a reduction (or even stability) of the external debt numbers, then the global economies will fall with it.--Bruce Krasting

Military and economic catastrophes are, by their nature, unpredictable. While we can’t plan on one, prudence requires that we take their possibility into account. In normal times, when we are lucky enough to enjoy peace and prosperity, the debt-to-G.D.P. ratio shouldn’t just be stable; it should be falling. That has generally been the case throughout our history, and it should become the case again as we look forward.   The bottom line is that President Obama is right that sustainability is a reasonable benchmark for evaluating long-run fiscal policy. But the standard he applies when evaluating it appears too easy. It will leave us too vulnerable when the next catastrophe strikes.--Greg Mankiw

Bitcoin isn’t tied to any commodity—besides trust. As a statement on the global economy, Bitcoin is hilarious. As a currency for the disenfranchised and distrustful, it’s as serious as can be.--Paul Ford

... a firm basis for religious freedom would be found in the Bible, supremely in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. "I did not come to judge the world," Jesus told his followers, "but to save it." Here is an Easter story—a message of the grace of God toward every human soul—for believers and doubters alike.--Joseph Loconte

Most bloggable SNL skit in recent memory

Quotes of the day

High frequency traders are very sensitive to cash flow (note Trading Machines shut down pretty quickly after not finding a niche), so they aren't building palaces based on unrealistic expectations like, say, California or or NYU journalism majors.--Eric Falkenstein

... the 93% increase in JPMorgan VaR from Q1 2011 to Q1 2012 is solely due to the sudden "realization" that the world's biggest bank by derivative holdings (at just about $73 trillion) is in reality nothing but a glorified hedge fund.--Zero Hedge

[Peter] Orszag’s [compulsory voting] proposal and others like it are potentially harmful solutions to a non-problem. There is no evidence that nations with compulsory voting are, as a result, better governed than those where voting is voluntary. As Tim Cavanaugh points out, the former category includes many states such as Argentina, Lebanon, Egypt, Congo, and others that are hardly paragons of civic virtue. By contrast, one of the few democracies that has even lower turnout rates than the United States is Switzerland, which is widely considered one of the best-governed nations in the world. ... More generally, we should spend less time worrying about turnout and more about whether those who do turn out actually understand what they are voting on.--Ilya Somin

Obama campaigned as a consistent critic of the Bush administration’s understanding of executive power — and a critic with a background in constitutional law, no less. But apart from his disavowal of waterboarding (an interrogation practice the Bush White House had already abandoned), almost the entire Bush-era wartime architecture has endured: rendition is still with us, the Guantánamo detention center is still open, drone strikes have escalated dramatically, and the Obama White House has claimed the right — and, in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki, followed through on it — to assassinate American citizens without trial.--Ross Douthat

I really dislike fawning Keynesians because I used to be one when I was a TA for Hyman Minsky back in college ... In contrast to the Keynesian vision of us all trying to figure out how to spend our endless vacation, there's Eric Hoffer, the enigmatic philosopher who appeared out of nowhere around 1934 in California at age 34 ... A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding, and so those unhappy with their own meaningless affairs will focus on minding other people's business. Hoffer noted one must not merely provide for those without meaning in their lives, but provide against them, because in a democracy and market economy their preferences will have power. Those who see their lives as inferior and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom, and this can cause a Republic to fall to a democracy, and ultimately a tyranny. ... In other words, Hoffer describes the essence of the Liberal desire to micromanage society into perfect equality at the expense of liberty. A coalition of intellectuals and the underclass, both of whom feel unappreciated. We haven't figured out a good outlet for these do-gooders, or a good way for those without a purpose to find life rewarding, so they continue to plague us with their plans and angst. That's a realistic vision of society, a future problem that is real yet potentially soluble.--Eric Falkenstein

Walmart often faces strong local opposition when trying to build a new store. Opponents often claim that Walmart lowers nearby housing prices. In this study we use over one million housing transactions located near 159 Walmarts that opened between 2000 and 2006 to test if the opening of a Walmart does indeed lower housing prices. Using a difference-in-differences specification, our estimates suggest that a new Walmart store actually increases housing prices by between 2 and 3 percent for houses located within 0.5 miles of the store and by 1 to 2 percent for houses located between 0.5 and 1 mile.--Devin Pope & Jaren Pope

Quotes of the day

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

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

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

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

Quotes of the day

Two years ago we invested $250,000 in Instagram. Thanks to the spectacular vision and effort of Kevin Systrom and the Instagram team, the investment will be worth $78,000,000 when the Faceboook acquisition closes.--Ben Horowitz

... sometimes patience is the way to go.--Mike Reiss

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.--Aristotle

Quotes of the day

Your hands should not, together with the face,
be drawn with the brush
You reveal them in your work
And hide them in the painting.--François Malherbe

It is difficult to say what will happen for Google, but a good dose of self-doubt that they are somehow above it all is a good place to start. Oh yes, and Facebook, if you are listening, all of the above applies to you too.--Joshua Gans

In China, the year is traditionally divided into periods based on the moon’s orbit around the earth and the sun’s path across the sky. This lunisolar calendar is laden with myths and celebrated by rituals that allowed Chinese to mark time and make sense of their world. So too the modern political calendar in China. It takes shape around the mysterious workings of the Communist Party, which rotates its top leaders every decade at a Party Congress, a comet-like event that awes onlookers as a portent of change and renewal. The next congress is set to take place in the fall of 2012—the 18th occurrence in the party’s 91-year history—and is already being associated with unusual phenomena. The most spectacular was last week’s eclipse of Bo Xilai.--Ian Johnson

The CSS Virginia, a.k.a. the Merrimack, makes a splash

A couple of splashes, actually, 150 years ago today.

She meets the USS Monitor, tomorrow.

Quotes of the day

I feel like I’m playing whack-a-mole.--Scott Sumner

Scott reminds me of Mace Windu.  And now that I think about it, certain Keynesians remind me of droids (ones who obviously fail the Turing Test).--Cav

The SOPA blackout: Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, Google, and many others protest proposed law.32
i  Two new laws proposed by US legislators, the Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act, have been attracting a very negative reaction from the web community over the past couple of months, which is today culminating in a day of protests. Aiming to curtail copyright infringement on the web by giving the US government unprecedented new powers, both SOPA and PIPA have been rejected as overreaching and unhelpful laws that cannot coexist with a free and open internet.--Vlad Savov

Image links here and here.

Quotes of the day

Economics blogs are ... “dim sum for the mind.”--Alex Tabarrok

We are mistaking high resolution and portability as an advancement of culture.--Rick Brookstaber

... we notice the monetary shocks that make us poorer much more than we notice the real shocks that make us richer.--Scott Sumner

Our economic system’s collapse may not seem as exciting as melting ice caps, but people really aren’t going to like it — at least, according to computer models.--Frank J. Fleming

... redistributionist government ... is inherently regressive: It tends to distribute power and money to the strong, including itself.--George Will

The table is set for the Patriots to be in the Super Bowl. A Bronco team comes to town that you already handled Dec. 18, on their home turf. So the chances of getting by Denver are good. I ask you this: Which QB scares you -- Joe Flacco or T.J. Yates? I say neither. Not only is it there for the Patriots to win this week, but if they don't make the Super Bowl, I'd be very disappointed.--Tedy Bruschi

Quotes of the day

Today's young women make $1.17 for every $1 their moms earned back in 1980. Young men, however, are earning 10 cents per dollar less than their fathers did 30 years ago, new research shows.--Annalyn Censky

Big losers had to have been small losers first. You have to be down 2% before you can be down 5% before you can get down 10% and so on. Cut your losers at the knees before they cut your throat.--Michael Martin

It's a cliche to say risk management is the combination of art and science. You need to know something about history, statistics, and programming to be useful as a risk manager. You also need common sense, and that is best informed by experience ...--Eric Falkenstein

... now it’s looking increasingly as though Corzine demonstrated virtually all of the pathologies of the rogue trader more generally. Lots of financial firms make big bets and blow up. But what we saw at MF Global was much more than that. In fact, as Corzine detailed at great length in his prepared testimony last week, his big sovereign-debt bet didn’t actually lose money at all. But MF Global died all the same, because the bet was so large and risky that it caused a fatal cascade of downgrades and margin calls.--Felix Salmon

In a democracy people are free to express and debate their opinions. This is valuable in itself. But it has also been held to be instrumentally important because it is claimed that through open free debate true ideas will conquer false ones by their merit. Democracy thus has an epistemic value as a kind of truth machine. In a democracy therefore there should be no dogma, no knowledge that cannot be questioned. Not only is this view mistaken, but it is so obviously wrong that it is astonishing that it has ever been taken seriously.--Philosopher's Beard

“Public choice” economics explores the problems of concentrated interests. There are fewer corn farmers than taxpayers, and the gains from ethanol subsidies are large for each corn farmer, while the costs per taxpayer are quite small. The costs of coordination and the financial incentives mean the farmers will get their way so long as the government has the power to subsidize or penalize. This simple dynamic explains much of how our government allocates resources.

...

And, unlike Marx or Citizens United, it is something the Tea Party and Occupy can agree upon. Although it may seem far-fetched at first glance, if Occupy found common ground with the Tea Party or the sentiments behind it, much could be done politically. After all, there are many 99 percents. But so far, Occupy has absorbed or been co-opted by various one percents.

...

For example, in education policy, teachers are the one percent, while students and parents are the 99 percent. But it is generally the power of the concentrated teachers’ unions that drives decisions about education spending and policy. The fact that teachers unions support Occupy undermines its power. A true movement of the 99 percents would be on the side of students, not teachers.

...

Examples abound that cut across typical ideological lines. For instance, military contractors are the one percent, while soldiers and the citizens they defend are the 99 percent. It is for this reason that in the recent census, 7 out of the 10 richest counties surround Washington, D.C.--M. Todd Henderson

Any time someone gets fired, a manager has failed. He or she hired the wrong person, moved someone into the wrong job, or screwed up in some other way. When it’s necessary to show an employee the door, it’s going to be because we’ve tried and failed to fix whatever in the relationship and the structure wasn’t working. It’s never going to be because the person fits a category that someone has outlined for us. That, in fact, is the opposite of leadership.--Liz Ryan

Fail a lot before you are paying for the failure….I got fired or asked to leave from all my jobs.--Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga

In 2002, a schoolteacher with previously normal sexual desire began experiencing sexual desires that he was not used to. He began looking at child pornography and engaging in sexual activity that was not common to him before this point. Little did he know, he had an egg-shaped tumor in the orb frontal cortex of his brain, and when he had the tumor removed his sexual desires stopped. A little while later the desires reappeared, so he went back to the doctor’s office. Lo and behold, the tumor had returned to the same region of his brain.--Mike Friesen

... changing your offense makes all your seniors freshmen.--unattributed

In the same way that there are people who never thought they'd see a black American president, there are also people who never thought they'd see a black basketball star dressed like a nerd.  ... If you happen to be someone who looks at Durant, James, or Amar'e Stoudemire's Foot Locker commercials — in which he stalks along a perilously lit basketball court wearing a letterman's cardigan, a skinny tie, and giant black glasses (his are prescription) — and wonders how the NBA got this way, how it turned into Happy Days, you're really wondering the same thing about the rest of mainstream black culture. When did everything turn upside down? Who relaxed the rules? Is it really safe to look like Carlton Banks?--Wesley Morris

On Dec. 12, 1991, [Paul] Kunz set up a Web interface based on a Web server to search a popular database of particle physics literature at Stanford, and sent an email to Tim Berners-Lee about it. It was the first Web site in North America and one of the first dozen in the world.--Liz Gannes

The smartest worriers are learning to code or marrying a developer.--Howard Lindzon

By virtue of its size, business model and popularity, Facebook is the rare company that doesn't need Wall Street to go public. It should press home the advantage and blaze a trail for others to follow.

...

Mr. Zuckerberg's has two options: a traditional IPO, in which banks distribute shares to investors in exchange for a percentage of total proceeds; and the little-used "Dutch auction" that cuts out the Wall Street middlemen by making the allocation of shares dependent on prices bid by each investor.

...

The biggest difference between the two systems, apart from the lower fees paid by companies in auctions, is that when IPOs go Dutch, banks don't choose who gets shares, giving all investors a fair shake and avoiding potential conflicts of interests.

...

This is particularly important for "hot" IPOs, like Facebook. Since these deals often record sharp rises in the first days of trading, there is a temptation for banks to dole out shares to their favorite investor clients, who stand to profit if they get in early.

...

Wall Street's penchant for being both poacher and gamekeeper has left banks with conflicted loyalties; they take companies public while at the same time trying to keep hedge funds and other high-paying customers satisfied.--FRANCESCO GUERRERA

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

Quotes of the day

Genuine courage presupposes fear that is overcome. If there is no fear at all, there can be no courage. Similarly, if there is no wrath, forbearance is no longer a virtue; it dissolves into some strange alchemy of niceness and moral indifference.--Don Carson

Being frank burns too many bridges.--Eric Falkenstein

If what such girls experience isn’t slavery, that word has no meaning. It’s time for a 21st-century abolitionist movement in the U.S. and around the world.--Nicholas Kristof

Every province in China is Greece.--Larry Lang, chair professor of Finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong

We need reform that provides real transparency. Congress should be subject to the Freedom of Information Act like everyone else. We need more detailed financial disclosure reports, and members should submit reports much more often than once a year. All stock transactions above $5,000 should be disclosed within five days.
...
We need equality under the law. From now on, laws that apply to the private sector must apply to Congress, including whistleblower, conflict-of-interest and insider-trading laws. Trading on nonpublic government information should be illegal both for those who pass on the information and those who trade on it. (This should close the loophole of the blind trusts that aren't really blind because they're managed by family members or friends.)
...
No more sweetheart land deals with campaign contributors. No gifts of IPO shares. No trading of stocks related to committee assignments. No earmarks where the congressman receives a direct benefit. No accepting campaign contributions while Congress is in session. No lobbyists as family members, and no transitioning into a lobbying career after leaving office. No more revolving door, ever.
...
This call for real reform must transcend political parties. The grass-roots movements of the right and the left should embrace this. The tea party's mission has always been opposition to waste and crony capitalism, and the Occupy protesters must realize that Washington politicians have been "Occupying Wall Street" long before anyone pitched a tent in Zuccotti Park.--Sarah Palin

It’s hard to believe how much damage Bush did to the US economy in 8 short years.--Scott Sumner

But the way it’s structured here is, I’ll take responsibility for all the plays that are called. I have the final say on it. If I don’t want to run the play, then I can call it off – that’s my right as a head coach. Any of the bad ones, you can blame me for because ultimately I could change them if I wanted to.--Bill Belichick

On the budget, I propose a plan to cut every Federal government expense by 10% and increase every Federal tax by 10%. I'd call that the default plan, meaning I prefer a better plan, but I wouldn't expect anyone to come up with one. The advantage of this plan is that it's bad for every American. That's a little something I call "fair."--Scott Adams

As the deadline looms for the congressional super committee, there's seems to be a growing sense that tax revenue for the government is like income for the household. That's wrong. Raising taxes is nothing at all like earning income. Instead, it's a lot more like visiting the ATM. The government's debt is the American people's debt. If we pay down that debt through higher taxes, we will, for the most part, pay those taxes by drawing down our savings. That's no more "responsible'' than drawing down those savings to finance overconsumption within the household. If you buy a kayak you don't need and can't afford, you're unlikely to placate your spouse by saying "Don't worry, dear, I withdrew the money from our retirement account.'' If your government insists on maintaining social programs we don't need and can't afford, nobody should be placated by a congressional agreement to finance that program with money withdrawn from those same accounts.--Steve Landsburg

I remember learning, in one of the few West Wing episodes I watched, that Aaron Sorkin had awarded President Bartlett the Nobel Prize in economics. No doubt this sounded super-awesome to Sorkin, but if you've ever met a Nobel prizewinner, it's ludicrous. The talents required to win the Nobel prize in economics include things like incredibly single-minded focus on one idea at a time, a willingness to ignore the opinions of others, and a positive enjoyment of the vast amounts of time you will spend alone in your office, thinking. I understand why Sorkin thinks that these would be very admirable qualities for a president to have . . . but I doubt he'd actually hire this person as, say, a producer on one of his shows. The type of person who is good at the one is not good at the other--and being president probably looks slightly more like producing a television show than winning the Nobel Prize.--Megan McArdle

My only regret is not suggesting that it would be a “worthwhile Canadian initiative” for our northern neighbors to “test drive” the [NGDP targeting] policy before we tried it here in the much more important American economy.--Scott Sumner

You know how things end for Sonny Corleone — he ignores his consigliere, makes it personal and ends up gorging on a bowl of bullets parmigiana. His brother, Michael, assumes command and remains all-business for his first few years, slowly losing perspective and becoming more and more paranoid. He stops trusting his inner circle, grows apart from his family and murders his bumbling brother. Killing Fredo is strictly business for Michael, a warning that nobody should ever cross him. He can't see anything beyond making money and keeping power. He's dead inside. No different than Sonny, really. What does this have to do with the NBA lockout? The owners wanted to blow up their current model; the players gave them gas and matches. But why? I think the answer lies in that Godfather scene. The owners treated these negotiations as a natural extension of their business, only caring about their bottom line and nothing else. The players took the proceedings much more personally.--Bill Simmons

In short, grade inflation in the humanities has been contributing to college students moving away from science, technology, engineering, and math fields, as well as economics, for the last half century. It's time for the pendulum to start swinging back. A gentle starting point would be to making the distribution of grades by institution and by academic department (or for small departments, perhaps grouping a few departments together) publicly available, and perhaps even to add this information to student transcripts. If that answer isn't institutionally acceptable, I'm open to alternatives.--Timothy Taylor

I expect the medical profession to undertake an all-out effort to raise fear, uncertainty, and doubt about technology to replace the doctor, until eventually people realize that they have more fear, uncertainty, and doubt about doctors themselves.--Arnold Kling

A new experiment appears to provide further evidence that Einstein may have been wrong when he said nothing could go faster than the speed of light, a theory that underpins modern thinking on how the universe works. The new evidence, challenging a dogma of science that has held since Albert Einstein laid out his theory of relativity in 1905, appeared to confirm a startling finding that sub-atomic particles called neutrinos could travel fractions of a second faster. The new experiment at the Gran Sasso laboratory, using a neutrino beam from CERN in Switzerland, 720 km (450 miles) away, was held to check findings in September by a team of scientists which were greeted with some skepticism.--Kate Kelland

The American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) recently reported that Americans will pay more to feed 10 people for Thanksgiving dinner this year than since the mid-1980’s. The average turkey feast for 10 this year will cost $49.20 – that’s $5.73 more than it cost just last year. Shoppers at Walmart will pay 1/3 (31%) less for the same Thanksgiving groceries and will have an extra $15 in their wallet with this savings.--Walmart

Photo links here and here.

Gangsters, punks, and smugglers are thoroughly respected

China's 'White Lines' may have been purposed for satellite calibration.

Wired comes clean about their bad advice

to Apple.

We all should be like Wired.

Quotes of the day

Right now the social networking sites occupy a similar position to CompuServe, Prodigy, or AOL in the mid 90's. At that time each company was trying to figure out how to become a mass-market gateway to the Internet. Looking back now, their early attempts look ridiculous and doomed to failure, for we have seen the Web, and we have tasted of the blogroll and the lolcat and found that they were good.  But at the time no one knew what it would feel like to have a big global network. We were all waiting for the Information Superhighway to arrive in our TV set, and meanwhile these big sites were trying to design an online experience from the ground up. Thank God we left ourselves the freedom to blunder into the series of fortuitous decisions that gave us the Web.  My hope is that whatever replaces Facebook and Google+ will look equally inevitable, and that our kids will think we were complete rubes for ever having thrown a sheep or clicked a +1 button.--maciej

... labor market opportunities for college grads have been eroding — except for the elite — in absolute terms since 1997-2000, well before the collapse in AD. If those same grads are highly willing to be geographically mobile, highly willing to consider actuarial training, and highly willing to take tougher courses and study where the jobs are (doesn’t have to be tech subjects, some of those are failing too), the unemployment response to a given AD shock will be much lower. But they aren’t, so it isn’t.--Tyler Cowen

Protesting is one thing, but those Harvard protestors who walked out of Greg Mankiw's class have to be some of the laziest protestors around.--David Henderson

The wealth gap between younger and older Americans has widened to its largest ever, exacerbated by the slow economic recovery that has hit young Americans disproportionately hard, a new study shows. With high youth unemployment and mounting student debt, the typical U.S. household headed by a person 65 years of age or older is 47 times wealthier than that of a household headed by someone under 35, according to a new Pew Research study. The median net worth of households headed by someone 65 years or older was $170,494, up 42 percent from 1984. Meanwhile, households headed by someone 35 or younger had a median net worth of $3,662, down 68 percent from that same year. In fact, 37 percent of the younger group had a net worth of zero or less, nearly double the percentage from 1984. But the percentage of the older group with less than zero net worth has remained unchanged in 27 years, at 8 percent.--Tim Mak

American households in the top income quintile have almost five times more family members working on average than the lowest quintile, and individuals in higher-income households are far more likely than lower-income households to be well-educated, married, and working full-time in their prime earning years. In contrast, individuals in low-income households are far more likely to be less-educated, working part-time, either very young or very old, and living in single-parent households.--Mark Perry

... combining salaries, fringe benefits and job security, we have calculated that public school teachers receive around 52% more in average compensation than they could earn in the private sector.--ANDREW G. BIGGS And JASON RICHWINE

Well there is no, you know, Grand Wizard in the party right now who can really force the [Herman Cain] issue.--David Gregory

If Jerry Sandusky starts directing films, what he did will be considered ok.--#OCCUPYHOLLYWOOD

A problem with modern politics is that as only dissembling narcissists can succeed, politicians at all levels become such pathetic losers. ... These aspiring politicians are afraid of saying anything that people might actually disagree with, but then if everyone agrees with you, you really aren't saying anything interesting. As George Orwell noted in his classic Politics and the English Language, the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. It's a dominant strategy. Remember Barack Obama's response to Rick Warren's question as to what he thinks about abortion: 'that's above my pay grade.' This was a stupid answer (he has an opinion and it would affect policy), but it probably worked out better for him than articulating his true beliefs. In a democracy the winner has to pander to a rabble--though there are better and worse among them. This is a major reason why I prefer a smaller government, because at least businessmen pursues their own advantage more openly and honestly, whereas government workers pursue their self interest hypocritically and under false pretenses. Petty school board nominees are now aping our betters, and bringing the level of discourse down to a point where everyone is afraid of a Kinsley gaffe.--Eric Falkenstein

A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.--Michael Kinsley

The judiciary is no replacement for a competent Congress.--Stephen Green

[Clint] Eastwood long ago gave up celebrating men of violence: the mysterious, annihilating Westerners and the vigilantes who think that they alone know how to mete out justice. But Clean Edgar [Hoover], working with an efficient state apparatus behind him, is a lot more dangerous than Dirty Harry. As the filmmakers tell it, the roots of Hoover’s manias lie in his nature. The movie bears a thematic resemblance to Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Conformist” (1970), in which a repressed homosexual (Jean-Louis Trintignant) in the nineteen-thirties, longing for “normality,” joins the Italian Fascist Party and operates as an amoral bullyboy. “J. Edgar” is the story of how a similarly repressed personality might operate in a democracy. The answer is privately, by accumulating secrets and blackmailing anyone who is even remotely a threat to his standing; and publicly, by making himself and his outfit pop-culture icons and then bending the government to his whim. The frame for the movie is the Director, in old age, dictating the story of his career to a series of young men from the Bureau. Black and Eastwood use this plot device ironically: Hoover is an exceptionally unreliable narrator, and the way Eastwood stages the actual events suggests that Hoover is pumping up his own role and stretching the truth.  ... Hoover, we realize, is obsessed with keeping America safe because he feels unsafe himself. Internal subversion is a personal, not just a political, threat to him. No stranger man—not even Nixon—has ever been at the center of an American epic.--David Denby 

Now let’s discuss how “we” think about the surpluses for Norway and China. (Of course by “we” I mean us white people):
...
1. Norway: What’s not to like? Finally there’s a country that isn’t blowing all its oil wealth like those more “backward countries.” By backward, I mean cultures that don’t have that enviable Nordic patience, whose governments don’t have the ability to defer instant gratification. The Norwegians are smart; they are socking away hundreds of billions of dollars in a sovereign wealth fund, which they will be able to draw on when the money runs out. What an inspiring model for the world!
...
2. China: You just can’t trust those inscrutable Chinese. Their government doesn’t play fair, they are socking away hundreds of billions in international reserves. Look at those huge trade surpluses (no less than 4% of GDP!! [v.s 12.9% for Norway])--Scott Sumner

Wherever I go, I speak Uncle Ho
and think Uncle Sam.--Engineer in Miss Saigon

That chick was harassing me. With her hotness.--Ta-Nehisi Coates

The story [Daniel Kahneman] tells has two characters—he names them “System 1” and “System 2”—that stand in for our two different mental operations. System 1 (fast thinking) is the mental state in which you probably drive a car or buy groceries. It relies heavily on intuition and is amazingly capable of misleading and also of being misled. The slow-thinking System 2 is the mental state that understands how System 1 might be misled and steps in to try to prevent it from happening. The most important quality of System 2 is that it is lazy; the most important quality of System 1 is that it can’t be turned off. We pass through this life on the receiving end of a steady signal of partially reliable information that we only occasionally, and under duress, evaluate thoroughly. Through these two characters the author describes the mistakes your mind is prone to make and then explores the reasons for its errors.--Michael Lewis

I think with the talent [the Philadelphia Eagles] have on their football team, they can be one of the most dangerous teams in the league. When they put it together, the thing I was quoted saying is, 'You can't buy championships.' And what I meant by that is, you've got to build chemistry. You can have all the talent in the world, if you're not out there playing as one, if you're just 11 individuals, you're not gonna beat anybody in this league. And I think right now that's some of the issues that they're having. Nobody can question how talented they are, nobody can question how good of a coach Andy Reid is. Everybody knows that. You need more than talent in this league, because every team has talent.--Justin Tuck

Wag More, Bark Less.--a bumper sticker

Photo link here.

Cartoon of the day: internet culture

Source here.

Quotes of the day

If Men’s Health magazine was true, you would never need to buy more than one issue. If the articles that promised flat abs and less stress and better sex really worked as promised, you’d never need to have a subscription because every issue is the exact same thing.--Jon Acuff

You can't stop Tebowmania. You can only hope to contain it.--Peter King

In four starts, Tebow now has two fourth-quarter comebacks from at least 13 points down. In John Elway's career, guess how many he had. Two.--Kerry Byrne

I.B.M. named Virginia Rometty as its new chief executive, certifying her status as one of the most powerful women in technology. She joins a list that includes Meg Whitman, the newly installed chief executive of Hewlett-Packard; Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook; and Safra Catz, the chief financial officer of Oracle.--Michael De La Merced

According to the British lexicographer John Ayto, 'cool' has become an “all-purpose term of approval.” Indeed, the term is so widely used that this might, at first glance, appear to be a valid definition. But I beg to differ: cool is more precise and complex, and an elusively moving target. It’s cool to be clever, but it’s uncool to be a know-it-all. Sometimes cool stuff is expensive – but sometimes it comes cheap, and the expensive stuff is uncool. Sometimes it’s cool to break the law; at other times it isn’t. Communism used to be cool, but not so much any more. Brooklyn didn’t use to be cool, but now it is. And of course people can be (or not be) cool. Steve McQueen was very cool. Clint Eastwood? – not really: he’s too edgy and tightly wound. Collectively, the Beatles could be cool, but viewed individually, John Lennon was cooler than the other three put together. The Dalai Lama is cool (or, at least, admiring him is), but it’s hard to imagine anyone seeing a pope as cool. Barack Obama is sort of cool, for a politician – although the word on the street says he’s failed to live up to his full cool potential. Tony Blair tried very hard to be cool, and for a while he seemed to enjoy some success. But you can’t fool all the people all the time.--Colin Eatock

No, life cannot be understood flat on a page. It has to be lived; a person has to get out of his head, has to fall in love, has to memorize poems, has to jump off bridges into rivers, has to stand in an empty desert and whisper sonnets under his breath. ... It’s a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn’t matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were . . . and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be. So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right.--Don Miller

I write about this mostly anonymous man because players like [Kent] Hull are the bedrock of so many good teams, past and present. Hull did his job and never sought glory. If glory came, as it did in the form of three Pro Bowl nods and two All-Pro selections, he would deflect it. He was the perfect Bill Polian/Marv Levy player. Do your job, be responsible, lead when needed, care only about winning -- and be smart. I am confident in saying he was one of the five or six most valuable players on those four Buffalo Super Bowl teams, because of what he meant to the team in making the line calls on the fastest-moving offense in football, and for what he meant as the last guy out of the locker room ... after every game, after every practice. If a problem needed to be solved, he'd help. If someone just wanted to talk, he'd talk. Part of his football life included being there if anyone needed him; someone usually did. I remember lots of big-talking (rightfully so), boisterous players on those Bills teams, on and off the field, and I remember Hull, with a dip between his lip and gum, accommodating teammates, reporters, fans, and never being too big for any of it. He'd do it quietly. He loved Levy's trademark, "Where would you rather be than right here, right now?'' He lived that. Being a cog in the wheel was his thing.--Peter King

I owe a lot of that stitching in my Hall of Fame jacket to Kent Hull.--Thurman Thomas

Image link here.

Quotes of the day

Over the next two years, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google will increasingly collide in the markets for mobile phones and tablets, mobile apps, social networking, and more. This competition will be intense. Each of the four has shown competitive excellence, strategic genius, and superb execution that have left the rest of the world in the dust. HP, for example, tried to take a run at Apple head-on, with its TouchPad, the product of its $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm. HP bailed out after an embarrassingly short 49-day run, and it cost CEO Léo Apotheker his job. Microsoft's every move must be viewed as a reaction to the initiatives of these smarter, nimbler, and now, in the case of Apple, richer companies. When a company like Hulu goes on the block, these four companies are immediately seen as possible acquirers, and why not? They have the best weapons--weapons that will now be turned on one another as they seek more room to grow.  There was a time, not long ago, when you could sum up each company quite neatly: Apple made consumer electronics, Google ran a search engine, Amazon was a web store, and Facebook was a social network. How quaint that assessment seems today.--Farhad Manjoo

High tech runs three-times faster than normal businesses. And the government runs three-times slower than normal businesses. So we have a nine-times gap.--Andy Grove, Intel CEO

... the average salary in the securities industry in New York City was twice the average in other private sector jobs. At last count, in 2010, it was 5.5 times as much. (In case you want to gnash your teeth, the average is now $361,330.)--Nicholas Kristof

In 1988 (earliest year available from the USA Today Salaries Databases), the average salary of a baseball player on the New York Yankees ($700,339) was 28 times the average salary in other private sector jobs in New York City (about $25,000). By 2010, the average salary for the Yankees (if you want to gnash your teeth, the average was $8,253,000) was 124 times the average private sector salary in NYC ($66,120). Where's the outrage about "excessive" salaries for Yankees players, which have increased relative to average New York City salaries much more than salaries for NYC bankers? What about an "Occupy Yankee Stadium" protest?--Mark Perry

... couples who say money is not important to them score about 10 to 15 percent better on marriage stability and other measures of relationship quality than couples where one or both are materialistic.--Science Daily

If there is any unifying them surrounding the Occupy Wall Street movement – and I use that noun in the Brownian sense – it’s that some people have too much, and others (the protesters) have too little. Exactly how much of the former’s property they should be allowed to keep, and how much must be yielded over to the latter has yet to be made clear.  But one thing has become clear – property redistribution is all well and good, so long as it’s somebody else’s property that’s being redistributed.--Neptunus Lex

Politicians leave reality to others. What matters in politics is what you can get the voters to believe, whether it bears any resemblance to reality or not.--Thomas Sowell

The amount of disrespect that the players involved here showed to each other, to the organization, to Tito [Francona], to the game, is staggering to me. Probably as staggering are some of the names that are on that list. I'm blown away. I'm incredibly disappointed. Things have changed here for a long, long time, and I think it's for the worse. I think the way that this was handled by the organization is pathetic and embarrassing. Why would you want to root for this team?--Curt Schilling

The negative growth impact of the sharp drop in China’s trade surplus may have forced GDP growth rates to nearly zero, and the sudden and violent expansion in investment was necessary as the counterbalance to keep growth rates high. Changes in the declining consumption share of GDP have had very little impact on changes in GDP growth. And it continues to decline.--Michael Pettis

Like classic demagogues, Berlusconi has displayed, since the beginning of his political career, a remarkable ability to fascinate the masses with political theater that exalts his image. At the same time, he has an impressive ability to win over the Italian public by telling them exactly what they want to hear. His speeches are skillfully crafted to exploit the electorate's beliefs and offer a comforting and simplified vision of reality. Unlike almost all demagogues, however, Berlusconi is immensely rich, and he uses his fortune to obtain and consolidate political power. With his money he buys people, and more often he uses his money to distribute favors of various sorts and value, from presents to jobs. In turn, he gets, as has always been the case with this kind of politics, the loyalty of a large number of supporters. One could say that Berlusconi has established an oligarchy within a democratic system.  ... Berlusconi is surely unfit to govern a democratic republic, but Italians are unfit for liberty.--Maurizio Viroli

Photo link here.

A good hacker defense article

here.

Megan wonders, why don't the ultra-wealthy have more servants?

Her suggested reasons here. My favorites:

5.  Labor saving devices  Servants were often standing in for things that machines now do more cheaply, and without stealing the silver.  

6.  Cultural mores We have a much greater affection for personal space than people did in the era of large families and small heating appliances.  Most people don't want anyone else in their personal space.

7. Liability  These days, you're liable for the actions of your employees in a surprisingly wide variety of circumstances.  Safer not to have employees.

Of course, there is a huge nanny industry here in Manhattan. Photo link here.