A light hearted view of the healthcare legislation foisted upon us

I am a little too depressed by Congress today (and still giddy from the Cornell win yesterday) to post more substantively on this, so I will just quote something from my favorite broker on The Efficiency of Government:

Think of it this way: A clunker that travels 12,000 miles a year at 15 mpg uses 800 gallons of gas a year.

A vehicle that travels 12,000 miles a year at 25 mpg uses 480 gallons a year.

So, the average Cash for Clunkers transaction will reduce US gasoline consumption by 320 gallons per year.

They claim 700,000 vehicles so that's 224 million gallons saved per year. That equates to a bit over 5 million barrels of oil. 5 million barrels is about 5 hours worth of US consumption.

More importantly, 5 million barrels of oil at $70 per barrel costs about $350 million dollars. So, the government paid $3 Billion of our tax dollars to save $350 million.

We spent $8.57 for every dollar we saved.

I'm pretty sure they will do a great job with our health care, though.

UPDATE: Some recent pictures of world class healthcare in Paris for your consideration:

Notice the seatless toilet (great for kids!), the mold in the corner, the paint job… all a kid needs to ‘get well soon’ at a “world class” level. A hole in the wall through which live wires come out. In a pediatric bathroom. Really. It was wintertime and the window was stuck open, but don’t worry, THEY TAPED IT SHUT.

UPDATE: This is sort of lighthearted--it's definitely lighting quick, so hold on to your seat:

Sweetest Sweet 16

ever.

Photo source here.

On to Syracuse, where #1 Kentucky awaits. I'm not sure they'll feel like its a home game.

Let's Go Red!

... or Screw BU, Kentucky, too!*

*the classic Cornell cheer that dates back several decades to BU's ECAC hockey rivalry with CU

SEC Exposes Phil Angelides

Angelides is the unnamed "former California state treasurer" in the SEC report.

Who investigates the investigators?

Cornell-Temple semi-live blog (it's quadruple witching)

2:31 Final 78-65. "Big Red: Big Time!"--Jim Nantz

2:30 Best. Expiry. Ever. See you Sunday. I hope it's a late game; I've got to take one of the kids to an awards ceremony.

2:24 I knew engineers in the band back in the 80s. These traveling musicians look just as geeky, 25 years later.

2:09 Dale banks a 3, opens it up to an 18 point game.

2:07 My favorite management consultant is watching it with the Faithful in Union Square, at sideBAR. He reports the bar is going wild.

2:02 "Big Red: Big Lead."--Jim Nantz. How great is it to have CBS' clichemaster calling this one? 63-48, biggest lead yet.

2:00 Lucky 13! Cornell leads 61-48.

1:55 54-44. Wittman is 4 for 5 from downtown.

1:44 Big Red starting to throw in the bombs. Biggest lead yet, 46-34.

1:25 Cornell made 43% of their 3-point attempts during the regular season.

1:23 From CBS halftime report: Temple only turned over the ball 10 times per game during the season; already 8 in this game. Cornell has yet to light up the three pointers; only 2 so far.

1:20 Halftime, 37-29. Cornell shoots 68% from the field.

1:17 Foote sinks both free throws; Cornell matches its largest lead of 11.

1:15 35-26 Cornell. Cornell defense set in a 1-3-1 zone, and forced another turnover.

1:05 Seniors Louis Dale and Jeff Foote are playing loose. They've been here before, getting beaten out by Missouri last year, and Stanford in 2008 (those pesky Lopez brothers).

1:03 Red's 2-3 zone looks like its giving the Owls some challenges.

12:53 Cornell's defense looks great; forcing lots of turnovers.

12:46 Commercial break. Head coaches Donahue and Dunphy worked together at Penn from 1990-2000; they know each other very well.

12:45 19-11 Cornell, biggest lead yet.

12:33 Big Red takes the lead!

12:31 This is probably the best Big Red team in my lifetime.

12:30 Cornell is the best 3-point shooting team in the NCAA? Wow. Temple is great at defending the 3.

Quotes of the day

A confused customer is a profitable customer.--Josh Reich

... the CBO process has now been so thoroughly gamed that it's useless.--Megan McArdle

... MAYBE we should hire the guys who run Wal-Mart to Fix the economy.--Jeff Miron

Is it really possible to reduce the deficit by adding trillions of dollars in government expenditure? Of course not. The health care bill is really two bills: one that creates all the expenditure, and one that (allegedly) raises even more revenue via taxes, fees, and cuts in Medicare. The first lie is that the policy changes in the two bills need to be linked; specifically, that we need the subsidies, mandates, and insurance regulation to obtain the Medicare savings. Not true. If we have ways to make Medicare more efficient, that’s great. But we can and should do that independent of expanding subsidies or further regulation of health insurance. The Democrats have linked the issues because they know the public would never vote for expanded subsidies straight up. That brings us to the second lie, which is that we can reduce Medicare expenses without reducing care. No one disputes that Medicare spends money on care of dubious value. But designing a better system is incredibly hard. If policymakers or economists had a solution, we would have adopted it long ago. The reality is that efficiency is impossible in a huge, complex, command and control systems. We do have ways, of course, to reduce Medicare expenditure: a higher age of eligibility, higher co-pays and deductibles, or rationing.--Jeff Miron

I read The Fountainhead in my third month of college. If I hadn't done so, I'm not sure I'd be a libertarian, an economist, or an American. It, and Ayn Rand generally, influenced a huge number of the choices I made, most very good, one very bad that is too personal to talk about. ... When I picked up [The Road To Serfdom] to read about 6 months later, I loved it. Not only did I learn [Hayek's] explicit message, but also I learned a style of debate that I still practice: zeroing in on the issue and assuming good intentions of the "other side."--David Henderson

From a young age, I thought that intelligence matters a lot. But several of my favorite K-12 teachers tricked me into abandoning my youthful insight. The Bell Curve gave me back my birthright - and persuaded me that econometrics was not a waste of time along the way.--Bryan Caplan

Satellite photography and the tragedy of the commons

Alex Tabarrok:

So what happened after the land [in Zimbabwe] was redistributed beginning in 2000 and all of it made communal? After reform the land quality worsened everywhere. In particular, note that the blue lakes and ponds on the right became dry and empty as farmers no longer had an incentive to invest in maintaining these resources.

Quotes of the day

I think it’s probably a good thing, to believe it when you win, to expect to win. It’s better, at least, than thinking you haven’t a chance.--Tony Woodlief

As a young player you have a lot of energy, a lot of strength, you are very motivated. But young players are often not good at defending a position; they cannot cope well when fate turns against them. The fact is simply that experience is a central issue. One of the most important things in chess is pattern recognition: the ability to recognize typical themes and images on the board, characteristics of a position and their consequences. To a certain degree you can learn that while training, but there is nothing like playing routine. I have always made sure to get that. I am only 19, but I have certainly already played a thousand games in the classic style. ... I’m not a disciplined thinker. Organization is not my thing; I am chaotic and tend to be lazy. My trainer recognized that and as a rule allowed me to practice whatever I felt like at the time. ... I’m not a genius. Sloppy? Perhaps. It’s like this: When I am feeling good, I train a lot. When I feel bad, I don’t bother. I don’t enjoy working to a timetable. Systematic learning would kill me.--Magnus Carlsen

To this day, I view the relationship among Treasury, the Fed, the New York Fed, and large financial institutions in Exclusive Country Club terms. These people vet one another, agree with one another, and support one another. They do not question whether their interests coincide with those of the rest of the country--they just assume that the country depends on their institutions and their class leadership.--Arnold Kling

I get very frustrated when I read Western commentators talk about China as if they are addressing a naughty schoolboy. It’s not that they aren’t naughty at times, the problem is that there seems to be no awareness that it not “our world” anymore. These Asian countries shouldn’t be treated as children. We used to treat Japan the same way. The Economist recently pointed out that in 18 of the last 20 centuries more than half the world’s GDP was in Asia. And in a few more decades they will regain a majority of world GDP. Each year the world economy will look a little more like the typical Asian economy. Maybe it’s time we stopped lecturing them about saving too much, and ask ourselves whether we are saving too little.--Scott Sumner

The irony of multiculturalism as a political process is that it undermines much of what is valuable about diversity as lived experience. When we talk about diversity, what we mean is that the world is a messy place, full of clashes and conflicts. That's all for the good, for such clashes and conflicts are the stuff of political and cultural engagement. But the very thing that's valuable about diversity – the clashes and conflicts that it brings about – is the very thing that worries many multiculturalists. They seek to minimize such conflicts by parceling people up into neat ethnic boxes, and policing the boundaries of those boxes in the name of tolerance and respect. Far from minimizing conflict what this does is generate a new set of more destructive, less resolvable conflicts.--Kenan Malik

In 1997, Pakistani suppliers and representatives of Unicef and the International Labor Organization signed the Atlanta Agreement in which the [soccer ball] industry agreed to stop the use of child labor. Thousands of children lost their jobs overnight.--Hasnain Kazim

... trials have proved the effectiveness of countless treatments, and the dangers of countless others. It is a shame, then, that there is so little appetite from politicians for the same standards of evidence outside medicine. In fact it is more than a shame – it’s a scandal. While randomized trials are not going to tell us when to raise interest rates or get out of Afghanistan, there are many policies that could and should be tested with properly controlled trials. Is Jamie Oliver right to emphasize healthy school meals? Run a trial. Should young offenders be sent to boot camp, or to meet victims of crime? Run a trial. What can we do to persuade households to use less electricity? Run a trial. Yet such trials are not common in the US, and downright rare in the UK. There is no financial, ethical or practical excuse for this. Trials are cheap. (Even if they were expensive, solid practical knowledge is well worth paying for.) This is not a question of carrying out dangerously speculative crank experiments, but simply adding the essential ingredient of randomization to a standard pilot project that would have happened anyway. Randomizing is often what distinguishes proper evidence from statistical mush, by removing biases in the setting of experiments – such as running pilots only in the most needy areas.--Tim Harford

$3 million per year is 'comfortably poor'

according to Felix Dennis.

Peter Hitchens, on Christopher and Christ

Some brothers get on; some do not. We were the sort that just didn't. Who knows why?

At one stage - I was about nine, he nearly 12 - my poor gentle father actually persuaded us to sign a peace treaty in the hope of halting our feud. I can still picture this doomed pact in its red frame, briefly hanging on the wall. To my shame, I was the one who repudiated it, ripped it from its frame and angrily erased my signature, before recommencing hostilities. In a way, the treaty has remained broken ever since. Our rivalry was to last 50 years, and religion was one of its later causes.
...
No doubt I should be ashamed to confess that fear played a part in my return to religion, specifically a painting: Rogier van der Weyden's 15th Century Last Judgement, which I saw in Burgundy while on holiday.

I had scoffed at its mention in the guidebook, but now I gaped, my mouth actually hanging open, at the naked figures fleeing towards the pit of Hell.

These people did not appear remote or from the ancient past; they were my own generation. Because they were naked, they were not imprisoned in their own age by time-bound fashions.
On the contrary, their hair and the set of their faces were entirely in the style of my own time. They were me, and people I knew.
...
I had absolutely no doubt that I was among the damned, if there were any damned. Van der Weyden was still earning his fee, nearly 500 years after his death.

At around the same time I rediscovered Christmas, which I had pretended to dislike for many years. I slipped into a carol service on a winter evening, diffident and anxious not to be seen.

I knew perfectly well that I was enjoying it, although I was unwilling to admit it. I also knew I was losing my faith in politics and my trust in ambition, and was urgently in need of something else on which to build the rest of my life.
...
Being Christian is one thing. Fighting for a cause is another, and much easier to acknowledge - for in recent times it has grown clear that the Christian religion is threatened with a dangerous defeat by secular forces which have never been so confident.

Why is there such a fury against religion now? Because religion is the one reliable force that stands in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. The one reliable force that forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law.
...
My brother and I agree on this: that independence of mind is immensely precious, and that we should try to tell the truth in clear English even if we are disliked for doing so. Oddly enough this leads us, in many things, to be far closer than most people think we are on some questions; closer, sometimes, than we would particularly wish to be.

The same paradox sometimes also makes us arrive at different conclusions from very similar arguments, which is easier than it might appear. This will not make us close friends at this stage. We are two utterly different men approaching the ends of two intensely separate lives.

Let us not be sentimental here, nor rashly over-optimistic. But I was astonished, on that spring evening by the Grand River, to find that the longest quarrel of my life seemed unexpectedly to be over, so many years and so many thousands of miles after it had started, in our quiet homes and our first beginnings in an England now impossibly remote from us.

It may actually be true, as I have long hoped that it would be, in the words of T. S. Eliot, that 'the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time'.

Read the whole thing, via Ross Douthat.

Chart of the day

Source here, via Ross Douthat.

Subsidies reduce the poor's access, because they create massive inflation

Health care. Education. Housing. And yes, even sugar:

Quotes of the day

Financial plans are worthless, but the process of planning is vital. Let me explain the difference. ... If we accept the fact that even the best plan will be wrong, we can focus our energy on the process of planning instead of obsessing over the assumptions. Sure we need to chart a course where we think we are headed, and this will involve making some assumptions about the future. But they are just guesses; make them and move on. Think of this as the difference between a flight plan and the actual flight.--Carl Richards

How often do we see consecutive trading days with moves of less than +/-5 basis points? Hardly ever. Over the last 50 years, there have only been 94 of these 2-day occurrences. --Bespoke

It seems we’ve hit an odd Wall Street moment — less fame means more fortune.--Michael Corkery

A set-up like that costs more than we ever took…If he’d just pay me what he’s spending to make me stop robbing him, I’d stop robbing him.--Butch Cassidy

This is a lesson in the limitations of the Coase theorem, especially when one party has shows a willingness to break the law. Reputation and trust matter for effective contracts.--Adam Ozimek

What has probably surprised me more than anything else about Speaker Pelosi is her ineptness. I didn't realize anyone could rise to the position of Speaker and be that inept. ... She's more inept than I thought she was, but she's not as mean as people think she is. ... The average member Congress – House and Senate – is first and foremost only a self-serving inconvenience-minimizer who doesn't have a lot of principle they stand on the first place. It doesn't take much to move a jellied spine, so they'll probably get their votes.--Dick Armey

The blossoming New Age/Buddhism lite that populates yoga classes talks about the toxic nature of the Western “ego” (you know, we work too hard, we value ourselves above others, etc.) But then it replaces this ego with something like a supreme inner deity residing in all of us whose dictates can never be ignored. Dahlia, you call it silly but to Rielle it’s so profound—divine, even.--Hannah Rosin

The rather more captivating woman in this drama—the axis around which the Lifetime movie should turn—is Cheri Young. She would appear, in this interview with Oprah, to be the most intelligent person in her marriage. And yet she took Rielle Hunter in, lied to her children about it, and came close to pretending that her husband had impregnated his boss's mistress. She evidently shopped for Rielle Hunter, brought her groceries, and answered her children's questions about why she was grocery shopping for the strange lady in their home. What motivates a woman to so indulge her husband's obsequious relationship to another man? Why risk your own dignity in the service of turning your husband into a doormat?--Kerry Howley

Ovaries have not adjusted to many women's decision to delay having children. ... Using a mathematical model and data from 325 women, the researchers found that the average woman is born with around 300,000 eggs and steadily loses them as she ages, with just 12 percent of those eggs remaining at the age of 30, and only 3 percent left by 40.--Carolyn Butler

Marriage matters. It is better for the kids; it is better for the adults raising those kids; and it is better for the childless people in the communities where those kids and adults live. Marriage reduces poverty, improves kids outcomes in all measurable ways, makes men live longer and both spouses happier. Marriage, it turns out, is an incredibly important institution. It also turns out to be a lot more fragile than we thought back then. It looked, to those extremely smart and well-meaning welfare reformers, practically unshakeable; the idea that it could be undone by something as simple as enabling women to have children without husbands, seemed ludicrous. Its cultural underpinnings were far too firm. Why would a woman choose such a hard road? It seemed self-evident that the only unwed mothers claiming benefits would be the ones pushed there by terrible circumstance. This argument is compelling and logical. I would never become an unwed welfare mother, even if benefits were a great deal higher than they are now. It seems crazy to even suggest that one would bear a child out of wedlock for $567 a month. Indeed, to this day, I find the reformist side much more persuasive than the conservative side, except for one thing, which is that the conservatives turned out to be right. In fact, they turned out to be even more right than they suspected; they were predicting upticks in illegitimacy that were much more modest than what actually occurred--they expected marriage rates to suffer, not collapse. ... as G.K. Chesterton points out, people who don't see the use of a social institution are the last people who should be allowed to reform it. ... The argument that gay marriage will not change the institution of marriage because you can't imagine it changing your personal reaction is pretty arrogant. It imagines, first of all, that your behavior is a guide for the behavior of everyone else in society, when in fact, as you may have noticed, all sorts of different people react to all sorts of different things in all sorts of different ways, which is why we have to have elections and stuff. And second, the unwavering belief that the only reason that marriage, always and everywhere, is a male-female institution (I exclude rare ritual behaviors), is just some sort of bizarre historical coincidence, and that you know better, needs examining. If you think you know why marriage is male-female, and why that's either outdated because of all the ways in which reproduction has lately changed, or was a bad reason to start with, then you are in a good place to advocate reform. If you think that marriage is just that way because our ancestors were all a bunch of repressed bastards with dark Freudian complexes that made them homophobic bigots, I'm a little leery of letting you muck around with it.--Megan McArdle

I have one friend, for example, who has proved himself over many years to be one of the world’s great celebrators of diversity, but who opposes gay marriage because he fears that gays, moreso than straights, will game the system by marrying or unmarrying as needed to secure tax advantages. Straights might do the same, but they will do it less because they’re more likely to be locked into marriages through childbearing. I happen to think this argument is completely nuts. (For the record, I think my friend is absolutely right that gays will game the system somewhat more than straights will, and that that’s a bad thing. I just think he’s absolutely nuts to put quite so much weight on it.) But everyone I know believes at least ten things that I think are completely nuts.--Steven Landsburg

Sports Illustrated cover-type curse strikes hedge fund managers

Matthew Lynn reports:

The more publicity [celebrity fund managers] get, the worse the performance will be. ... Ozik and Sadka studied 978 hedge funds over the decade 1999 to 2008, and correlated their performance against media coverage, measured by checking mentions on Google News. “We document that hedge funds with media coverage underperform no-coverage funds by 3.5 percent annually over 1999-2008,” they concluded.
...

There are four plausible reasons for this.

First, the media coverage is backward-looking ...

Second, they attract too much money ...

Third, they believe their own hype ...

Lastly, some of them were just glorified publicity managers ...

Trader of the 20th Century?

James Simons:

Mr. Simons made his reputation on his signature fund, called Medallion, which has posted average returns of about 45% a year, after fees, since its inception in 1988. Since 1995, it has had only one money-losing quarter, slipping 0.5% in the first quarter of 1999, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Medallion's returns have outpaced those of Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway Inc. has gained roughly 20% a year since Mr. Buffett took over in 1965.
...

In the 1980s, Mr. Simons, who shuns the public eye, was among the first to develop a form of trading that used mathematical models and computers to predict markets. In the process, he blazed a trail followed by a slew of hedge funds that rely on quantitative strategies—so-called quants—such as D.E. Shaw Group, AQR Capital Management and Citadel Investment Group.

Nearly all of the Medallion fund's trading is automated, involving little to no human interference. Computers are programmed to buy and sell assets of all kinds, attempting to predict whether they will rise or fall based on historical patterns.

I'm proud to say that I've only had one losing quarter in the last 4 years (Jul-Sep 2008) of my primary trading strategy. But I'm nowhere near 45% per year in average returns.

Then again, Medallion's returns have been easing in recent years. My theory is that other high-frequency players are now eating part of the same lunch that Simons was able to eat by himself a decade or two ago.

Healthcare legislation more uncertain than ever

Source here.

Poster of the day: Honor

Source here, via Jules Crittenden.

If you were right, you'd be right!

True, but not interesting.

Paul Krugman should read the paper

for whom he writes.

UPDATE: This is good too:

So many questions. No doubt some will be cleared up by a Krugman column in 2017.

If you like the wines coming from the Bordeaux region (and yes, I do)

then you, too, owe Heinz Stahlschmidt a debt of gratitude.

Quotes of the day

... voluntary activities vary systematically as a function of their consequences, where the consequences include benefits, costs, and values. ... according to Western legal traditions individuals are usually held responsible for those activities that are susceptible to the influence of their consequences and, conversely, individuals are not responsible for those activities that vary little or not at all as a function of consequences.--Gene Heyman

We consider the dating market decision problem under the quantum mechanics point of view. Quantum states whose associated amplitudes are modified by men strategies are used to represent women. Grover quantum search algorithm is used as a playing strategy. Success is more frequently obtained by playing quantum than playing classic.--O.G. Zabaleta, C.M. Arizmendi

Sexuality (or gender) is just as distorting when we fixate upon it as when we deny it.--Tony Judt

So I appeared in Manhattan Supreme Court to explain the complexities of academic harassment to a bemused jury of plumbers and housewives. The student’s lawyer pressed hard: “Were you not prejudiced against my client because of her transgendered identity preference?” “I don’t see how I could have been,” I replied. “I thought she was a woman—isn’t that what she wanted me to think?” The university won the case. On another occasion, a student complained that I “discriminated” against her because she did not offer sexual favors. When the department ombudswoman—a sensible lady of impeccable radical credentials—investigated, it emerged that the complainant resented not being invited to join my seminar: she assumed that women who took part must be getting (and offering) favorable treatment. I explained that it was because they were smarter. The young woman was flabbergasted: the only form of discrimination she could imagine was sexual. It had never occurred to her that I might just be an elitist. ... Why should everything be about “me”? Are my fixations of significance to the Republic? Do my particular needs by definition speak to broader concerns? What on earth does it mean to say that “the personal is political”? If everything is “political,” then nothing is. I am reminded of Gertrude Stein’s Oxford lecture on contemporary literature. “What about the woman question?” someone asked. Stein’s reply should be emblazoned on every college notice board from Boston to Berkeley: “Not everything can be about everything.”--Tony Judt

Clearly the CSE program was an abject failure: it could put together stress tests, but then the SEC and the NY Fed ignored the results. There’s obvious bad news here: that the Fed is such an incompetent regulator of systemically-important institutions that it can’t even get alarmed when one of those institutions fails its own stress tests. But there’s a possible glimmer of good news too: that the Fed had people capable of putting together a decent stress test, and that the SEC sensibly deferred to those people in terms of stress test design. In other words, the Fed has the ability to regulate; all that’s needed now (and was missing in 2008) is the willingness to do so and to bare teeth once in a while.--Felix Salmon

If there's a theme to my blog posts, it's something along the lines of Complexity is Killing Us. The complexity of investment options is why you're afraid to put your money anywhere but inside an old sock. Complexity is why the healthcare system in the United States is apparently unfixable. Complexity is why scientists can't convince a large segment of the public to believe in evolution or global warming. Complexity is why your computer spends all morning begging you for updates instead of just doing what-the-frakk you want it to do. And lately, I've noticed that routine conversations have become too complicated.--Scott Adams

... take a moment to remember Menaechmus, the geometer who first described the parabola in the 4th century B.C. He never made a layup, but he got game. --Washington Post Health & Science

Saint-making fatigue; who knew?--Alex Tabarrok

We find that, on average, successful assassinations of autocrats produce sustained moves toward democracy.--Centre for Economic Policy Research

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made School Boards.--Mark Twain

We're not sure American schools teach civics any more, but once upon a time they taught that under the U.S. Constitution a bill had to pass both the House and Senate to become law. Until this week, that is, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi is moving to merely "deem" that the House has passed the Senate health-care bill and then send it to President Obama to sign anyway. ... We have entered a political wonderland, where the rules are whatever Democrats say they are. Mrs. Pelosi and the White House are resorting to these abuses because their bill is so unpopular that a majority even of their own party doesn't want to vote for it. Fence-sitting Members are being threatened with primary challengers, a withdrawal of union support and of course ostracism. Michigan's Bart Stupak is being pounded nightly by MSNBC for the high crime of refusing to vote for a bill that he believes will subsidize insurance for abortions. Democrats are, literally, consuming their own majority for the sake of imposing new taxes, regulations and entitlements that the public has roundly rejected but that they believe will be the crowning achievement of the welfare state. They are also leaving behind a procedural bloody trail that will fuel public fury and make such a vast change of law seem illegitimate to millions of Americans. The concoction has become so toxic that even Mrs. Pelosi isn't bothering to defend the merits anymore, saying instead last week that "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it." Or rather, "deeming" to have passed it.--WSJ Editorial Board

Had the idea of a government plan to shift the clocks back and forth twice and year been proposed today I am reasonably certain that I would have been against it. ... And yet, it works and I like it. It is good to be reminded of this twice a year.--Alex Tabarrok

Real, live Germans are not heartless ants, and the Greeks are not broke because they are giddy crickets who sing their summers away. Greece is a grown-up country with grown-up problems: rough, tough politics, and a lot of recent history, not all of it very nice. And it is precisely that recent history, and rough politics, that are at the core of Greece's fiscal woes today. Take the painful question of the huge public sector, and all those civil servants with jobs for life, and unusually generous retirement packages. The existence of those jobs for life is not a cultural quirk, in which Greek officials simply like coffee and backgammon too much to do any work. It is the end result of a brutal, multi-decade power struggle between the left and the right: a struggle that got people killed within living memory.--a.k.a. Charlemagne