Photo links here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.The story of how same-sex marriage became legal in New York is about shifting public sentiment and individual lawmakers moved by emotional appeals from gay couples who wish to be wed. But, behind the scenes, it was really about a Republican Party reckoning with a profoundly changing power dynamic, where Wall Street donors and gay-rights advocates demonstrated more might and muscle than a Roman Catholic hierarchy and an ineffective opposition.--MICHAEL BARBARO
Tracy Morgan recently got in trouble for saying in his act that if his son announced he was gay, Tracy would stab him. If we presume that this was one of fifty outrageously inappropriate things Tracy said on stage that night, all within character as the absurdly ignorant and selfish guy he likes to portray for laughs, it means a comedian was trying to be outrageous and funny and missed the mark. That's all it means, since no reasonable person believes Tracy would stab his own son or love him less if he came out. But reported out of context, as it was, one has trouble seeing the statement as anything but the worst kind of hate speech. I would argue that Tracy was 100% responsible for whatever psychological or social harm he caused to the audience that heard his remark live, and zero percent responsible for the harm that was caused when others spread the story. The spreaders became the authors (as far as responsibility) when they changed the context. They became the Authors by Relocation, a term I just made up.--Scott Adams
The spread of sex-selective abortion is often framed as a simple case of modern science being abused by patriarchal, misogynistic cultures. Patriarchy is certainly part of the story, but as [Mara] Hvistendahl points out, the reality is more complicated — and more depressing. Thus far, female empowerment often seems to have led to more sex selection, not less. In many communities, she writes, “women use their increased autonomy to select for sons,” because male offspring bring higher social status. In countries like India, sex selection began in “the urban, well-educated stratum of society,” before spreading down the income ladder. Moreover, Western governments and philanthropic institutions have their fingerprints all over the story of the world’s missing women. ... The American establishment helped create the problem, but now it’s metastasizing on its own: the population-control movement is a shadow of its former self, yet sex selection has spread inexorably with access to abortion, and sex ratios are out of balance from Central Asia to the Balkans to Asian-American communities in the United States. This places many Western liberals, Hvistendahl included, in a distinctly uncomfortable position. Their own premises insist that the unborn aren’t human beings yet, and that the right to an abortion is nearly absolute. A self-proclaimed agnostic about when life begins, Hvistendahl insists that she hasn’t written “a book about death and killing.” But this leaves her struggling to define a victim for the crime that she’s uncovered. ... the sense of outrage that pervades her story seems to have been inspired by the missing girls themselves, not the consequences of their absence. Here the anti-abortion side has it easier. We can say outright what’s implied on every page of “Unnatural Selection,” even if the author can’t quite bring herself around. The tragedy of the world’s 160 million missing girls isn’t that they’re “missing.” The tragedy is that they’re dead.--Ross Douthat
Bon Temps is a world where it doesn't matter whom you love or how. A fantasy world that we are getting closer to all the time.--Molly Lambert
The process of selecting and securing a partner, whether for conceiving and rearing children, or for enhancing one’s socioeconomic standing, or for attempting motel-room acrobatics, or merely for finding companionship in a cold and lonely universe, is as consequential as it can be inefficient or irresolute. Lives hang in the balance, and yet we have typically relied for our choices on happenstance—offhand referrals, late nights at the office, or the dream of meeting cute. ... Men want someone who will take care of them, make them look good, and have sex with them—not necessarily in that order. It may be that this is all that women really want, too, but they are better at disguising or obscuring it. They deal in calculus, while men, for the most part, traffic in simple sums. A common observation, about both the Internet dating world and the world at large, is that there is an apparent surplus of available women, especially in their thirties and beyond, and a shortage of recommendable men. The explanation for this asymmetry, which isn’t exactly news, is that men can and usually do pursue younger women, and that often the men who are single are exactly the ones who prefer them. For women surveying a landscape of banished husbands or perpetual boys, the biological rationale offers little solace. Neither does the Internet. ... One woman who has dated fifty-eight men since her divorce, a few years ago, told me that she maintains a chart, both to keep the men straight and to try to discern patterns—as though there might be a unified-field theory of why men are dogs. ... men exaggerate their income (by twenty per cent) and their height (by two inches), perhaps intuiting that women pay closer attention to these data points than to any others. But women lie about these things, too. A date is an exercise in adjustment.--Nick Paumgarten
There is a fundamental imbalance in the social dynamic. The most valuable asset is attractive females. As soon as you get them, you get loads of creepy guys.--Harj Taggar
Our social and sexual patterns have changed more in the last fifty years than in the last ten thousand. Our courtship rituals are rapidly changing, and we don’t know what to do.--Helen Fisher
Don't expect to buy the bottom - expect the market to torture you with some pain, and prepare yourself to deal with it - that way you won't find yourself unprepared and regret it.--Josh Brown's colleague
In raw numbers, New York has the greatest legal surplus by far. In 2009, 9,787 people passed the bar exam in the Empire State. The analysts estimated, though, that New York would need only 2,100 new lawyers each year through 2015. That means that if New York keeps minting new lawyers apace, it will continue having an annual surplus of 7,687 lawyers.--CATHERINE RAMPELL
Some observers are calling for a “repatriation holiday” on profits held by foreign subsidiaries. Some members of Congress, eager to stimulate our fragile economy, are listening. They shouldn’t. A tax holiday on repatriated funds is a proven failure — expensive in both direct and indirect ways. It was already tried in 2004 and didn’t work.--WILLIAM GALE & BENJAMIN H. HARRIS
On economic growth, real GDP has risen 0.8% over the 13 quarters since the recession began, compared to an average increase of 9.9% in past recoveries. From the beginning of the recession to April 2011, real personal income has grown just .9% compared to 9.4% for the same period in previous post 1960 recessions. The standard response from Obama apologists is that recession of 2008 and 2009 was different because, as former Clinton administration economist Robert Shapiro puts it, "this was a financial crisis, and these take longer to recover from." In fact, in most cases, the deeper the recession, the stronger the recovery to make up for lost ground. That was what Ronald Reagan's critics said when the U.S. economy soared during 1983 and 1984 with quarterly growth numbers exceeding 7%. At the time, liberal Keynesians yawned and declared the good times nothing more than a normal snapback from the deep recession.--Stephen Moore
The southern San Andreas fault has not experienced a large earthquake for approximately 300 years, yet the previous five earthquakes occurred at ~180-year intervals. ... We conclude that rupture of the stepover faults, caused by periodic flooding of the palaeo-Salton Sea and by tectonic forcing, had the potential to trigger earthquake rupture on the southern San Andreas fault. Extensional stepover zones are highly susceptible to rapid stress loading and thus the Salton Sea may be a nucleation point for large ruptures on the southern San Andreas fault.--Daniel Brothers, Debi Kilb, Karen Luttrell, Neal Driscoll & Graham Kent
I'm So Meta Even This Acronym.--Douglas Hofstatder
ISMETA--Cav
Monday, June 27, 2011
Quotes of the day
Friday, June 24, 2011
Quotes of the day
Photo links here and here.Apple makes more money from the sale of one Mac than HP does from selling seven PCs.--Matt Richman
Nothing contradicts [Keynesians'] dogma more conclusively than former President Clinton's massive fiscal squeeze. When President Clinton took office in 1993, government expenditures were 22.1% of GDP, and when he departed in 2000, the federal government's share of the economy had been squeezed to a low of 18.2%. . . . And that's not all. During the final three years of the former President's second term, the federal government was generating fiscal surpluses. President Clinton was even confident enough to boldly claim in his January 1996 State of the Union address that "the era of big government is over." President Clinton's squeeze didn't throw the economy into a slump, as Keynesianism would imply. No. President Clinton's Victorian fiscal virtues generated a significant confidence shock, and the economy boomed.--Steve Hanke
I've spent the first half of my life being underestimated. It used to bother me, now I use it to my advantage - they never see me coming. And god help the poor soul who ever tells me that I can't do something. Oh PLEASE tell me that so I can watch the horror and panic on your face when I come out of nowhere and do it better than you. I've also spent the first half of my life rebelling. There are rules that were made to keep order and protect people, these are the rules I respect as a citizen and a family man. But then there are rules that have outlived their usefulness or only exist to protect someone else's entrenched interest or personal fiefdom. These make me want to smash my guitar and kick an amp off the stage.--Joshua Brown
Thursday, June 23, 2011
The magic of competitive markets in getting an NFL deal done
Peter King says:They’re going to get it done. My over-under is July 10. They get it done by July 15-17, they won’t lose any preseason games, which is really the goal here. I think they’re going to make progress and get it done by the middle of July. ... That’s about $700 million if they don’t play preseason games that comes off the table, not only that they owners don’t earn but the players don’t get a cut of. So if you’re talking about a specific cap number for players’ salaries only in 2011 of maybe about $118 million per team of which every team would have to spend a floor of 90 percent of that, you start taking $700 million out of there and all of a sudden, then that’s maybe $10 million less per team because they don’t have that money. That’s something both sides are cognizant of. ... If this deal goes too far into the preseason, I can tell you for a fact right now that there are going to be some major corporate advertisers, beer advertisers, car advertisers, who say, ‘You know what, thanks but we’re going to take all of our September advertising and we’re going to ESPN and we’re going to college football. Or we’re going to take some segment of it now and we’re going to make our decision. You can’t make your decision. We need to make ours.'Photo link here.
Quotes of the day
I finally watched “Inside Job” this weekend. It was an excellent documentary for people who don’t want to understand the financial crisis but want to believe they would’ve seen it coming. Watching it, you’d think that the only people who missed the meltdown were corrupt fools, and the way to spot the next one is to have fewer corrupt fools. But that’s not true. Worse, it’s dangerously untrue. In telling the wrong story about how the financial crisis happened, it misinforms about how to keep it from happening again. ... it is clear that our key systems are going to continue growing more complex, and we’re not getting any smarter, or any less able to ignore risks that we know we should be preparing for. “Inside Job” may have missed that story, but the rest of us can’t afford to.--Ezra KleinPhoto link here.
While the NYTimes likes to put scare quotes around 'property rights' when discussing eminent domain as if it's some newfangled right wing obsession, the following following psychology experiment suggests it's human nature.--Eric Falkenstein
Apparently soaps and reality shows attract similar viewers—they appear to be substitutes for the average consumer. As with any new product that is hot, its substitutes suffer when it enters the market. As the World Turns and Guiding Light have given way to such pathetic substitutes as The Apprentice and Let’s Make a Deal.--Daniel Hamermesh
By increasing the demand for lower-wage non-unionized workers while decreasing the demand for higher-wage unionized workers, the difference between the annual incomes of each of these groups of workers shrinks. Incomes in America thereby become less ‘unequal.’--Don Boudreaux
The way I see it, the main difference between a business entrepreneurship and policy entrepreneurship is that if things do not work out as planned, the policy entrepreneur is insulated from the adverse consequences. For me, that difference does not work in favor policy entrepreneurship.--Arnold Kling
During the Bush presidency, which ended on Jan. 20, 2009 with the inauguration of President Obama, U.S. troops were present in Afghanistan for 87.4 months and suffered 570 casualties—a rate of 6.5 deaths per month. During the Obama presidency, through today, U.S. troops have been present in Afghanistan for 29.1 months and have suffered 970 casualties—a rate of 33.3 deaths per month.--Edwin Mora
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Chart of the decade: the Fed is projecting better news on the unemployment front than is justified
by their economic growth forecast. More tellingly, the red dots showing the Fed forecasts are all close to the bottom of the data cloud, which means that it will be quite unusual to see the labor market perform so well, given their projections for only moderate economic growth.--Justin Wolfers
Quote of a lifetime: C.S. Lewis
... it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.--C.S. Lewis
Please forgive the colorful language
Quotes of the day
Photo links here and here.The New Republic's Jonathan Chait is unimpressed by my "rebuttal" to Stephen Metcalf's Slate essay about libertarians and the philosopher Robert Nozick. This is probably due to the fact that I didn't write one. However, others have, and I want to make sure Chait has sufficient reading material before his next squash game with Jacob Weisberg.--Matt Welch
I fear it represents a great deal of confirmation bias on the left. A lot of liberals who see all libertarians as less-lovable Ron Swansons nod along with Metcalf as he makes one clichéd assertion after another and the end result is a bunch of readers happily cheering a piece that makes no attempt at all to treat its subject with any sort of seriousness or grace. It affirms deeply held opinions and distrust, and helps cement the language barrier between liberals and libertarians in ultimately a very destructive and unfortunate way.--E.D. Kain
What strikes me about Paul [Krugman]'s blog post, however, is how completely unconvincing it is. He uses a chart that starts the Reagan era in 1979, arguing we need to correct for the business cycle. But would or should this persuade anyone? The null hypothesis being tested is that Reagan policies had a significant effect on revenue growth. But would any believer in that null hypothesis include the last couple years of the Carter administration as part of the Reagan era? Weren't the policies of those years precisely what Reagan was trying to reverse? Maybe Paul's chart might appeal to someone who already agrees with him, but I thought economists turned to data to try to persuade those who are truly undecided. It is hard to see how this presentation of the data would move someone who is yet to make up his mind. One more thing: What Paul calls "the Clinton miracle" might also be called "the Internet bubble."--Greg Mankiw
Magnetar would put down a few million bucks to start a collateralized-debt obligation (CDO), cram it full of the junkiest mortgage bonds it could find, then get a bank like JPMorgan to sell it off to investors as a triple-A, gold-plated piece of the booming housing market; when in reality it was a time bomb filled with toxic waste. Whatever Magnetar lost when the thing went bust, it more than made up by taking out massive short positions against it. For a real world corollary, consider this akin to building a crappy house, selling it to someone, and then taking out an insurance policy so that when it falls down or catches fire, you get paid big bucks.--Matthew Philips
$25 billion a year isn't bad, especially when you consider that the expenses of the supplement companies are just a tiny bit lower than those of the drug companies. Not having to do any preclinical research at all helps, of course, and not having to run any clinical trials at all (nothing for efficacy, nothing for safety) helps, and not having to be reviewed by the FDA helps, too. And then on the other side of the ledger, being able to say any damn thing that comes into your head helps the most of all. And as you'll see from that article, not only has Senator Hatch himself benefited greatly from his nutritional ties, but so has his family, immediate and extended. And his friends, and his former business partners - pretty much everyone within range, it seems. Each sides regards the other as the gift that keeps on giving. And why shouldn't they?--Derek Lowe
Complacency is baked into our species. We can’t resist thinking that recent experience defines the future. Give us a run of good luck, and we are apt to turn that into an implicit expectation that our luck will continue -- even that we are entitled to it. This kind of thinking was instrumental in the run-up to the financial crash of 2008. Too many private and public institutions assumed that an extraordinary run in prosperity, particularly in the real estate market, was just normal. It didn’t occur to them that things could go so wrong. Even when token stress testing or risk assessment was done, it largely excluded the possibility of a bad shock or a protracted slump. Risk wasn’t systematically measured; it was ignored. It’s easy to write this off to greed or foolishness on the part of Wall Street. But the truth is, our entire civilization rests on a foundation just as shaky. We assume that the very Earth is static and will always be as it is now, or as we remember it. Yet geophysics tells us that is emphatically not the case. Bad things happen. ... natural disasters are almost always compounded by human error. The buildings in Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, were poorly constructed. That most of them would collapse in a severe earthquake, leading to enormous loss of life, was easily predictable. Worsening the situation, United Nations aid officials staffed the relief effort with personnel from Nepal, where there was an ongoing cholera epidemic. Unsurprisingly, those workers brought the disease with them, and so began an outbreak that is thought to have so far killed at least 4,700 Haitians. It’s easy to dismiss this kind of poor response when it occurs in Haiti, which has an infamously ineffective government. But a mortifying degree of incompetence was also on display after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, and again this year when the Japanese tsunami swamped four reactors at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear-power plant. --Nathan Myrvhold
It goes without saying that economists--especially macroeconomists--have a poor track record on big historical trends (eg, most economists in the 1950s believed that socialism was more productive yet less polluting than capitalism, that a permanent trade-off between inflation and unemployment existed, that the third world would grow dramatically after colonialism, that dynamic programming would be useful for fiscal policy, or more recently, that requiring 20% down payment to get a home mortgage was merely a pretext for racism and should be abolished, to name but a few). Too many believe in the naive Marxist fantasy about a life of dilettantish activities unrelated to economic scarcity. How many times are programs justified by the fact that 'The US is the richest country in the world' or some corporation has billion of dollars, as if that capital was sitting there, unused and probably stolen. Bankruptcy will make us a better society because currently many people think that solutions are as simple as creating a mountain of debt (Bill Gross estimates it at 500% our GDP) to create make-work or new economic rights, and those sinecures don't create what Arthur Brooks calls perceived earned success, the satisfaction that comes from work that is appreciated both by your boss, who compares your cost to alternatives, and your customers, who compare your value to alternatives. There are no shortcuts to the rewards of the virtuous life, as a person or a society.--Eric Falkenstein
The failure of Western experts to anticipate the Soviet Union's collapse may in part be attributed to a sort of historical revisionism -- call it anti-anti-communism -- that tended to exaggerate the Soviet regime's stability and legitimacy. Yet others who could hardly be considered soft on communism were just as puzzled by its demise.--Leon Aron
Like many people, Justice Ginsburg assumes lopsided statistics prove discrimination.--Kay Hymowitz
I pray that Allah destroys America and all its allies. And the day that happens, and I assure you it will and sooner than you think, I will be very pleased.--American-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki
Vodka's a joke. I don't listen to the Black Eyed Peas. I don't watch reality television. I don't drink vodka. I make those decisions for the same reason. It's filler. There's no substance to any of that stuff. It's designed to smell and taste like nothing.--Adam Stemmler
Among 50-year-old men, for example, those in the highest education group are now projected to live almost six years longer on average than those in the lowest education group -- and this differential has been rising sharply. The widening gap in life expectancy is also evident geographically. In 2007, men living in the American counties with the greatest average longevity could expect to live more than 15 years longer than men in the lowest- ranked ones. In 1987, that gap was less than 12 years. Sadly, life expectancy in some counties actually declined over that period. The leading explanations for this involve health behavior -- including diet, exercise and smoking. For example, men 50 and older without a high-school education are more than twice as likely to smoke as those with a college degree. Exercise behavior also varies substantially. Among 45- to 54-year-olds in one study, only 16 percent of those without a high-school degree exercised vigorously at least once a week, whereas 56 percent of college graduates did.--Peter Orszag
This month marks the two-year anniversary of the end of recession and start of recovery. But it’s a recovery in name only, so weak as to be nonexistent. And it has been weak from the start. Real GDP growth has averaged only 2.8 percent per year compared with 7 percent after last deep recession in 1981-82 ...--John Taylor
If the US is able to build the healthiest financial sector in the world, certainly other countries will want to imitate it. If some prefer to redistribute the risks to their own taxpayers, and their taxpayers are willing to bear this cost, so much the worse for them. All this emphasis on international coordination of policy is unnecessary. And it’s good to see so many disparate voices once again adopting the Reaganite stance of hanging out a beacon to the world.--John Carney
[Tim] Thomas became the face of the playoffs — his pugnacity, flexibility, and pure skill were exhilarating. He became the beard of playoffs, too. And there was exhilaration in that. If you came to see him as a bear, he was also a paragon of what else a bear could be, a tough, tender vision of love — him loving you, you loving him, him protecting you. Of course, he’s the goalie. You can always sense warmth in Thomas' beady eyes — not lust or desire, nothing deviant or super freaky, just pure love. He’s the bear that Timothy Treadwell expected to find in "Grizzly Man." He’s the aberrant bear you bring home from Castro Street to mother. Even in the finals after he’d just laid out a Canuck, he radiated more affection than brutishness or anger. He’ll deck you, but he’ll also water your plants.--Wesley Morris
The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts
human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the
grace of tragedy.--Steven Weinberg
The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes ...--William Shakespeare
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Quotes of the day
Photo links here, here, here, here and here.... for a quarter century before heading up State-L, [Harold] Koh was the leading and most vocal academic critic of presidential unilateralism in war, and a tireless advocate for institutional cooperation between the political branches in war decisions. I am thus genuinely surprised, as many people are, by his current stance.--Jack Goldsmith
If all art aspires to the condition of music, all the sciences aspire to the condition of mathematics.—-George Santayana
As a Princeton University professor, Ben Bernanke castigated the Bank of Japan in 2000 for a “case of self-induced paralysis” that led to a decade of stagnation. Now, the Federal Reserve chairman may be allowing the U.S. central bank to fall into the same trap after its second round of quantitative easing ends this month. By all but ruling out another cycle of bond purchases, Fed officials have left themselves with little in the way of policy options to respond to slowing growth and rising unemployment. This raises the risk that the U.S. will remain saddled with what Bernanke himself has called a “frustratingly” sluggish recovery that leaves millions of Americans out of work.--Rich Miller
One thing college does do is to keep 25 million students off the unemployment rolls, much like it did for me when I went on my own four year vacation. The world was a different oyster in 1966, however, and it behooves America to recognize the reversal and the necessity for significant changes if it is to compete in the global marketplace of the 21st century. It is becoming obvious that the 2012 election will be fought on a battlefield of job creation. A 9.1% official unemployment rate, and a number nearly double that when discouraged and part-time workers are included in the rolls, portend an angry and disillusioned electorate, which will include millions of jobless college graduates ill-trained to compete in the global marketplace. Over the past 10 years under both Democratic and Republican administrations, only 1.8 million jobs have been created while the available labor force has grown by over 15 million. It is clear, however, that neither party has an awareness of the why or the wherefores of how to put America back to work again.--Bill Gross
The problem is not the curricula—it’s the expectation that college can make all students above average. Overinvestment in college education is not something that can be repaired by tinkering with what college kids are taught. We’re just sending too many students to college at too great an expense. In the present crisis, college education is not the solution; college education is the problem. We need to get college off our backs.--John Carney
If health care becomes an increasing share of the economy, how will we allocate it, and how will we pay for it? That is, if controlling the cost of health care fails, what is Plan B? That is a question that candidates from both political parties agree on as well: they all seem determined to avoid it.--Greg Mankiw
[Megan Fox] was in a different world, on her BlackBerry. You gotta stay focused. And you know, the Hitler thing. Steven [Spielberg] said, “Fire her right now.”--Michael Bay
Ideological Turing Test
Bryan Caplan impresses again:
Put me and five random liberal social science Ph.D.s in a chat room. Let liberal readers ask questions for an hour, then vote on who isn't really a liberal. Then put Krugman and five random libertarian social science Ph.D.s in a chat room. Let libertarian readers ask questions for an hour, then vote on who isn't really a libertarian. Simple as that.Photo link here.
My challenge: Nail down the logistics, and I'll happily bet money that I fool more voters than Krugman. Indeed, I'll happily bet that any libertarian with a Ph.D. from a top-10 social science program can fool more voters than Krugman. We learn his worldview as part of the curriculum. He learns ours in his spare time - if he chooses to spare it.
Monday, June 20, 2011
There is an inherent conflict
That's Arnold Kling. Photo link here.Ask a lefty what caused the financial crisis, and the answer will be that there was too little regulation and too much reliance on market discipline, which did not work.
Ask a righty the same question, and the answer will be that there was too much confidence in regulation, so that market discipline was undermined (creditors assumed they had government protection).
Quotes of the day
Photo links here, here, here, here and here.Farmers have been the wisest investors, especially in the collar counties [of Chicago]. They were smart enough to hang on to their money and reinvest it in the land. It's like any other business. Invest in what you know.--Mark Goodwin
I loathe nothing more than laboring for profane achievements.
Who has ever seen mountains of gold and silver
last through 10,000 generations?--Wang Gonquan
Wife-sale auctions identified “suitors” – men who valued unhappy wives more than their current husbands, who unhappy wives valued more than their current husbands, and who had the property rights required to buy unhappy wives’ right to exit marriage from their husbands. These suitors enabled spouses in inefficient marriages to dissolve their marriages where direct Coasean divorce bargains between them were impossible. Wife sales were an efficiency-enhancing institutional response to the unusual constellation of property rights that Industrial Revolution-era English law created. They made husbands, suitors, and wives better off.--Peter Leeson, Peter Boettke, and Jayme Lemke
The economic structure of the media business is not fundamentally different from that of business in general. The most-prevalent sources of industrial strength are the mutually reinforcing competitive advantages of scale and customer captivity. Content creation simply does not lend itself to either, while aggregation is amenable to both.--Jonathan Knee
... most of [Gary Kasparov's] world-class expertise comes from how he sees and looks at the chess board, not from his calculation ability. The traditional picture of the chess master as a calculating prodigy is bogus.--Sanjoy Mahajan
Try this test: see if you can read [Paul] Krugman's blog and NY Times column for two weeks and not find him, at least once, attributing motives to those economists he disagrees with that you are pretty sure are not their real motives.--David Henderson
So now we have a politician justifying petty corruption by arguing that since every American cop is in fact corrupt, we can’t call it corruption. Fixing tickets isn’t wrong. It’s just a perk that comes with a badge. Unfortunately, this entitlement mindset – the notion that my individual or group interests are special and more deserving than the interests of others – is deeply embedded in our society. Why do so many homeowners who face foreclosure flip out when losing their homes? They’ve convinced themselves that it’s unjust…that they’re somehow entitled to a home they bought with a 2% or 3% downpayment. The entitlement mindset is most destructive when it comes to Medicare and Social Security, the programs that are bankrupting our nation. Unlike fixing traffic tickets, Social Security and Medicare are offered to all Americans of a certain age. And because these entitlement programs are so universal, most Americans think that they must be “fair.” Of course, they’re not “fair.” As currently configured, Medicare and Social Security are transfer payments from younger and future generations of Americans to their elders. Worst of all, the economics of these programs simply don’t work.Too little money going in and too much money going out. Even the AARP has finally figured this out. ... Entitlements corrupt, and Medicare and Social Security corrupt absolutely.--Evan Newmark
Some of the slow-down in the American economy is undoubtedly due to problems in the world economy: the excessive Greece debt and other serious economic problems facing a slowly growing European Community, the nuclear disaster in Japan and the sluggishness of the Japanese economy, and the possible slowing of the rapid growth in both the Chinese and Indian economies. Another part is explained by the policies that slowed the early stages of the recovery, perhaps especially uncertainty about the effects of the financial reform act, and lack of clarity about the cost implications to business of the health care act. I am persuaded that an important third part is due to concerns that the US will be unable to control its fiscal situation. The ratio of federal government spending to GDP grew from about 21% in 2007 to 25% in 2011, a very rapid change compared to the relative stability of this ratio during the prior 25 years. Unfortunately, there is not yet a strong enough will in Congress and by the president to lower this ratio during the coming decade. Indeed, with the looming enormous growth in entitlement spending, especially Medicare, the spending to GDP ratio could well increase sharply in the coming decade, along with the fiscal deficit and the federal debt.--Gary Becker
Nothing in American life today seems as archaic, ubiquitous and immovable as the Republican and Democratic parties. The two 19th-century political groupings divide up the spoils of a combined $6.4 trillion that is extracted each year from taxpayers at the federal, state, county and municipal levels. Though rhetorically and theoretically at odds with one another, the two parties have managed to create a mostly unbroken set of policies and governance structures that benefit well-connected groups at the expense of the individual. Americans have watched, with a growing sense of alarm and alienation, as first a Republican administration and then its Democratic successor have flouted public opinion by bailing out banks, nationalizing the auto industry, expanding war in Central Asia, throwing yet more good money after bad to keep housing prices artificially high, and prosecuting a drug war that no one outside the federal government pretends is comprehensible, let alone winnable.--Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch
If you "screwed up," as in the case of the New York Congressperson Anthony Weiner, you're a dead duck from second one. Nobody but his godfather and mentor Chuck Schumer has ever liked this guy. I'm disappointed to say he is the rep from my old neighborhood, Brighton beach/Coney Island. He is a loudmouth liar who was unable to "hear" the President, Nancy Pelosi, and 433 of his remaining colleagues. He received the support of Charlie Rangel, which, of course, needs to be a vignette in the Tracy Morgan film and tour. Weiner and King James both suffer from ESPN (Extraordinary Sanctimonious Pompous Narcissistic) Syndrome. The halls of Congress are in a way quite similar to an NBA locker room: An outsider can actually feel that everybody else exists to serve the "special people," be they elected or signed via free agency. Once you get there, you ain't leaving so quickly. And, with press people, appointment secretaries, personal assistants, business managers, lawyers, and "Spolestras" to serve your every whim, it's easy to buy into the illusion — there is a monarchy in America.--Dan Klores
Friday, June 17, 2011
Quotes of the day
Photo links here, here, here, here, here and here.I had always believed in the analytic self; I was rational, calculating, and tried to make smart decisions. Of course real people don’t use math, but I figured that we’re still weighing costs and benefits just as our models say. Or at least that was my understanding of the world. Today, I’m not so sure. ... My feelings toward my daughter Matilda aren’t easily expressed in analytic terms. I struggle to express it, just as I struggle to understand it. I think about my daughter, and I smile. Her laugh is the greatest joy, and it thrills me that she shares it with me. ...There’s something new and strange about all this. Today, I feel the powerful force of biology. It’s visceral; it’s real; it’s hormonal, and it’s not in our economic models. I’m helpless in the face of feelings that overwhelm me.--Justin Wolfers
When my mother showed the cops her plastic bag full of crack vials that we picked up off the sidewalks around Washington Square, the cops looked at the residue and deduced that it couldn’t be cocaine. Addicts would never leave that much behind. Thwarted in their efforts to get police attention, my mother and a neighbor, Diane Whelton, did what came naturally to children of the ’60s: they organized. My mother became the head of Mothers and Children of Washington Square [Park]. ... By the end of 1987, the crack dealers had been driven from the park. The neighborhood got so nice that eventually we were driven out, too. I’m in Brooklyn, and my mom and dad moved to Westchester. That park, however, will always feel like ours.--John Carney
Praying is hard sometimes but it’s nowhere near as difficult as flossing regularly.--Sammy Adebiyi
There's a lot of (justifiable) chest beating over Android at Google these days -- a corporate development VP has called the Android acquisition Google's "best deal ever" -- but in hindsight the overwhelming success of Android is kind of a miracle. Big tech companies screw up many if not most of their acquisitions, letting them wither from corporate neglect or driving out founders and other talent with their inflexible cultures and protocols. (Skype buyer Microsoft (MSFT), are you listening?) Even Google can be guilty of this too (dMarc, Dodgeball), but its management of Android is a textbook example of a deal gone terribly right: Rubin and his team thrived in Google's engineering-driven culture, which encouraged innovation by letting Android release less-than-perfect versions that it would continually upgrade. Google also embraced Rubin's vision of giving the operating system away -- a gambit, enabled by Google's broader ad-based business model, that stoked adoption of the platform. But Android ultimately triumphed thanks in large part to its corporate benefactors: Google co-founders Page and Brin saw the broader potential of Android almost from the outset. For the young entrepreneurs Android was more than just another software acquisition. It was the centerpiece of their grand vision to transform the telecommunications industry and make it more open and accessible -- in short, more like the Internet.--Beth Kowitt
You can still see the contrast between American idealism about companionate marriage and French “sophistication.” In France, we now know thanks to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, men were not only allowed to stray, they earned praise for doing so. As DSK’s wife Anne Sinclair once said, “It’s important to seduce, for a politician.” Male attraction to women, particularly younger women, has been considered both natural and virile, and no one seemed especially troubled by the possible suffering of the cast aside and frequently aging wife. What did Mme. Mitterrand, wife of Francois, think of la Presidente’s mistress and child? No one asked and no one cared. That is not the case in the United States. The public humiliation of Anthony Weiner, like that of his predecessors in sexual malfeasance—John Edwards, Chris Lee, Eliot Spitzer, Mark Sanford, and so many others—has the effect of a moral crusade against those who violate both the companionate ideal and his wife’s dignity. We subject him to weeks of derision, we debate his uncertain future, we pick apart the poor man’s psyche, we insist on public penitence, otherwise known as the press conference, and we may, as in the recent case of Chris Lee and now Anthony Weiner, take away the powerful position that he used to lure women.--Kay Hymowitz
We're all trying to appeal to totally different (sometimes conflicting) demographics simultaneously, which is why Katy Perry and Rihanna wear vinyl nurse outfits for audiences of 12-year-old girls.--Molly Lambert
Should we replace machines that produce light bulbs with human glass blowers, to bring back those jobs? Should we replace machines that produce cigarettes with human cigarette rollers to bring back those jobs? Should we go back to the manufacturing processes of the 1950s in steel, automobiles, and durable goods in order to bring back those jobs? I would gladly support a tax-financed program to subsidize manufacturing jobs provided that those jobs were filled by every politician who calls for a return of manufacturing jobs.--Arnold Kling
Under Basel II in December 2009, Greek government bonds, rated A-/A2, had the same 20 percent risk weight as AA/AAA asset-backed securities in the United States. It seemed like easy money, and banks levered it up. As usual, regulations did not alleviate the problem, rather, they encouraged it.--Eric Falkenstein
The oddest aspect of Green Lantern—and I wonder if the filmmakers were even aware of it—is its frankly fascist sci-fi philosophy. The green rings and lanterns are charged with the Power of Will, the various counterpoised yellow thingies with the Power of Fear. At one point, Sinestro (who would trust a guy with a name like that?) says, “Fear is the enemy of Will. Fear is what stops you and makes you weak.” At which point I wondered what kind of movie Leni Riefenstahl might have made from this material. Possibly a more interesting one.--Kurt Loder
Three years ago, Iceland forced its over-leveraged financial sector into a painful debt restructuring instead of bailing out its banks. The government had no other choice: Icelandic banks' assets totalled roughly 1,000% of GDP, and in the world's smallest currency area, no less. The central bank could not take on the role of lender of last resort without igniting a currency crisis. Critics dubbed this response disastrous, and Iceland served as the cautionary tale of an "Icarus economy" whose banks had grown too big to save. Today, though Iceland's banking system defaulted, its government remains solvent, with debt levels close to the European average of between 80% and 90% of GDP. Iceland's luck was that it did not qualify for a bailout. ... There may be no better contrast between restructuring versus bailouts than to compare Iceland to Ireland. Dublin faced the same predicament as Reykjavik in 2008, but it responded with a blanket guarantee that turned Irish taxpayers' money into collateral for Irish bank debts. Rating agencies and so-called experts hailed the move at the time, in part because Dublin had the euro and the mighty German state vouching for its credibility. But Iceland's experience of botched government takeovers and private-capital flight has also played out in Ireland—only much more slowly and, arguably, more painfully. The crucial difference between Iceland and Ireland is that Icelandic taxpayers relinquished responsibility for their banks' bondholders, while their Irish counterparts are on the hook for their banks' crushing debts. Even worse, we may not have seen the full scale of the Irish banking system's losses, given that it remains on government life support. It is becoming clearer by the day that too many of Europe's banking crises were initially misdiagnosed as liquidity, rather than solvency, problems. For some countries, most notably Ireland, the policies prescribed for that misdiagnosis have transformed banking crises into sovereign-debt crises. --ÁSGEIR JóNSSON
Republican-led House of Representatives smells a lot like the previously Democrat-led Congress
Alex Tabarrok notes:... anyone who argues against making school meals healthier because it’s too expensive at the same time as they vote for keeping billions of dollars in farm subsidies is not concerned about expenses. What unites the bill is not ideology but protection of agribusiness.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
No more weeping, gnashing of teeth, or legislators
... here in Montana ... the state legislature meets for just 3 months every two years and small budget deficits are quickly closed without much ado.--Tim Iacono
For use with funding applications, exhibitions, curriculum vitae, websites
Guess who's coming to dinner ... Artsy Bollocks.
Top paid athletes
as compiled by Sports Illustrated, including endorsement income (in millions):$62 Tiger Woods
$61 Phil Mickelson
$45 LeBron James
$38 Peyton Manning
$36 Alex Rodriguez
Photo link here.
Quotes of the day
Photo links here, here and here.If your world view depends on believing everyone you disagree with is either corrupt or incompetent, you are not clever. You are a fool.--Epicurean Dealmaker
You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.--Dr. Seuss
Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods.--C.S. Lewis
[Kanye West] is unsatisfied with Miss Albania even though he's spent his entire career working to a place where he could have sex with Miss Albania. A woman whose only talent is being beautiful bores him because he wants a woman he can talk to and feel comfortable with, the way he felt around his mother. That he channels this into a song that vaguely suggests a desire to have sex with his mom is extremely Portnoy's Complaint of him. And then, of course, he sees himself in his mom's boyfriends. In the various boyfriends who mistreated his mother, men who lied to her when she was obviously smart enough to know when they were lying. And he wonders how he could have hated these men so much as a boy, only to turn out exactly like them.--Molly Lambert
Like Obama, Hoover was the child of a broken home with an unconventional background. He was far more widely traveled than most Americans in his day, and his time overseas made him a globalist in his thinking in many ways. His wife (Lou Henry Hoover) was unusually well educated and assertive — at a time when few women went to college, she graduated from coeducational Stanford with a degree in geology. Hoover was an unconventional candidate who came into office on a tidal wave of support. ... President Hoover brought some convictions with him to office about how the economy worked, how government worked, and what his role as President should be. As the Depression deepened, he did the best he could within those limits, but nothing seems to have made him reconsider the mix of progressive ideas that he brought with him to the White House. As months of failure and disappointment grew into years, he doesn’t seem to have questioned those core ideas or to think about ways in which the economic emergency might require steps that in normal times would not be taken. He not only failed to end the Depression; he failed to give people a sense that he understood what was happening. Over-optimistic forecasts issued in part to build confidence came back to haunt him. To the public he seemed fuddled and doctrinaire, endlessly recycling stale platitudes in the face of radically new economic problems. That’s beginning to sound a little like the current President’s predicament. ... Lincoln, Clinton, Carter, Hoover: that is a trajectory no President should want — nor will the country benefit from 18 more months of Presidential subsidence. One hopes the White House realizes just how much trouble it, and we, are in.--Walter Russell Mead
Krugman writes as if the volatility of stock prices alone disproves market efficiency, and believers in efficient marketers [sic] have just ignored it all these years. This is a canard that Krugman should know better than to pass on, no matter how rhetorically convenient. There is nothing about ‘efficiency’ that promises ‘stability’. Stable price growth would in fact be a major violation of efficiency as it would imply easy profits.--John Cochrane
... we must stop telling foreign entrepreneurs to build their companies in other countries--Michael Bloomberg
Women in large swaths of the U.S. are dying younger than they were a generation ago, reversing nearly a century of progress in public health and underscoring the rising toll of smoking and record obesity.--Noam Levey
... at the highest level, poker isn't even gambling at all. It's a gunfight, with both sides exactly equal in weaponry and numbers; over time, only strategy, courage, and execution separate winner from loser.--Brian Koppelman
[Meredith] Whitney has become known for exaggerating a bit in her predictions. That’s probably true this time, at least for the moment as localities scramble to balance their budgets and the worst of the debt crisis is still overseas. But just as her calls for 100 muni defaults may be off the mark, so is the notion that all is well in the state of government debt.--Jeff Cox
These Canadians are more American than I thought
UPDATE: Bill Simmons is also expressive, but not as classy, but that's a good thing:
How crazy was it that people started calling Luongo "LeBrongo?" If you had tried to explain to me in May 2010 that, within 13 months, LeBron James would be the most hated athlete in sports, and also such a playoff failure that his name was now being used as a derisive nickname for a skittish hockey goalie, I would not have believed you.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
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