Me in businessweek

More shameless self-promotion. A mention in businessweek.

No quotes from the interview. I haven't learned yet to give good sound bites.

Avatar: Micro-reviewlet (warning spoilers)

Not only was the plot ridiculously cliched (e.g. Pocohantas and Dances w/ Wolves), it was obnoxious. David Brooks captures the condescension of the movie perfectly. What I would add is that it annoyingly perpetuates Rousseau's myth of the noble savage. That civilization (things like literacy, and representative rule, and division of labor) are all corrupting, and instead we were better off running around naked, bowing before unelected rulers. Another reviewer made Brooks' point a bit crassly. The movie is telling us is that the alien’s need Americans (not the dumb militaristic kind, but the real Americans, the scientists and the Sully types) which represents American can-do spirit who comes in, f***s (the reviewer's word not mine) their princess, learns their battle tactics better than they do in just a few months, mounts that flying thing that none of the natives have been smart enough to do in generations, and united all the tribes as their new dictator.

Still the visuals were breathtaking, and after I started ignoring the plot, was blown away by his achievements in technology, and it had robot suits that fought with giant knives.

Thoughts on Copenhagen II: On Negotiations amidst the Circus

Back in Copenhagen, I attended a briefing for US NGOs. Two things that struck me.

One is I am ambivalent about NGO invovlement. One notable thing was at the meeting, you had Fred Krupp, president of the one of the largest environmental groups (who quite reasonably should be there), but he was sitting next to a couple kids painted and dressed as green aliens carrying placards. On the whole, it was a surprisingly young group.

The other was again, how similar the US government position is in the current administration as it was under the previous. That the US will not concede sovereignity in terms of taxes it must pay. That the US cannot commit to greater cuts than Congress will allow. That the US cannot commit to spending, in such contexts.

And again, on the sovereignity issue, which is not unique to the US (but a big part of why negotiations broke down with China and India), that the idea of a binding carbon price/limit may be futile because it requires a higher extra-governmental power. The WTO did achieve this (somewhat) but that took half a century, and in general, free trade is win-win (countries generally benefit from lower trade barriers, even though they may suffer from political trouble from noisy constituents, overall countries are typically better off). Whereas in climate change, it is by and large a pure public good to constrain carbon, so an even harder sell without a world government. This suggests again that the technology push is key making green technology cheaper than dirty. (This was the position of the Bush administration--I don't mean to be so defensive on that, really--and also what Bjorn Lomborg has been pushing, hopefully that doesn't automatically discredit the idea) I think economists by and large agree that technology is key, though many would then say that a carbon price would be the key the incentivizing new technology, though I think most economists agree that we have little evidence to that effect, only faith.

Thoughts on Copenhagen I: Legitimate Policy or Optimal Policy?

It is kind of fascinating. How different policy is actually made, compared to political econonmy models. I am reminded a bit of the march and olsen garbage can model, but instead of policy by flight and by oversight, this is policy by pseudo-consensus, generated by people sitting in a room, making comments, randomly interacting, and in the end, people agreeing not because they are happy with the outcome, but out of fatigue, or out of agreement that sufficient process has been conducted.

It has been noted that while economists focus on outcomes, lawyers care about process. Economists have written a bit about preferences over actions (legitimacy) vs preferences over otucomes, but the latter still largely defines the field.

Policy folk like typologies. I worry a bit that much is decided by policy folk who understand politics and process well but have often only a cursory understanding of the scientific and economic details. They like colorful bar charts, and 2 x 2 typologies.

Not so different than whitehouse. A consensus process. Difference is there is no executive, essentially a dictator, of last resort, who may be convinced to make the optimal decision.

This leads to interesting implications for what good policy should look like. Economists would like a global carbon tax (or cap and trade) since that is likely optimal, but given that consensus is required this may no longer work. Even amongst the countries that agreed to Kyoto, half of them failed to comply and many of the ones who did, did so because they had an economic collapse.

This gives further credence to the Bush administration's technologically focused environmental policy.

My first real tweet: Does being #vegan and #prochoice make you a hypocrite?

Usually stuff I want to post requires more than 140 characters, but "Does being #vegan and #prochoice make you a hypocrite?" was idea that I was contemplating after a recent NY Times on why killing plants is as unethical as killing animals, that I didn't have anything else to add.

I don't really twitter much, since few of my friends use it, but created the account long ago mostly just to stake out a username in case I had some need in the future. Had to settle on ho_ben since every other permutation of my name that I could think of was taken.

The Ethics of Killing Brussels Sprouts: And the Ethics of Climate Change

In Krugman's obituary for Paul Samuelson, he mentioned that one of his contributions is he clarified the idea of welfare for economists, and the common good. Economists have a very well defined notion of social welfare, that is entirely human centric, but at least it is clear and well defined.

I do concede that animals and plants must fit in there somewhere, but since I have yet to come across a good definition, I tend not to use use it.

This interesting nytimes article questions whether killing brussels sprouts is any better than killing a pig for food?

This is particularly relevant when it comes to the issue of climate change, since if we just consider the impact of humans, climate change has arguably negligible impact 0 +/- 2% of GDP say the best estimates (of course extreme events are possible). But the impact on plants and animals is tricky. Many animals will die, though plants on the whole stand to benefit. And was it wrong for say the mammals to kill the dinosaurs (as some theories suggest)?

Star Power in Copenhagen and Lots of Lines

Waited in line today 90 minutes in 0 degree C weather to get in for the UN COP\15 Climate Change Conference (people who hadn't registered yet apparently had to wait 5+ hours in the cold yesterday). Leaving tomorrow, which is good because I imagine the logistics will only get more hectic tomorrow. They apparently registered nearly 40,000 people for a confernce center that only holds 15,000.

In some ways, it is a shame I'm leaving, since the star power is starting to heat up today. Up until now, it was all very policy wonkish. (More substantive thoughts in my next post.) But today, after waiting in line to get in, I waited in more lines to see Arnold Schwarzeneger and now I'm seated in a CNN debate with Bjorn Lomborg, Kofi Annan, Thomas Friedman and Darryl Hannah (let's play the Sesame Street game: one of these things is not like the other, three of these things are Kinda the same).

I arrived too late for the Al Gore tickets, but might be able to see part of the opening ceremony for some of the more high powered guests (minsters only now though) the heads of state mostly arrive tomorrow or Thursday.

Copenhagen: First Impressions

Just arrived on red-eye flight, straight to the COP15 conference. Impressed by Copenhagen's airport. Very nice, clean scandinvaian (ie Ikea-style) aesthetic. R- says "i always just think all the nordic countries are like one big ikea...organized, natural looking." Also impressed by how well organized they are for the conference. Special passport lines, lots of conference information booths, special free shuttle buses, nice graphic design of posters, free public transportation passes, free wifi at the conference center, lots of power plugs, impresively good and cheap conference food, even a specially designed iphone app to disseminate news, videos and meeting schedules, lots of stunts makes it a little silly -- WWF drawing cartoons and doing a skit with a giant baloon earth; people carrying around skis, a group in matching red suits. Lots of lines. Long security lines, but lots and lots of scanners unlike at airport.

Shameless Self-promotion: me on NPR

I don't sound as awful as I feared, but I was still too nervous to get through the thing without getting stuck on words. If they had only taped the conversation I had with the other guest (David Biello) while we were waiting in the green room. I was fine there.

The Takeaway: Why It's Not Easy Being Green

The Takeaway is unfortunately one of the new format public radio shows that tapes things live, and doesn't edit out stutters and umm's, as is typical for NPR (technically also, the show is a PRI show, not an NPR show but close enough). The only consolation was that the hosts got stuck over a couple words too while I was there.

The best thing I've heard on npr in recent memory...

This story reaffirmed why I still trust NPR.

It echoes the most important thing I learned from psychology classes (see the 1.14.03 entry here)

America owes less money than you think

It is impressive, how much more economic literacy the country has developed in the past 12 months. Just enough to be dangerous. I've often lamented that a little bit of economic knowledge (say from Econ 1) gives people a dangerously distorted view of the world. The recent education people have gotten from newspaper editorials and headlines is perhaps even more distorted. Though I have been impressed with coverage, it still worries me because it gives people a false confidence in their own economic literacy. Many times, I'm sitting in a restaurant, overhearing snippets of conversation at tables next to mine where everyone's talking about the economy with great conviction while at the same time it is quite clear that no one knows what they are talking about.

I was recently waiting at a bus stop recently, and when it came up that I'm an economist, the guy having just seen a movie about the debt starts ranting about how the US debt is unsustainable. And we are headed for doom.

Really?

So the national public debt has gone up a lot in the past few months, to around $11 trillion. Is that a lot? Sounds like a lot. On a per capita basis, that's about $110,000 per household.

So 11 trillion is a lot, maybe 80% of GDP. Is that a lot?

Let's put this another way. If your annual income is $100,000, and you take out a mortgage to buy a house that costs $80,000. That seems quite reasonable doesn't it?

There's a bit of a slight of hand there, because GDP is how much money the country as a whole makes, and public debt is just how much the federal government owes. So let's try this another way:

If the US makes about $13 trillion a year, how much does the US as a whole (including government and private companies and individuals) owe to other countries? Note (over half of the federal debt is borrowed from Americans, so when we pay back our creditors, we are giving money to our children). The answer is about $13 trillion. The thing is, the US is also owed $8 trillion by other countries. So on net, the US debt is only about 35% of GDP.

Back to our analogy, that's like someone with an annual income of $100,000 having a mortgage of $100,000 but also holding $65,000 in stocks and other assets. Doesn't sound so untenable.

You might also note that the real problem is not the current debt (as the OMB chief likes to point out) but the size of the obligations to Social Security and Medicare. Which some estimate are in the tens of trillions, most of which is medicare and medicaid. So if you look at the numbers, the deficits in Social Security can be wiped out just by raising the retirement age by a couple years, or by indexing payments to inflation, rather than to wages, meaning that retirees in the future will get as much money as retirees of today, which doesn't sound so bad. Both are still politically difficult, but quite reasonable. Medicare and medicaid costs are the far bigger looming obligation, but those obligations assume that unchecked health expenditures, and given that the US spends more or less twice as much as every other developed country on health care, it is quite plausible that health expenditures can be brought down significantly in the future.

Of course the problem with metaphors is they are always imperfect (for example, if the US really needed to, it could just print more money to pay off its creditors). But many smart people are quite worried about the current levels. But put in perspective they are not as big as people seem to believe.

Ways of Seeing (Art)

I guess one main reason I post these publicly instead of keeping them as a private journal is that usually comments from all of you make me think about things in a new way. Recently, comments to a snobbish nytimes article I posted about art made me think about how we visit museums, and the ways of seeing (as an old art history book of mine called it).

The article laments the practice of people who jog through the Louvres, to snap their photo next to the Mona Lisa, without spending more than a few seconds in front of each work.

Nowadays, when i go to a museum, i try to go to the special exhibits, mostly because they are transient, but also because they often tell more of a story, in terms of how they were curated. (Hanging out with art historians, you realize someone puts a ton of thought on these things) I'm also actually sympathetic with the jogging (though R- didn't like the fact I made her do that for her first visit to the louvres). I guess I got that from my art history prof who did that for my first visit. Even though over the course of the 6 week course, we spent pretty much every other day in some Paris museum, we still only saw a tiny fraction, and the prof thought it would be a travesty if we didn't at least see the mona lisa, the venus de milo and the nike. You can see many reproductions, but I've learned that reproductions are always a poor substitute in terms of image fidelity, size, impact, context in terms of other paintings, but also geography, and the other people watching.

Just like watching a movie alone is different than watching it in a theater. I'm also at the end of the day, less judgmental than the article. It is true that for a lot of people, they are there because they feel it is good for them, or because it is a status symbol. saying "hey, i saw the mona lisa last weekend" is similar to driving up in a hybrid car, or giving someone a diamond ring. but maybe that's ok. Americans are more likely to go to a museum than go watch sports, and somewhere along the way, that probably leads to something good.

Augmented Reality on iPhone

Augmented reality is another one of those technologies that I saw demoed at the Media Lab way back in 1997, and finally in 2009 it gets commercialized. (The Kindle and eInk was the other example).

But the new iphone augmented reality apps offers tremendous potential. Yelp already lets you point your iphone camera at stores or restaurants, and it will annotate the image with information about the store. I'm sure Google Earth will soon do the same with even more info including wikipedia entries and photos.

It's like those fancy head's up displays in military aircraft.

But the gaming potential is neat. This upcoming game will put invisible aliens in the world around you, visible only when peering through your iphone screen (like the special sunglasses in that old 80's movie), which you shoot by pointing your phone at them.

Taking advantage of the fact that iPhones connect to the Internet is even more impressive. The video showed shooting aliens in the world around you, but you could also shoot other people also logged in. Your screen revealing the hidden players amongst the people around you. You could play a real FPS in your office or outside in a field. Literally run over powerups, get healed at certain stations, get special weapons, shoot things in the environment like cars to make them blow up, etc. A bunch of Stanford kids tried something similar without the fancy video a year ago, that didn't catch on, and probably the tech is still too slow to really do this well, but it is not far away.

Blame Obama (Michelle) for the lack of Tomatoes

One of the joys of moving to Ithaca is simply sublime tomatoes. My roommate in grad school introduced me to "real" tomatoes late in life, with a tomato picked up from Berkeley. I felt like a Platonic cave dweller, for the first time exposed to the true thing. I quickly learned that such perfection is really only available a month or two during the year, and only available from serendipity. Even some of the best restaurants I've been to have not been able to deliver a consistent tomato experience. But Ithaca in late August was always a heavenly time where visits to the farmer's market will yield a pretty good shot at a great tomato (eaten by itself, or maybe toasted with fresh basil and mozzarella on a slice of ciabatta). Not so this year. Most of the north east crop apparently has succumbed to the Blight (a variant to what caused the Irish Potato famine).

Dan Barber - Owner and Chef of Blue Hill at Stone Barns (the current contender for the "it" celebrity chef, only chef on Time's 100 most influential list, and probably the chef of the best meal I've ever had) offers an interesting reason why... the expansion of gardening, promoted in part by Michelle Obama which has led to a greater dispersal of globalized tomato plants to untrained amateur home gardens who increased the geographical reach of the disease, but also led to more grown by people who didn't know how to identify and deal with it. To be fair, I think Barber supports very much the trend of home gardening, but still an interesting story.

On the latest guest columnist at the NYTimes: They have a point.

I used to complain about people using They as a substitute for he/she (or the more compact s/he). Which is strange for me, because I tend to be a descriptivist when it comes to language rather than a prescriptivist. But at some point, I caught a NY Times article using They for the singular. which bugged me. This new column argues that using They as singular was common until a feminist grammarian in the 1800's convinced everyone to use He for the genderless singular pronoun.

Up to grad school, I still stuck to the old rules and used he exclusively, but that raised the umbrage of a feminist education prof of mine, so I have adopted the economics standard of alternating, though that normally means defaulting to she especially for people in positions of power. Now, it is nice to know that maybe using They is ok.

And come to think of it, at some point, it became ok to use the 2nd person plural as a singular (You used to be plural, Thee and Thou was the singular form). So why not use They for the singular as well.

(I used to stick to using he/him exclusively as I had been taught in grade school until getting chastised by a feminist professor in grad school, so now I adopt the alternation which seems to be the norm in economics [the norm also requires the gendered pronoun used to defy stereotypes. For example, the manager is always a she])

The real shocking thing of Wilson's "You Lie": the fact that people find it shocking in the US.

One interesting point made in an op-ed today attacking Joe Wilson, was that this type of behavior is normal in Great Britain. I was actually thinking about that while I was in Australia last week, where on tv, there were clips of a member of the opposition calling the climate minister "Legally Blonde" which made me wonder why of all the legislative bodies in the world, why the US seems to be the only civil one (what with fist fights breaking out in places like Taiwan, Russia, Bolivia, Australia, Japan, Korea, Ukraine, Macedonia, Czech Republic, Turkey, Iraq, Germany, all through Africa and regular insults and shouting matches going on everywhere else).

SCOTUS Live!

(Sorry for the hiatus. Was in Australia. Will post photos and recap some day...)

I had never really understood the fascination people have with the surpreme court (nor with the continuing coverage of the space shuttle though that I can explain to historical path dependence) but people seem to love talking about Nina Totenberg (a favorite answer in nytimes crosswords and this comic) and the latest antics of Scalia or Roberts, or that Thomas never talks, or the excitement over Sotomayor.

Though a recent minor change allowing surpreme court proceedings to be taped may change my mind. Flipping on CSPAN as is my habit on the elliptical, I happened on the latest hearing on campaign finance reform.
From the cold logic of propositional calculus and induction based machine learning, to the somewhat rigorous forms of economic proofs, to the styles of academic argumentation, it amuses me to think formally how conversation/debate/dialectic/dialog works. These other forms are easier for me to follow, but it is interesting to see the logics employed by the supreme court. The reliance on analogy and precedent, the backward induction and strategic consequences of various statements, what is allowable as evidence and what is not.

I guess I knew some of this given that I teach it in class and have been working on a model of malpractice, but it is neat to hear it directly. I imagine allowing the voice recordings will help (a bit) get people more involved in the courts; I'm surprised it took so long.

Though one thing that sadly may be lost, is Nina Totenberg's dramatic re-enanctment of surpreme court debates on NPR, now that we have actual recordings.

Tour guiding Nostalgia

I wrote this entry some time ago after reading this article in the MIT magazine.

But was inspired to post it after seeing this rather vapid article on the NY Times most e-mailed list.

We were told not to walk backward way back in 1997. Though I did anyway, since that was the only way I was able to get through my 75 minute spiel.

I swear that tour guiding was responsible for getting me to feel comfortable talking in front of a large audience at length (sometimes over 100 people). Before then, in high school, I came in close to last in the 5 minute speech event required for the Academic Decathalon. The thought of having stuff to say for more than 5 minutes was incomprehensible. Of course, now I regularly do 6 hours of lecture in a single day, it's funny, how life works.

I became a tour guide, inspired by my guide when I first visited MIT as a high school student in 1995, and tried every time to give a tour that went beyond a recitation of the same platitudes about class sizes and TA's that made all the other schools sound the same.

I worked extra hard because I knew that who your tour guide is has a disproportionate effect on which college you choose (the weather on the day you visited also does). I was told by one parent after a tour that they were impressed because tour guides at most colleges are normally pretty girls, and given I was neither, I started with two strikes against me.

I also always tried to dispel the myths people normally have about MIT. Telling people about how we have the most varsity sports in the country (which unfortunately ended this year), with the best civilian pistol team in the country (I always joked that I always thought it was a good thing that West Point beat us at pistol).

I talked about the almost balanced gender ratio in the Ellen "Swallow" Richards lobby (sometimes mentioning the quotes around the words "Swallow" as my favorite hack), and how women have graduated women since the beginning, whereas that school up the street didn't graduate women until 2000 (up until then, women only got degrees from Radcliffe). One of the mothers on a tour noted that I mentioned Harvard at least a dozen times. I was always happy to play up the friendly self-deprecating one-sided rivalry.

I talked about Tetris on IM Pei's Green Building. About the sleepy student discovering a Japanese tourist sketching the urinal in the Alvar Aalto designed Baker Hall one morning, or the moat that reflects light from beneath the Aero Saarinen MIT Chapel, or the 1/8 sphere of his auditorium.

My most memorable tour was for the mayor of Dalian, one of the largest cities in China, which I did in broken Chinese. I felt bad that I was the only representative of MIT his large entourage got to meet.

One of my favorite tours was the ones where only tourists came. And I could just talk about the fun stuff.

Good times.

Glad to see the tradition lives on.

The secret to losing weight

Recently people have emphasized the formula:

[calories eaten minus calories burnt] times 3500 = change in lbs of weight

Which is fine, and a useful tautology to start with, but people interpret this the wrong way.

Time magazine recently came down on the side that reducing calories eaten is all that matters, though others have argued that increasing calories burnt through exercise is all that matters.

The problem is that all of these things are missing a third factor, metabolism. which we don't directly control, but is probably far more important than the other two.

The typical American gains about one pound a year. That corresponds to 3500 calories.

That means over the course of a year where we typically eat around 1 million calories, the difference between calories eaten and calories burnt is only 3500, or or about 0.3%

I do believe that we probably have a fair amount of control over how many calories we eat (not complete, but fair). However, I find it hard to believe that somehow our conscious self manages our activity level to be within 100.3% of that calorie level. Clearly automatic mechanisms in the body are kicking in that regulates how fast we are burning calories.

Thus, as the Time magazine article points out, it is not at all clear that exercise increases calories burnt. It does while you are exercising, but if it causes those automatic mechanisms for metabolism to slow down for the rest of the day, then exercising would achieve nothing at all.

So that's the secret. Find a way to adjust that automatic mechanism and the path to weight loss is clear. Just don't ask me how to do that.

Damn you Congress for ruining my credit line

I still have the same credit card from 2000 back when credit was cheap and interest rates were low and I got offered a credit card with a 7.99% APR. Not that I use it much, but it's nice to know I have a credit line that's almost cheap enough to finance buying a car, or to borrow money to invest in the stock market. So a couple weeks ago, for no apparent reason, they tell me they are doubling my APR to 17%, and if I don't like it, they will cancel the card.

Thanks Congress. Since Congress made it much harder to increase APR in the event of missed payments, the credit card companies reasonably responded by pre-emptively raising APRs on everybody including me.

Stupid populist policies and stupid populist NY Times who thinks this is a good thing. Last time I checked, price discrimination was welfare enhancing, but I guess it doesn't feel fair.

Good times for the car industry

Wrote the paragraph below a few months ago. Just wanted to state for the record, that even with out the Cash for Clunkers program, the car industry is in for good times. The Clunkers program which probably has no redeeming social value except as a very rapid $3 billion stimulus (the last $2 billion are still being debated though) into the economy. I am probably also more annoyed because my "clunker" missed qualifying by just 1 mpg. But otherwise, it is likely bad for the environment, potentially quite wastefully destroying good cars.

Despite the doom and gloom, the short term forecast for the car industry is good times ahead. This article takes a gloomy look, saying that US demand for news cars will fall just like it fell 46% this year from 17 million to 10 million. But the short term effect of that is a huge pent up demand for new cars that is going to help the car industry come roaring back in the next few years. That along with the $60 billion or so in handouts GM alone got, will mean the US car industry should be quite profitable in the short term. Of course, one still has to wonder whether it was worth the $60 billion+ in tax payer money.

Read this article! Finally, a reasonable answer to the health care crisis.

Apparently, this New Yorker article by Atul Gawande has been getting a lot of attention, circulated amongst doctors, and pushed by Obama's team, and frankly I am heartened, because it is the most reasonable response to the health care crisis and the puzzle that I normally devote a lecture of my classes to: Why does US healthcare cost so damn much. Written by Atul Gawande, a Harvard surgeon and long time New Yorker columnist, I've loved his books Complications and Better, because he is a doctor who appreciates the views of economists, but with a healthy dose of skepticism.

To save you some time, Gawande's answer is that the high costs are due to excess healthcare (too many scans, too many procedures, too much surgery). I can believe that, though it may be too simplistic an answer, but I have long argued that the traditional reasons people give for excess costs don't hold up to scrutiny--medical malpractice, insurance administrative costs, paper records, emergency room visits, excess end of life care, these all do lead to waste, but none come anywhere close to explaining why the US spends pretty much twice as much per person more than any other country.

Gawande then argues that as a result, the left's solution--government paid healthcare, and the right's solution--individual paid healthcare, won't work. Since neither gets the incentives right. Gawande is a bit too dismissive of the profit motive--nothing wrong with the profit motive if the incentives are properly aligned as in most industries. But his solution is reasonable nevertheless.

All that said, Gawande doesn't provide any evidence to back up his hypothesis beyond charming anecdotes. There is still reason to believe that actually the US is underspending on healthcare, because while we're spending a lot, we're actually getting a lot of value from it despite what others may claim. However, at least unlike just about everybody else out there, he's not pushing an argument that I know for a fact is patently wrong.

Also, a cool aside on the small world of academia, even though this isn't my field, I know half of the academics he cites in this paper, I happen to know them all pretty well actually. Kate Baicker I worked with at CEA. Amitabh Chandra I chatted with a long time when he came to visit Cornell, and he once co-authored a paper with R-'s classmate. And Woody Powell, I took two seminars with at Stanford.

Healthy Eating on a Dollar a Day

I have noted here in the past, that it is a fallacy that healthy food is more expensive than junk food (it seems that way because rich people like healthy foods and shop in expensive stores, while poor people like junk food and shop in cheap stores; but there is no particular reason why healthy food has to be expensive, see Chinatown for loads of cheap produce).

I have also noted that it is not that hard to feed yourself well on $3 a day. In response to all of these politicians looking like idiots by living for a week on the money people get for food stamps ($21 a week) and claiming it is impossible and that it leads to weakness and starvation, so in response I made up a shopping list of a variety of meals that aren't that far from what I normally eat for $21 a week.

So nice to know that I'm not alone. In fact this woman claims to be able to do it on $1 a day which impressed me.

But also just emphasized for me again that hunger in America is largely by choice (of course there are exceptions). This American Life story about a couple homeless guys emphatically makes that point that there is so much food available for the homeless that it is impossible to go hungry unless you choose to. As well as this photo I saw in the NY Times a while back, about people who have to skip meals to feed their children. The illustrating photo was a woman who claims she regularly skips dinner so her kids can eat. The thing was, that the woman in the photo was huge; she must have weighed at least 300 pounds.

Humans Can Multi-task!

Lifestyle gurus these days love talking about how multi-tasking is a myth, that people can't multi-task, but instead, just switch their attention rapidly between different tasks. And therefore we should do only one thing at a time.

Idiots.

That is multi-tasking. At least that's how computers do multi-tasking. (ok, there are exceptions, especially as computers take advantage of multiple processors) but that is by and large how all personal computers have handled multi-tasking. (that was one of the first lessons I learned about computers back when we were first upgrading from DOS to Windows 3.0... not even 3.1).

And if that kind of multi-tasking has worked for computers, I don't see why that's an argument that humans can't do the same.

A very dumb idea: make b-school like law/med school

The idea that we should "professionalize" business school so that it is more like med school or law school has been making the rounds recently (e.g. Time, NY Times, NPR, etc.). Whereas a true profession like law or medicine has a code of ethics designed to serve the greater good, business school is different because no such code exist.

Very large red alarms goes off for the economist in me at this idea. Because whereas others see professions as something noble, the economist sees a cartel. The standard view of professional societies (stemming from the medieval guilds) is that by regulating who can enter the market, they create a cartel that keep prices high by keeping people out. As Time noted, professionalization implies "a professional exam, a licensing board and exposure to malpractice," as institutions quickly become cooped by government. Economically, these institutions use government's coercive power to maintain their high prices. Some of the largest sources of dead weight loss and inefficiences in the economy are associated with the legal and medical industries.

That said, I am sympathetic to the benefits of monopolies. Like a benevolent dictator, a benevolent monopoly can often do the right thing, where a competitive market cannot (see Google for example). So maybe the lawyer and the medical cartel is justified, but the idea of professionalizing business so that you would need government approval to run any company is more than a little scary.

When politicians argue, what they really believe rarely matters, all that matters is what they want.

Obama announced the intention to raise the requirements for average fuel economy standards.

Note this is much the same as the plan I helped develop for the Bush administration that got pooh poohed by the press. Obama wants 35mpg by 2016 and its get called historic, (we proposed a similar level by 2017, and the compromise with Congress came to 35 mpg by 2020).

The frustrating thing is that part of the defense for the increase that Obama and pundits have been using is that they are merely homogenizing standards since allowing different states to have different standards is highly inefficient.

Of course when Bush used that reasoning to block California from setting their own standards, this was roundly bashed by Obama and the media as impeding progress. The only reason different standards exist is because Obama overturned the Bush ruling.

How to fix the economy: On Transparency

When people ask my opinion as to what to do about the economy, I mostly punt the question. Arguing that is a macro question, and I gave up on studying it, because I think it is too hard a problem, not only for me to figure out, but even for the profession. I'm not sure anyone knows. But if pressed, one reform that does seem to be pretty easy to advocate is to increase transparency (this is a favorite prescription proposed by my students). Or perhaps not. As Truman famously lamented, there's no such thing as a one handed economist.

On the surface, transparency is good. It increases the free flow of information, and economic theory has told us that more information is almost always good, theory says that perfectly efficient markets depend on perfect information. And when information is hidden (i.e. when there is asymmetric information) you get market failures and inefficiencies. A practical implemenation of this idea in the financial sector that is often tossed around is to make more securities traded openly on exchanges rather than over the counter.

Of course thinking a little more deeply, there are problems with transparency. Partly, is the practical matter of standardizing incredibly complicated securities to put on an exchange. But more fundamentally there is the problem that transparency impedes the firms abilities to maintain trade secrets. Trade secrets, like patents, are another form of intellectual property protection (some argue they are the primary form of intellectual property protection given that the patent system is so broken), and though all intellectual property protection is bad for competition because it creates monopoly power and higher prices, it is good for innovation. So a byproduct of greater transparency could well be less innovation.

More reason to abolish the words billion and trillion from policy: Or why Gingrich and Waxman are morons.

I multi-task whenever I can, so at the gym, I normally do the elliptical with something to read, and then have tv on in the background, often c-span. So on a recent house hearing about climate change the following debate came up between Gingrich (uber-Republican) and Waxman (the Democratic sponsor of the climate change bill), I got more evidence why million, billion and trillion should be abolished from policy (see also here and here).

Paraphrased:

Gingrich: Your bill is going to cost Americans, half a trillion dollars over 10 years
Waxman: You are misinformed it is going to cost each person 40 cents per day
Gingrich: No, it's half a trillion!
Waxman: No it is 40 cents!
Gingrich: Poopy face
Waxman: Stupid Head

Ok, so they didn't use those words exactly, but that's what it sounded like. Of course 40 cents per American per day over 10 years is [drumroll please...] half a trillion dollars, but of course.

On Bull Shit: When Bull Shit has meaning.

While this article is a little harsh on the rarefied obtuse language favored by the literary theorists, it's still an interesting article.

While it is true that the language of literary theory is often obfuscating and it is often hard to tell good theory from bad theory so long as the same fancy words are used, as demonstrated by the column's writer, or by the physicist (Alan Sokol) that got what he called mumbo jumbo published in a literary theory journal, that doesn't mean it is all bad, it just means that it is an inexact art.

Reading what Sokol wrote which tried to combine ideas from quantum physics with words from literary theory, I actually think it contained useful ideas despite the author's protestations, and it doesn't demonstrate that literary theory is all bull shit.

What literary theory taught us is that the meaning of a work can be disconnected from the author's intentions. And many novels, works of music, paintings, have power and meaning far beyond what the original author foresaw. And there is nothing wrong in that. There is beauty in the stars without the need for intention (unless you want to claim that the beauty of the stars is evidence for God).

Also, I recently came across the Journal of Wine Economics (I was shocked that such a thing existed) and read an article on how in randomized controlled experiments, nearly all the judges at the most prestigious US wine competition gave identical wines significantly different scores, even when tasting then from the same flight. (This was a useful antidote from having to worry too much about taking wine too seriously).

However, while this study shows that taste is inexact, it doesn't show that there's no such thing as good wine and bad wine, just that there's a lot of noise.

And so just like it may be hard to judge good vs bad literary theory, it doesn't mean that all bull shit is without meaning.

(I've been meaning to read the book On Bullshit, been carrying it around, but haven't gotten around to it yet).

It isn't Easy being Green: and how feel-good environmentalism is usually dumb

In class, I talk about how hard it is to figure out which activities are good for the environment, once the entire supply chain is factored in. And how common strategies to reduce your footprint are often dumb. In class, I talk about how ridiculous policies like banning bottled water (ala San Francisco) or banning air conditioning (Japanese government) are just incredibly dumb.

Part of the problem is that once you calculate the entire supply chain, it is unclear what practice is better for the environment. This recent nytimes article argues that steel water bottles are better than disposable plastic if you use it at least 50 times, though if you read the article carefully, if you wash your water bottle with hot water, then there is no benefit at all. The same is true for local food. Though you are not shipping your produce from Mexico, the fact that local food is often brought in smaller trucks and you drive more to buy it, means it is often worse for the environment.

The other part of the problem is that there are much cheaper and simpler ways to help the environment. For example, for about $20 you can take a ton of CO2 out of the atmosphere. Companies like Terra Pass will take your money and use it to plant trees or reduce landfill emissions or buy more fuel efficient stoves in poor countries.

So yes, you can reduce your carbon footprint by about a ton a year if you give up meat, or you can achieve the same effect for $20. If you value meat at less than $20 per year, than go ahead, but otherwise, that's not the best approach. There are of course other reasons to be vegetarian, just like I love local food.

Given the complexities, how do we make figure out what's right. Of course the easy economic approach is to make sure you pay for the carbon you are responsible for. This can be accomplished most simply with a carbon tax, or a little less simply with the cap and trade proposals currently on the table. That way all you have to worry about is the price, which encapsulates all the environmental costs within it.

new policy wonk blog KeithHennessey.com

Keith Hennessey, someone I used to work/with for at the White House (also a Stanford alumni) has been making the morning talking heads circuits recently. He was the National Economic Adviser, the position that Larry Summers now holds. To complement his punditry in today's new media age, he has a new blog.

This is his blog entry on gas prices based on a memo I wrote.

His latest entry on counting the under-insured is quite interesting, and contains lots of the other side of the story that we worked on producing under the W White House, but rarely gets play in the press. For example, he notes that of the 45 million without insurance, about a quarter are non-citizens, another quarter are automatically covered by government insurance even though they may not know it know it, but would if they walked into any hospital, and another quarter are young or with above average income.

Reminds me of another useful stat we found on minimum wage. Of those making minimum wage only 20% are in poverty, and only 20% of those in poverty make the minimum wage. Essentially most are well-off teenagers or people who may not really need the money.

The words billion and million should be abolished from news coverage.

Ha. I've said before the words billion and million should be abolished from news coverage.

Two Visions of Healthcare reform: Bush v. Obama

The NY Times recently laid out succinctly Obama's plan for healthcare. Something that sounds eminently reasonable, especially to an economist. Roll out a national system of electronic healthcare records, which will create a dataset that the government can spend $1 billion to analyze, so that they can design the proper incentives system to give doctors the right incentives to treat patients efficiently.

It all sounds very reasonable, especially to an economist. Because economists don't have tools to understand its central flaws: big government projects tend to screw up. A national electronic records system sounds eminently sensible, but the industry that creates such software systems (Enterprise Resource Planning ERP) is more known for its multi-billion dollar failures than its successes. The FAA has been trying to computerize for the past 40 years but so far is still using 40 year old technology. Plus, assuming that underpaid government bureaucrats can properly interpret the data and create the right incentives is a heroic assumption.

Seeing the Bush plan, first hand, you see a clear difference. It favored electronic records but it was hesitant to mandate a national system, preferring to make ways for private enterprise like google to solve the problem. It recognizes the failings of the free market (failings economists are quick to recognize) such as moral hazard, adverse selection, externalities, myopia, but also recognizes the main advantage, that competition leads to cost minimization, whereas lack of competition such as the case of government bureaucracy leads to potentially massive waste.

Play Magazine - RIP

Play magazine appears to be a casualty of the financial crisis which has hit the newspaper industry hard. And that is quite sad. Play is one of the magazines that the New York Times puts out 4 or so times each year, so that on any given Sunday, the New York Times comes both with its main magazine, and one of its targeted ones (e.g. Travel, Design, Style, etc.) and Play which covered Sports. The magazines are the main reason I subscribe to the Times.

I was recently reminded how way out of touch with sports I've become, while watching the superbowl. Back in college, still most of my friends followed sports, so I wound up watching as well, or at least keeping up so that I could talk about it. But for the past 8 years, I guess I've mostly been hanging out with academic types, who never talk about sports, which I'm cool with, but Play magazine was a nice way to stay somewhat in touch.

Play magazine was basically the sports magazine for over intelectualizing npr/nytimes readers. Its writers included people like David Foster Wallace and Steve Levitt who looked at how sports betting worked. Its articles dissected plays, analyzed the game theory of football play calling, and the physiology of sports.

You can see evidence of the cancellation by the articles appearing the regular magazine: the business of Roller Derby, or the use of serious statistics to analyze basketball; the article on NBA star Shane Battier by Michael Lewis was as much a lesson on conditional probability and marginal analysis as it was about basketball. So at least the articles are still being written hopefully.

Oh, and the magazine was pretty.

Great stuff. But I guess not much of a market. Ah well.

Giving an A for effort

A recent NY Times article laments the fact that students these days have come to expect an A for effort.

Thinking about it, I'm actually ok with the idea of A for effort (there's the Marxist in me again), Assuming of course we could measure effort accurately, and they really put in sufficient effort. From a contract theory point of view, arguably grades are designed just to incentivize effort, and if they really put in maximum effort then an A makes sense.

Also, from a Rawlsian distributive justice point of view, it also makes sense. There's an interesting paper by John Roemer on how in a fair Rawlsian economy wages should be based only on effort. and things like innate ability and privleged background should all be subtracted out.

The only reason not to give the A for effort is if we believe our job is to provide accurate signals for employers or if it would be unfair to other students. Though perhaps the ability to put in effort is the only dimension that employers really care about. That is far more useful to them, than the ability to write essays about the fall of carthage or to derive Legrangians for maximization problems. There is evidence (that gladwell for example popularizes in his latest book) that innate ability doesn't matter too much, and that people we call geniuses like Mozart, are people who just had a low cost of effort. They only became geniuses after 10 years of hard effort and practice.

Already the disillusionment

The Republican Senator who was tapped as Obama's Secretary of Commerce nominee pulled out, citing that he has to come to realize that he has irreconcilable differences with the President. I can see where Gregg's coming from. When Obama was elected, I like most everyone was hopeful and expectant of a new kind of politics. But the process surrounding the stimulus bill has felt a lot more like "more of the same" rather than "change."

Apparently I'm not alone. When both Paul Krugman and David Brooks are both disillusioned, that is a powerful message.

Though unlike those two., I remain sanguine and optimistic about the economy, perhaps Panglossianly so. Still, while I agree the stimulus package is probably far from ideal, I still think that government has minimal effect anyway, and the economy will right itself soon enough, I'm still predicting, in time for Obama to claim credit for an easy re-election. It may be a sucky year or so until then, but 2012 is plenty of time for the economy to recover.

More Finance Schadenfreude

This nytimes article reports a finding by economists at EPI that Wall St pay has only been out of line with other professional pay (Doctors, Lawyers, and presumably, academics, though academics I learned at a recent seminar are paid significantly less than doctors and lawyers, but still on the same order of magnitude at least) for two periods in the past 100 years, that was the period leading up to the stock market crash of 1929, and the past 10 years.

So nice to have hard numbers backing up the sense of schadenfreude this has given me, making me feel less regret for giving up on Wall St. 8 years ago. Of course, if I had stayed, I might have made my $10 million by now (F^*& U money as Stephenson calls it). But who knows. Probably not.

A Portrait of Change - Nation’s Many Faces in Extended First Family - NYTimes

This article about Obama's multi-cultural family reminds me partly of why I identified with Obama since I first learned about him. And indeed exciting.

"Mr. Ng stared at the picture and wondered how much had changed since it was taken. After Tuesday’s ceremony, he said, “folks like me will have a chance to be on the other side.”"

When I thought about it, I did notice that I was almost always the only minority in any white house meeting (plenty of women though), but I rarely thought about it. Though I think that may be cultural, as pursuing policy and politics requires giving up financial security for something less tangible.

Obama Innauguration: Moved by music

Perhaps it was just me, but I was a bit disappointed by Obama's speech. Not that it was bad, but just said nothing new really, and Obama has set a high bar in past speeches.

But I was moved by the John Williams arrangement "Air and Simple Gifts" played a panoply of the pop-stars of classical music, and was touched by the mosaic of colors represented in the simple quartet of musicians, the fact that they demonstrate America still attracts talent from around the world. The theme of the song was nice, with each musician given the chance to express his/her individuality, before coming together in a resounding whole.

I've always liked Simple Gifts especially, we played the Copland arrangement in marching band, and always liked the high drama of the half-time restatement of the theme (which Williams happily stole as he always does), but also portrays a nice essential image of the American spirit, of humility, that the world can be proud of.

So sure, John Williams, blockbuster maestro, did what he is best at, tug at the heartstrings with manipulative music. But it worked for me.

NPR never too late to learn an instrument

A recent NPR story encourages people to learn a new instrument at any age, which reminds of this old interview I saw.

One of the things that sticks with me through the years is an interview with a 100 year old + woman (perhaps she was the world's oldest). The interviewer asked her if she had any regrets. She said just one. When she was 60 she thought of taking up the violin, but figured she was too old. But now, at 100, she realized she could have been playing for 40 years by now.

Just recording this to remind myself of this.

A clear failure of the financial bailout: mental health reform (and contract theory!)

One provision of the TARP financial bailout is a clear failure. (The rest requires macro, and I have to little expertise to judge, and doubt anyone does).

One feature that got slipped in is a provision that requires insurance companies to give equal coverage for mental health as they give to non-mental health. No one in the media has noted that this is very bad from the point of view of basic contract theory. Two recent npr stories highlight why.

1. On the media on the DSM
2. Leanord Lopate interviewing Norah Vincent on A Year in the Mental Institution

Health insurance is an example of a contract that deals with uncertainty and private information. On the point of uncertainty, there is much more uncertainty in mental health than there is other health. This is highlighted by the On the Media story which notes that one study finds that 84% of Manhatannites would be classified as having a mental illness under the DSM (the definitive book used to define mental disorders). They also note a study where a researcher had his healthy grad students hospitalized for schizophrenia but told them to act normally. It took them weeks before before they were allowed to go. In a follow up, hospitals were told to look for such grad students and identified dozens, though all the ones the hospitals thought were faking it, were in fact real patients.

Contract theory suggests that the higher uncertainty makes such diseases much more expensive to insure. And thus most rational individuals would choose to have more coverage for non-mental illness, and less coverage for mental illness. The new regulation would likely reduce overall health coverage in the market.

The second concern is the problem of moral hazard. The second npr story above interviews the writer of a recent book who was depressed herself, and later researched the treatment for depression by getting herself hospitalized at different psychiatric wards over the course of a year. She argues quite lucidly and fairly (to me anyway) that there is some room for individual effort involved in mental illness, and that more insurance could reduce the incentives for patients to get better themselves. Of course, there is also moral hazard in non-mental illness, such as eating right and controlling your cholesterol. However, insofar as moral hazard is worse for mental illness, than coverage is more costly, and therefore, people would optimally prefer less coverage for mental health. Again, the new regulation would reduce health coverage overall.

Financial Reporting and the "$62 trillion" securitization market

I do have to say that economic reporting on the financial crisis has been amazingly good. Sure I've had my gripes but venues (especially This American Life's Planet Money) have done on the whole pretty well.

One failure though is the failure to note the winners along the way. The millions of people who were able to purchase a home who otherwise wouldn't have.

The other failure is just accounting, making the $62 trillion notional value of the credit default swap market sound like a big deal. It is a meaningless number.

Two reasons in particular.

1) Many of the trades are double, triple, etc. counted. It's like if I sold a pen to R- for $1, who sold it back to me for a $1, and then we repeated this 1 trillion times. That would create $1 trillion of notional value, but no real value. The swap market is counted this way.

2) The trillion is the notional value, but it is not representative of how much money is changing hands. You can think of these as insurance contracts. Taking out $1 million in life insurance doesn't mean $1 million is changing hands, far less. Just the premium. The insurance company is not taking up a $1 million obligation.

Two Tiered Teacher Contract

An interesting "innovation," separate high ability teachers from low ability teachers by offering a choice of two contracts, one with low powered incentives that low ability folk take, and one with high powered incentives that high ability teachers will select into. Something you learn in day 1 of a (econ) contract theory class (contract theory means very different things in poli sci and different again in law). And then you spend the rest of the semester learning far more complicated contracts. So it amusing that actually using that day 1 invention is considered novel enough to be an idea of the year.

Amusing, but not surprising.

Ny Times Food Article from May 16, 1909

Found this ancient nytimes article randomly googling. Fascinating stuff. The writer (Laura Smith) writes to explain to ny times readers what a Menu is. Apparently the concept of menu was freaking people out, as something french and newfangled. Whereas previously, I guess patrons had no choice in what food they got. She also was defending the adoption of french food in US restaurants and hotels, which many Americans apparently were taking offense at. To think of a time when French was new-fangled. Yet, the author is still impressively cosmopolitan. She is familiar with Chinese and Japanese food. And expects the reader to know what curry is.

She also makes the interesting/good point that we find it natural to use italian for music terms (We still do today) why not french for food terms.

Even the title is interesting: "Why the French Menu Has Become So Universally Popular; American Woman Tells Why They Should Continue in Favor. Easy to Understand Even If One Does Not Know French."

I remember reading the Jan 1, 2000 nytimes, which reprinted the front page from Jan 1, 1900. Which had a front page story about a poor manhattan women who got lost across the brooklyn bridge and spent an afternoon lost in brooklyn before a nice policeman helped her find her way home.

High School Drama on 20/20: A This American Life Knock Off

Watching 20/20’s Drama High: the making of a high school musical on ABC, which is the behind the scenes story of real high school musical. It is a blatant knock off of an early This American Life show, and not as good, but still such a great idea that I’m watching it anyway.

Reminded me though that that was the show that got me hooked not just on This American Life, but also on NPR. I hadn’t heard of either at the time (this was sometime in college), and my knowledge of talk radio was limited to bloviating talk show hosts like Rush or Imus. When I first accidentally flipped to the channel, the story telling style was totally foreign, but the honest portrayals of the little unheralded life stories that make life wonderful, the hallmark of This American Life has kept me hooked to this day.

(wow, that was from the first season of the show, which was I guess my freshman year back in 1996.)

NYTimes.com: The Brightest Are Not Always the Best

An interesting and somewhat potentially ironic column by Frank Rich, on the rise of the technocratic meritocracy in Obama's economic team. Rich warns that Obama's choice of the technocratic elite may not be the best for the country, as the elite may be out of touch with the concerns of everyday folk.

The contrarian in me has long made that argument in defense of Republican politicians, including Bush amongst others. The latest and perhaps most extreme example being Sarah Palin whereas everyone around me (even the McCain supporers) seemed to hate her, despite the fact that nearly half of americans thinks she's great.

It is ironic that Rich, who undoubtedly hates Palin, now raises the same argument to attack Obama's economic team.

It may be odd for me to be suspicious of the meritocracy, when I am a product of that system, and a highly ranked player in that game. But the skeptic in me has to ask whether it is the best way to run a country.

Time magazine and Abe Lincoln on Attribution Bias

Time magazine had a good article last week.

They only look as if they inhabit our galaxy. In truth, the men who would be President have been running for months in a parallel universe, a place where a Chief Executive changes laws by waving a hand and reorders society at the stroke of a pen. "When I am President," the candidates declare — and off they go into dreamspeak, describing tax codes down to the last decimal point and sketching health-care reforms far beyond the power of any single person to enact. In their imaginary, reassuring cosmos, America is always a mere 10 years — and one new President — away from energy independence. And the ills of the federal budget can be cured simply by having an eagle-eyed leader go through it line by line.

Then one of them wins the election.

In an instant, the winner is sucked through a wormhole back into the real world. A world in which Congress, not the President, writes all the laws and gets the last word on the budget. Where consumers decide which cars to drive and how many lights to burn. And where the clash of powerful interest groups makes it easier to do nothing about big problems than to tackle them.

It's good to see this message get out, because though I've been complaining about attribution bias on this blog (e.g. here and here), it's something the media rarely considers.

The article also had this nice quote by Lincoln: "I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me."

Later in that issue, they quoted a seemingly non-partisan pundit (he attacked both sides) who gives another reason to worry about Obama's campaign promises. Obama promised to abide by campaign financing limits, but reneged on that promise as soon as it was expedient. In fact, Obama has had no history of sticking up against his party for his own principles. Doesn't give much confidence that he will follow through with any of his promises now.

Worries for a new administration

A friend of mine used Krehbiel's Pivotal Politics model to analyze the implications of a Democratic Congress and Presidency. He finds the scene is set for substantial policy change.

That was a good time to reflect on the perils of an Obama administration.

Higher trade barriers (which will mostly hurt the poor in developing countries and the poor Walmart customers in the US), more frivolous lawsuits (something the current administration has been fighting behind the scenes), more wasted bureaucracy, less school choice and school reform, slower growth (see QJE paper by a former classmate of mine), regulation that leads to less home ownership, higher minimum wage (which hurts the poor through more unemployment and increases the prices at places they shop most like walmart). Could be good as well, but I worry. could be quite bad for the people who need help the most.

Bush's staffers and the kool-aid

The New York Times ran a mostly touching (and rare) piece about the positive parts of Bush's legacy. One quote rang true:

Then she looked directly at me and said, “But it’s all worth it, because I so believe in the president.”

It would have been easy for me to dismiss Ms. Perino as a bright and likable but ultimately Kool-Aid-stricken peddler of talking points, were it not for two things. First, my interviews with current and former Bush staffers constantly veered off into similar testimonials. Their belief in Mr. Bush transcended ideology: as much as anything else, they just loved the guy.

I also often use the kool-aid line myself, when people ask what I thought about the President (a friend of mine remarked that it was odd that I call him "the President" as opposed to Bush, or Dub-ya, habit I picked up while there I guess).

But I generally say that I didn't know him really well personally, but I respected the opinions of the people who interacted with him every day, and they all respected the guy. Of course, maybe they had "drank the Kool-Aid" but that must count.

And it wasn't just staffers, it "transcended ideology." I remember talking to a Washington Post White House correspondant (and Democrat) after a talk she gave when I was in grad school who also said she respected the President's abilities quite a bit.

Anyway, just my two cents.

Our insignificance in the Cosmos

The New York Times reported a student at Dartmouth asking: How do you keep from despairing at the immensity of space and the smallness of us?

I remember having the exact same question back in high school, learning about cosmology, the age and shape and size of the universe, thinking about space-time (roughly 15 billion light years wide in at least 4 dimensions) and how insignificant any one life is (whose theoretical limit of one light-lifespan). And indeed I did despair for a time.

My answer at the time was that while one human is mortal, humanity is potentially immortal, and information and knowledge, would outlive even the life of the last man. As was the theme of the Shakespearean sonnets I had to memorize back freshman year. "So long as men can breathe, and eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee."

So my answer to the vastness of space back in high school, was to become part of the cloud of knowledge achieved by humanity.

Haven't thought about that in a while. I used to think about it more. Even used it on my first date with R-. Not sure if that helped or hurt.

Ha, I'm not the only one who doesn't believe in voting

From the current issue of The Economist's Voice

As the election approaches, please
remember to be kind to any economist
you know. Economists feel
on election day a little like Jews
feel on Christmas. Participating
makes them feel like a traitor to their kind but
boycotting the extravaganza makes them feel
estranged from the rest of society.
Like everyone, economists have a choice on
election day, but to an economist neither option
seems good. We don’t mean the choice of voting
for a Republican or a Democrat. We mean
the choice of whether to vote.
An economist who votes commits an irrational
act, and to an economist irrationality is
a sin. Why bother spending half an hour or
more going to the polls and waiting in line
when the chance is infinitesimal that your vote
will affect the outcome?
Yet, what is the other choice? Not voting.
But, an economist who doesn’t vote must
squirm when others ask that day: “Have you
voted yet?” Any explanation about the irrationality
of voting will be scorned.
There is no winning for an economist on
election day (unless he or she is running for office,
and probably even then).

More evidence that Gore = Bush

I have long noted here that people commit the fundamental attribution error when evaluating the Bush administration. Over attribute outcomes to disposition, and not accounting for situation. Most say that had Gore won, he would not have reacted the same way to 9/11 (though his VP, the wife of the president he served under, and that president's British doppleganger were all strong supporters of the war in Iraq).

In a recent economist book review, they find the following Al Gore quote:

IN 1993, Bill Clinton was pondering whether to authorise what is now called an “extraordinary rendition”, when American agents snatch a suspected terrorist abroad and deliver him to interrogators in a third country. The White House counsel warned that this would be illegal. President Clinton was in two minds until Al Gore walked in, laughed and said: “That’s a no-brainer. Of course it’s a violation of international law, that’s why it’s a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.”

Obama is one of "us" and indeed "we" are not "real" and "we" are not "pro-American"

A problem I’ve had with this election is that I actually identify with Obama quite a bit. But as I’ve elaborated on at length in this blog that doesn’t mean I’d vote for him (e.g. because I dislike many of his supporters, because I dislike the policy of the median Congressional Democrat).

The media has recently taken a lot of umbrage at the suggestion by the McCain campaign that Obama is not “pro-American” and that he is out of touch with “real” America (e.g. Time magazine). But I think those accusations are fair.

First of all, by “us” I am talking about well-off highly educated coastal elites. Although Obama often evokes the language of unity, when talking about tax policy Obama talks about people like “us“ meaning Obama and McCain and other well off elites, which implicitly creates the “other” of people not like “us."

Pundits are happily making the point that the real “Joe the Plumber” makes well less than $250,000 a year, but the point of the McCain campaign is that that doesn’t matter. Because in his world view Joe and McCain are part of the same “us.”

But Obama’s “us” is different. Saying that we are anti-American is too far, but that’s not what the McCain campaign’s been saying. The most extreme way to see this is the number of my friends who (jokingly, but still) threaten to move to Canada. Or, I bet if you poll my friends and ask them if they had to choose between wearing a Canadian flag or an American flag on their bag while traveling, I bet nearly all would choose Canadian. I bet most people in the pro-American states that Palin is talking about would never do that (admittedly, I’m not sure what I’d pick, but probably I’d still put an American flag). It’s not a bad thing to not be “pro American.” It represents a different cosmopolitan ecumenical humanist world view that I like. But it is different.

This is an old notion of course, the different ways of defining identity. Democrats try to create identity along economic divisions, whereas Republicans do so along social divisions.

A Kristof column I agree with?!

I had this discussion with myself some time last year, even before Obama won the primaries. Obama would have a huge effect on world perception of the US. As a semi old-school Marx style materialist/realist, I am not convinced that perception matters, but it is still nice when it shifts to what I think is a more accurate image of America.

A friend of mine said recently, it'd be nice to tell your grand kids, that you voted for the first Black US President. But otherwise, he like me is still mostly unmotivated to vote.

I also decided, when I had this thought some time last year, the same sentiment Kristof ends with: "Look, Mr. Obama’s skin color is a bad reason to vote for him or against him."

That logic takes away the main reason I have for voting for Obama. So I am still largely indifferent.

(Amusingly, in Kristof's list of countries led by minority presidents, he left out Peru's Fujimori, perhaps because Fujimori fled in ignominy.)

Krugman and Asimov and Me

So Paul Krugman received a well deserved Nobel Prize today. Despite my political differences with his Ny Times column that I have commented on many times here, I still respect his models of international trade (I went to grad school wanting to expand on his models to understand development) and his popular books before the New York Times.

Watching him on News-Hour today, interesting that he said it was Asimov's sci-fi Foundation novels and psycho history that made him want to be an economist. I, somewhat embarrassingly, said exactly the same thing in my grad school essays. The idea that you could use mathematics to not only understand but also to shape society. In some ways, its amazing how far we've come toward achieving Asimov's vision, on the other hand, it's also notable how very far away we are as well.

The intro to my essay:

Issac Asimov, the science fiction writer, once envisioned a world where a mathematician invented a science called psychohistory that allowed him to foretell and therefore improve the course of human events. When I was younger, this fascinated me. However, it was not until I took freshman economics in college that I realized this was not all fantasy. By studying economics, I could apply my training in abstract math and theoretical computer science to something beyond the world of academia. The field of economics provides a window where my interests and abilities could be applied to research that has direct impact on the lives of so many people.

Heh, also gratuitously mentioned "such as those from Paul Krugman’s graduate International Economics class which I audited." Interesting to read these old essays, made readily available by Vista search.

Doctors as Titans

R- often describes the founders of modern medicine as Titans, superhuman, looming over mere mortals with their larger than life presence. In some ways cultivating the exalted status the medical profession enjoys (doctor was the highest status job in some New York Times article some years ago, college professor was down around the 75th percentile).

Flipping through an issue of Hopkins medicine, there was one article about the passing of someone they literally described as a “towering international figure.” It was also interesting. The cover story was about work-life balance. It is funny, that most civilians think the 80 hour restrictions with the 30+ hour shifts every 4 days is insanely too high, and leads to tired doctors and needless mistakes. Instead, in this article, nearly every quote is of a Hopkins doctor talking about how working ONLY 80 hours, and ending a shift at ONLY 30 hours demonstrates a disgraceful lack of commitment to their patients, and anyone who wouldn’t happily put in those hours is a disgrace to the profession.

Wow.

It seems like the profession is changing. And the younger doctors interviewed didn't feel that way. But Wow.

NyTimes Op-ed: Drill Baby Drill

Not related to the financial crisis, but have been meaning to post this nytimes op-ed.

I made this point in a debate I did for the incoming freshman class at Cornell. Nice to see the same point find a larger audience.

Basically, silly that there's so much debate on off-shoring drilling. It is basically a no-brainer.

To be clear, it will not reduce gas prices in any significant way. Oil is a global market, and the US while big cannot move it by itself.

But it will add $1.7 trillion to the economy. Must of it to government coffers. (Easily paying for any costs of the proposed bail out.)

This holds even after taking into account costs due to greenhouse gas emissions.

Green advocates like Thomas Friedman who oppose offshore drilling like to point to Brazil and Denmark as paragons who are energy independent (a stupid goal btw). And while it is true that Brazil and Denmark do have programs for alternative fuels like ethanol, they both get most of their domestic fuel from offshore drilling, a fact green advocates conveniently like to ignore.

Obama and McCain have both reached the same policy conclusion on this (given it is a no-brainer).

My opponent in the debate asked, if it is such a no-brainer, why is there still so much opposition. My (perhaps too flip answer) was to quote Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. When they were both asked why they supported policies that essentaily all economists thought were a bad idea (Clinton on ABC News re: tax holiday; Obama on NPR re: windfall taxes), they both replied that listening to economists is Elitist.

Nice to see reporters on the ball in these cases. Frustrates me to no end when economic consensus is ignored.

It's fine to ignore economists on subjects on which the profession is essentially clueless (like the sub-prime bailout) but on basics like optimal taxes, economists have a pretty good consensus idea of what's right.

Recording Memories Using Implated Electrodes

Nifty article in the New York Times on new research recording human memories using electrodes.

I remember my friend working on this project back as an undergrad in 1999, when they recorded the memories of rats as they ran mazes, and showed that rats dream about running mazes. I guess it took 10 years for them to replicate for humans. But I remember being blown away by the idea that you could "see" memories. Back then, a bunch of us were excited about the prospect of recording memories (a la the movie Strange Days), and that neuroscience would be the biggest thing in the 21st century, and the youthful hubris that we could help made it happen.

Krugman out does himself

Sigh, and to think I used to admire Paul Krugman. I read many of his pop books in college, took his graduate class for a while as a junior though it was way over my head. Appreciating his even-handedness in explaining economics.

Politics really does bring the worst out of people. After reading perhaps one of the most contemptuous articles I've seen in a while--an anti-Palin screed by Judith Warner in the NY Times, I come across Krugman's equally contemptuous disdainful resentful anti-Republican screed, which paradoxically complains that Republicans have imagined this contempt from Democrats, when you just have to read anything written by Krugman in the past few years to see it.

See I really do like Obama, because it seems like (at least from his rhetoric) that he's better than that. He really doesn't seem to be contemptuous about the other side and he rightly chastised the McCain campaign for questioning Obama's patriotism. It's just much of his party I can't stand. At least around election time when people seem to make things so personal.

(Of course there are Republicans who are just as contemptuous about liberal elitists I'm sure, but I guess since I mostly read NY Times and NPR I'm never exposed to them)

(And for the record, much has been made about Bush's C average in college, but what is often forgotten is Nobel Prize winner Al Gore had a worse college record)

Globalization and the Olympics

Kinda neat the intermingling of nationalities on display at the olympics. Also heartening to see the mixing on the US team. Shows that the US is still capable of attracting the best talent and hopefully in integrating it. For example:

• gymnastics, women. winner looks the all-american texas girl, but was born in moscow. 2nd place from iowa has a chinese coach
  
• men's gymnastic team, us captain looks Chinese. and the team also has the first south-asian athlete i've seen outside of cricket at an international event
  
• us volleyball head coach is a chinese woman
  
• in swimming, less so, from what I see. except that it seems that athletes from around the world (like Zimbabwe) all trained in the US. one black swimmer.
  
• the distance runner from kenya
  

Also, nice public diplomacy (the euphemism for propaganda) for the US. Despite the anti-immigrant sentiments that politicians bandy about.

The related amusingstat is that 70 of the competitors in ping pong are either Chinese or Chinese hua-qiao (of the Chinese diaspora)

Though probably the Brazilians play volleyball for Georgia is a bit much, if it is true that they've only spent 2 days in Georgia before hand.

More Energy Insanity: this time from Thomas Friedman

Friedman, never one to let facts get in the way of his argument, says in his latest column the US should follow the example of Denmark, who is energy independent, and has high taxes (sometimes a good idea but probably excessive here) and a lot of senseless regulation (no driving on Sundays, at least once upon a time). (He's also easily impressed by the two button toilets, which I've had in my bathroom for the past year or two).

He says we should follow their example, instead of pursuing dumb ideas like drilling for offshore oil.

Of course, what he neglects to mention is that Denmark produces about 5 times more oil per person than the US, nearly all of it from off shore drilling. If the US had the same amount of off shore oil drilling per capita, it could supply the oil needs for roughly half the world.

Similarly, in Brazil, held up by NPR as the model of using biofuels for energy independence, still produces 7 times more oil than ethanol, and has achieved energy independence largely because of new offshore oil discoveries. (The story also mistakingly fails to account for the energy content of ethanol.)